Just one 10-foot-by-12-foot room with a sliding-glass door onto the epic mountain sky. Out in the sagebrush, off a dirt road, next to an aspen-lined creek in the high desert, the cabin has everything and nothing: no electricity, no running water. One afternoon in August I lay on the deck of my friend Kevin’s cabin not far from Mono Lake, in the eastern Sierra Nevada, and told myself that I could love, in some deeply-flawed-but-beautiful kintsugi way, the ash-paste air. As one of the study’s authors told me, “Wildfire is literally making it unsafe to be pregnant in California.”) A recent study found that a month of medium-to-heavy wildfire smoke - what much of California experienced over the last few years - increases the risk of preterm birth by 20 percent. (I should say this exercise is not for everyone. For those of us committed to sticking it out, our relationship task is making peace with smoke. Yet the rains turn the burn scars into mud slides and allow the next season’s flora, what the foresters call fuel, to grow.īillboards beckon us to Miami.
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Where we are now - January, the fresh and less fire-alarming time of year - should be the moment for us to relax and reassess what we’re doing in California and how to live here well. All thoughts, all phenomena, existed relative to fire. Even a wet winter (if we caught a break from the drought) offered little reprieve. The dry spring was bad the dry summer, worse the dry fall, unbearable. Wildfire was a constant, with us everywhere, every day, all year long, like tinnitus or regret. Living in California now meant accepting that fire was no longer an episodic hazard, like earthquakes. We were in the midst of the worst wildfire season in the state’s history, and the evident wrongness traumatized us and shook us awake. 9, 2020, was proof that our beloved was corrupted and had been for some time. The dominant story in California these days is that the orange, dystopian smoke-filled sky that blanketed the state on Sept. You couldn’t just abandon basic functions and duties, could you? But it turns out you can. We all knew these so-called public-safety power shut-offs were an appalling sign of a diseased empire. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, started turning off power to millions of residents in an attempt not to ignite (more of) the state. My parents - thank God - were already with me. I woke up to texts from friends: HAVE YOU HEARD FROM YOUR PARENTS? ARE YOUR PARENTS OK? after their neighborhood in Napa burned. Police escorted us over flaming hills as we tried to return home from backpacking trips. Ours, courtesy of privilege (race, education, a house purchased in the 1990s), are mundane. But when you’re enmeshed, even the troublesome patterns are hard to see. In hindsight, it’s clear that this romance between California and her citizens was fundamentally unstable, built on a lousy foundation and crumbling for years.
We propped a bright red surfboard against the living-room wall. Why live anywhere else? My human spouse hung photos of El Capitan in the entrance hall.
We stowed an earthquake kit in the basement of our tiny house and, even prepandemic, cached boxes of N95 masks under the sink. In return, we’d spend a stupid amount of money on housing and tolerate a few hazards. The implicit bargain was that California would protect and deliver to her residents the earth’s own splendor.
This was not just our relationship to California this was everyone here. But she was gorgeous, and she brought into our lives, through the natural world, all the treasure and magic we’d need. But really, we already had a bonus partner: California.
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To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.Įarly in my two-writer marriage, my husband and I joked that we should add a silent third spouse who worked in venture capital or practiced corporate law.
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