“Driving through this densely wooded land parched by drought, it’s impossible not to think about it burning,” Dave Eggers writes. “In California, everywhere we go, we look for risk.”
Calistoga is an amiable town of five thousand or so, and today it’s as lively as any Sunday during the pandemic. The smoke from the fire, only two miles south, is travelling southwest, so here in Calistoga the skies are blue and the town is bustling. People sit and eat outdoors at outdoor cafés. It’s hard to say how people in other parts of the country or the world would react to a fire so close and now burning a thousand acres, but Californians are calm.
At KC and Tom’s house, a few blocks away, we sit in their back yard, under the dappled shade of their hundred-year-old sycamore. They bring out their new puppy, which looks like a tiny caramel-colored stuffed animal with black-button eyes. I ask Tom if this new fire changes his plans for the rest of his harvest.
“As long as they can keep it from jumping Silverado Trail,” Tom says, referring to a road which acts as a key line of defense to the east. But, as the evening comes on, the flames pulse brighter in the dimming sky. A three-quarter moon is visible to the south, the pink smoke giving it the look of a copper penny. Then an arm of black smoke arrives from the direction of the fire, its long fingers reaching, grabbing, until the moon is gone.
Justin Hunnicutt Stephens, his card says. I know his winery. It’s no more than two thousand feet from where we’re standing, and, whether or not it’s burning now, it’s directly in the line of fire.I’m standing in front of the AXR winery, just a bit north on Route 29. There are two young men filming the fires in front of me. The air is calm, and that’s good.
I text KC. I tell her that the fire jumped 29. She and Tom and the boys are in Santa Rosa, having dinner with Tom’s parents.
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