Disasters, yes, but this state’s golden
Soon, the winds will calm and the smoke will clear, Julia Wick writes.
A few hours before dawn on Monday, I was driving back toward the massive Kincade fire while on the phone with my sister, who’d been scrambled awake by the howl of mobile evacuation alerts in Los Angeles. She was staring out an upstairs window at the orange glow of flames, trying to figure out if she needed to flee.
You run to cover one fire across the state and wake up to find your city back in danger, 400 miles to the south.
So this is what it’s like to be a Californian in 2019, I thought, as I maneuvered a rental car down a country road in the PG&E blackoutinduced darkness. You can’t run toward or away from danger, because it’s all around. There is the distinct feeling that nowhere is immune.
And we were the lucky ones. The screeching cellphone alert system had been overzealous, and my sister was fortunate enough to live outside the Getty fire evacuation zone. My press pass grants me the dark privilege of crossing evacuation lines and humbly recording the worst moments of people’s lives. But then I drive back out.
The Kincade fire, which forced nearly 200,000 people to evacuate, is finally nearing full containment. By the week’s end, most evacuees had returned, though some remained in limbo.
Two strange and not quite conflicting truths: First, the Kincade fire was merely one dozens of blazes, large and small, that exploded around the state across the last week. It was the largest zone of upheaval, but it was far from the only. Second, “California” may have been burning, but in a state of nearly 40 million people, most of us were unaffected.
It was almost as if the state contained two parallel universes: One where life was suspended in an elastic, ongoing emergency. And an alternative world, where appointments were kept and the toggle switch from normalcy to chaos was still firmly fastened on business as usual.
For those in the latter camp, it could feel almost impossible to wrap one’s head around the sheer scale of the Kincade fire and the surrounding blackouts, even if you constantly hit “refresh” on the news. I struggled to get a handle on the entirety of the situation, even as I spent days driving through the fringes of the flames. So many people’s lives were affected, and in such all-encompassing and varied ways.
Maybe the only real way to understand the enormousness of the situation through much of the week — where millions were without power and hundreds of thousands evacuated from their homes — is by breaking off a little at a time. Here are some scenes from a single day in the North Bay:
SANTA ROSA — Sitting in a rocking chair on a friend’s porch, Barbara wasn’t sure if her duplex in Windsor was still standing, or what day it had been when police showed up at 4 a.m. to evacuate the neighborhood. The 76-year-old, who didn’t want to give her last name, had her red cane propped up behind her. The other side of the porch was crammed with hampers of clothes and black garbage bags stuffed with belongings.
On the ledge in front of her, the top half of a Better Homes and Gardens “Rustic Woods”-scented candle was filled with still smoldering cigarette butts, the smell blending into all the rest of the smoke.
“It’s all too wild for me,” Barbara said with a slight European accent and a shake of the head. It was Tuesday afternoon now. But who could know how many days it had been?
Time seemed to collapse in the long shadow of the fire. Everyone had been wearing the same clothes and sleeping with one eye open since the first sirens had herded out entire neighborhoods.
UNINCORPORATED SONOMA COUNTY — “Country living, not for sissies. Right, Sean? Right, big guy?” Denise Drawski said in a sing-song voice as she bounced her baby grandnephew up and down in her arms.
The blond tufts of the baby’s hair were waving in the wind, and an occasional helicopter could be spotted, above mountains still charred from the 2017 Tubbs fire.
Just behind Drawski, the 10-month-old’s parents — Drawski’s niece Julie Keller and her husband, David — were in the driveway, loading framed family photographs into their blanketlined trunk.
The rural compound had been in the family for nearly a century, but all the buildings were new. The old ones were destroyed two years ago in the Tubbs fire — four houses, the family hatchery, the chicken coops.
They’d only just finished rebuilding this summer, but the property was once again under mandatory evacuation. Once they finished packing, the baby and his parents would be leaving. But Drawski was staying.
She meant what she sang to baby Sean. Country living wasn’t for sissies.
She and her husband were sleeping in shifts, taking turns monitoring the fire. They were running their small generator every three hours or so, to keep the refrigerator going and communications open so they could track the blaze. Maybe power had gone off on Saturday, or maybe it was Sunday. She couldn’t remember exactly.
“We’ve gone without power three out of seven days every week for the last few weeks, so I kind of lose track,” Drawski said.
The temperature was dipping fast and they didn’t have heat. But Drawski reasoned that her greatgrandma Ward had made a life on this same mountain without electricity generations ago. And greatgrandma Ward had done all right.
Drawski said this land here was her only home. She had too much skin in the game to leave just yet.
PETALUMA — In an office park here, dozens of volunteers darted around an industrial kitchen. With their own restaurants closed by blackouts, renowned chefs had carted the gourmet contents of their powerless walk-in fridges here to prepare meals for the displaced. Sonoma Family Meal, a nonprofit that began during the Tubbs fire, had once again kicked into high gear last week.
Most of the meals were going to evacuation centers, but Oswaldo Jimenez, a chef with deep roots in the Latino community, was coordinating deliveries to those who might not feel safe interacting with officials. Jimenez said Sonoma Family Meal founder Heather Irwin had called him a few days ago about outreach to the Spanish-speaking community. But Irwin insisted it was only a single day prior.
One could forgive Jimenez for thinking it had to be longer — so much had happened since then, including a flood of logistics and a police escort to retrieve 3,000 tortillas from a factory in the evacuation zone. That night, they planned to serve hundreds of meals to a group of largely immigrant farmworkers who had been sleeping in their cars.
CALISTOGA — Sister Marie Callas wore an N95 smoke mask over her dark brown nun’s habit as she flipped the little sign outside the Holy Assumption Monastery bookstore from “Closed” to “Open.”
The Orthodox Christian monastery for women was on the city generator, meaning they still had power, unlike many other parts of Calistoga. Their little bookstore sells religious items and literature, along with granola and prayer ropes made by the sisters.
The sleepy Napa Valley town known for its hot springs and mud baths was currently east of Kincade’s wrath, but a shift in the winds could bring the fire this way.
The sisters had gassed up their cars and prepped their pet carriers the day the advisory was issued, so they’d be ready. If the call came, the 10 sisters, four cats and four birds would drive three hours north, to another monastery in Manton, Calif., that has a large guesthouse. ::
Back home in Los Angeles, the fierce winds continued to spark more fires across the Southland. Meanwhile, every august East Coast media outlet seemed to be leading with a single story: California is over.
“We are done. We are history. Pack up and leave now, while you still can,” is how my colleague Steve Lopez summarized the gist of the stories, as delivered by a “pack of gleeful doomsayers.”
The Atlantic declared that “California Is Becoming Unlivable.” The writer of that piece had moved here a year ago from the nation’s capital.
According to a New York Times op-ed, it was “The End of California As We Know It.” The list goes on. And on.
The truth is, it would be difficult to say that it has not gotten harder to be a Californian.
The hots are hotter, the dries are drier, the rents are higher and the income divide grows ever deeper. But most of that is also true of life in any 21st century American city, hypercharged by capitalism and climate change. For once, maybe California isn’t so unique.
“Disaster is not an enduring discomfort — cold weather is an enduring discomfort,” the late historian Kevin Starr said many years ago. “Cold weather emptied the Midwest and filled California.”
Soon, the winds will calm and the smoke will clear from our skies.
In New York, it will be winter. In Boston, the snow will come down in sheets. In Chicago, the frigid air will pierce right through the added layers.
And we’ll still be here. Unbundled, and unbound by all the old rules about how things should be.
Disaster is always at the gates, but look at that perfect, golden light. Every now and then, it will hit a line of stucco houses in such a way that we re-remember every possibility and every promise of our not-yet-failed, grand California experiment.
I don’t mean to sound glib. The raw uncertainty and fear of so many I spoke with still loops in my head. But of all the people I met, no one said they had plans to leave here.
Mainly, they told me about how they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.