Wandering Wednesday - Hopes for Maui

 

I saw the bad news about the fires in Maui last night, and woke up today to see it's even worse. I'm hoping that some of old-town Lahaina has survived. It was such a beautiful unique place and it's hard to imagine it just being gone. Also very scary to imagine being there as a tourist during something like this, no cell service or 911, very few roads in or out, etc. Really hope people are okay.

The downtown streets of the small town were lined with old wooden buildings. I didn't take many pictures when we walking around there because it was just so charming.  This picture of vintage spools was one of the few, I took it in a hat shop. I'm guessing this store and/or building are no longer standing.

When we were there in 2017, we happened upon a birthday party for this massive Banyan tree that takes up acres in downtown old town Lahaina. It was a community thing more than a tourist thing, with local kids performing and that sort of thing. Just lovely. The idea of a community party for a tree is really something isn't it?

I really really hope that the tree has somehow survived. 

One of the other fires yesterday, was located on the downslope of Haleakala, which is one of the driest parts of the island. This is a picture from our visit to a really great lavender farm in that neighborhood. I thought it was really something to have a thriving lavender farm on a tropical island, but those plants love hot temperatures and they only got a fraction of the rainfall in that spot. So pretty perfect for lavender. 

Fingers crossed for all the people to be safe. Buildings and businesses can be rebuilt, and trees regrown, lavender replanted etc. 

Hold the Mud, Thanks

 

We got almost 2" of rain over the weekend. But most importantly, not all at once or too fast. We're very worried about a new thing around here now: debris flow after the fire. Our mountains are very very steep and the soil may not stay in place after everything that's gotten burned.  A lot of the plants and trees are integral to holding the hillsides in place. 

We happen to be on the "safe" side of the highway/river so thankfully we're not impacted. But we're still worried about our community. There are warning signs up all over the entrances to town, and the local authorities have been working really hard to contact everyone and have people be prepared to flee. They're worried about a Santa Barbara style catastrophe happening here. We get a whole lot more rain than Santa Barbara ever does, and we sometimes get incredibly intense rainstorms. 

 Welcoming the return of the rain is of course, still an annual thing, the continued survival of the forest and our community is depending on it being a gentle rain season for this year and probably the next several years. We're hoping for the same amount of rain as usual so that the forest gets what it needs, but having the rain arrive spread out evenly over the months instead of concentrated into a few weeks. I'm

On The Helping List

 

This satellite comparison of the before and after views of the area that I live in. We live just below the "O" in Boulder Creek on this map. 

Every day that I drive by the spot where the fire reached the highway that bisects our valley and get reminded all over again about how close we came. As I drive past the burned hillside, I send up all thanks that the firefighters were able to stop the fire's progress right there. It's tough knowing that there are a lot of people in our community who've lost everything. 

If you feel moved to make a quilt for the CZU Fire, our great local quilt store, Modern Handmade is hosting a benefit Sew-A-Long beginning on October 8th. It doesn't cost a lot, for $10, you get video tutorial and three patterns as well as a FaceBook group that goes along with all the projects. It's billed as a "get a jump on Christmas". Hope to see you on there!

There's also a local quilt group that's collecting "personal sized" quilts to distribute to Fire Survivors, minimum size of 48"x 60".

White Balance Challenges in the End of Days

I'm sure you've seen the orange or red sky pictures from the West Coast yesterday because we're on fire right now. This terrifying/hilarious combination of Pantone insignia and the name they gave the color of the sky made me sad and laugh at the same time. 

I struggled mightily yesterday to take my own accurate pictures of the apocalyptic sky that I was seeing with my iPhone.  This 3 second long picture captures how the light looked out on my deck the best. All other color was muted and almost gone, there wasn't a lot of green available to see. It was boggling the camera because it's so weighted towards automatically messing with the white balance. It was so dark out that it kept switching over to night shooting mode. 

The skylight at the top of our stairs was a glowing rectangle of orange red which doesn't come through well in this picture. Eerie is a word. Discombobulating also works. 

This is how an unedited picture was turning out, and it just didn't capture the orange-ness or the darkness at all.

The next two pictures are my attempts to adjust the color to what my eyes were seeing. It was somewhere in-between these two. It varied a lot during the day, sometimes getting quite a bit darker. We had all the lights on inside, that's how little light was getting through. 

Now, I'm a person who really loves orange, and this is too much for me. It's like the whole world is early decorating for Halloween or to celebrate the SF Giants. I miss my blue skies, or my foggy skies, it's too much. Will it be like this every year now? It's hard to imagine it getting better because the climate has indeed changed. We're hotter, we're drier, and we're just going to keep burning, year after year.

What can I possibly do besides take pictures? 

Fire Drill Fridays - the Greenpeace supported, Jane Fonda protest movement

Listen to Jane be interviewed about Fire Drill Fridays and her new book about why she's working so hard on the issue What Can I Do? on this episode of the great podcast, Hysteria

I'm going to be reading Naomi Klein's book On Fire - The (Burning) Case for the Green New Deal

In case you didn't see this video, check it out:

Red Sun=Stay Inside

 

The sky was weird with all the smoke from the zillions of fires around our state. We're happy to find out today that"our fire" is 83% contained. Good thing, because the firefighters need to move on and save some of the Sierras and elsewhere. Dire. This morning it was so dark when I woke up, I thought I'd woken up too early (which almost never happens) but it was just the smoke layer added to the fog layer. And I was cold, finally cold, because the weather changed. ahhhhh what a relief. So staying inside is a big part of the plan for the next few days. A new wives' saying: If the Sun Is Red Stay Inside.

We did finally get some of our packages from the Post Office, which was nice. The mail was redirected to Scotts Valley at first, but then they evacuated, so then it was sent all the way down to Watsonville. But they weren't giving out packages and there were long lines, so I didn't bother driving all that way from where we were evacuated. 

So...it was nice to have something nice to open. These were things I'd ordered In The Before Times. I'd used up my Shapeflex on the Cotton Candy Pouches so I'd ordered more. I wanted to make some more masks and I wanted to get the right size bias tape maker for the ties. That was my least favorite step in making all the masks I've done, ironing the fabric strips.

I also ordered some soft flat cotton twill tape to use for ties and some very soft satiny elastic for around the head or ears types. Trims on Wheels has good deals. They even have some fabric for good prices.

Now that it's cool enough for me to use my iron, I'm getting some sewing done today.

Rim Fire

We were just in Yosemite last week when the Rim Fire started really going. Here is a picture of Yosemite Valley taken from up on Glacier Point with the fire on the horizon.  At first it just looked like a big Sierra thunderhead. This picture was taken Thursday August 22nd at about 1pm. I believe that the fire is around 25 miles away from the spot I was taking the pictures.

But then you look closer and see that  it is actually a huge amount of smoke underneath that white cloud.  The smoke is actually causing its own mini-weather system to form.And the smoke wasn't just contained to one spot it really spread wide depending on the winds of course, but thankfully didn't affect us in Yosemite Valley, or up on Crane Flat campground on Highway 120 (which was closed right after the turnoff for the campground).

 There were some better places to take close up pictures of the smoke the next day when we went up the Tioga Road to Tuolumne Meadows but my husband didn't want to stop, he said it was too scary as we were too close to it. And since he was driving at the time, that was that. He was right of course, because he knows how fire freaks me out because of where we live. Let's just say we were so close that I would not have needed the zoom at all to get some of these pictures because where we were driving was right on the other side of those mountains that you see. Also it was a day later and the fire had doubled in size.

I really hope that the fire is able to be controlled enough where there are homes and towns, and that of course the firefighters stay as safe as possible. But I also hope they let the rest burn, this forest needs it, there's been too many years without a fire. Also the sequoias don't grow unless there is a fire, the seeds don't come out of the pods, there's too much shade from other faster-growing trees, etc. Fire is part of what is supposed to happen in these mountainous forests,

 On Friday as we drove back down to the valley to leave on 140, we stopped at a pullout near the turnout to Foresta and looked back up the mountain towards the fire.  The halo ring was new.

All I could keep thinking was this is Nature's Terrible Beauty, unstoppable (at least for a time) by humans, necessary and vital to the ecosystem, and so aesthetically beautiful in a abstract don't think about the trees burning and the animals running and the humans in danger kind of way.

Fire in the Valley

A big fire is going in my area in the Santa Cruz Mountains in Bonny Doon. This shows the smoke yesterday early evening around 5:30pm, the fire had only been going two hours. In the foreground is my chimney.
The smoke just billowed up so quickly, the fire is far away across the valley over the rural highway and over at least one ridge of mountains. The area hasn't had a fire in at least 100 years, so there is a lot to burn, and extremely steep mountain canyons to try and firefight in.
We're feeling a bit nervous as I'm sure you can understand. But that is how it goes in the urban/wild interface zone. We've been hearing the helicopters and fire-fighting planes all morning, I sure hope everyone involved is safe.
Luckily the wind has changed and the smoke is no longer coming this way, and is barely visible from my house this morning. But the fire evacuees are being directed to my son's middle school. Hitting too close to home!