What it's like right now

Photo: Cal Fire

It’s happening again. I always forget this specific feeling, but when it comes, it’s like it never left. A constant sinking sensation, pulling me magnetically back to my phone, refreshing the same news pages and apps, sifting through the contradictory reports of evacuation zones and containment numbers. Mentally scrolling through lists of friends and family to text, are you safe? Have you evacuated? Time passes strangely, quickly while I’m dissociated on my phone, slower when in the real world, distracting myself from forces I can do nothing to control. I’m living on fire time.

From 2017 to 2020, terrible fires ravaged Northern California. Three of these directly impacted Sonoma County, the place I grew up. The Tubbs Fire, in 2017, destroyed several neighborhoods of Santa Rosa, the mid-size city 20 minutes from my house, where, as a teen, I’d hang out at the mall. At the time, it was the most destructive wildfire in California’s history, burning nearly 37,000 acres, hopping a six lane freeway, and killing 22 people. My mom and her cats evacuated, and many people we knew lost their homes. The next year, the Tubbs Fire would be eclipsed by the Camp Fire further north, which killed 85 people and drew international attention for leveling the town of Paradise.

Though I witnessed most of this destruction and trauma from afar, I did happen to be in Sonoma County during the Camp Fire (I wrote about efforts to hand out masks to Oakland’s homeless population for Splinter). Walking through my old high school, the sky was clouded with smoke that turned the sun red. I slept on my dad’s couch that night and forgot to fully close the window, waking up with a sore throat and headache from whatever chemicals were floating in the air. My dad told me at the time of people he knew whose homes had been destroyed in the Tubbs Fire. They had moved up to Paradise the next year and lost everything again. Double victims of climate catastrophe.

The same time next year, I was living in Melbourne, Australia, watching the Kincade Fire burn through Sonoma County from afar. A few months later, Australia went through its own catastrophe: Black Summer, an explosion of fires that overwhelmed the continent for months. All in all, these fires, which stretched from the tip of rural Victoria on the east coast all the way to Western Australia, burned 243,000 acres, and killed 34 people. A later study found that 450 people died from inhaling the smoke that blanketed capital cities like Canberra and Sydney for months.

The end of Black Summer faded into the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Returning from my pre-pandemic trip to Mexico in late February of 2020, I saw early adopters wearing masks to protect themselves from COVID in the airport. I hastily Googled “do masks prevent viruses” on my phone, as I scoffed at them, thinking they would be better off wearing an N95 to protect themselves from the bushfire smoke that still hung over Melbourne than from this disease we still barely understood.

Unlike much of the world, Australia took the pandemic extremely seriously. We spent months and months at home, leaving only a few minutes a day to walk to the grocery store. It was in fall of 2020, during one of our endless lockdowns, that the LNU Lightning Complex fires hit Northern California. A complex of over 250 individual fires started by lightning strikes burned 363,220 acres, sending smoke into the Bay Area in such a massive quantity that it was easily visible from space. My mom and the cats evacuated again. You probably remember this period from the dystopian images of the Golden Gate Bridge beneath an orange sky.

Deep in lockdown, the borders shut for the foreseeable future, I wrote for Gizmodo about my mental state: “The world I left in 2018 is gone, and the next one is not settled. I’m scared of what’s coming—not just in the course of this pandemic, but beyond it. That future is always unknowable, but right now it feels nonexistent, so I have to find a way to be OK with just the present.”

If I’d been more honest, I would have written that some parts of the future did seem fairly predictable: more of the same, but worse. That’s the future we’re facing now. The only question is how we can manage to survive it. How do we live in a world where repeated disasters teach us nothing? How do we heal from the trauma of these events, knowing that this is what our leaders have decided will be normal? How do we grapple with the suffering our country is still inflicting on so many people around the world–the unnatural disasters that are seemingly immune from our efforts to stop them? I don’t know the answer.

Of course, there are spots of hope: as always, disasters bring people together, and often we see the best of humanity amid the wreckage. I am far from hopeless about the human condition. But individual acts of kindness and local community aren't enough to save us from what’s coming.

After the initial shock of the apocalyptic fires engulfing Los Angeles, we’re now beginning to hear of the aftermath. Luckily, all of my friends are alive and physically safe. I know several people whose homes burned down, who lost everything. The fires are still burning, but people are starting to think about what comes next. Will they rebuild or move? Will insurance ever cover the areas that burned again? Some level of normalcy will return, until another “unexpected” disaster strikes.

I wish I could end this on a positive note, with something satisfying and conclusive. I want to impose some kind of order onto this suffering and chaos, make it fit into a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. I want to learn the moral of the story. But that’s not how reality works. All we can do keep going, and believe that there is value in the simple documentation of our experiences, in all their grim, messy realness. That it is enough to simply say: this is what it’s like right now.