The Station Fire
It is named for the Ranger Station near where it started. I hope that doesn't mean the station occupants start it.
I am sadder still that two firemen were overrun and killed in their tumbled vehicle.
I am angry that we can do nothing to convince the refusniks who defy evacuation orders that they are endangering all the helpers and firefighters and rescue folks who have to fly them to burn treatment centers.
Maybe heavier security of the areas would allow more folks to leave. Maybe the animals need more places and transport, volunteer horse trailers etc.
I am watching the pictures and videos of piled up smoke in Los Angeles.
Is this the ongoing desert-ification of the USA? The drought and insects followed by fire and flood.
Angeles National Forest, my own personal New Orleans, is gone.
I suppose the salamanders that lived in my childhood memories in the streams behind Altadena were gone long ago.
How can it burn just my favorite patches of the landscape, the parts I remember???
All the names reminiscent of my brother's and my scout troop travels:
Millard Canyon, Huge Pine cones, Angeles Crest Highway, Mt Lowe, Mt Disappointment, LaCañada, Loma Alta drive, the parks, the little reptile rescue centers, the campgrounds all gone.
I went to Girl Scout camp there, I went to a cabin with a group of grownups near Arrowhead Lake, I walked down into the Arroyo Seco behind our house to play with my best friends and neighbors in the streams behind Crestford Drive.
We spent hours swinging on trees, playing and hiking in the pathway that in the 1920's had been cabins. Foundations the only thing left in the 1950's and 1960's after fire and flood had washed them out.
We found old perfume bottles and imagined driving coaches and wagons up the road.
We knew not to light fires ever. We loved each plant and bird and insect. Rattlesnakes were very familiar.
The rough hills above the Jet Propulsion Lab burned one year while my parents were out of town, and the 80-plus year old babysitting us was unable to consider evacuating us, but we only saw the fireline go partly down the hill across the stream, and then it stopped.
I remember each Thanksgiving hiking to the Devils Gate Dam and playing on the bulldozers in the basin.
I played with wild tobacco, mashing it and feeding it to my dolls.
We lost part of the edge of our property during one heavy erosion event and it was repaired with rebar and cement bags laid like sandbags into the back of our lot. The eucalyptus trees behind the pool were messy but helpful in keeping the pool on the hill instead of in the arroyo. If you lit the pool at night it looked like it was suspended in the air with the lights of La Cañada and La Crescenta across the darkened arroyo.
My sixteenth birthday party caused a near disaster because you couldn't see all the dry brush in the dark and some kids sneaked down in the arroyo and set off firecrackers. I first noticed the problem when the firetrucks had already arrived...THANK the blessed Lord. Those were the years of ok rain, november rains that always made me sad.
Now the fire people are getting exhausted and the shelters are unairconditioned and uncomfortable and wild animals and all the insects are in danger...
Surely there is something Kos folks can do.