Fire Season #6

My sense of reality started to shimmer and bend.

This is a free post from The Real Sarah Miller, my sixth about fire season which, unfortunately, is about all I can think of right now. People who can or want to pay can support this. Those who can’t or don’t feel moved to for whatever reason don’t have to. Everyone who reads this is appreciated.

I just want people to know what fire season is like.

Bennett Fire, Grass Valley, August 25, 2021, Uncredited.

This is a free post from The Real Sarah Miller, my sixth about fire season which, unfortunately, is about all I can think of right now. People who can or want to pay can support this. Those who can’t or don’t feel moved to for whatever reason don’t have to. Everyone who reads this is appreciated.

I’m writing this from Los Angeles on Friday morning. I drove halfway here on Wednesday night, stayed in Firebaugh at a motel and got up Thursday morning and drove the rest of the way. My air conditioner died in Santa Clarita, so the last forty minutes of my trip were very hot. My air conditioner (and entire car) is now being fixed.

Wednesday morning, back in Nevada City, I was making vague plans to come down here, to get out of the smoke, and to see an old friend. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said to my friend. “I just can’t seem to leave town.”

“Well, I’ll be here whenever you decide to come,” she said. “Take your time.”

I had plans Wednesday afternoon to ferry my friend E., who lives in Grass Valley (the next town over) to a hair appointment, also in Grass Valley, because her father was visiting from Colorado and using her truck. We wore masks on the drive, what a fucking pain in the ass, I mean, I am just so sick of it, but what are you going to do. Some prominent anti-masker in our town died of COVID this week, and I would not want to be him. I told E. how I wanted to go to Los Angeles to get away from smoke and general fire stress but also felt lazy and didn’t know what to do with myself.

E. said she was feeling stressed herself. She is normally and weirdly disposed to cheerfulness. When she was 39, her boyfriend of six years finally admitted that he didn’t want to go through with having a baby with her. So she got out of that relationship and proceeded to find a donor and get pregnant and have a baby on her own. She still loved the guy. Her heart was broken. Yet through all of that she managed to remain in a fairly good mood and rarely sank into self-pity. But the fires and Covid were getting to her. “I feel so terrible,” she said. “My son is 7 years old! He told me last night he felt like he didn’t have anything to live for.” Her voice cracked. Her voice never cracks. She stepped out of my car into the AQI 230 or whatever air and said “I mean, if I’m not doing OK,” and here she laughed with some self-deprecation at her relentless optimism, now tested, “If I’m feeling bad, I just don’t think anyone could possibly be feeling good.”  

I asked her what she said to her son. “I didn’t know what to say! I told him every day we just need to have something to look forward to, like, today, I was looking forward to my hair appointment and seeing you, and he could look forward to soccer practice.” She shrugged helplessly. “What else could I say? I’m not going to lie to him.”

I asked her if she was just getting a cut or getting a cut and color.

“Oh, both,” she said. “I’m going all the way.”

After I dropped her off, I still felt at loose ends. I had Ruthie with me. I had decided to bring her along in case there was a fire. If there was a fire I didn’t want to have to weigh going back home to get her with my own survival. I realize this sounds dramatic. It is both hysterical and real, like my, like everyone’s, entire existence.

I have missed working at the wine store, and missed hanging out with J., the owner, my new friend, who laughs at my jokes and tells me funny stories and is from New York. Hanging out with someone from New York while living in Northern California (I mean unless they’re a total asshole, and honestly, even then it’s pretty good!) is like opening a window in a stale room.

So I went to the wine store, and J. and I talked for a while about fires and smoke and being depressed and feeling insane but also laughed. Then a rep showed up, the kind of seasoned saleswoman who makes you think everything is your idea, isn’t pushy at all, and heartily agrees with you when you say you don’t like something. Wearing our masks except when we were drinking, staying as far apart as we could with an open door, we tried a lot of German Pinots. It being daytime we spat a lot, but we did drink a little. German Pinots are good and getting better because of climate change. I’m not going to call this a sliver lining but it is a fact. J. ordered a few German Pinots, one fruity and approachable, one a little dustier, and also a sort of obscure varietal (to Americans anyway, not so obscure in Germany) called Lemburger. We talked about having a section of the store called “Interesting Varietals” or “Worth Trying.” We discussed line-ups for the store wine club. J. likes to have a more intense red, a lighter red, and a white.

At around 3:30 I decided to go home. The air looked alright. I would go for a swim and then make dinner. Maybe I would drive to Los Angeles tomorrow? Maybe I would take a train? Would I take Ruthie?  I still felt undecided. I walked out the door into the heart of downtown Grass Valley and looked down Main Street, which is on a hill looking down into a sort of basin, which is in fact called Brunswick Basin. There used to be a lake in Brunswick Basin. But they turned it into a shopping center, with a Safeway, a mattress store, nail salons, a Grocery Outlet, and a Ben Franklin. It’s still called Brunswick Basin.

At any rate, Brunswick Basin seemed to have recently and vigorously caught on fire. A plume of smoke billowed in front of me, maybe twenty stories high. My sense of reality started to shimmer and bend.

Thank God I just went on Wellbutrin. I didn’t lose my shit. I poked my head back to the wine store and said to J., “There’s a pretty big smoke plume that looks close, you should probably check it out.” Then I put Ruthie into my car and drove away from the fire. In a few miles I would stop and see if I could get the incident up on my phone, to find out exactly where it was. As I drove, I spoke soothingly to my pet animal. “We are Ok, Ruthie. Mommy isn’t going to let anyone hurt you. As long as you are with your mom everything is Ok.”  She met my gaze in the rear view mirror. I like to think she trusts me. 

I pulled into a semi megachurch parking lot on Rough and Ready Highway. A guy with white hair spilling out of a bike helmet wearing high tech biking clothes, a real Nevada County type, was sitting on a curb in the parking lot, staring at his phone. “Do you know where the fire is?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “What? There’s a fire?”  A sort of light came up in his eyes.

He stood up and turned around. At this point we could see the plume, growing, to the east. “Wow, that’s a big one,” he said without emotion. He struck me as one of those “life is a highway” dudes who I both hate and envy, but mostly hate, but also in a very abstract way, in the sense that my heart rate had not increased as our auras co-mingled across the six or so feet of space between us.

I looked back down at my phone. But the reception was bad. Nothing would load. I called T. “There’s a fire in Grass Valley,” I said. “It looks big.”

His internet was out for reasons not having to do with the fire.

I told him I’d call the friend of ours who was staying with us for a while and call him back, or at least this is how I remember it.  Our temporary housemate answered their phone. They told me that the fire was at the Idaho Maryland exit off 49, about ¾ of a mile from where I thought it was, and it was spreading, though how fast was unclear. “I’m packing up my stuff in case we have to evacuate,” they said, adding that a couple of people we knew who lived in Brunswick Basin were on forced evacuation right now.

I texted a friend who lives just another mile or two east of the fire. “There’s a fire in Grass Valley,” I wrote. She said she knew, that she was packing up. She has two kids and a dog and a husband. Last week her husband went up north to help his father evacuate from the Dixie Fire, and on the way out they ran into another fire, and it was unclear for a while if they’d be able keep driving. “I fucking hate this,” she texted me at the time, but a half an hour later wrote back and told me everything was alright, that they’d been able to get out.

I called T. and told him what I knew about the fire. I said I was going to drive home and get my stuff and go to LA. “It’s not that I think our house is going to burn down today,” I said. “It’s not that I think I am going to die today. I just need to take my Ruthie and go and get out of here.” T. said he thought that was a good idea.

The traffic going back into Nevada City on Ridge Road (the best way to get between Grass Valley and Nevada City without using the freeway) was light. But the traffic coming towards me, leaving Grass Valley, leaving the area, was bumper to bumper. My anxiety swelled, and I reminded myself that everything was alright, that I was pretty far from the fire, and that I had time to go home and get out, ample time, and that probably nothing was going to happen, that the fire would probably get put out. Or it might not.

Back at our house I threw a bunch of underwear, bras, socks, dirty dresses, one caftan, one bathing suit, one pair of shorts and my “go bag”  — jewelry and dog food and notebooks — into tote bags and then the car. I took a red Courbiere to give to my friend in Los Angeles and made my way southward on an extremely circuitous route, all the way out to friggin Marysville, just to insure I would not have to be stuck in any fire traffic.

By the time I got to Sacramento, which took me two hours rather than one because I’d gone so far out of my way, the fire was on its way to containment. I was glad, but I was also glad to have put distance in between me and Nevada County.

I stopped in Stockton to get a Diet Coke and called my friend E. who told me that some of the soccer practice her son had been looking forward to went on as planned, with the fire in the background. “All of the parents just tried to pretend nothing was happening,” she said.

I drove four hours on I-5, then checked into a motel in Firebaugh. It was nicely air conditioned and had a large dirt patch in back for Ruthie to pee in. Ruthie did not like the ice machine next to our room and I didn’t like it either, but I told her that it was fine, that we were going to have a relaxing evening together, reading a World War II spy thriller and having a glass of white wine poured over some of that thunderously loud ice. She paced for a while then curled up next to me.

I called my friend in Los Angeles. I told her that after much hemming and hawing, a startlingly large local fire had finally sent me on my way to her. “Yes!” she said, her tone victorious. “I love you! I can’t wait to meet Ruthie! We are going to have so much fun.”

Happy to be in LA with Mommy