Fire Season 2

Wholly Smokes

This is a free post from The Real Sarah Miller, my second about fire season which, unfortunately, is about all I can think of right now. I am going to continue to keep these free for a bit longer. I keep saying I’m going to make more stuff private but I feel like honestly people who can or want to pay can support this and those who can’t or don’t feel moved to for whatever reason won’t, and that seems fine with me at this point.

We woke up to a lot of smoke this morning, not from the River Fire, near us, but from the huge Dixie Fire, up north, now at 432,813 acres. I thought about people I know in Oregon that have had terrible smoke and hoped they were getting a break from it, even if it meant we now had it.

I checked my phone. Three things: My swimming date for the morning was cancelled, due to smoke, obviously. An editor had sent back a draft I had written, with the note that it was “good, but a little thin” (true!) along with suggestions to improve it.  Finally, someone had forwarded me a series of Facebook comments about an article of mine. A few of the comments were nice. One was not. “Poor Sarah,” the Facebook commenter mocked me. My work was “depressing” they wrote. Guilty as charged, I thought, and went back to sleep.

That’s a lie. Rage hit and and then turned to sadness (my emotional process, impervious to therapy and everything else) and then I wrote something angry to the person who had forwarded these comments to me. I told T. what happened and gave him the gist of the email I’d written.

“I’m sure they didn’t want to be mean by sending it, they were probably just trying to show you they were on your side, why did you have to go off on them,” T. said, still half asleep. “I thought we talked about your impulse control problems.”

“We did,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

For a few hours I kept asking myself: Was I just an insolent brat to be upset about climate breakdown? “Sarah’s glass is always half empty,” the Facebooker, who I have known since childhood, who always struck me as a bit of a viper underneath a pleasant facade, had said. It wasn’t just mean, it was enraging. How was I supposed to feel? How was anyone? Also, my sadness wasn’t just sadness for me, it was being surrounded by sad people, everyone heartbroken and terrified, and trying to keep it together for each other, having laughs and conversations and working, working, working, through all of it. For Christ’s sake, I thought, looking out the window at the hot, gray listless world, I can barely see the house next door through the smoke, and I’m not even in a bad mood right now! I actually felt relatively cheerful. Today was fine. We didn’t have to flee from the River Fire. They were doing a good job putting it out, fingers crossed. We were going to Sacramento to volunteer at a mutual aid fundraiser for fire victims, and I would probably meet people there that were cool and have spaghetti. I love spaghetti. This qualified as a good day and I knew it. My attitude was exemplary. I could fill a fucking glass when it was appropriate.

It was so smoky we could barely open the door to let Ruthie out. I rewrote the story and made it more robust. I conducted an interview for my podcast. I did a terrible job. I sounded like a complete nitwit. Oh well, I thought. I ate a vegetarian sandwich and took a shower and washed my hair. I wrote out some instructions for the Badger, who was looking after Ruthie since we’d be gone for five or six hours: 1. Feed Ruthie. 2. Make sure Ruthie has water. 3. Be nice to Ruthie. 4. Let Ruthie out. 5. Love Ruthie. 6. Make Ruthie the center of your world. I shoved it in front of him while he was on a zoom call and he nodded.

On the way to Sacramento, we picked up a friend at the K-Mart parking lot in Grass Valley. Her house was just outside the evacuation zone for the River Fire so she’d spent the last several days ready to go, and now it looked like she wouldn’t have to. For this reason, she was in relatively good spirits, despite the smoke and terrible air.

We took 49 to 80. Everything was shrouded in gray, the ground scrubby and brown, everything dead.  I’m sorry if this is depressing.  It was actually an enjoyable drive but that’s what it looked like, and this is non-fiction. Making things up would be against the rules of the genre. The trees remained pleasantly vibrant. As we approached Auburn we passed a field of beautiful black cows, grazing on a hillside. “Cows!” We all said it at the same time, like five year olds.

The fundraiser was in a restaurant that serves breakfast and lunch and lets people do stuff like spaghetti dinners to make money for various causes at night. I was supposed to serve but there were too many servers so I rolled silverware for a while. The guy I was rolling with told me how he had just been in Greenville, California, a few weeks ago. “The place I ate lunch at, it burned down,” he said. “The whole town burned!”

“I know,” I said. “It fucking sucks.”

 He told me more bad fire stuff that had happened to people he knew and I just kept saying “Man,” and “Fuck,” and “That sucks,” and tried to keep rolling, to keep it together. After a few minutes he said, “I think we have enough silverware.” So I hostessed for a while. Some old guy told me I had pretty eyes and then made a strange motion like he was going to hug me, but on my chest.  “Ha ha, yeah, no,” I said. “Enjoy your dinner.”

photo by Josie Morales

After a while the nice people running the event said it was fine if I sat down and ate. I got my food and tracked down a beer and joined some other volunteers at a booth overlooking a nail salon, a bar, the dim air, and the red sun.

I love strangers. I talked with one woman about being a leftist in a small mountain town. I talked to another one about leftist-y reading group stuff, which we are both into. “It’s my big contribution to the cause,” I said. “On account of being a coward and all.” She told me about all the shitty things that happened to not-white people when they built the freeways in Sacramento. I introduced them both to the term “Y'all Qaeda” and also had occasion to explain the concept of social reproduction. They were fascinated. Their eyes got big and their mouths fell open. They looked the way everyone looks when they first hear the Good News.

photo by Josie Morales