5 October 2021 Summer of Seether Sacramento Day 2 Fire

 

Sacramento News & Review

A small black speck, a cinder, floated down to my truck window as I sat waiting for the one lane only traffic to move driving off the mountain from Lake Tahoe.  I caught it and rubbed it between my fingers and it broke apart and smeared like ashes from a fireplace. We were shifted left and right across lanes all the way down to Placerville, about 60 miles,  and it was very clear why.  Back in Tahoe, the hotel lot was filled with emergency vehicles that were too tall to fit under the 6' 9" clearance for the underground garage.  All the firefighters that had come to fight the fires were sleeping in the hotel we were, and probably many others in the area.  I had rolled down my window to smell the pine trees and caught the fragrance of what smelled like incense until it intensified into smoke.  As we slowly moved in the line of traffic down the mountain, we could see workers shoring up the side of the hill with netting to keep the soil from sliding onto the two lane road.  The power company was trying to establish communication lines.  Other companies were cutting and stacking the trees that had burned and died in the fire.  As I concentrated on the downhill drive, my husband could see area after area of burned trees and houses with only the bare foundations and the fireplace chimneys left, next to houses that were untouched.  Like a tornado touching down and wiping out one house and leaving the next intact, the fires pick and choose with some cosmic selection.  Or perhaps the fires randomly touch down to burn away, the sparks floating on the wind to touch down into the next area.  

From home, two states away, we complain about the smokey air making our eyes burn, our throats scratchy and that hides our mountains behind a haze.  Seeing the poor charred trees and what was left of houses make our complaints ludicrous.  As we wait for our turn to drive down through the wounded forest, we can hear the helicopters and see them flying water drops to hot spots.  Forest service vehicles. Emergency vehicles with their lights on.  Lines of power department trucks.  The passenger in the car in front of us tapping his fingers on the roof of the car as he waits.  We come around a corner and great billows of smoke are coming off the side of the mountain to our left.  "A hot spot," my husband says, "they are trying to put it out."  God protect these people who are staying there to fix something bad that can kill them as we crawl our way down the mountain and away from them.

There are flags and signs thanking them in front of houses and on top of a bridge in the small communities we pass by.  Our vague annoyance with the smoke from a fire that is of immediate and imminent interest to the people here leaves me with a sense of entitled ignorance at the graceless way most of us ignore what is happening to others because it's not happening to us.

I am reading The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah.  A family in the Texas Panhandle in the 1930's watch their land slowly blow away as rain and crops are replaced by dust storms that make dunes from the topsoil, blowing past the windows and making piles of dust on the floor.  Giving the old and young people dust pneumonia, also known as Silicosis. Blowing dust into their livestock so when they finally die, they are packed full of dirt.  Imagine a dust storm with dirt so black that you can't even see your children when they are right in front of you.  The mother of the family, after four years of this, takes her children to California.  The population already there are sick of dirty, diseased "Okies" coming over with their lazy work habits and illiterate children.  "We are from Texas" the mother insists more than once.  Yes my daughter can read and write.  They have been essentially starving for four years and now they have become less human because of the whims of nature.

The example of the less than sympathetic welcome from the California population in the 1930's is uncomfortably like some of the attitudes of different groups of people today.  There are two sides of the tarnished coin of being human.  We are afraid to be alone, so we tend to gather in groups of people like us to feel less alone.  People who speak like us, look like us, are like us.  The other side are people who don't.  Are they safe?  Will they hurt us?  Should we give them a chance or just paint them all with the same brush to be on the safe side.  It's a small step for us from "not us" to "dumber than us" "uglier than us" "not as worthy to live as us".  We have no idea what it's like to be someone other than us, without pushing ourselves really hard.  Even then, going into someone else's world, they can tell you don't fit in just as much as you can tell they aren't like you.

My husband just said that Aftershock expects 40,000 people a day at the festival.  Will they be like me?  Will I fit in because I love the music?  Will I not fit in because I'm too old?  The wrong color?  Too young?  Too educated, not educated enough?  Too fat? Too flat?  No talent?  Well, I don't have to get up on stage, thank the Lord.  Do I have too many tattoos or not enough?  Remember the start of "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot?  "Oh my God Becky, look at her butt, It is so big, she looks like one of those rap guys' girlfriends".  "Oh my God Becky, look at her arms.  Her tattoos are so big.  She looks like one of those rock guys' girlfriends."  Perhaps instead of wearing masks, we need to put paper bags over our heads so we can't see each other and have "blind auditions" like they have on The Voice so everyone has a chance to be human!

EM

P.S.  My prayers and thanks to the brave people who are trying to put out the fires and are giving up their lives or endangering their lives for others.  Here and in the world at large.  May we all be braver, kinder and more human.  If we can't, remember to go paper, not plastic.  You can't see through the paper.