home is still burning

[click image]

This picture would have been taken at dawn facing roughly southwest from about ten miles west of Willits, California, from the edge of an oak woodland looking into the redwood timberlands. In the last fifteen years these timberlands have become so choked by weed trees, primarily tanoak, that you can actually see the broadleaf mixed in as you look out over canopy vistas like this. Weed trees burn. Eucalyptus explodes! Young redwoods burn, and so, now, does even mature secondgrowth, because growing from the roots of the giants changed the quality of the ring structure, leaving them vulnerable to pests and fire -- both as trees and as lumber. There are slash piles there the size of office buildings. Outrageous amounts of underbrush. Whole slopes clotted with tanoak duff. A travesty the size of Jupiter. Over fifty thousand acres have burned so far, and all the towns on the 101 corridor east of, or in, the coastal foothills have been breathing smoke for weeks, the air still literally brown with it. The past four days have been over 110 degrees, and I am freaking out that the two areas about which I worried the most, hollered about the most, have been burning for two weeks and are still only half controlled. With the bone dry air and the outrageous heat, the firefighters are very apt to be losing ground.