My city is still on fire and the sky remains choked with smoke
This is a follow-up to my previous wildfire post. If you'd like to kick a few dollars our way, we're just now buying groceries and pet food and everything we went without for almost a week.
Let's get a few things out of the way:
- We were in a Level 2 - Get Set! evacuation zone for four days before dropping into a Level 1 - Get Ready! zone. Yesterday, we were given the all-clear... for now.
- We went without power for 4-5 hours on Saturday, which is pretty good! We've at least had air conditioning and good indoors air quality for the majority of this ordeal.
- We did not end up having to flee our apartment, which is great! There wasn't a comfortable place for us to relocate our pets in that case.
- They're saying that the winds will pick up over the weekend, so we're keeping our belongings packed up.
With that out of the way...
Not religious but thank fucking god. We have power, we have our precious air conditioning, and we have internet. There's a lot to be thankful for! My second cousin's house did not burn down, though it's still in a Level 3 evacuation zone and ash is raining down all around it.
The fire struck at a particularly bad time: between paychecks, right after rent was paid, with not much of anything in the fridge. In fact, I'd placed a pickup order for groceries the same day that the fire took its first three acres (the combined area fires are now over 10,000 acres), which I then had to cancel around an hour later... haunting us as a big-ass pending charge on my card for almost six days. Once we lost our power, I began to panic a little more than I already was, as I'd lost a way for us to prepare any of the shelf-stable foods in the pantry. This was an important lesson to learn.
I spent the first chunk of time hurriedly packing with my wife, who is much more resilient when it comes to this kind of thing. She grew up in Oklahoma, and I could immediately tell that she had done the whole get-everything-together-at-a-moment's-notice thing many more times over than I had. The process was painless up until we realized that we had a suitcase left over; many tears were shed trying to figure out what held too much sentimental value to lose and what could be left behind to burn.
I've lived in this town my entire life. I have watched climate change warp its all-seasons way of life into a two-seasons binary of extreme heat and extreme cold. We never had wildfires like this when I was growing up; my lungs had never known this smoke. Everything changed after 2020, and it's beyond upsetting that my partner's primary frustration with living here is "we lose the end of every summer to wildfire smoke."
It's been a very hard week.
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