When I was a child, I loved the wind. Growing up in Maryland, if we had a big wind, it was something to enjoy. My mom would bundle me up and I’d go outside and across the street the woods. The trees were up on a slight rise and there was a sort of bowl-shaped lawn down below between two lines of townhouses. I’d stand in that spot with the neighborhood kids, letting the wind buffet me, and move my body back and forth. If it was fall, the trees in the wood (probably maples?) would begin to shed leaves. All the kids would race to catch them as they fell. It’s a happy memory, and so clear in my mind.
It’s nearly 2 am here, and the promised wind has started picking up. I was woken by the sound of acorns being flung from the oaks and hitting the cars and the house. It sounds like 3 inch hail, or like someone throwing a rock at the house. I’ve come to dread the wind in October, as I imagine all Californians do. This is a fairly new feeling. I mean, we had two huge events here years ago, both in October - the Loma Prieta earthquake happened 30 years ago on October 17, 1989, and the Oakland Hills fire was 28 years ago, October 10-21, 1991. So we’ve had a common feeling of portent since those events happened. But in the last three years, the wind events have increased, and as we’ve discussed before, they always happen this time of year. Always when our vegetation is at its driest.
Our house is lucky tonight - we have power. Most of Northern CA is in blackout. This is the second major loss of power in the last couple of weeks. Many areas have lost power more than twice. Sonoma county was in the middle of a blackout when the fire started in Geyserville last Wednesday. In many ways, having the power out makes things worse for everyone. Certainly it increases the dread.
We’ve never had a fire come within five miles of Poppy Corners - I mean the big wildfire kinds of fires. And yet I hear the wind and I am on high alert. Partially this is because I am thinking of what this wind is doing to the fire up north - now I see that there is a new evacuation warning for the entire town of Santa Rosa - and partly this is because of this sort of PTSD thing that I really believe all Californians have regarding this time of year. If I’m feeling it this much and I’ve never had any fire-related trauma, can you imagine what the folks in Santa Rosa feel like tonight, who haven’t yet recovered from the 2017 fire?
I also can’t stop thinking about the firefighters, how difficult their job is, how many of them are at the scene right now, how many haven’t slept in days. How there are people organizing this tremendous effort, what they must feel like, how they will dream of smoke and fire for years. How it will affect the children of these places. What it must do to a person to hear a bang on the door in the middle of the night and have two minutes to grab things and leave a home you may never come back to.
Maybe it’s because it’s the middle of the night, or maybe it’s because of this latent anxiety, or maybe it’s just fanciful, but I can’t help but think: This is only the beginning.