Summertime in California, when it’s 110 and you wake up in a sweat at 7am and can’t fall back asleep regardless of how much sleep you actually got. You open a door or a window and smell smoke. The air is hazy, the sky is orange, the sun bright red. You go back inside. You stay inside. You don’t worry about the fire, it’s probably miles away. The smoke lasts for days and even after a shower you can’t get the smell out of your nostrils, can’t get the taste off your tongue. You hope your neighbor doesn’t mow his lawn, you hope no one throws a cigarette out a window on your road, or lets a loose chain drag behind their truck.
The wind picks up, you get nervous. a helicopter passes low overhead, you get anxious. You wait for sirens. You watch more helicopters carrying heavy sacks of retardant, tanks of water, and keep testing the way the wind blows. Somehow, the fire misses you this summer.
Wintertime in California. The yellowed, crackling grass that looks like miles of sand dunes turns gray and falls loose from the baked earth. You pray for rain but you beg that it doesn’t come with lightning. Still, you don’t expect rain because every winter is “dry.” Snow falls somewhere in the mountains where someone skis then comes back and tells you it wasn’t much. No rain means more fire in the summer.
Then, after New Year’s, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and won’t absorb water after an hour of moderate rain. The water rises. It fills streets, houses, threatens levees and dams. After days of this the ground finally softens. The plants, their root systems shriveled and mostly washed away by the flooding, can’t hold the dirt in place. Where it has no choice,the earth gives way to landslides.
The Sierra Nevadas, riddled with abandoned gold mines and in some place stripped by hydraulic mining. The water is always tainted with mercury and alkali. Occasionally a mine collapses and a sinkhole appears. If the house shakes you ask your friends and neighbors if they felt it too, but then you forget it happened. You actually sleep through most tremors.
Everyone knows at least one old mining song. School projects and field trips are to Sutter’s Fort and the missions. Cracking adobe that predates the country. You can tell vultures apart from other birds of prey easy because they’re the ones you see most often. Orchards that go on for miles and towns built on top of old olive orchards—occasionally a business or private home has kept a few to remind you. They don’t plant them. Those are the original trees.
You’re hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fence posts that look like they were used for target practice with a machine gun. You hear what sounds like a lawn sprinkler go off and you get as far away from the rocks as you can, watching where you step.
Sacramento is a concrete jungle of one way streets and sky-blocking towers before endless miles of ugly industrial wasteland. San Francisco is a twisting maze of clogged overpasses where you drive three miles an hour and watch a dense blanket of bonechilling fog climb over the hills and obscure everything before you enter the city where you keep your foot pressed flat to the brake at the steepest intersections. LA is a fever dream, a knotted nightmare of traffic you can never escape, air you can’t breathe even when there’s no fire, and someone’s always playing Norteño, which sounds exactly like polka but with melancholy Spanish lyrics.
The Central Valley gets funnel clouds that touch down even less often than snow falls, but you remember once as a kid getting sleet in the Valley and thinking that’s what snow was then later huddling in the school cafeteria because of a tornado warning. You remember visiting the ocean and bringing home kelp and colored glass. In the mountains you found a sticky pinecone the size of your head and a snake with minuscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are giant statues of golden bears at the state fair, and someone’s always going missing from Modesto.
But in the springtime, the hills are orange and purple and you realize that oak trees are actually green once a year. The heavy wind makes the grasses sway in waves and it sounds like waves and you’re nowhere near the ocean anymore, but it’s right there, endlessly green and almost sentient. The hills are moving.
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