10/29/2003
fire
The fire continues. It's very surreal. The sky here is invariably some wrong color and still smells vaguely of yesterday's campfire. And the schools are closed. And work's been cancelled. And it feels like we live in some smog-ridden place. And we are lucky. We live in one of the cleanest spots of the county. The air is fairly clear. And we haven't ever been fearful that we were in peril.
This is a NASA/AP photo. To give you some sense of scale, the penninsula at the bottom is Baja California, Mexico. The top of the picture is Los Angeles. San Diego is somewhere in the middle under all the smoke. This photo shows all the smoke over the ocean. This must have been while the Santa Ana conditions prevailed. Now, the fire is moving hungrily eastward. The area is not as heavily populated, but whole towns are being wiped out. It's staggering.
As I talk to friends, I hear more and more about the fire's effects. A vacation home, an RV, the farm where Zoe was to have had a fieldtrip yesterday to go to the pumpkin patch, a friend of a friend's house... someone who knows someone who didn't evacuate quickly enough and perished in her car.
Weird. Weird, weird, weird.
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