I am so tired of fire season. The last couple of years here in Sonoma County have been too much for me. The smoke is unhealthy, your house is threatened and perhaps the worst thing is not having electrical power. When our power goes out, we have no water. Many of you others in California have been negatively impacted as well, I’m sure. And we all remember how smoky it got in Grass Valley at the Father’s Day Festival a few tears ago.
Like most of you out there in CBA land, I like to play music but even more than that I like to ride my bike and I have not been able to do that much recently due to poor air quality or other reasons.
Fire on the mountain, run boys run
We were forced to evacuate our home in Healdsburg recently due to the Kincade fire. We loaded up our most important stuff and evacuated to our friends’ house in Santa Rosa.
If the house catch on fire and there ain’t no water round
Throw my old guitar out the window. Let it burn right to the ground.
Our friends in Santa Rosa have a really nice house and we had everything we needed including electricity, internet and cable TV. We watched the live newscasts with trepidation as the fire approached the highway 101/ Russian River “barrier” that our house sits on the other side of. I recognized familiar landmarks close to that dividing line on the newscasts and wondered if our house would be next to go up in flames. Evacuations were happening so fast that I wondered if the whole state of California would go up in flames.
Fortunately it didn’t and I’m back on my bike. Today I rode through one of the worst hit local sections on Chalk Hill Road. The air still smelled of smoke and I saw houses completely burned to the ground. An old winery, Soda Creek, I have past many times is completely gone. As I saw on the live news broadcasts the fire roared to the outskirts of Windsor, a populous bedroom community near Santa Rosa. A few houses went up in flames but the town itself was saved.
As I viewed the devastation today on my bike ride I was sad for how the beautiful hills and dales I love so much will never be the same again. It will take quite a few years to restore the beauty to these hillsides and meadows. But I was also impressed by how much worse it could have been. From the look of the scorched areas of landscape that i saw today it is very apparent that there must have been spot fires everywhere during the height of the fires. Some buildings caught flaming cinders and went up in flames while the houses of neighbors were left untouched. My admiration is great for the dedicated fire fighters who put out all of those spot fires and saved so many houses and other buildings.
I am so tired of fire season. I hope Somebody can come up with a solution for the dry windy prelude to our rainy season. Maybe we should bury our power lines like they do in Austria. Maybe we should make microgrids to distribute power locally. If something doesn’t happen to change all this madness I’m thinking a lot of people will just get fed up and move.
And Leavin’ will take that load off your mind
