Nine days after the start of the most destructive fire in California history, the Bay Area is filled with smoke. When you walk out of your house, you smell it. There’s ash on your car in the morning. The parks, normally filled with kids, are eerily empty. Our air quality index has been between 160-180. Unhealthy.
In our western part of Silicon Valley, you can barely make out the hills a couple miles down the street. The scenery around us is grayed out, like an unavailable option on a computer screen.
We’re staying at home. Inside.
I’m trying to write for NaNoWriMo, so this has worked pretty well for me. When I get antsy, my go-to is usually a hike. Since I can’t do that, I write. I research. I dip into that stack of unread books spawned by my serious book buying addiction. More than usual, I’m getting stuff done.
In the evenings, we’re watching movies and playing games. My youngest is obsessed with 1980s movies, which is amusing to me, since these are the movies of my youth and young adulthood. She’s obsessed with the Back to the Future series, which has made for lots of deep discussions. The kind that you hope for and don’t easily get. What events in your life caused you to be who you are today? What if things had happened differently? And, more importantly, was Biff Tannen really modeled after Donald Trump? (Yes—confirmed by screenwriter Bob Gale in a 2015 Rolling Stone Interview).
And we’ve played board games, one of my husband’s favorite things to do. As an introvert, he socializes more easily when he’s doing something. And occasionally, I do win a game.
Our bad air quality is expected to last through Tuesday (four days from now).
Indoor life has been less frustrating than I thought, a reprieve from busy Silicon Valley life. The sad thing is to go outside, smell the air and think of the cause of all this. Two hundred miles away, people’s lives are going up in smoke. I have nothing to complain about. I have my family around me and a house to be indoors in. The people in and around the town of Paradise, California do not. And their situation is heartbreaking.
I got some sobering perspective from this post by a woman who grew up in Paradise. “Please Excuse the Smoke,” https://legitfaith.wordpress.com/2018/11/16/please-excuse-the-smoke/
Are you holed up indoors, too? For those of you outside California, what’s your perspective on what you’re seeing and hearing about the fire?
I lived in the Bay Area for 20 years, and it always astonished me how smug the residents were about the smog and air pollution. With nature’s air conditioning, it was blown from the Bay Area into the Central Valley, and south. Now the favor is being returned.
It does not mean the fires are not bad; there were heavy winds during the Oakland fire storm in 1991. It also means no weather condition should surprise anyone any longer.
Agreed. đź‘Ť