Grief

I know that California is still there. I know that it is still mystifyingly beautiful and paralleled by no other. It’s landscape can fill the whole spectrum of my desires. I had a partner once who adamantly described the state as “the most desirable place to live”. This wasn’t his opinion. He meant it as a statement of objective truth. That really pissed me off at the time. I don’t know if I would go so far as to agree with him, but after having travelled to the opposite side of the country, the fact that California is my favorite state and where my heart resides has hit me. Hard. 

I spent a summer and a fall in Yosemite when I was 21, then moved to Tahoe two years later. The North Shore is the first place I spent more than a handful of months, other than my hometown, in my entire ‘adult’ life. It’s where I decided that maybe part of growing up is staying put for a while. The past 10 years of my life (save two that I was with family here in NY) have been lived in the Sierras.

I remember my first fire season. It was apocalyptic living in Yosemite during that time. Until then I had no clue that this was a ‘normal’ thing that happened and affected peoples’ lives every year. It’s not something that’s really in your sphere when you don’t live on the west coast. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess. There were rock slides going on while ash fell from the sky. So many times I wondered if my roommate was in the clear or whether I’d be able to get back to the high camps to sleep in my bed. At one point I hitched a ride from the Valley with a friend to Tuolumne. We drove all the way around the park through Sonora Pass to circumvent the fires. It took us eight hours. 

When I moved to Tahoe, I had all but forgotten what those fires were like. It wasn’t until I’d been there for two summers that there was an incident close enough to the North Shore to really experience. Above the treetops, the sky was an ominous, gray backdrop. The air quality was so poor that our food truck did not attend the event we were scheduled for in favor of escaping the smoke. That night, my partner and I drove, heads aching, throats sore, to San Francisco. We car-camped by the Golden Gate Bridge and woke feeling miles better.

There have been many fire seasons before and since then that devastated forests and homes, killed animals, crops, and people, and ruined plenty of lives, but last year was different. It began in June, which seemed early. Small blazes started up everywhere due to the relatively dry winter we’d had and larger complex fires burned relentlessly for weeks… some for months. From wildland fighters and hotshots I heard tell that it was the worst season a lot of crews had seen and the last that quite a few would work.

Nowhere on the coast was safe. The Bay, where I had always gone to get away from the smoke, was no longer a place to take refuge. Friends in Oakland, Portland, and Seattle said that the sky was a dim orange haze, expelling ash like snowflakes for what seemed an eternity. The places that you’d think would not be on fire were. It was fucking terrifying.

Currently there are three fires burning and it is not even June yet. My people are still there, many of them. Toughing it out, loving their homes, and just living through it. I hope that it gets better and I will help in whatever ways I can, but last year I decided that I could not take another fire season the way things had been progressing. My heart breaks for California, the only place outside of myself that I have ever actually felt ‘at home’.

I set out on my van adventure with various intentions. One was to find a new home. This country is full of beauty, magic, and wonder… natural features that move my mouth to grin without my mind even knowing. I made my way through state after state, each one more enchanting than the last and thought to myself, what would it be like to live here? There are pros and cons to everything, right? But the more I explored, the sadder I became.

That feeling I have in the Redwoods, the Bay Area, the Sierras… I haven’t found it anywhere else and I think that’s okay. But I guess that just like anything loved that is no longer, this is what it feels like to grieve the loss of my home. In some ways, my decision to leave and my deep sadness seem more like a demarcation of internal temporal factors rather than a recognition of external material ones. I know that California is still there and I hope like hell that it will be when I get back.

**For the record: wildfires are just one of many environmental and economic issues that the state of California faces due in large part to climate change. They just happen to be the one that is ravaging it and surrounding areas at the most alarming rate.**