This morning I woke up looking at the white wall next to my bed, splashed with an orange glow from the sunrise in the window behind me. For the few moments between sleep and awake, my heart pounded with the memory of the fire. Last fall, I woke up in the middle of the night to see an orange pulsing hue on the wall next to me, accompanied by intense heat and the choking invasion of smoke. Since this event, I have often thought of the rolling green hills and alpine lakes of my childhood in Austria, where I was born and lived until I started primary school. Austria, so different from the place I knew now, was always wet. In the summer it rained, and even when it was sunny, the mountain plants and deep grass had dew on them. The air was laced with a twinge of moisture, fresh and full and light. We used to hike when I was young, even after we moved to California, but only for about a year until my father became the head of his firm and my mother decided she wanted to divorce him.
I have witnessed the drying up of California in my lifetime, especially in the last ten years. I remember going to visit the snow in the Sierras around Christmas time, every year and to my amazement, the cabin would be only half visible over the fluffy berms of snow all around it. A narrow pathway guided us in from the driveway to the front door. But there is scarcely a scene like this now. The last time we went as a family, I was maybe seventeen, and there was only a few feet of slush to behold. It was a disappointment. But I thought to myself, it is just because of the drought, and this too will pass.
California is bigger than the entire country of Austria, and feels like a country in its own right. We had gotten accustomed to breathing in wildfire smoke every August-September for the last maybe eight years in the northern region. “Fire season,” uttered on the lips of everyone on the first day of the orange hue and heavy air. Late summer to early fall became its own season, the season of death to allow for regrowth. “Wildfire is ok, good for the land” my grandpa would say, in his thick accent. He knew all about that stuff, even though for most of his life he was a mechanic. He was connected to nature, you would see it in his steady gaze on the bark of a tree as he would stroke it, examine, and explain some out-of-pocket fact about this kind of tree, and how it probably survived the invasive beetle that killed most of its relatives years ago. My family, like many American families, is like a puzzle with pieces all over the world. But many of us made northern California home, and many of us suffered when the fire came.