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.
Day 153: Fire This Time
Shelter in Place, August 19, 2020
The Lanterna blossoms along the edge of the garden remind me in this morning’s early light of the illustrations in the latest California wildfire map - myriad young conflagrations sparked in grass by the strange lightening several days ago, each fire now growing bigger and heading for the hills. Seems the Bay Area was not as lucky as I’d hoped. Inside our house the smell is almost pleasant, like embers from a fireplace left to smolder through the night. But as soon as I open the doors to take a slow walk around the garden, all doubt is gone: fire season is the next plague upon us, not locusts after all.
I’ve been dreading this. I still consider myself a California newbie, but have already suffered through several autumn bouts of choking smoke and falling ash, the air so thick I could not see up to the corner. This is early and, with the lack of rain this year, not a good sign at all. My heart goes out to those more directly in the fires’ paths, the ones who are already compromised by the virus and its myriad disruptions to their lives and livelihoods and schools. I wish them safety and clean air to breathe today. I I wish for all of us a respite and a little peace.
Day 152: Waiting for the Mail
Shelter in Place, August 18, 2020
This morning I’m working to finish up some get-out-the-vote postcards before the mail carrier arrives. The thump of his feet on the stairs, the rattle of his keys, and the familiar clank as he opens our letter box signify one of the only predictable in-person contact we have with other humans these days, and we are dependent not just on the wave he offers through the window, but on what he brings and takes away - our medications come through the mail, financial documents, some catalogs we want and some we don’t, reimbursements from Medicare, an occasional cheery letter from a friend, and yes, voting information and, eventually, a ballot.
I’ve always considered postal service to be a given in my life, a hallmark of the civilized world that I inhabit. In my reading as a kid, I marveled that Jane Austin heroines exchanged mail with neighbors and family several times a day, delivered by horseback over muddy rural roads; and that old but welcome letters followed Laura Ingalls Wilder’s family to a succession of new prairie towns as they moved ever westward. That was after Lewis and Clark and other explorers of the western United States, managed to report by mail on their journeys of discovery and after the Pony Express sprang up as an essential service upon the arrival of white settlers in California. Through every war this country has fought at home and abroad, mail service - with great effort and ingenuity - has kept American soldiers connected to their families. That includes my father, in World War II, whose illustrated missives caught the attention of the censor, and got him assigned to a safer duty drawing maps. I like to think the wartime postal service saved my father’s life. It is the reason I exist.
I grew up in an era when letters bearing nothing but a name and town would still make it to the mailbox. No zip codes then. And though people now tend to roll their eyes at what they consider post office inefficiency, I cannot think of a single time in my life when a letter went astray or important mail was damaged. I do not think for a minute that if I vote by mail my ballot will be compromised.
Yet here we are. This service (not a’ business’ I hasten to add) has been made a political football and once again I am wondering whether such a travesty signifies that the civilization we take for granted is coming to an end. I am delighted to pay taxes to subsidize the postal service, Mr. President. I buy my stamps without complaint and appreciate the speed with which my postcards travel from here to there. I trust the postal service. Just as it is. The people who - with conflicts of interest evident for all to see - have been appointed to run it? Not so much.