An Apocalyptic August in California

In the early hours of Tuesday, August 18th, the California sky split with lightning: dry, purple, spectacular, relentless. The following evening, the sunset was streaked, psychedelically, with luminous shades of clementine and fuchsia. A heat wave—the sort that was described with words like “historic” and “unprecedented”—was finally on the wane, and the stream of cool air was welcome. I stood outside my apartment, in San Francisco, and sent photographs of the sunset to friends on the East Coast. The landscape here so regularly stuns and humbles; I wasn’t thinking.

The magnificence of the evening sky was due to particulate matter generated by the C.Z.U., L.N.U., and S.C.U. Lightning Complex fires, which had been sparked by the storms. So far, the latter two are the second- and third-largest fires, respectively, in California history. (The largest, the Mendocino Complex Fire, occurred in 2018.) This past week, evacuation orders were issued across the state, including in Napa, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, and parts of San Mateo County, which abuts Silicon Valley. People fled their homes in Solano County, near Sacramento, and in rural areas close to the Sierra Nevada mountain range, which includes Yosemite National Park and Tahoe National Forest. (To date, more than a hundred thousand people have been evacuated.) Photographs surfaced of burning houses, burning farmland, burning woods. Images of Big Basin, California’s oldest state park, showed five-hundred-year-old redwoods blackened and scarred. There were pictures of people standing in the smoldering remains of their homes—a twisted gate, a gnarled oven—and of evacuees’ stalactite-looking tail lights, melted en route to safety. Once again, California has declared a state of emergency.

The state has always had a fire season, but this month’s fires are unprecedented. Unprecedented does not mean unanticipated: in recent years, fires have intensified—a consequence of climate change, exurban sprawl, and neglected electrical infrastructure. A certain amount of dry vegetation is natural, but rising temperatures have yielded longer periods of drought, accompanied by insect infestations and disease; these factors have led to weaker, drier, and dead trees, and to parched brush and grasses—in short, abundant kindling. Californian housing policy, and the subsequent housing crisis, has led developers and residents to push outward, and nearly a third of residential buildings in the state are situated where urban and wild lands meet. Meanwhile, in 2019, P. G. & E., the electrical utility that services much of California, declared bankruptcy, after being found liable for the wildfires of 2017 and 2018. That year, Sonoma’s Kincade Fire, the state’s largest that season, was catalyzed when a P. G. & E. transmission line malfunctioned.

Forest mismanagement has contributed to the problem. In the early twentieth century, the United States Forest Service adopted a policy of suppressing all fires, and California followed suit. For decades, the state resisted mitigation strategies such as controlled burns, in which fires are deliberately set to clear out dry brush and overly dense clusters of trees. California began setting controlled burns in the seventies but only addressed a modest fraction of vulnerable territory; in 2018, Cal Fire, the state’s fire-protection agency, made plans to triple the amount of “prescribed fire” on state-controlled land, but the burns were temporarily paused this spring, due to the coronavirus. In recent years, the state has strategically deployed herds of goats, which can be spotted not just in the countryside but in various parts of San Francisco—on hillsides below the mansions of Pacific Heights, and on the shoulder of Highway 1—contentedly clearing the brush. The goats are credited with saving the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library from last year’s fires. But, over all, the state’s parks and forests are still glutted with flammable vegetation.

In 2018, one source of the Mendocino Complex Fire was a rancher working to plug a wasp nest; as he hammered down a stake, a spark flew into dry grass. This month’s fires were set off by lightning strikes. But fires thrive in hospitable environments; their growth can seem preternatural. By Friday, August 21st, there were five hundred and sixty fires spread across the state. More than a million acres have burned.

San Francisco during fire season is subdued and strange. It is hard to overstate just how close the wildfires are. Nearly everyone here has a personal connection—friends, family, memories—to the areas most affected. City residents are protected by both density and geography. Still, the air feels heavy; ash drifts onto everything. People close their windows and hibernate. Those who can work from home do so. Things shut down. In 2018, this meant public schools, offices, and cable cars; last year, it meant parts of the electrical grid. This year, the rhythms of the city were already disrupted. The cable cars shut down in mid-March. School buildings and white-collar workplaces have been shuttered for months. The Bay Area was in the midst of planned, rolling blackouts, prompted by the heat wave.

One benefit of living in California during the pandemic has been the abundance of open, uncrowded natural spaces. The heat wave tested this; the wildfires nullified it. It is a cruel irony that outdoor spaces are now inhospitable and unsafe. People cannot congregate indoors, owing to the virus; they cannot congregate outdoors, because of the fires. (In other parts of the country, where winter is unforgiving, this dynamic may soon become familiar; both ash and snow render outdoor dining—a Hail Mary pass for restaurants during the pandemic—untenable.) In the Bay Area, where housing is short and the cost of living is high, many people live in homes and apartments that are packed beyond comfortable capacity; in San Francisco, thousands of people live in parks or on the street. There are very few places to go.

In 2018, during the Camp Fire—the state’s deadliest wildfire, sparked by neglected P. G. & E. equipment—my household purchased N95 masks from a hardware store. This spring, we donated the unused masks to local medical workers, handing them off to a P.P.E.-clad administrator in a hospital parking lot. We figured that the pandemic would pass before fire season; we would be able to restock before fall. (We did not yet know that the N95 masks we had purchased, which had exhalation valves—a comfort when the sky is smoke-choked—would turn out to be a public-health hazard during a respiratory pandemic.) Now we’ve begun discussing how we might apportion our apartment in a covid-19-safe way, should friends or family be evacuated. We’ve contemplated hanging up tarps and building ad-hoc air-filtration systems; for now, we’ve settled on indoor masks. Because of the fires, we can’t simply open all the windows.

People want to help, but aid, like everything, is complicated by the virus. Many organizations on the ground are asking for money rather than dropped-off donations, which come with a risk of transmission; money is tight at a time when nearly fifteen per cent of Californians are unemployed. Service journalism during wildfire season is usually bleak; with the pandemic, it’s nearly apocalyptic. “Masks for Smoke and COVID-19—What Kind is Best?” a headline on KQED asks. In a running series titled “How to Survive,” the San Francisco Chronicle offers detailed guides: “How to keep flames from igniting your home”; “What to do in 1st critical minutes.” It is tempting to turn to metaphor, or to memes. On social media, a viral photograph of a sign outside a senior center—advising hand washing, mask wearing, and social distancing, and swarmed by an inferno—earned the caption “This is fine.”

But memes are a distraction, and metaphor fails. Public schools, previously closed as a public-health measure, are reopening as evacuation shelters. It is grape-harvesting season, and the vineyards are on fire. Farmworkers, who have been hit hard by the coronavirus, are still moving methodically through fields of produce, harvesting fruits and vegetables in brutal heat and toxic air. Many are undocumented, without health insurance, and ineligible for government assistance. Then there is the crisis of firefighting resources. In the past, California has bolstered its crews with inmate firefighters, who are paid a dollar an hour to stand at the front lines under showers of retardant. Many were released from prison earlier this year, as a protective measure against the coronavirus; because they have criminal records, it is extremely difficult for them to get jobs with Cal Fire. Others are still incarcerated in facilities where the virus is widespread. The state has had to appeal to out-of-state agencies, which are sending equipment and assistance: fire engines from Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. Everything seems characterized by a sense of wild fragility.

It’s hard not to see all this in terms of a cascading series of national failures: the chaotic, politicized, fabulistic response to the virus; the political influence of oil and gas conglomerates; the fecklessness of private utility companies; cruel immigration policies and weakened labor protections; environmental rollbacks; a weakened social safety net. Some failures, like global warming, are bigger than any one country’s, although the United States has failed here, too. According to meteorologists, last week’s dry lightning was connected to the heat wave, which was generated by winds from Tropical Storm Fausto. Colorado is also experiencing a spate of wildfires, one of which is the second-largest in its history. These are the conditions for secondary environmental and public-health crises. Smoke from the fires in California and Colorado is uncoiling across the country. Plumes have already drifted as far as Kansas.

The air is cleanest on the coast, even as smoke billows from beach towns like Point Reyes and Santa Cruz. On Friday night, people gathered on Ocean Beach, in San Francisco, to picnic, fly kites, and take photographs of the sunset’s radioactive, marigold glow. Tanker ships turned toward the open Pacific; a flock of pelicans pushed northward. A hurricane of birds, stretching the length of about two city blocks, hovered ominously over the waves, and a surfer, caught beneath them, emerged from the water to say with slack awe that he had never seen anything like it. A friend of mine wondered aloud whether the birds knew something we did not. No, thank you, I thought. A “Spare the Air” alert—a temporary ban on wood burning—had been issued for the entire Bay Area, but, in a spot designated for bonfires on the beach, people nurtured small ones against the wind.

The crescent moon hung low and orange. Back in my own neighborhood, on the southeastern side of the city, diners lingered at sidewalk tables outside bars and restaurants, masks pulled down around their chins like orthodontic headgear. A group of teen-age girls cruised up Valencia Street on e-scooters; a man playing a guitar serenaded two-tops at a Spanish restaurant. The air wasn’t clear, but it offered some relief. In October, the traditional fire season will begin.

Anna Wiener