This has been the week from hell down here in SoCal

As a friend mentioned today, it’s a good thing we are a rich state, or those of us who live in southern cali would all be toast by now. Here in Los Angeles, our canyons have been spared this time, but being sandwiched in between 12 out of control wildfires has been no picnic either. I’ve been breathing in chunks of particulate, wiping ash out of my eyes and off of my car all week. On Tuesday the heat was so oppressive, the air so still and the sky so low and orange I thought I was in the middle of some post nuclear nightmare. I can’t even imagine what it has been like for the folks who’ve had to deal with the winds, the flames and the smoke.

The bright spots in my week were:

1: a comment from thirithch on my post on Augusten Burroughs a few weeks back. Thirithch: you aren’t late to the party at all: In fact just last night in a class on memoir I’m taking, our instructor, the wonderful Amy Friedman, professed her disdain for Running with Scissors for all the same reasons you cite, so your timing is uncanny!

2. this picture that showed up on my flickr RSS today:

4durt: this picture arrived in the nick of time. It is so absurdly beyond cute, that I’m just going to stare at this photo until I start to feel normal again.

****

Goodbye Jack. You are missed.

god’s lute will beg for your hands

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Wildfires

The Angora Fire in Tahoe jumped the fireline this evening, 3 days in and just when firefighters thought they’d seen the worst. Until last year, I always thought of Tahoe as some hideous frat boy puke fest tourist trap, and there are aspects of South Tahoe (like Harrah’s) that seem like a throw back to mid-70s Vegas, complete with rows of slot machines reeking of cigarette smoke and white trash desperation. Though to be fair, there is some great neon….

I realized how much I’d been missing all these years when I spent a week there last fall while on vacation with my family. We stayed in South Tahoe, and explored as much as we could in such a short period.

Lake Tahoe woke something up in me that had been dormant for a long time – a joy in nature that brought me back to myself after a long time spent adrift. I felt vigorous and free and a little bit wild. Most of all I loved the area around the Angora Lakes and the Desolation, in a way that almost didn’t make sense. It now ranks alongside Pura Ulun Danu Bratan temple in Bali as a favorite place on earth. Granted, we were there mid week and had the place largely to ourselves; I understand it gets pretty overrun during peak times. I vowed to be back soon to spend more time with that terrain. We’ll see what’s left after the fire.

Oddly enough, just last week I uploaded as my header a detail from a picture I took of the Upper Angora Lake. Tahoe had been on my mind a lot, and I like the kind of impressionistic ambiguity of the photograph.

A friend asked me why I was so upset by these fires. I suspect there is more than one answer. There are the obvious reasons: the footage of people and animals fleeing for their lives in the wake of destruction unleashed by careless (or vile) humans, and the sentimental sadness that comes with knowing that something you love is gone forever. But that isn’t really the truth about forest fires – the forest will renew itself, in a way that wouldn’t happen if, say, the land was commercially developed. Wildfires can be seen as an environmental correction. But I don’t suppose that offers much consolation to those who love that land so much that they built their homes and lives around there. Maybe my feelings are in part due to some deeper knowledge that I prefer not to acknowledge – that fire is beautiful in its own right, majestic and intoxicating. Wildfires involve a commingling of a sense of loss with a fear of being mezmerized by the agent of that loss.

Anyway, here are a few pictures from my visit last Fall.

 

 

 

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