fire season
I’ve been thinking a lot about fire lately. I blogged a few days ago about starting an informal experiment to look at ways to start seeds that require fire to germinate. And lately we’ve been experiencing the sort of dangerous fire conditions that you only see in the autumn here in Southern California.
When the dry Santa Ana winds scour westward from the desert an hour to the east, they can bring to October some of the warmest days of the year. At the same time, as these dry, gale-force winds blow westward through the mountain passes, they breed dangerous conditions for major wildfires.
Monday night, as I was leaving the office, someone stopped me on the way out. “Have you heard about the fires?” he asked. The Los Angeles area had been seeing fires over the last couple of days and now Camp Pendleton, forty miles to the north, was burning. People were being evacuated from their homes.
Oh no. Here we go again, I thought. Fortunately, several days later, those fires all seem to be doused or at least on the way to containment. But the fire weather is still with us.
It was almost a year ago when John and I were up on the roof deck, having an early dinner, enjoying a freakishly warm October afternoon. Looking directly west the horizon was clear, but to both the north and south there were dark streaks of smoke. Driven by the same desert winds that had made that afternoon so remarkably warm, the smoke rose high into the atmosphere from sources farther inland and streaked out over the ocean. Things were burning, and it was looking bad.
Above: An enhanced NASA image of the San Diego County fires that first afternoon, October 22, 2007 [ source ]
One of John’s coworkers lost his home that first night of the fire. Over the next several days, hundreds of thousands of others were temporarily homeless when they were ordered to leave their homes in the largest evacuation in California history. In the final tally, a quarter of the county’s land had burned and at least people seven had lost their lives, including several migrant workers who were traveling on foot, north to their jobs. (Earlier this year producer Laura Castaneda put out a documentary, The Devil’s Breath, on some of their stories. When the history of the migrant workers is written, it’ll be full of the sort of heroic figures and trying circumstances that populate the American narrative of the settlement of the “wild west.” )
Last year’s fires had followed a set of even more destructive ones in 2003. Those came closer to my house than last year’s flames–within maybe three miles–and that first morning saw a hot rain of ash and even embers.
The photojournalists were rushing to the fire lines, trying to get a shot of the devastation. But it was the vision of the sun veiled in smoke drew out my camera that first morning. There’s a color to the light that comes with fire, a pervasive and almost sticky yellow-brown that reminds you of sunset colors even in the middle of the day, but the browning effect is so profound that everything looks wrong. If I didn’t tell you that the images were of smoke you might consider the images beautifully atmospheric. I guess they are, but there’s that scary counterbalancing of something being out of control and dangerous.
(That vibration of beauty and terror goes straight back to eighteenth-century aesthetics, and to early writings of people like Joseph Addison, who remarked that “The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror.” This is rich ground that been mined by a number of artists for the last quarter-millennium. In the photography world, John Pfahl and Richard Misrach are just a couple of those who have produced significant bodies of work drawing on this conflicted Romantic notion of the sublime. And as long as people have this notion of awe and powerlessness, there will be centuries more of art drawing from it.)
[ next, after the fires… ]
October 18 2008 | Categories: art • landscape • photography • rambles | Tags: 2003 • Cedar Fire • fire • Santa Ana winds | 3 Comments »
