San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Meditation on an orange sky
For years, two men — one young, one older — stood on opposite sides of Market Street in San Francisco every morning carrying signs. “Fallen! Fallen! is Babylon the Great,” the signs said. It is a quote from the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament. It is about the end of the world, the Apocalypse. The two men never said a word. They stood there, with their signs, like sentinels. People smiled when they saw them. It’s San Francisco. Everybody’s a character.
Now we’re not so sure. We all woke up Wednesday morning to find it was still night at daybreak. The sky was orange. There was darkness at noon. For the rest of the week, the air was choked with smoke. Unhealthy as hell. The hills and mountains that ring the Bay Area vanished.
Before that, there was a heat wave. It was 100 degrees in San Francisco last Sunday, and that was cool by comparison. The rest of the Bay Area felt like Death Valley.
It’s happening all over California; the Golden State is either burning or baking, or both. Stick a fork in California. We’re done.
And this in the middle of a plague and social unrest. There’s never been a summer like this.
I think there is a message in all this. Something is going on, and nobody knows quite what it is. Maybe we’ve crossed some invisible line and stirred up natural forces we don’t understand.
But this is the 21st century, and we understand everything. And this is the Bay Area, the center of high tech. Didn’t we invent the smartphone? Didn’t we invent Twitter? Didn’t we invent the future?
If we want to know what time it is in Timbuktu, we just ask Alexa. We have an encyclopedia in our wristwatch.
But isn’t it curious that all those scientists and meteorologists with all their computer models and satellite images and Doppler radars seemed to be as surprised as the rest of us when the sky turned orange on Wednesday?
It was unexpected and unprecedented — like climate change on steroids. We were warned, but the change seems to have come faster than we expected. It’s not the September we remember and may never see again.
I think we have exceeded the natural carrying capacity of the place we call California. We have nearly 40 million people now, and maybe that’s too many. We’ve built towns into the edges of forests. We’ve tamed the rivers, moved the natural flow of the streams so we can live in what used to be deserts, and grow crops on what used to be dry range. We’ve built cities on top of earthquake faults.
We’ve built California into the fifthlargest economy in the world, a nation state, as Gavin Newsom likes to call it. Maybe we’ve gone too far. Maybe it’s too much. I’m reminded of the old radio jingle for Eddie Bauer, who sold clothes and outdoor supplies: “Don’t expect the sun to shine when you want it to / Don’t expect Mother Nature not to turn on you.”
I’m not one of those nature lovers who believe spirits or gods live in trees or sacred rocks or mountains.
But there is something there, and if you have ever spent some time away from civilization, even if only for a day or two, you can feel it.
In my backpacking years, I have camped in places in the far north of California where the very country seemed unfriendly, very much unlike the Sierra Nevada. John Steinbeck, the poet laureate of the Salinas Valley, called the Gabilan Mountains to the east of the valley warm and friendly and the Santa Lucia Range to the west dark and brooding — and the mountains themselves are a character in his classic short story “Flight.”
California must have burned before in the centuries past. Look at the fire scars on the ancient trees in Muir Woods. There were no firefighters then, so the forests burned and burned. There must have been days when the sun did not rise and the skies turned orange. The native people must have thought it was the end of the world.
But the end of their world came later when Europeans came and turned the place into the fifthlargest economy in the world.
And now we are paying the price.