Braving California’s fires on trip to parents

On Wednesday, August 19, I drove through hell.

The day started well enough. I woke up in a lovely pine forest near Mount Shasta. The night before, I had watched the sun set on the mountain and the stars come out. By breakfast, the mountain was enveloped in smoke.

As I left the Siskiyou mountains, the smoke thickened, darkened and filled the wide Sacramento Valley. After Redding, I can usually see the Sierras about 25 miles on the west, to my left and the Coast Range about 20 miles to my right, to the east. All the way down to Sacramento, I enjoy the open country and the big sky and the way oak-covered hills and grazing land give way to olive and walnut orchards and fields of rice.

This time the horizon was a faint smudge. There were no peaks, and even the rolling hills around me were hard to see. Instead I was looking at an immense dome of smoke that changed color and texture as I drove in and out of fire areas.

At Red Bluff, the sky to the west was charcoal black. That was the Red Bank fire, which grew from 1,000 to 7,000 acres that day. After a few brighter miles, even a glimpse of blue, the sky to the east darkened: a fire in Lassen County. In the town of Orland the charcoal moved to my right again, as the Butte-Tehama fire complex burned a few miles west.

Around noon came the evacuation notices. Regular radio programming was interrupted as an announcer calmly read down a list of 50-plus rural roads – Long Gulch Road, Gunsmoke Lane, Road Kill Road, and a host of roads named for quail, deer, raccoons and rattlesnakes. Every eight roads or so, he would remind listeners what he was reading and what it all meant and then launch into the next part of the list.

In my past, I have been evacuated from an active North Cascades fire down a road ringed with flames and firefighters. I wasn’t particularly worried. The fire was moving slowly, and I could count on the hot shot team to see us to safety.

When pukish pinky-brown smoke filled the Skagit Valley in August of 2018 I was annoyed, but I knew the fires were not nearby. The high-pressure system that was keeping smoke over our heads would eventually dissipate, and rain would eventually put the fires out.

The ever-shifting gray and black canopy over this Valley was much more frightening. The threat surrounded me, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Every direction led to danger.

Rain is not coming to California soon. Smoke and ash are here for many weeks. So are 14,000 firefighters and their equipment from 10 states. I am grateful our own Fire District 13 crew that is working in Calistoga on the 375,000-acre LNU Lightning Complex fire. That is the second-biggest of the 585 fires that have burned their way through a million acres – an area the size of Rhode Island.

In this part of the valley, the closest fire is 40 miles away. The smoke comes and goes and the air quality index bounces up and down as the wind changes direction. Now and then I can open the windows at night, but I still have to dust the ash off the backyard tomatoes and wear a mask when I walk outdoors.

The big black and gray canopy has lifted but every direction still leads to danger. There is a sense of a state under siege, a “what’s next” pall hanging over everything.

“If you don’t believe in climate change, come to California,” tweeted Governor Gavin Newsom on Aug. 22.

I long for a cool, clear evening in my own garden on the flats, with a soft Skagit rain in the forecast.