San Francisco's skies now have a dark, sickly orange glow
I woke up this morning to that text from my housemate, upstairs in our Oakland home. It was 8:30 in the morning, California time, hours after I usually get up to try to work in step with my East Coast colleagues. See, I usually get up with the sun but on this September morning, four years into what we’ve started calling our annual “fire season” in California, there was no sun. Just a dark and sickly orange glow.
“Does it really look like that?” one friend from down south texted. Meanwhile a closer neighbor got a little more reflective: “This level of weirdness definitely sends the mind scrambling for precedent or explanation. The scale of it feels Biblical, or at minimum aseason finale cliffhanger.” It's true I can only reach for sci-fi/fantasy references. It's Herbert's, Tolkien's Moria, Lucas's Tatooine, or, yes, Whedon's Hellmouth . And it could be so much worse.
“N-95” was a common term here in the San Francisco Bay Area long before COVID-19. Most of us had stashes of the medical-grade masks left over “from the last fire season” when the pandemic hit in March, donating our troves to hospitals and first responders when the shortages of PPE started to make headlines. We’ve become amateur meteorologists, fluent in what it means if the air is “262” today or “pretty good, 72.
Earlier this summer, in an attempt to lighten the pandemic mood, we hosted a small, socially-distant outdoor movie night in our backyard. We picked the 1987—a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. But my stomach churned watching it as I remembered that this favorite from my childhood centers on an imperial army hell-bent on stealing one of the most precious resources left in the galaxy: clean air. The vision of Brooks’s villainous President Skroob sniffing a can of clean “Perri-air” has haunted me since.
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