In the Ruins of Paradise

Photo courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management California via Flickr.

Creamy yellow-orange light touches down on the lifted diagonals of the shipping cranes down by the port. Though I live on the other side of the lake, though I’d expect the burgeoning construction in downtown to block the view, somehow I can still peer through trees and buildings and across the gap of the lake to the wetlands, the marshlands of West Oakland, the brimming edge where shipping containers that have crossed the wide Pacific–sometimes spilling loads, red-beaked tub ducks bobbing to join the tract of plastic, the eighth continent–dock at the brink of the west coast, unload cargo from carmine-painted containers, shifted by workers’ hands. Light arrives there.

Lately I have become addicted to the dawn. There are brief moments of a part of an early hour when pink daubs the pale buildings and orange anoints the stucco. I love to get up for the painting that, should one turn one’s head, should one fail to look up and out, should one forget to attune the orbs skirted by eyelashes, would be missed as if it had never existed. As if we had never existed.

That’s why, by 6:33 a.m. on November 8, 2018, I happen to be watching the sky closely.

After writing for a couple of hours, I get up from the window to heat the tea kettle.

When I return to the glass pane–the frame with its 20s-era curved wooden moldings that my new landlord is replacing with straight-edged vinyl (flouting the city’s historical preservation code)–black billows like tumbleweeds scurry across the pastel horizon, hurrying as if carrying an urgent message of hope. A fire on the other side of the lake?

I assume I know the source of the fire, having followed the pattern of seven Oakland fires in the last two years: a construction site on a lot that was cleared for a high-rise with no or few affordable units. The fire that lights the hand that lights the fire.

I post a thread asking neighbors for the origin of the smoke. Someone says it might be a grass fire that has shut down the 13 up in the Oakland hills. Looks like my assumption was wrong.

I go out and walk the cement tiles. Shadows are yellowed on the ground, and I already can tell that this is the kind of air they tell you not to go around in, but, having heard no official warning yet, and hankering to stretch my legs, I do a loop anyways. The blurry, jaundiced light around the green of leaves is reminiscent of the other times. But for now I consider myself free.

Back home from the walk, I see what my neighbors have linked to: up in Butte county, a fire has spread quickly through the dry November hills (no rain yet in what we used to call the “rainy season”), and officials have called on people to stay indoors to avoid unsafe air.