Monday Morning Beach Report

Everyday the news is sad and terrible.
Look at the ocean, I tell myself, not at the headlines on your phone.
We love who we love. We breathe the air we have to breathe.
So drink it in, and hope the toxins and the sorrow will alter just a cell or two.
Look at the curlew going about his business.
Look at the new plume on the horizon and nod.

The Fire/Day Nine. Really? Yep.

Mountains, I thought. I can see the mountains! Sure there's some smoke, but it looks good out there.
And, yes the situation is improving if you're not someone whose house has burned down or is still evacuated, BUT the fire is still burning.

The night the fire started a friend in Ojai got the emergency knock on her door at 1:00 a.m. Earlier she'd offered shelter to a friend who was evacuating from Santa Paula. A few days ago other friends who were evacuated from Ojai decided to go to Santa Barbara for a few days to escape the smoke. Then the fire spread and  now that's where the worst pollution is. Or maybe not today. Maybe it all blew down here.

I went to run some errands under this morning's rosy assumption. When I got out of the car at the shoe repair about 5 miles north, I choked. Ash blew into the car. The second errand was a half mile to the east from my house and the air was clear. But my neighborhood looked like this. Smoke goes wherever it wants to.

I'm inside now and I think I'll stay in. There's a big wide world beyond my front door, but I'm not going there.

Yesterday and this morning I pulled 44 pounds of paper out of my filing cabinet and had it shredded. I've dusted all the places I never dust. I've refurbished my emergency backpack, ordered some emergency water with a long shelf life, re-organized my writer's space,  Earlier evenings of the fire, I made dinners for friends, and tonight seems like a good time to do that again. Ratatouiile would be perfect.

The Fire/Day 7 and its Crimson Lining

view from the Channel Islands Visitor Center tower of a smoke plume just beginning to form about 11:00 this morning

view of a big plume--maybe the same one--from my neighborhood 15 minutes later

 Fires make spectacular sunsets. So much destruction and then this beauty.

To the far left is the edge of Santa Cruz Island as the smoke rolls out to meet it

The Fire/Day Five

Things are improved today. The water in the marina is rippling ever so slightly the other way--meaning the wind is shifting, and there's now a whisper of a breeze off the ocean. A couple friends are returning home. A couple are still under evacuation orders. Mind you the fire is still burning. And there are five other fires in Southern California.

The smoke is intense. I'm staying in doors. The masks I ordered from Amazon arrived around noon. For a while today I wore it inside my house. Later this afternoon I was lucky enough to get an air filter installed. What a boon it would be if some agency or another could pass those things out. Some area hotels are offering free rooms or discounts for evacuees.

Yesterday afternoon's smoke cloud arriving .

Today the smoke is everywhere. There is no blue sky. From here on out though, I think things will get better. Thanks for checking in. I'm okay. Breathing easy. 

The Fire, Day 3

Owl's Head Blown Off by High Winds

The owl on my balcony lost his head this morning or maybe it was yesterday. Everything is topsy turvy. No sense putting it back because the wind is kicking up again. Luckily, no flames here in this paradise though the fire is just 10 miles away. Friends have been evacuated. Friends have lost a home.

View from Ventura Marina Last Evening

Smoke Above Oxnard Today

I bought a membership at Costco and went there to breathe today as the smoke clouds stalled over my house. I bought a bunch of things for an easy dinner and had friends over. They arrived wearing masks. It's that bad. But now that the winds are blowing again the air is much clearer here. But. Those winds are very bad news for the fire.

More Oxnard Smoke

 I am safe. Here is the bulletin from the city of Oxnard: "At this time there is no threat of active fire in the city of Oxnard and the municipal water system is functioning normally, and the water supply is safe to drink."

And I'm all set for a power outage due to the high winds tonight. All devices charged.

Thanks for all of the messages of love and concern. It helps.

Fire and Water

View from my living room window last night at 9:30 pm

Santa Paula, a place I love dearly, is burning. The fire has spread to parts of Ojai and Ventura. Last night I could see flames that looked to be two blocks away. With so many other big fires, there was no information to be had. A drive in the windy dark proved that it was farther away than it looked, but not far enough to sleep easily.

Then the power went out. The internet even via cell phone was sketchy. The emergency alert came through on the cellphone. Check the website it said. The emergency website wouldn't load.

I hate trying to sleep in a room that isn't really dark, but last night kept the shades up with one eye on the flames.

Things are okay here chez moi. For now. There's water between me and the fire, but it's worth noting that the water is super super high in the Marina. I'm gonna say that's a good thing. So my personal paradise isn't on fire, but a lot of other people's edens could be mistaken for the gates of hell right now. The wind is howling like a hungry monster. New fires are popping up. Friends have been evacuated. Prayers, please. So many are in danger.

Notes from the Apocalypse

Blue heron on a neighbor's chimney

Parts of Houston are still underwater. Many Texas towns have been washed away entirely. California is on fire. The rest of the West is pocked with similar wildfires. A 2700 year old grove of Sequoias near Yosemite is burning. One of the longest-lived organisms on this Earth, the Sequoia has seen centuries of man's folly. The freeway in my old neighborhood is closed due to L.A.'s largest-ever wildfire. A dozen cites in California recorded their highest-ever temperatures yesterday. Today's temperatures may beat that.

It was 86 here in paradise on Friday. Yesterday's high was a little higher. The temperatures aren't dropping much at night. I turned on my air conditioner before going to sleep last night since it was in the high 80s upstairs. Right now, it's already 92 outside. Probably a record. When my mom first arrived here in August of 2012, one of my first tasks was to buy her some long underwear. The fresh breeze from the ocean blew right through her. It was perfectly still here this morning.

And I'm wondering about how my front closet would fare as a fallout shelter. Sometimes the skies around here rumble and roar with military activity. At night it makes me uneasy. There's something going on, but I don't know what it is and probably don't want to know, really.

But the un-knowing of what we know doesn't serve us. I want to hold fast to what I know and let it propel me toward change or insight or something.

I hope you are well, dear everyone. Stay safe. Don't breathe the smoke. But breathe.

And now a poem.

copied from the poets.org website  The Fire   Katie Ford

When a human is asked about a particular fire, she comes close: then it is too hot, so she turns her face— and that’s when the forest of her bearable life appears, always on the other side of the fire. The fire she’s been asked to tell the story of, she has to turn from it, so the story you hear is that of pines and twitching leaves and how her body is like neither— all the while there is a fire at her back which she feels in fine detail, as if the flame were a dremel and her back its etching glass. You will not know all about the fire simply because you asked. When she speaks of the forest this is what she is teaching you, you who thought you were her master. There was a quickly knocked down fire last week.   It's impossible not to think of fire in southern California when it's hot and dry and windy like it is today. It's impossible not to think of the phrase trial by fire. Or the word  crucible. Or hell.  Or chemotherapy. Or radiation. Or the image of walking across hot coals as a test of one's fortitude or belief in not being burned.

California is Burning

"Every story happens in a particular place at a particular time," a writing teacher of mine once said. Place has always loomed large for me. I long for places I've lost and yearn for places I haven't yet seen. California was just blot of color in my grade school geography book--one more thing I had to memorize until I heard the Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, and Jan and Dean. That music and those silly romance/surfer movies transported me to an imagined beach blanket of adolescent perfection. 

I was 22 years old when I finally got here. The palm trees were real--not cardboard prom decorations, the ocean was surprisingly salty, and people ate strange green-fleshed things called avocados.

I've travelled  the entire length and breadth of California. Driving, camping, backpacking, touring, sailing, eating, drinking. Coastal redwoods, Yosemite, Sequoia National Forrest, Mineral King, Mojave Desert, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Visalia, Stockton, Fresno, Bakersfield, San Diego, Monterrey, Big Sur, Napa Valley, Sonoma Valley, Mendocino, Cambria, Anza Borrego, Montana del Oro, Anacapa, Catalina, Calistoga, Lake Tahoe, Lake Arrowhead, Lake Shasta, Big Bear, Death Valley, Ojai, Oxnard, Ventura.

Each day when my feet hit the sand for my morning walk, I renew my sense of amazement at what a stunningly beautiful state I live in. But while it's a balmy 75 here in Margaritaville, there is beauty burning farther inland. Fire season is a given in Southern California. But climate change is making it worse here and in many dry western states. There's this from a piece in Mother Jones: "Thomas Tidwell, the head of the United States Forest Service, told a Senate committee on energy and natural resources recently that the fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did four decades ago. Fires now, he said, burn the same amount of land faster." 
My mother is always cold here where the coastal breezes blow. "It's never summer here," she grumbles to everyone. If she gets her wish and breaks the family record by living to age 99, we may have to send her long underwear back to relatives in Iowa as the climate gets hotter. But then again, if a mile of coastline disappears as the seas rise, we'll be living on a boat. It might be drafty.

Visualize rain clouds, everyone, and send them to the fires burning around Yosemite National Park. And while we're at it, let's visualize tall corn, waving wheat, healthy livestock in green pastures, plentiful fish in pristine waters all over this land which is your land which is my land. Let's visualize stories and places that speak to us. Let's visualize politicians and people with some wisdom about climate change.

photo credit: Ansel Adams photo from the Yosemite National Park website

Whatever you do, DON'T head for the hills!

the view from my front door

From Joan Didion: I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. 

I knew the Santa Anas were blowing before I opened my eyes this morning. "Fire and Ice" read a headline from the Los Angeles Times. The photo was of the snowstorm in the Midwest. Here the wind felt like a blast furnace. Reports came over the radio. The 101 Freeway had lanes closed. Later the wind was blowing the fire toward the sea, and the alternate route along the coast had a section about to be shut down, too. Sirens. The university campus and homes evacuated. More sirens and the drone of helicopters. Luckily, this is all "over the hill" to the east of us. 

I was out for a bit this morning, and when I came back, my mom was on the patio eating her cereal.

She likes the sun, and it's seldom warm enough here for her to get a little on her skin. "I had to wear my hat," she said, "to keep my hair out of my eyes and mouth." Stuff was blowing by the boat dock. A large inner tube, a tarp, patio furniture cushions.

Then as I sat here at my desk, the wind stopped. When it started again, it was a gentle breeze from the ocean. But still, the sirens are wailing in the distance, and the helicopters are buzzing like bumblebees.

If you want to read more of the Joan Didion piece it's from "The Los Angeles Notebook."