I sometimes think that every region of the country has a month when, as if by distillation, it is most itself. For New York, that’s December: those few weeks when the holiday lights give even midtown a romantic glamour and all local schedules seem to gather speed against a shared deadline—everyone racing to finish at work, moving among parties in the dark, and trying to get home or get out before the big snowfalls. For Northern California, the molting comes in October, when the fog clears out even near San Francisco, the light and air go hay-like, and the fruit trees droop with goods. Sometimes a cool, sad breeze comes at day’s end. Then something changes. San Franciscans talk of the arrival of the “earthquake weather.” The landscape becomes the driest it will ever be. The coast is swept by strange, hard inland winds; the ground bakes; and these factors, plus a warming climate, make October the month of high-wind fires.
This past week seemed to focus the season’s effects to a rare degree. On the heels of some small earthquakes in the Bay Area, the Kincade blaze, the largest Northern California fire of the year so far, has burned across more than seventy-six thousand acres. Geyserville is a picturesque winery town about eighty miles north of San Francisco and a frequent site of weddings. The fire has destroyed eighty-six homes in the region in just seven days. When news of the blaze first came to greater San Francisco, on Thursday, a specific concern was attached. Heavy winds from the north were expected on Saturday. They promised to whip at electrical wiring, feed flames, and channel the smoke southward, toward the urban center. The regional energy utility, P.G. & E., whose equipment failures last year were held responsible for the record-setting Camp Fire, had planned to shut down portions of its grid, not for the first time, in an effort to prevent potential sparking and more liability. But, oddly, it did not power down a transmission tower at the origin of the Kincade Fire, and it is speculated that a broken jumper cable there might have started the blaze.
Human habitats are easily disturbed, and the power shutoffs, nearly universally condemned, have created their own perils: unsignalled traffic, big losses in the food and service industries, and switched-off air-conditioning and medical devices for the infirm. On Friday, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, described wanting to hold P.G. & E. “to an account that they’ve never been held in the past.” The company, which has been in bankruptcy since facing liabilities for last year’s fires, has often been accused of failing to maintain its network adequately. In June, protesters had assembled outside a shareholder meeting, in San Francisco, with the suggestion that the utility, which is currently a private corporation, should be made public. “Remember Santa Rosa,” a sign there read, referring to the devastating Tubbs Fire, from 2017. Another: “PG&E is Burning our Homes.”
This past weekend’s power outages started as something little more than rumor; confirmation, when it came, was vague. “PG&E may turn off power on 10/26/2019,” a text message on my phone read, last Thursday. “Prepare a plan.” I live slightly north of San Francisco and decided that my plan would be to go to CVS. I bought candles from the small selection that remained—unwanted, nasty candles, with fragrances like “apple berry” and “the beach.” I bought the kind of lighter people use to fire up their barbecues, because the matches were sold out. I put the candles in a cupboard and a flashlight in a drawer. I spent the evening chopping vegetables on the premise that vegetables are better chopped in daylight than in the dark.
By Saturday, I was feeling lucky. Wind patterns held the worst at bay: I saw a great, sick cloud of smoke on the horizon to the north, but it appeared immobile, and the air near the water was clear. Then rumor rode again. It was said that power would be killed at 6 P.M. That afternoon, a friend and I went for a hike to Pirate’s Cove, a rocky outcropping nearby, with the idea that the air was best where it was pressing up against the Pacific. I hadn’t known there’d been a minor brush fire nearby, but the sky was clear, and the surface of the water shattered the light to shards. I got two more messages—one from P.G. & E., with no new information, and another from a friend, with an updated rumor: the power would go off at four. My stove was electric, and I was having people over for dinner; I raced home through traffic that seemed alternately dense and thin.
The power didn’t go off at four, or five, or six. We ate our appetizers outside, and I turned on outdoor lights as the sun set. We ate our dinner inside, and I brought bottles of wine and fizzy water cold from the refrigerator. I’d just prepared dessert and boiled the water for tea when the lights in the house and in the hills around it disappeared: 8:25. The music from the stereo stopped. A dance of iPhone flashlights, as in a night raid. I put twelve tea lights on a plate, used wax to stand two larger truncheons, and lit two votives that purported to smell of “the beach.” My guests stayed past ten, when the wicks drowned, and then drove off in the dark.
The winds did come that night, building from a two-mile-per-hour breeze off the bay to a more than thirty-mile-an-hour blast from the north. In the morning, every unlocked door—the shed, the boiler closet—flapped open, and the lawn and patio were covered with leaves, branches, and little tufts of fir. Still no power. Not a lot of information. Cousins of mine up north had been evacuated—not the same cousins who were forced to evacuate last year.
When I was growing up in San Francisco, fires in the area were rare, horrific crises. Now they are a way of life, the West Coast’s answer to the hurricanes that shifting temperatures bring off the Atlantic. People keep their dust masks at the ready, with their earthquake kits; in an era of androgenic climate change, it’s as though we’re in the process—slow, then fast—of chasing ourselves out of our own homes. If, that is, we are lucky enough to have them: as in the case of most disasters, the least privileged have been the hardest hit. California’s homeless population struggles to find indoor spaces when the air gets dangerously smoky. Employees getting by on hourly wages may come up short if fires or outages force their workplaces to close. Those who can afford a degree of mobility can escape acute effects, but people without means or local connections may have no good path to relocation. Fires leverage standing power structures in odd ways. The San Francisco Chronicle has reported that more than twenty per cent of firefighters on duty in peak season are inmate firefighters—prisoners hired to help clear brush and dig trenches. They are paid an average of two dollars a day, plus a dollar an hour for duty on an active fire.
Being among the comparatively lucky ones, I left my neighborhood, which was still without power, to go into the city, where the electricity was on. In the street outside my place, a middle-aged man wearing long shorts and a jacket that looked awfully like a bathrobe skated by on a longboard. “A tree fell down up the road, man, and there are no caaars! ” he exulted, catching a grade. Actually, there were cars, parked, and people seemed to be conducting aspects of their lives in them: reading, listening to the radio, discussing who had power and who didn’t with the passersby. I spent that afternoon with my friend in the Botanical Gardens. On the walkway of ancient flora, I read that plants emerged from the sea at a time of greater carbon-dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere. I thought about the keen alertness needed to discern the normal flux of change from what is human-created and dire. I’d spent the weekend under skies that were beautiful, clear, and bright. All the while, friends in the East had texted me to make sure I was all right. There’s a desire to address big problems, like the climate, at the individual level—each of us trying to do his or her part. And yet the big picture and the realm of personal experience rarely connect even in moments of crisis. Change must come at the level of policy; as individuals, we remain a lost cause.
Overnight Monday, the air quality grew poorer, and twilight took on the distinctive all-the-crayons-together hue of evening light through smoke. Kids, let loose from school, followed their parents aimlessly to supermarkets; the Peet’s near me was crowded with people taking hours to drink coffees with their laptops plugged into the wall, and every twentieth pedestrian wore his or her mask. The Kincade Fire is still burning, and the Bay Area has an eerie quality, hazy and cold. More winds arrived on Tuesday. My power came on in the wee hours of Wednesday, and I woke at 3 A.M. to find the lamps surrounding my bed bright and gazing down at me, as if I’d fallen asleep and the past days had been a dream. It is easy to think of oneself as moving, in the space of hours, from the escaped to the affected and back again, but that image is untrue. One can live within the heart of a disaster and hold dinner parties and see hours of blue sky without outrunning its ill effects; the fires will probably come again next year. The personal, on issues of important scale, can be deceptive. And, by the time we realize that we are all on the losing team, it’s sure to be too late.
