Sept 27 - October 31 2020
Smoke has been staying at the higher elevations these last few days as if drifting off into space which I think the whole world would actually condone. You can see this haze in the upper atmosphere but you can’t smell the smoke, you can just feel it here. This heavy mass off on the horizon. It's the new normal for the end of September: smoke banks. I feel like a ham hanging in a smokehouse.
It’s so dry that the weeds and ground cover under your feet crunch like you’re walking on potato chips. The oak trees have been shedding for weeks now, a sticky sap substance that drips down onto the gravel stone driveway and makes debris and stones stick to the bottom of your shoes. The tough stuff drops all over the vehicles and seems to have been drawn to the tractor seat as if aimed somehow by cognizant branches. The sap requires hot water from the tea kettle to dissolve. It gets baked on the hood and roof of your car or truck and is completely ash-covered and hardened. You can tell by a vehicle’s appearance who’s local and who’s from the city. My white pickup truck is now baked-on sap-hardened ash-sprinkled grey.
Our garden plants are tired. They are worn and frazzled. Every bush, tree, and vine looks the same way, too. Fall began a few days ago and the amount of sunlight already seems shorter. It's getting dark and chilly by 6pm and downright cold by evening. The weather patterns are hinting at changes but the days are bright blue and they warm me at my writer's table where I pledge to both of us to soon stop this journal. I committed myself to one year in a vineyard. It’s been one year and one month but it doesn’t seem the right place yet. Let’s hang on and I’ll look for a graceful exit.
Harvest is in full swing. The whole affair is known as The Crush and is loosely fueled by copious amounts of burritos and beer and the most sumptuous sleeps in your life. For five weeks when you pick everything you can, get it into the winery, crush the grapes, ferment them, and save the juice. The wineries are full of people early in the morning, during the day, and late at night, everyone doing their best to get the harvest in from the vineyard to the winery as fast as possible. Get it out of this frightful weather before something goes wrong!
And sure enough, wrong happens. This time it’s wind.
It’s going to get very windy Saturday and it’s coming from the north which means the desert winds. There’s absolutely no humidity, nothing, zilch, possibly down to fifteen even ten percent. These sinister winds are looking for havoc, gusting randomly, blowing one way from the north and then another way from the northeast. Strong enough to make waves in the bird baths, strong enough to pull deadwood out of the oaks. The bird baths are quite popular as a source of drinking water. The large clay saucers evaporate quickly and need to be refilled three times a day now, morning, noon, and night.
Soon it gets quite gusty. PGE has issued text alerts about shutting down the entire northern California grid because of the forecast: nighttime winds, gusts up to 60-80 miles per hour in the mountains. That’s definitely hurricane force. Trees get blown down over power lines, poles give out, something goes down and once a spark hits the ground it has all the dry fuel and breezy oxygen it needs to spawn fire tornadoes and fire storms.
The gusts are stripping the tired leaves off of the dry oaks and those tiny spiked leaves are flying in every direction at 20 miles an hour, sticky with oak sap, and they can ouch when they slam into you. My poor vineyard, unharvested, full of dry, shriveled grapes now the size of peas, has lost most of its leaves. There’s no moisture in the air. It’s dangerously down to 20%. At 15% or god forbid 10%, a fire is somewhere imminent.
A new PGE text comes in during the afternoon. Power off between 7pm-9pm, remaining off until 5pm tomorrow when the winds are forecasted to subside: they’re shutting down anyone who lives in the hills and mountains surrounding Napa, Sonoma, Lake, and Solano counties. There is little time to prepare especially with an earlier sunset these days. I go through the whole property and put things away that might get blown away. The entire Party Patio had to go and I pack a new go-bag and prep for electric turn off. Elizabeth and Tom are in Palo Alto where the power has already turned off. So there is no place to go, nowhere to hide. I dig in and charge every device I have.
The wi-fi goes out first. Damn! My wi-fi antenna directs signals to the valley floor, to a small access point on a pole that then repeats the signal up to large towers above east Yountville. The electricity goes out an hour later exactly at 7pm. I could have set the clocks to the PGE forecast. The emergency LED lights come on giving the living room that strange bright LED white glow but the valley out the window is dark. It’s pitch black and blowing hard. I sit by the picture window and listen to the moisture-less wind while reading a book and eating all the sandwiches I made earlier in the day for tomorrow.
I sleep unfitfully on the couch, fully clothed, ready to flee if I must. Soon after 4am I awake from a deep sleep. Out in the darkness a siren is coming, several miles away but moving quickly. And then another. I’m wide awake in seconds with adrenaline pumping. I jump up and stare out the picture window. Two sheriffs going 90pmh. And then I see emergency vehicle lights crossing the valley floor on Oakville Cross. Two or three of them. They eventually pass me on the Trail. It’s three CalFire pickups, and I can see lighted faces inside the windshields.
By 5am it’s well-known on the Internet that a new fire has started on Glass Mountain, in the Deer Park Area of outer St. Helena. That's smack dab in the middle of Up Valley Napa, home to some of the world’s most prestigious and amazingly-tended vineyards. It's nine miles away. While the Hennessey Fire went northeast last month, this one is blowing west. It spreads rapidly threatening to go north to Calistoga and then flips south towards Rutherford. After several hours the Glass Fire rumbles down Deer Park and jumps the valley and starts going up Spring Mountain, passing St.Helena. It burns Spring Mountain, which we can normally see, but there's a thick vile smoke where Spring Mountain should be. I watch the internet the whole day as the fire burns towards Sonoma while another splinter goes north from Deer Park and threatens Calistoga. Calistoga evacuates. St. Helena, surprisingly does not.
I struggle with the news and the urgency of having a fire where I live and play as it gains strength and the cycle repeats for more Covid days. The power is guarded protectively by PGE, sometimes on and then sometimes off. I haven't been to a grocery store for awhile as I live badly off of daily excursions. I hand-water the gardens and watch the smoke blow across St. Helena, over Spring Mountain, and into Sonoma. It's all visible from Oakville until the wind finally shifts and the smoke drifts down valley and fills the sky. Either I'm going nuts or else this smoke smells fresh to me.
The next day a splinter of the Glass Fire goes south and ends up much closer, now about four miles away. They are fighting like mad to stop the fire before it ventures south into lucrative fire lanes. The CalFire airwar is almost overhead and it’s time to go. I grab my favorite guitars, laptops, go-bag and pile in the car. A text comes saying they are evacuating two miles away from me now. I might as well go, too. And true to plan, the house is locked and I’m in the car and out on the Trail in about two minutes. It's pitch black. The headlights don’t work well in this fog-like smoke but once I leave Napa County things clear. I spend the whole drive wondering if I should tell Ford about smoke-enabled headlights as a feature set or whether it would be an admission that the end is near.
It's nice to be back with my wife and son but the hazardous smoke is imprisoning the entire SF Bay area. Smoke is everywhere. All I can do is monitor the Napa fire’s paths and evacuations, the bad weather feeds, the virus tallies, the non-stop fire news. I watch from afar using maps and news and Twitter while several wineries and hospitality venues burn to the ground around my home and vineyard. Portions of Meadowood burn, including the venue where my wife and I were married. Calistoga Ranch burns. Augerge de Soleil is being threatened. I am losing my mental guardrails.
It's apparent half-way thorough the week that the fire isn't going to go south, but moves north now threatening Calistoga. I consider going back to the vineyard but all my masks are shredded leftovers from the Hennessy Fire, starting to fray and not hugging my cheeks properly for a tight seal. It's impossible to buy new ones anywhere. I sit tight and wait it out.
When I do return days later on Saturday morning the smoke has cleared and upon arrival I quickly double-water all around the house. I put on all the masks type I have and leaf-blow every inch around the house, kicking up clouds of ash and smoke debris. This takes several hours as I consider it all toxic and try to blow things carefully, if that’s possible in a Dad kind of way. The vineyard hasn't changed except for more yellowing in the leftover leaves. The finches are happy to be fed and their birdbaths refilled with fresh water. Slowly things improve. I now have electricity and can sit in the house and work comfortably.
But I know I am suffering from depression. I can feel it. I am morose and sad about all the fire and death in the forest and trees. Sometimes I just sit down and stare out past the vineyard into the smokey shapes and shadows of what used to be the valley floor. I don't want to do anything or start anything new. I don't want to write.
It's been two months of fire, heat, and smoke since I watched the lighting strikes. During that entire time the Covid virus is spreading, politicians are dismantling the world for their profit, and the presidential debates, protests, and unsettling news is all-consuming. I wake in the morning and immediately turn on a device and check the air quality for local stats, then quickly scan the NY Times corona virus maps. My schedule is determined by what the smoke and the virus is doing.
The county opens several roadways around St. Helena and Calistoga and I decide to get the grey pickup started and venture northward to see the damage.
I shouldn't have done that. Once I pass Pope Street on the Trail, the damage is apparent. Mile after mile along the Trail is burned, in a few spots still smoldering. Complete trees are burned, black, sticking out of the ground like black spirits, angry but stunned. It’s all grey and gritty like it was piped in for a very real Hollywood disaster movie. At one point I pull over and start to cry. I'm thinking of my finches and how every tree has a roost of birds, an ecosystem around it, and now all that is burned. Literally millions of animals have perished.
When I drive through downtown St. Helena I am stunned by how much dirt and ash is on everything. The Glass Fire luckily jumped over the town's housing so now it’s filled with heavy equipment trailers that rumble down the quaint town’s main drag. On the outskirts of town PGE has set up several camps for trucks and crews, supplies and breakers, new telephone poles and giant spools of cabling and wire. The entire place looks like a fire outpost that’s as close to the fire as it can get, except that the Culinary Institute is within sight in it’s magnificent castle-like headquarters. The whole town is busy with dirt-smeared men in bright orange vests and after several traffic stops I feel like I’m getting in the way. I can't bare the drive up to Calistoga, and turn around, come home, and sit motionless at my writer’s table. I pretend to write for days and I know it and allow it to happen.
By the third week of October things are improving but I don't feel like ending this book just yet. I know it's been over a year since I started, and that was my premise, to write about one year but I'm completely off the rails here. The book, my life, our society has been pushed aside. I lost the crop and I think I lost the book. The fires, the drought, the virus, and the smoke have taken over these pages even though I tried to examine life occurring in the charming confines of a beautiful wine country vineyard. In the end I agree with myself and will stop writing upon the first rain.
Three days of glorious wine country weather happens over the next weekend and Napa Valley shows up beautiful and dramatic for a good long weekend. Tourists jump in their cars to see the wineries and the burnt roadways. Crews are still containing the Glass Fire and other fires but the wind is blowing east and it's a strong Pacific breeze. It’s gotten to be late October and it tries to rain but it's that California way of looking like rain but nothing happens. The whole thing flys over without a drop.
Then, like a false ending in a movie, another heat spell comes, five days of hot weather, high gusts of wind and low humidity but I don’t even notice. My wife goes back to Palo Alto for business meetings and I stay with the dried grapes hanging in the vineyard and somehow outlast every evening’s news reports, just wanting to get through this year of hate and anxiety and turmoil. I'm very worried about the presidential elections.
November 2020
November comes and the days get cold, still in that unmovable humidity range of 20-30% . The time changes from daylight savings time and that messes with me every night. I'm ready for bed at nine which is now eight which doesn't matter because I'm so wired from election scrolling all day that I can't sleep anyway.
Then it happens. On the same day Biden wins, rain is forecasted for Sunday the 15th. Amazingly the forecast sticks as time crawls toward the forecast and I know this Californian trick about rain and clouds that pass over. The apps continue to predict rain for Sunday. Everything is dry, parched, dead, or rapidly going dormant. The valley floor of Napa Valley is brown with spent vine leaves. Gone is the red, yellow, and orange of fall.
Then at 1pm on a Sunday afternoon, I eagerly watch rain clouds cross the valley. It's a wall of vapor. The wind picks up, blows dry stuff around, and then it starts raining. Not big droplets but lots of wind and then a full steady rain. I walk outside and let it hit my face. It's cold! I close my eyes and just stand there for the longest time getting wet looking out over a valley filled with clouds instead of smoke and fire.
My vineyard gives me views I could not otherwise see. I can see a few miles to the West and on a good day I can see the southern skies above Carneros. I can see Spring Mountain above Saint Helena and the large brown patches where the fire burned its way up Spring Mountain Road. I can see some of the most expensive, pampered vineyards in the world, and in Oakville, where I live, I can sit and watch the hawks and hawk-talk to them on sunny days and hear them hawk-talk back.
This journal in a vineyard was highjacked by climate change and a global pandemic. My view is a little different now on this first day after the first rain, a morning so gloriously cool in the November sunlight that I must wear a fleece, a morning so quiet that I can hear the geese cross the valley to the north, a view so charmingly beautiful that vineyards stretch as far as my eye can see. This year will never be far from my memory. This is the year we must change.