Shortly before I left New Brunswick, New Jersey, a local slumlord torched two or three of the houses he owned on my street. A couple of weeks before I left Jersey City, a friend and I stood on the roof of my apartment building and smoked a joint as we watched a couple of blocks' worth of stores go up in flames. I left New York a year after they blew up downtown. My mother tells me that for several years there weren't any fires in Santa Barbara. On July 4th of last year, the Zaca fire started and burned until September, consuming nearly a quarter of a million acres. Now there's the Gap fire. People who are paid to notice these sorts of things might be tempted to make some sort of connection, but I haven't had anything to do with any of this. Really.
Anyway. My Wi-Fi router died yesterday. The power was out from 6:30PM until one or two AM last night, and was out for a few hours this evening. A vast plume of blackened brown smoke has swept south across northern Goleta and out over the ocean, and if the wind shifts, that plume will descend upon Santa Barbara with Vesuvian ferocity.
Okay, maybe that was overwritten. Nobody's going to be burned in place or have plaster casts made centuries hence of the hollows their bodies left in the pyroclastic flow, but the air quality could get rather murky.
I do have writing-style things to report, which I'll get to as time, electricity, and potential evacuations allow. The fire's still a ways from here, but it's a hell of a lot closer than the Zaca fire was, in that I can walk around the corner and up the road a bit, stand by the liquor store sign, and watch the fire on the mountain. This, in turn, brings to mind stoned evenings in a cemetery playing Grateful Dead tunes with my friends on the grave of Amos Sked.
But that's another story.
More later.
Anyway. My Wi-Fi router died yesterday. The power was out from 6:30PM until one or two AM last night, and was out for a few hours this evening. A vast plume of blackened brown smoke has swept south across northern Goleta and out over the ocean, and if the wind shifts, that plume will descend upon Santa Barbara with Vesuvian ferocity.
Okay, maybe that was overwritten. Nobody's going to be burned in place or have plaster casts made centuries hence of the hollows their bodies left in the pyroclastic flow, but the air quality could get rather murky.
I do have writing-style things to report, which I'll get to as time, electricity, and potential evacuations allow. The fire's still a ways from here, but it's a hell of a lot closer than the Zaca fire was, in that I can walk around the corner and up the road a bit, stand by the liquor store sign, and watch the fire on the mountain. This, in turn, brings to mind stoned evenings in a cemetery playing Grateful Dead tunes with my friends on the grave of Amos Sked.
But that's another story.
More later.
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