Zombie Fires and Oregon Sleeper Cells

Another day under a Kryptonian style red sun.

Smoky gloom and ashen haze hung over everything in sight.

SoCal was cooked.

In the midst of another historic heat wave, Los Angeles County recorded an all time high of 121 degrees in Woodland Hills. The National Weather Service declared it was the hottest temperature ever recorded at an official weather station throughout the greater Los Angeles basin, breaking the previous record of 119 degrees set in July of 2006. For any part of L.A., so close to the coast, to hit 120 degrees was a staggering mark.

It also purportedly hit 122 degrees up in north Santa Barbara County.  The heat over Labor Day weekend was unbearable. Strict Covid-19 measures to close down beaches through the holiday weekend were issued from public health departments. Regardless, inaccessible parking lots and taped-off beach entrances were ignored by thousands of people looking to escape the heat. Not a great number of older homes and apartments had air conditioning units in Santa Barbara because of its history of near perfect, temperate climate, generally a balmy 70-75 degrees year-round.

Armageddon in California was indeed a dry heat.

Yes, climate change had left initial stages of prediction and abstraction. Experts concluded we entered a second stage of full onset, evidenced by major events like Hurricane Laura, the fifth strongest storm to ever hit American shores, which devastated Louisiana in August of 2020, 15 years after Hurricane Katrina drowned the place.

Third stage is a point of no return for everyone.

Most ecological models reveal we have ten years left to reverse this shit.

Ten years.

It came on faster than we thought, much faster. It’s not a cycle of the earth as so many head-in-sand deniers want it to be. We burned too much carbon dioxide, released too much chemical shit in the atmosphere. The ozone is burning away. The polar ice caps are melting.

A third of Canada was covered by smoke plumes from zombie fires torching boreal forests in the Arctic Circle.

Yeah, you heard that right.

Zombie fires!

Thawing permafrost fires were set off by methane gas. They continued to smolder underground after their surface conflagrations burned out. It was a direct result of melting polar caps.

Australia, the Arctic, California, the Gulf Coast, Florida.

What was it going to take?

I’m pretty sure we know.

It will take mass displaced American refugee tent cities set up in the northern regions, in Montana, the Dakotas, and Canada, for Americans to finally start taking climate change seriously.

When ragtag Americans are shuttled from regions no longer able to sustain human life, they’ll agree to give up their fossil fuels, then and only then. But by then, it’ll be too late. Too late for the current generations of humans alive, in any case.

What happens when most of the southwestern and coastal United States becomes uninhabitable?

We will become a refugee society.

Not unlike the Marshallese, or the displaced peoples of the Sudan, Bangladesh, Jordan, Syria, and the current humanitarian crisis, Palestine. Except our relocations probably won’t be brought about from civil wars and genocides (maybe), but rather from heat and lack of water.

According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, wildfires torched over 2 million acres in 2020’s fire season, a record-setting watermark beating the previous high of 1.96 million acres in 2018. There were 900 separate wildfires from mid-August to early October of 2020. 70 plus active wildfires continued to torch the southwest that month, 23 major ones in the Golden State. New events arose; the El Dorado Fire, ignited by a gender reveal party fireworks stunt in San Bernardino that torched 8,700 acres, the Creek Fire up near Fresno burned 152,000 acres, and the Bobcat Fire in the Angeles National Forest torched 4,900 acres.

The Creek Fire produced a pyrocumulonimbus cloud so large it was the biggest one in American history. It reached 9 miles high into earth’s atmosphere, poured burned pollutants into the ozone, a massive thunderhead that affected weather patterns across the western United States.

Social media feeds were full of NoCal citizens posting pictures of an orange dystopian sky looming over San Francisco, its residents waking up in a haze bereft of any sunrise. The orange gloaming was prophetic and wondrous at the same time, an ethereal, future-shock canvas. Painted as it appeared to be, it was a residual effect of the heavy amount of smoke particles in the air which only allow yellow, orange, and red light from the sun through thickened atmospheres.

I’d love to say that fire season was unheard of, but it wasn’t. It was predicted. What all the fire experts said would eventually happen, did in fact happen.

It was the heat. It was killing California.

If all those fires happened closer to the coastlines, there would have been a lot more misery and suffering. It’s a foregone conclusion it’s only a matter of time before fires begin encroaching more populated areas. With no rain expected for the interim future, we expected things to get worse. The Santa Anas were coming, and those harbinger hot winds were going to surge down slope through our mountain canyons to crispy SoCal ‘burgs, two old lovers gearing up for an autumn rage. I figured in that year of savage omen, their annual union would be too terrible to behold.

But we made it.

By the hair of a chinny-chin-chin.

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Joan Didion once said of the Santa Ana winds:

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

Jeff Weiss of Los Angeles Magazine penned a somewhat darker and perhaps more prognostic essay about the relationship of fire and Southern California:

“Fire isn’t the reflection of Los Angeles but, rather, its shadow…an unwanted reminder of the natural and existential consequences that it has historically attempted to ignore. It is the big payback for the redlining and police brutality that eventually turned the city to cinders in 1965 and 1992. It is the hidden cost of the county’s contracts with the devil, giving developers free rein to build generic fortresses inside any available canyon—even those directly adjacent to ready-made conflagrations of coastal live oak and chaparral. It is a reminder that hopes rarely align with what actually happens, and that all time in the sun eventually yields to death.”

Romanticizing SoCal’s toxic relationship with fire is easy for writers to do, myself included. Ours are but simple artistic license, though. Reality is what it is, for this region on the West Coast continuing its degradation of desertification. If we choose to stay, then we accept the risks. The rapidly accelerated genesis of climate change has transitioned California’s fire season beyond a perpetual yet relatively manageable state of being, to a more uncontrollable and eventually a more unbearable phenomena.

Climate change isn’t dicking around anymore. There’s no more rational recourse for putting it off until the next generation. There’s no passing the buck or hoping for a natural regression or a reversal of fortune. There’s no leaving it in the hands of gods and no relying on amazing graces.

It can be undone, but it has to be a worldwide effort.

As we know by now, getting a multi-nation body of politic to do anything in unison is almost the same thing as getting a room full of stray dogs to sit at once.

But it can be done. At great personal and national sacrifice.

Are Americans up to it?

No.

Not yet.

We’re not near enough the finish line.

If there’s going to be any last-minute saves, they will only occur in the very last minute.

If at all.

In early autumn of 2020, the August Complex Fire in Tehama County up north of Sacramento became the biggest wildfire in Californian history. It torched an estimated 470,000 plus acres, resulting in at least seven deaths.

Oregon and Washington sparked up wildfires as well. The entire West Coast was ablaze in that second week of September. Several small towns across Oregon, including Phoenix, Talent, Detroit, and Blue River, were nearly or completely destroyed. Half a million Oregonians, roughly 10 percent of their population, were evacuated or put on Level 3 ‘go now’ notice for evacuation.

New conspiracy theories from the alt-right sprang up regarding the West Coast holocaust, citing arson sparked by radical leftists as a measure to corral emergency federal funding for California. In Corbett, Oregon, there were reports of illegal checkpoints and roadblocks set up by armed alt-right civilians to check vehicles escaping fires during emergency evacuations.

Not quite sure how they would’ve determined whether anybody in the car was an anti-fascist, unless they were traveling through central Oregon wearing a black beret or a red star patch on their khaki denim jackets? The lengths to which people go in continuing to deny real time crises are long indeed. I’ve reluctantly come to accept some will only realize their folly when they are literally running for their lives or bleeding out.

That damned hammer again.

It’s a bummer.

The Dolan Fire in Big Sur expanded to 73,000 acres, fanned by incoming winds, spreading across the southeastern expanse of the Santa Lucia range. The massive plumes from that burning portion of the Los Padres National Forest were seen as far south as San Luis Obispo. Falling ash turned San Simeon’s pastures from their customary September browns to a salt and pepper sandpaper.

Some good news…the condor chick named Iniko from the Ventana Wildlife Sanctuary, formerly missing and presumed dead, was found alive.

One bright spot.

Cooler temperatures were coming.

Immeasurable losses were piling up in the interim.

It was tough to be a Californian that year.

It felt like that summer was never gonna end.   

*Compiled from September 29, 2020