Summertime in California, when itâs 110 and you wake up in a sweat at 7am and canât 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 donât worry about the fire, itâs probably miles away. The smoke lasts for days and even after a shower you canât get the smell out of your nostrils, canât get the taste off your tongue. You hope your neighbor doesnât 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.Â
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 doesnât come with lightning. Still, you donât expect rain because every winter is âdry.â Snow falls somewhere in the mountains where someone skis then comes back and tells you it wasnât much. No rain means more fire in the summer.
Then, after New Yearâs, it rains. And rains. And gushes. The ground is baked stiff and wonât 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, canât 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 Fort Sumter and the missions. Cracking adobe that predates the country. You can tell vultures apart from other birds of prey easy because theyâre the ones you see most often. Orchards that go on for miles and towns built on top of old olive orchardsâoccasionally a business or private home has kept a few to remind you. They donât plant them. Those are the original trees.
Youâre hiking and you find a massive flat rock with fist-sized holes bored into it. Trees and fenceposts 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 and 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 canât breathe even when thereâs no fire, and someoneâs 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 thatâs what snow was then later hudding 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 miniscule legs. An owl with a broken wing was brought to your classroom, there are giant statues of golden bears at the state fair, and someoneâs 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 youâre nowhere near the ocean anymore, but itâs right there, endlessly green and almost sentient. The hills are moving.Â
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