Shelter in Place, August 21, 2020
John planted this artichoke years ago and every spring it has borne at least a little fruit. This year I’d given up. At the appointed time no artichokes appeared. But then on my first trip to the garden post surgery I found, this week, one small fellow nestled in the branches - a gift. We will not eat it - we never do. Rather, we’ll let it grow and look forward to the resilient thistle flower that will, we hope, someday, rise up and bloom, audaciously purple and completely out of season.
If we really want to eat one, we usually head some 50 miles south of here to a little town in artichoke country, where you can get artichoke soup at the dark wood bar of the local tavern and artichoke bread in the bakery up the street (the corner gas station, by the way, serves tacos so good we’ve been known to buy a quart of the salsa to take home). This is a three-block town at best, where a prim little clapboard church and a more blistered community hall serve as quaint and tired bookends to the ‘business district’, and a creek runs along the only street. Pescadero. Named for the fishermen who used to live here, it is everything you think a vintage California town should be, including the peeling white paint on Victorian porches, set off by colorful and abundant hydrangeas that look to have lasted at least a hundred years. Pescadero. We love it. Our first stop is always the custom wood shop where we’ve bought enough pieces over the past few years to be greeted by name and invited to sit on the porch and shoot the breeze. You can’t see the ocean from that porch, but if you take the empty and rugged Stage Coach Road out of town, and zig-zag up and down the mountain, you see the Pacific shimmering in the distance with nothing but hillsides of dried grass in between.
Now that grass is on fire and the road is closed. As is the dense redwood forest that offers another route back to the city, another, more inland and vista-less winding road, dark and deep. Fire. Out of control with California firefighters stretched beyond capacity. There’s little they can do but move the people out. Pescadero and all the little hamlets along the lonely route have been evacuated and, we learned by email last night, the guy who built us a beautiful cedar bookcase last year has already lost his house. My heart is sick. I cannot sleep. I lie here scrolling through the pictures of an apocalypse.
We have not gone to Pescadero since well before the pandemic kept us homebound. It’s one of those places so present in your heart and mind that you put off going because you know it will always be there. But we’ve been talking lately about getting in the car and driving down for some take-out tacos and the view. We wouldn’t even need to get out of the car to have a lovely day, but we’ve hesitated only because of my hips and the stories of overcrowding from city folks as restless as ourselves. And now it is too late. There’s nothing left to do but smell the smoke from here, and hope that resilient Pescadero and its brave inhabitants will still be there once the fire’s run its course.