I wrote most of this while the fires in Southern California were burning out of control from Malibu to Tijuana. I wanted to publish this that week, but I didn’t have time to finish it properly for publication. Regardless, I think it’s still worth publishing though the danger to the region has diminished.
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“Is this what I think it is?”
A thin film of gray matter lightly crusted my car. This is unlike the usual grime that had settled eons ago on the outer shell of my vehicle like cheap powdered cosmetics, which I’d like to think of as a baseline from which to build all other friendly particles that happened along the way; this is an entirely different matter. Much like piece of pottery in a kiln being heated then cooled then heated again, the crust above the paint-job of my car had been heated and cooled and heated again through the wisdom of the elements and protected my precious paint job from the vagaries of life. This gray interloper was of a much less permanent nature.
I heaved and blew across my windshield. The gray matter moved.
“My Lord,” said I, “The ashes have flown this far?”
Being naturally negligent of cleanliness with respect to my beloved yet valiant Japanese model car, this time I wanted this gray trespasser to be wiped off my car like a layer of grease off a pizza. After getting in, I flicked on my windshield wipers. The gray matter instantly turned into gray mud.
This first happened Monday morning, and there are many miles between me and the fires raging in Malibu and Magic Mountain and San Diego. Perhaps I’m making mountains out of molehills since the crust was actually very light and the mud not very thick; however, their existence on my car over 30 miles away speaks to the enormity of this fire.
Then it occurred to me that maybe the gray matter dusting my car could have been what’s left of someone’s book, or his home, or his clothes; perhaps someone’s most precious belongings sat on my car and I didn’t even know it.
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It’s now Tuesday evening as I scribble these thoughts. An odious reddish gray pigment stains the sky and spreads out across the oceanic horizon into wherever that might end. It is incredible to me that a fourth of the California coastline is engulfed in flames, fires exploding like blast furnaces in the depths of Hell’s Inferno and here I sit along the coast safely lodged in between the fires. The satellite photos of Southern California’s coast this afternoon looked like the ash-end of a cigarette, except the cigarette happened to be a state.
Earlier in the morning on my walk to work I crossed through a neighborhood street that happened to be closed off to all but foot traffic. I have worked in a Southern California beach community for the past few years surrounded by multi-million dollar homes of incredible variety and quirkiness. I’ve passed a home that exudes Parisian quaintness; another could only be described as a large tugboat in the shape of a two story house.
As I made my way through in the eerie orange light of the morning with the vague nondescript weight on my lungs, I felt I was Vincent Price in one of his old black and white horror movies. It was about 8:20 in the morning, the kids on the street where off to school and the parents were probably off to work somewhere. They were nowhere to be seen but the evidence of their existence was everywhere.
A tether ball pole stood listless at the center of the street with the ball and tether being nudged by the winds. A soccer ball, a hockey stick, neatly arranged metal tables and chairs littered the concrete path like a social gathering in full swing minus the people. Like Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth , I strolled among corpses, graves, dangling vampires and skeletons. These were Halloween decorations, of course, and not at all the ghastly ghouls of the living dead.
Even still, in the sickly red morning glow it was unsettling…