California’s Forever Fire

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This story was co-published with The New York Times Magazine and is not subject to our Creative Commons license.

Early in my two-writer marriage, my husband and I joked that we should add a silent third spouse who worked in venture capital or practiced corporate law. But really, we already had a bonus partner: California. The state was dramatic and a handful. But she was gorgeous, and she brought into our lives, through the natural world, all the treasure and magic we’d need. The beaches. The mountains. The clean waves at Malibu. The seal pups at Año Nuevo State Park. This was not just our relationship to California; this was everyone here. The implicit bargain was that California would protect and deliver to her residents the earth’s own splendor. In return, we’d spend a stupid amount of money on housing and tolerate a few hazards. We stowed an earthquake kit in the basement of our tiny house and, even prepandemic, cached boxes of N95 masks under the sink. Why live anywhere else? My human spouse hung photos of El Capitan in the entrance hall. We propped a bright red surfboard against the living-room wall.

In hindsight, it’s clear that this romance between California and her citizens was fundamentally unstable, built on a lousy foundation and crumbling for years. But when you’re enmeshed, even the troublesome patterns are hard to see. All Californians tell their stories. Ours, courtesy of privilege (race, education, a house purchased in the 1990s), are mundane. Police escorted us over flaming hills as we tried to return home from backpacking trips. I woke up to texts from friends: HAVE YOU HEARD FROM YOUR PARENTS? ARE YOUR PARENTS OK? after their neighborhood in Napa burned. My parents — thank God — were already with me. Pacific Gas and Electric, California’s largest utility, started turning off power to millions of residents in an attempt not to ignite (more of) the state. We all knew these so-called public-safety power shut-offs were an appalling sign of a diseased empire. You couldn’t just abandon basic functions and duties, could you? But it turns out you can.

The dominant story in California these days is that the orange, dystopian smoke-filled sky that blanketed the state on Sept. 9, 2020, was proof that our beloved was corrupted and had been for some time. We were in the midst of the worst wildfire season in the state’s history, and the evident wrongness traumatized us and shook us awake. Living in California now meant accepting that fire was …….

Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/californias-forever-fire