Common disasters rage around us
Just over the California border we saw the first of the roadside signs — an announcement banning lawn mowing during the hottest hours of the day.
It was not warning of heat stroke. It was warning against fire. California was in its sixth year of drought, and the grass was no longer greener on the other side of the fence — it was tinder. Sparks from a struck rock could ignite a backyard brush fire, which could become an inferno in which whole neighbourhoods burn down and people die. California’s tolerance for ignoring such bans had fallen to zero. Otherwise law-abiding citizens could be, and had been, charged with arson. Homeowners had gone to jail for incendiary lawn care.
And this: In a small burg north of San Francisco, standing among the usual Chamber of Commerce signs at the edge of town, was a fire-danger index the kind of which we had never seen in Canada. Here, fire indexes usually range from “Low” to “Extreme.” This town’s index upped the ante. It went from “Low” to “Extreme” to “Catastrophic” — which for us, accustomed to milder public service announcements, was a frightening departure that seemed a step closer to the apocalyptic. On this sign, the “Catastrophic” section had been painted an angry purplish red, and the sign’s indicator arrow was pointed squarely at it.
Yet to travel south was to be constantly reminded of America’s capacity and wealth, especially in California — the gigantic vineyards, the dynamism of its cities, the unending fertile immensity of the Central Valley. (Forget the Grand Canyon, the Central is the greatest natural wonder in the U.S.) We drove through 100-plus degrees Fahrenheit (37-plus C) temperatures, and passed shrinking reservoirs and dry river beds, but even in the grip of its severest drought in recorded history, California was thriving. It was in the midst of an employment boom. It had instituted strict new water restrictions that, while not perfect, had allowed the state to adapt.
Reaching Carmel, we stopped for the night at a resort after a week of tent camping. We had not gone online in all that time, and the local newspapers offered little coverage beyond their city limits, so we had no idea of what was going on in the world. But the first thing we saw on our room’s TV was coverage of the huge Soberanes fire burning to the south of us in Big Sur. It had been raging for over a month. It was close enough that smoke occasionally reached Carmel. The size and intensity of the fire had caused a debate as to its nature, with some diehard locals insisting that, as a fire season, it was business as usual and had nothing to do with global warming, while scientists and climatologists were insisting this was different, that this wasn’t just a fire but a harbinger. As tourists, all we knew was that the fire threatened the coastal Highway 1 along Big Sur, which we had planned on taking, but which had been opening or closing according to the fire’s whims. Even if the highway had been open, the park in which we had reserved a campsite had been shut down. We drove inland and took the interstate to Los Angeles.
Los Angeles was still balmy, still sunny, still thrumming with its inconceivably immense flow of traffic. But that traffic seemed to epitomize the identity struggle California was having with itself during its age of uncertainty: By far the two most common cars we saw on our trip were big, powerful Mustang convertibles (red being the predominant colour) and gas-sipping Prius hybrids. If the state’s political and natural climates were changing, so, too, it seemed, was its traffic, populated at one end by California’s recalcitrant hedonists and at the other by conscientious New Agers.
After three days in L.A., we headed north for home, camping the first day in Yosemite. We gawked in awe at Half Dome and El Capitan, the Yosemite monoliths, but as breathtaking as they were, the landscape around them was a blight of dead trees. Pine beetle and drought, a forest ranger told us, had killed 66 million trees in the state since 2010, and Yosemite’s ponderosa pines had been particularly hard hit. The valley was being deforested.
We left, fleeing Yosemite’s daily traffic jam. (“We have met the enemy,” goes the famous Walt Kelly quote, “and he is us.”) West of the park, among gorgeous rolling hills of tall grass and oaks, we passed a billboard that read: “Wildfire is coming. Are you … READY?”
It wasn’t the “READY” written in bold that alarmed us. It was the verb that, with absolute certainty, declared that wildfire “is” coming, not “could be” coming. This insistence, this expectance, felt new to us, but it was something during our trip, while the miles passed and life around us seemed to be going on as before, that had flickered at the edge of our sensibilities:
It was the normalization of disaster.