I bring fire and pestilence

Dear friends — 

Wherever I decide to go, fire and pestilence follows. 

A few months ago, just as I was about to leave Los Angeles for Tucson, coronavirus cases started spiking in Arizona. National newspapers began reporting on how bad things were in the Grand Canyon state: major testing shortfalls, packed hospitals, many many dead people. Things got especially bad in Tucson’s Pima County, which saw a 300+% rise in cases in June.

Then, a wildfire started burning a little north of Tucson! Big houses went up in flames! People and horses and chickens were forced to evacuate!

What am I getting myself into, I wondered as I drove to Tucson — though my trip was placid, and my Airbnb, once I arrived, peaceful. 

The Bighorn fire, however, raged on for over a month — while the coronavirus too continued to rage. One nearby park burned so badly that it’s still closed — and will remain so until November. The weather was relentlessly hot, even for Tucson: July 2020 was the city’s hottest month in the 125 years that records have been kept.

Tucson treated me well, though. I had AC. I got some writing done. I went on pretty sunset hikes with my writer friend Michelle (Read my review of her debut short story collection at The Rumpus!). I found free reads at a few dozen local little free libraries. I got to try carne seca from El Charro and green chili butter and jalapeno prickly pear cactus jelly and rhubarb pie made with mesquite flour from the local farmers market.  I quit my job and started a new one I like a lot better.

By August, Tucson’s coronavirus rates had gone down, all nearby wildfires had been put out, and I was getting ready to head to the second destination of my new nomad life — cool, calm Lake Arrowhead, Calif.

Then, coronavirus cases in Lake Arrowhead’s San Bernardino County began to ratchet up.

And California started burning, burning, burning.

Cut to Labor Day weekend. Southern California got hit with a heat wave — reaching a record high of 121 degrees. Excessive heat warnings went into effect to warn people the heat could indeed kill them, as did Flex Alerts urging Californians to conserve energy to prevent power outages or rolling blackouts.

Then, some people decided it would be fun to set off a pyrotechnic device for a gender reveal photo — thus starting the El Dorado Fire in the San Bernardino National Forest. 

By the time I started driving to Lake Arrowhead on Sunday, that fire had grown to about 7000 acres. Once I got past Palm Springs, I could smell smoke — and see it too. 

As I got closer to Lake Arrowhead, the Santa Ana winds started blowing! Junk and debris hurtled across the freeway! A gigantic palm tree frond flew through the air and smashed into my windshield! It was so dry it splintered into shards and rained on the road like confetti!

I arrived at my friend Zach’s cabin in the mountains in one piece. The place looked peaceful, though the entire mountain town smelled like a fireplace. The back deck overlooking the lake was sprinkled with ash. 

Zach happens to be the public information officer for the San Bernardino National Forest, so he had to work late into the night, helping to coordinate evacuation orders and containment updates. “Just in case things happen fast, sign up for reverse 911,” he told me, and sent me a link to an app that would send me emergency alerts should we need to evacuate. I clicked on it and got a 503 error — too many people were trying to do the same thing, and San Bernardino County’s server was overloaded.

I went to bed early Sunday night — and woke up this morning to this smoky yet still beautiful view. 

There’s a continued disjunction between the craziness that’s going on around me and the calm of my actual lived experience. Today I went on a long, shady walk on cool mountain roads. Friendly neighbors waved hello; dogs wagged their tails. I found a bunch of plays on Zach’s bookshelves and excitedly planned out a reading list for the month: Moliere, Wilde, Beckett, Chekhov. Aside from the apocalyptic scent of smoke in the air, everything feels eerily serene. 

Meanwhile Zach’s been working nonstop. More than 20,000 people have been evacuated. The entire 823,816 acre San Bernardino National Forest will soon be closed to the public.

Do you feel a disjunction too, between what you know is happening in the world and what your day to day life feels like?

And are you too worried for the next destination in my nomadic itinerary?

I feel grateful not to be sick or in flames. I hope you too are free of plague and conflagrations.

Love, 

Siel

P.S. Three links you might enjoy: 

• An oldie but a goodie: Californians Gather to Celebrate Annual Wildfire Tradition from The Onion.

• “When something’s not coming, it’s coming.” Nick Cave’s advice to a blocked songwriter.

• If there is no victim, is it still a sex crime? NYT reports on disturbing sex stings.

P.P.S. Recent books I read, from most enjoyed to less enjoyed: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, Samantha Schweblin’s Fever Dream, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and I, Yasmina Reza’s Happy Are the Happy, Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, Brooke Fossey’s The Big Finish, Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Death in Her Hands, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano.