At the Mercy of Lightning Strike Fires AND the Pandemic AND…

At least I know I’m not alone. None of us on this planet are having a super wonderful time of it, except perhaps some creatures who are benefiting from the “anthropause” to make their way into environments that they’ve avoided for awhile. How I wish we human beings could find it in our hearts to be a little less relentless once we emerge from current conditions.

So, not fun. And I’ve been sheltering in place alone except for the cats since mid-March. My errands (groceries, gas) are already as minimal as I can make them.

But there is a particularly harsh quality to waiting to see if a wildfire is going to spread to the area where you live, and wondering if you’ll make it out okay (with seven cats and a compact car, this is a huge concern). It reminds me of the early days of the pandemic when I obsessively checked the Covid-19 stats several times a day–national, statewide, and local. Now I’m checking the CalFire maps and local emergency scanner Facebook groups. Who is evacuating? How close is the northern edge of the Hennesey Fire? What’s going to happen next?

It also makes me even more reluctant to run to the market. I am consumed by the fear that if I leave my beloved felines for too long, that something might happen and they will be vulnerable to disaster. They are all indoor kitties and so they depend on me to open doors for them. How I wish I could invent an automatic emergency door that would work if the temperature rose to a certain degree. Then at least they could bolt to safety, and hopefully I’d find them later.

Thousands and thousands of people in the Western states are finding that their homes — the places where we shelter in place to avoid catching Covid-19 — are now threatened by 2020’s dramatic start to fire season. It wouldn’t be nearly so bad if it weren’t for 72 hours worth of lightning strikes that happened last weekend. I believe there were over 10,000 of them, and over 500 fires started as a result, just in California alone.

As for those people who haven’t had reliable shelter during this period–I can’t even imagine. I try, but I can’t. As a person with multiple chemical sensitivity disabilities, I rely so much on control of my home environment to keep me safe from chemical toxins. But with smoke pouring into the atmosphere of normally pristine Lake County, there is literally nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

I’m not complaining so much as describing. I know many are much worse off and are much closer to the fires. It’s the waiting and wondering and planning, and then replanning, that is wearing me down.

Is it any wonder that I’m on my fourth bingewatch of The Untamed? That is all.