When we woke up Tuesday morning, it was still night. I live in a wooden hut with just a small window facing the rising sun, and on Tuesday the weak mid-morning light was red. Raised on the east coast, the possibility of fire has always felt remote to me. I’ve had to work to internalize it just as I’ve had to feel my way into the visceral anxiety Californians display around flowing water. But on Tuesday, the sky required no local grounding or acquired knowledge to instill immediate fear—its wrongness was so apparent.
That sky was beyond any warning, even though on Monday the sunlight that filtered its way to the roads cast pale red stains on the terrain. Confused, I wondered if even the shadows had turned—exchanging their comforting, predictable dark selves for this new celestial color of red. But Monday’s odd red tinge did nothing to prep me for the shock of waking up beneath that sky.
In the past few weeks, we have all become lay-experts at maps depicting the AQI (Air Quality Index), satellite images tracking dense clouds of smoke visible from space as they are to those of us living in the midst of them. Purple Air, the community sourced map of home based AQI sensors, lives as a perpetual tab on my computer. I wake up and refresh the tab, unsure if I can trust my lungs. Every location that has a sensor is marked by a small, color coded blob with the AQI. Green is healthy air, air which poses no risk, then yellow, orange, red, purple, and various stages of deep maroon. When the air is dangerous to everyone who breathes it, the map is covered in red and purple dots, so the virtual version of the state looks as fiery as the real state.
We’re learning too, how quickly our air can change, no matter how vigilantly the maps are monitored. The few days before the sky turned red, the wind shifted suddenly. When we left the farm for lunch, it was merely hot. But when we came back down through the field, everything was pale yellow; impossible to tell if what we were drinking in was heat, dust, or fine particulates smaller than COVID particles. I began to cough, after ten minutes in it, a cough that lasted on and off until past midnight the next day. I had not been wearing the right kind of mask, and in the course of the hour, the AQI had spiked from 136, yellow zone, to 327, maroon zone.
My partner and I had been planning on backpacking in Yosemite this past week. Two days before we planned to leave, the Creek Fire started, which would grow to gobble 1,000 acres every half hour. Within hours, Fresno, Madera, and Yosemite were filled with smoke. A week later, they are still blanketed, the fire only 6% contained. We live in a monastery, my partner and I, a small community under perpetual quarantine, and work on a farm with a carefully coordinated vacation schedule to stagger our exits and enable two week quarantines upon returns. We have not left our monastery, not for anything, since January.
The day the sky was red, I was out of my mind. I felt so trapped, so hopelessly stuck, so caged by these wild, beautiful hills we’re nestled in. My partner was less frazzled, but my desperation was so potent he agreed to try to leave. On PurpleAir, we saw the circles in Tahoe, orange the day before, had turned green, and we choose to believe the winds had shifted for good. Maybe we could flee across the state to where the air is good.
We left at 11 in the morning, yet all the lights were still on to brighten the dim daynight. Our drive across California was a drive through smoke, but when we made it to the mountains around 4:30, the sky was blue–the granite rock topped with peaks of pines, the clear water of the lake. At 5:15, we learned a state order had shut down all national forests in California.
Bewildered and exhausted by the drive as well as by my desperation which had run us both down to the quick, we ate Fritos in the parking lot just to stay up in the mountains a little longer. It was another six hours back to the smoke of the Bay, but we were able to sleep in a South Tahoe budget motel. The first one up, I went for a walk–two hours later, this boulevard too, was covered in the haze. We got back in the car to head home to an even more extreme quarantine, to ensure we wouldn’t endanger the indoor air our community breathes. We came back, at least, with surety about something—there was nowhere to go.
But that wasn’t all we’d learned. It has never been so clear to me that for some there will be place after place to go. It is one thing to know of inequity, to witness it from afar, it is another to understand from within things must be changed. Ping-ponging across the state, stuck in the smoke, we have been able to come up with possibility after possibility of where to turn next. I read friends’ Facebook posts that cast chilling reminders that for those in Dhakar, in Jakarta, in Kathmandu, this toxic air is the normal air. That at times, the Jakarta sky turns purple from the factory chemicals. I look at my own desperation, the penned-in-ness that I would do anything to escape, and the options that we had and realize how easy they would be to share. Even in this mouse-in-a-hole feeling there is a breath of liberation—knowing clearly what resources I have to make this escape possible is the same as knowing what resources I can share to make other escapes more easeful. My frazzle isn’t just about me. It points toward the necessity of a collective survival/solution.
At home, in quarantine, I read that “Gavin Newsom has approved 190 percent more oil and gas drilling in the first half of 2020 than in his first six months in office. He’s green-lighted 48 new permits for hydraulic natural gas fracturing just since April; according to the Center for Biological Diversity, he’s also approved drilling permits for 1,400 new oil and gas wells so far this year.”[1] Historically, California has relied on firefighting crews comprised of incarcerated folks. Allowed to fight the fires for $2-$5 a day while incarcerated, these firefighters were barred from the work once they were released[2]. But with the unchecked spread of COVID-19 in the state’s penitentiary system, California found itself desperately short of crews to face the fires. On 9/11, Newsom finally signed a law expunging the records of firefighting inmates upon their release, making them eligible to apply for the jobs they had actually been trained for. The ironies and contradictions in Newsom’s stances, which portend more fires, while enabling ex-prisoners with experience fighting them to finally obtain livelihoods, even as the fires themselves destroy life after life—is the stuff of all too familiar fever dreams.
One symptom of smoke inhalation is lethargy, exhaustion. After a month it may be that we lack the energy it takes to get to the root of this burning system. It is a waste of another kind of resource if we believe we are locked into the habitual maintenance of catastrophe and the most we can be roused to do is to uphold basic rights previously denied. So I place my trust in that burning clarity coming down from the mountains. Big change has got to come to meet the future that is already here. And that change will happen when we take in fully what we already have—and commit to sharing it completely.
Notes
1 “Drilling for Oil While California Burns”, Kate Arnoff, The New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/article/159313/drilling-oil-california-burns?fbclid=IwAR3chH2oXFNjTSeIuYLK7QP5lA7OIhRnDeghyj-5nZVSRMGy_prewlSk0RU
2 Pandemic Sidelines More Than 1,000 Incarcerated Wildfire Firefighters in California.”, Maanavi Singh, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/10/california-wildfire-coronavirus-prison-incarcerated-firefighters#:~:text=In%20exchange%20for%20extremely%20dangerous,m%20to%20%24100m%20a%20year.