The Carr Fire is in the headlines of every newspaper, radio station, and TV news broadcast right now. We've been watching it for nearly a week. It was initially a little 3,000-acre fire that we could see from the second floor of the house at night - that weird, super-bright, almost-neon-red color that fire turns in the dark. And then it blew up. Hearing about it taking out a town, no problem, overnight, was pretty scary, but watching it double over the last two nights and begin to encroach on the City of Redding has been horrifying.
Seeing the south flank of the Carr Fire slowly advance, toward Happy Valley, we decided to evacuate ourselves and our furry animals yesterday. Our wonderful friends at Red Gate Ranch generously took in Hansel and Gretel, our lovely little soay sheep. Our wonderful friend in Red Bluff took in us and our SIX cats and dog. Where would we be without friends?!
Pedro has soaked the orchard over the last several days with sprinklers, turning them off yesterday evening after the water district requested conservation to support fighting the coming fire. We opened our curtains so that law enforcement could see that we were gone, and are now simply hoping for the best. The chickens are still at Oliview, which breaks my heart, but it's incredibly difficult to evacuate chickens... especially as many as we have.
We know that the fire has already taken at least 500 structures, many of them homes of our friends, colleagues, and neighbors. These disastrous events are such a challenge to empathize with from afar, but your texts, e-mails, and phone calls have heartened us for what is doubtless more challenges ahead.
This fire is making us think, yet again, that climate change is already being embodied in this "age of consequences". The legacy of all of our past actions, and continued profligate lifestyles, will continue to revise our expectations of how natural disasters behave, demolish our millennia of experience in seasonal impacts on food production, and wreck havoc on our mal-adapted civilization. We must change the way in which we're relating to the environment around us. Some of that adaptation must be uncomfortable: shorter showers, bringing your own bags, buying glass or metal in place of plastic, driving less. Not all of it has to be, but without using fewer resources, we simply cannot hope to be a positive force on the future of our world.
Thank you for your expressions of love. We will let you know the outcome as soon as we can.
- Elizabeth