I did not realize how much living in a fire zone fucked my whole brain up until tonight, now that I've lived out of wildfire country for? almost four years? Watching a documentary about the Camp fire (my aunt lives out there and I was the only available long haul driver in the family to be my dad's second set of wheels, if the fire had shifted much farther, I'd have gone up with him to help my aunt evacuate, as it was we were hours southeast and the smoke left us with visibility of MAYBE a quarter mile) and remembering the King fire and the fires that came close to where I lived at the start of college. The grass fires along the sides of the freeway driving home as a kid. The fires I drove through and past in college. And I realized that even with the structure fires, the floods, the tsunamis, the earthquakes. I'm not afraid anymore. The fall isn't a threat anymore. And it feels crazy. It feels crazy. Something that I grew up alongside, that I grew up understanding as a fact of life, it just. Stopped being anywhere near as intense of an issue.
They don't cut my power in the summer and the fall here. I can own N95s and OSHA filter masks just to keep from getting sick. There's still risk, but it's so much less.
