The Burning Season
You cannot save everything when the fires come to Northern California.
To grow up in the wild American West is to live under different gods. Leave behind the urban sprawl and palm trees of Los Angeles, the candy-colored Victorians and precipitous hills of San Francisco and drive north. Just a few hours will be enough to find the buildings replaced by towering redwoods, Douglas firs, sugar pines and oaks. Here, people find north by looking for where the moss is thickest on tree bark. They harvest wild huckleberries, pick pea-sized strawberries and eat thistle hearts. They get their water from cold springs and flowing creeks and can identify poison oak even when it is leafless in winter. Their children learn to ride a tricycle or roller skate indoors, because the dirt roads are too rough for little wheels. Neighbors are the distant buzz of a chainsaw, deep in the forest. The land smells like fresh-baked bread in the summer, and blooms with a musty spice after the first fall rains. Fog rolls off the ocean, over the coastal ridges, sucked inland by heat, and the fading sun paints it rosy. Innumerable stars, hard and bright, throw their blanket over the land at night.
These western gods are generous with this bounty and beauty, but it doesn’t come free; fear is their tariff. Mountain lions slink from under trees into the bright, golden meadows…
