In August of 2018, the Carr fire was ripping through Shasta County.
In the past month, Shasta Lake had taken on the characteristics of what I imagined Armageddon to look like as a child in my Floridian Baptist school - the sky, a deep fiery red and the air, thick with soot.
The fire, combined with severe asthma, restricted me for weeks, but it was finally time to go.
My first year at UC Berkeley was about to begin, an escape I had been dreaming about for three years now, but I was heavy with guilt.
Packing up the back of the Ford Ranger in a dirty mist of ash, my things slowly collected a layer of black grit and I wondered if the house knew I was abandoning it, if the lake knew, if my neighbors knew.
I was running away.
The Carr fire had jumped the Sacramento River, something which I was assured would never happen.
The silence that overtook the neighborhood when we found out was deafening.
That moment was the eye of the hurricane, a moment to take stock and reassess what we thought we knew, and in this, what we clearly did not know.
After triple checking the bungee cords stretched across the bed of the truck as a form of procrastination, I stepped into the car.
Hoarsely coughing and struggling to catch my breath, I placed my head on the steering wheel.
Would I ever return to Shasta Lake? Would it still be here if I returned? A burnt out husk or nothing at all?
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As summers become dryer, as rains become heavier, as storms become more intense, the havoc on the physical landscape becomes more unbearable.
The fires which rip through Northern California’s deciduous forest and the flood waters which drown the land of Hurricane Alley are intensely reshaping the physicality of these places.
Yes, but they are also fundamentally changing an emotional landscape which drapes, cuts, and curls through the geomorphology.
What waits for us when we navigate that aether?
One scarred by the ghosts of places and people that no longer exist, the hauntings of possibilities and opportunities which have been stolen by something completely avoidable?
These particular scars on imaginings of the future pose not just something deeply poignant, but in many configurations, something incredibly dangerous.
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