I was driving west on Highway 44 just before noon when I noticed the huge plume of smoke pouring from what looked like North Market or Hilltop. My thought was, “Here we go again. When does this end?”
It’s been a hell of a summer, and let’s just go ahead and put the emphasis on that hell part.
Thankfully, we haven’t lost a lot of homes in Northern California. But the close calls have been numerous, the evacuations have been frequent, and in addition to our normal eyeball-frying heat, we’ve had the pleasure of sucking in that wonderful smoke. We should do for smoke what the Eskimos do for snow — give it about six different names. I’d call today’s texture the north-metro frightful brush haze.
I’ve got this friend who lives off Hilltop who shall remain nameless due to the following advice she gave me about how I could get past the roadblock to help her: “Lie to the cops.”
In the early afternoon she was panicking (and the way this summer has gone, who could blame her?). She had reached her Hilltop condo on foot because the police weren’t letting people through at that time unless they had an emergency at their home.
I was to “lie to the cops” and tell them that a) I lived on Hilltop, and b) had a sick dog or something.
“Fine,” I thought, as I drove back east across the Highway 44 bridge. “I can do this.” Then I started thinking, “How often does lying to the cops actually work out well for people?” Lying to the cops when there’s an emergency going on? That one’s not sitting well for some reason.
Then I saw the cops on Hilltop at the blockade and thought, “I’m not lying to the cops.” So I called her.
“No, don’t lie to the cops,” she said. “Just walk up here if you want to. It looks like the fire’s going the other direction.”
As I was walking across the Hilltop bridge over I-5 the “hell of a summer” thought hit me again. Then I thought about U.S. gold-medal-winning gymnast Nastia Liukin, because I’m pretty sure she’s the only person on earth who would feel comfortable walking across the balance beam that passes for a walkway on the south side of that bridge.
My friend on Hilltop had lost power at her condo, but it looked like the primary danger had subsided. My wife had walked over there, too, and we were all three kind of wilting in the sun.
Won’t we all just feel a million times better after a solid week of hard rain?
Until l then, it’s back to the old coping mechanisms: swimming at Whiskeytown and camping on the coast. The second your skin hits the water of Whiskeytown Lake, your whole world view changes. Bad days turn to good days. Awful summers turn to tolerable ones. The same is true of your feet hitting the Pacific Ocean just north of Arcata.
Maybe you have a pool? Get in it. I’m taking a shower after I finish typing.
And, together, as a collective, let’s concentrate on this single thought: NO MORE FIRES.
