One day after I sent out my belated Spring letter that focused on the loss of our Summers, the Caldor Fire picked up and burned through 20,000 acres of dense forest in 24 hours. When the day started, we were slated to attend a 200+ person community potluck that evening. By 10am I knew it wasn’t going to happen. By 4pm the AQI was hovering around 500, ash was raining down all over town, and the organizers finally made the call to cancel the event. A week later as the fire officially reached mega fire status (100k acres), we packed up our pets and important belongings and headed down to Palm Springs. One week later, the fire crested Echo Summit — 30 miles away from its start — and triggered a mandatory evacuation for the entirety of South Lake Tahoe. The next morning the fire burned down The Old Cabin at Leaping Daisy.
Not a single structure was lost in South Lake. Miraculous is the wrong word. It was a historic effort by firefighters who fought all night to keep the wall of flame descending from Echo Summit from devouring neighborhoods. This is not a case of firefighters stopping a fire. The fire went through town. And not a single structure was lost. Fire maps do not look like this.
Things are coming back together now — five weeks after the fire’s start. The City is back open, we are home, the fire sits at 76% containment, skies are blue, traffic is light, highway 50 is back open, and firefighters and their equipment are parked all over town.
The fire continues to burn. The forest is closed for the rest of the year. No more hiking, backpacking, camping, or mountain biking. Summer has been ceded to Fire Season in South Lake.
All of this is extraordinary, unprecedented, expected, commonplace, and very much normal for 2021. This is the pace of the present, and it is expected to quicken as we move into the future. Every year we'll have larger wildfires, more powerful hurricanes, hotter summers, colder winters, and more destructive floods. They'll happen in confluence with pandemics, earthquakes, wars, and economic downturns. And we'll know about all of them thanks to the internet.
Take a deep breath.
This is not the end times. The world is not ending. These are the challenges of our times. Challenges that were obvious, predicted, and expected. No matter how overwhelming they may feel in the now, we must meet these challenges and live through them.
This is something I’ve been ruminating on a lot lately: we failed to act to prevent a climate disaster, so what does adaption to the ongoing emergency look like? The first part of this is physical — things like infrastructure, farming practices, and geoengineering projects. The second part is cultural — our collective attitudes toward work, capital, food, travel, war, transportation, and government. But the third part is emotional — how do we adapt our mental outlook to a world faced with constant and cascading disaster? And more importantly: how do we find a way to cultivate joy and thrive in this environment?
If you’re curious about this perspective and interested in reading a climate change book that sits somewhere between we’re all fucking doomed and the magic technology fairies will solve this and just plant some more trees I'd highly recommend reading After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration by Holly Jean Buck.
Disasters are going to keep happening. And we will keep going on. We'll make art, meet people, invent new technology, watch bad TV, make babies, solve hard problems, and sit around being bored — all while our climate triggers a near constant series of catastrophe.
It’s only been a little over a month since my last newsletter, but it’s been a busy month!
About a week before we left town, we finally got our building permit and broke ground on the new house.
Throughout the smoke, evacuations, and re-population the build team has been busy excavating, building forms, and pouring concrete for our underground swimming pool!
Just kidding — this will be our daylight basement where we’ll have our mechanical room, root cellar, and music room. Pushing the basement above ground lets the house sit above the snow in the winter and provide a barrier for moisture/pests/fire to the wood cladded areas above.
Another thing that happened right before we left town is we entered into contract on a commercial building here in South Lake Tahoe. If you’re familiar with South Lake, there’s always been an old gas station / vehicle garage right at the entrance to the “Y” called Runnels Automotive. It’s sat unused for the better part of two decades now.
As of a week ago it’s now ours! And soon to be the home of Aster Station. I’ll try and share some ideas for the property in later newsletters, but needless to say we’ve got some big ideas for the property. And I have another use for my SketchUp skills.
While we were down in Palm Springs escaping the smoke & fire, I was also able to follow through on one of my silly rich person dreams. A 1965 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
I’ve always dreamed about owning a Ghia, but they were always out of reach back when I drove air-cooled VWs. And then, of course, I got seduced by modern features such as “starts every time” and “has a defroster” and kind of put the Ghia dream to bed. But this will be a perfect little car for Palm Springs. I'm hoping to send it off to get electrified one of these days, but in the meantime it's a fun little car to put-put around the neighborhood in.
And hopefully when temperatures cool down — actually drive during the day.
Oh, and hey! We’ve been married a whole year now!
Who knew we’d still be in the midst of a pandemic a year later? Well, actually I kind thought we would be — I just didn’t think we’d have vaccines! And that the reason we’d still be in a pandemic is because people wouldn’t take them.
We still don’t really know when we’re going to have some bigger celebrations, but some day we will.
We’ve both now pretty much changed our names everywhere. We’ve got our new passports, drivers licenses, and even a new business (Aster Station LLC) with our new names on it. So I guess it’s real? I mean, as real as a name gets.
One reason I’ve really enjoyed writing these newsletters over the years is that they’ve forced me to sit down and catalog how I feel right now. Looking back at last year’s Summer issue, I remember the feeling of stagnation I felt then. It felt scary to commit to anything outside of my little bubble. It felt scary to start new things.
The world hasn’t changed that much since I wrote that letter. All of the unknowns about our world still hang over our heads, ready to drop at any moment. But I think I’ve been successful in changing my perspective — how I see myself fitting into such an unknown world. That ability to change one’s perspective feels important, and something we’re all going to have to work on as the world keeps getting weirder.
I’ve never been good at journaling, but I have been good about writing down my longer term goals — and revisiting/rewriting them on a regular basis. It’s helped. It anchors me to a longer-term perspective on the world, and that fills me with the fuel to execute on bigger ideas. I don’t know what the answer is for everyone else. I do know we need to work on prying ourselves away from the doomscrolling and nightly news and search out a longer-term perspective on the world. I also know that’s not easy.
Much of the world is literally on fire and fixing it will be difficult. But it’s still our world, and we’ve got to find a way to live in it.
Until another time,
Kyle
P.S. If you live in the West and haven’t yet, why not start on an evacuation checklist?