In May this was a Tuscan landscape at sunset,  an etching by the friend of a friend.  Yesterday, our copy, fresh from the framing shop, had morphed into a row of blackened trees in the foreground of an inferno.

In the interim, we had spent several days on the Mendocino coast, just a few hours from what became the largest fire in the recorded history of California. We had rented a house with gas grill, bird feeders, and wifi. We watched the birds, grilled salmon, combed the beaches, hiked Fern Canyon under a blue sky. Upstairs we identified orioles and woodpeckers and kept track of the fire news and presidential gaffes, while others below stairs engaged the video screens and hot tub.  Meanwhile, the west wind kept the coast gloriously clear as it continued inland to feed the flames.

We had also been watching the Carr Fire’s progress above Redding and around the Whiskeytown Lake. The fire had begun in French Gulch, a former stagecoach stop southwest of our family camp on Scott Mountain. We heard that the local Van Ness cousin, a kindly fellow with a deep voice and a long, weedy beard, a legendary grasshopper fisherman, had been burned out.

The good news was a photo of my Smith cousin, one who had, like us, been exiled for decades. She was astride the ceremonial cedar stump in the middle of the camp, smiling through the smoky haze.

The several hundred thousands of incinerated acres would have been many more if not for tens of thousands of firefighters from as far away as New Zealand.  Some 3,500 of them were firefighters from California’s prisons. The women receive two days off their term for each day of service, two dollars a day for active firefighting.  After they are released, it might reasonably be assumed that these incarcerated but experienced firefighters would find work as professional firefighters, who make $73,000 annually, but they are presently excluded from this possibility. Governor Brown may or may not be presenting a bill to change this. He has a lot on his plate.   

Naturally wildfires would be political. The Oakland firestorm of 1991 was blamed partly on the local defense of flammable stands of non-native eucalyptus from the east bay hills.  

“I go with what the Australians say about eucalyptus — they call them ‘gasoline on a stick,’” said an Oakland resident who had watched a flaming eucalyptus grove explode just yards away from her family van, stuck in a line of evacuating cars. But other residents still want to preserve the ridgeline pines and eucalyptus, although those that survived the 1991 fire are yet more flammable today, and many more have matured since.

In other news, I read, not long after midnight last Thursday, that shortly after Thursday midday,  a third major earthquake had struck (or would have struck) the island of Lombok, Indonesia.

Indonesia has three time zones, and Lombok appears to be in the middle longitudes, so let’s say that the Lombok quake struck about fourteen hours ahead of the hour that I read about it on the Pacific coast. WIB (Western Indonesian Time) = GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) + 7 hours.

I boated once along the Thames to Greenwich, the home of GMT, Greenwich Mean Time.  The Old Royal Observatory was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, an astronomer better known for his architecture, and of course I had my photo taken astride the Prime Meridian.

Not actually my tennies

In 1851, Sir George Airy established the Royal Observatory as the zero degree line of longitude. His line is the starting point for longitudinal lines that run north-south, the measurements that form the basis of our geographic reference grid.

And yes, I do accept the concept of global time zones, but there’s that occasional seismic disjuncture that fogs the brain.  Along with global time gaps, anxiety about the Indonesian temblors led me to look up the so-called “Ring of Fire,” the horseshoe of active volcanoes and faults around the coast of the Pacific Ocean. 

More specifically, I was wondering about the chain reaction among quakes, faults, and volcanoes along the Ring of Fire, flames and faults colliding along the horseshoe and curving south along the Pacific Coast. This line of insomnia may seem on a par with anxiety about our president’s late-night tweets, but I live with my near and dear atop the Hayward Fault, recently assessed as more dangerous than the San Andreas Fault that ravaged San Francisco in 1906.   

In 1989 the Loma Prieta quake clocked in at 6.9:  I was sitting in a corner of the living room, complacently perusing proofs of my novel, when the house began to shake, wrenching around like an unbalanced washer. On TV, cars were hanging off the broken Bay Bridge. Husband returned, having felt nothing on campus, but noting plume of fire downtown, where our car, in for a new headlight, had been incinerated in the body shop. Calls began to arrive, from children across the bay, from Italy, from Prague.  

Somewhat earlier in the century, at my Girl Scout camp on Loma Prieta in the Santa Cruz Mountains, my counselor’s camp name was Cedar. I l loved that camp, the hikes and the singing, and would gladly have spent the whole summer there.  Cedar was smallish and acerbic, with short hair and a sharp jaw. One night she helped us insert a dead rattlesnake into the sleeping bag of the head counsellor. The backstory of my own encounter with that rattlesnake is perhaps too well-known in my family.

This summer the youngest grandson stoically suffered several weeks of camp, but was reported early on for having filled his water bottle (twice) with dirt. An older grandson actively resented the interruption of his electronic pursuits but kept his water bottle potable. At his age, his big sister had already assembled her own earthquake survival kit. 

Our president has at latest count nine grandchildren. He doesn’t seem to tweet about them or their future on this dirty, shaky, and ever hotter planet.