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Ashes, Ashes
A reflection on California’s conflagrations
It’s dark outside. Dark and sooty. The air is heavy. It obscures California’s undulating golden hills—hills that should be green by now. The bay that usually beckons at the foot of the hill is blanked out. Mount Tamalpais, ditto. You wouldn’t know a mountain was there at all—let alone a rich, dark, majestic one cloaked in redwoods, beyond which lies the Pacific Ocean, which is usually scintillating. Probably not today.
Late on Tuesday, November 5th, the Santa Ana winds arrived to California. A seasonal wind that used to excite and enthrall me, a perfumed wind that pummeled my door and intoxicated me with its floral desert aroma, the Santa Anas were a wind I used to welcome on autumn mornings.
I’d fling open the door, delighted at the warm wind. I’d sit with bare feet on my front stoop and call the kids and say, “The Santa Anas are here! Come smell the desert!”
In those days, the wind was clean and clear, warm and heady, fragrant and exotic.
I loved how the wind shuddered the window panes, the force of it, nature’s power. I loved the way the world was swept clean the next day—how the dark trees were suddenly and totally stripped of their jacquard leaves, piles of which lay heaped in gutters or wherever they had lodged.
