After a particularly strenuous semester and an equally grueling finals week, and feeling the frostbite from the 20-degree weather with the worst yet to come, I was overjoyed to be lucky enough to fly home to sunny San Diego. I could feel the jealousy radiating from all my New England native peers; they were stuck in this frozen hell. I was even looking forward to the plane ride home, anything with the thought of warmth to tide me over until I escaped the stress of finals, moving, and ice. Finally, after giving away half of my belongings, shoving four suitcases of clothes into two, and passing all my final exams, I was off. After checking my nearly overweight suitcases, one 48 pounds and the other 49, I boarded the plane dressed in six bulky layers of snow gear and snow boots for shoes. Finally, after what felt like eons of time drifting among the clouds, we landed.
I practically ran through the terminals to get outside, I couldn’t wait to feel the warmth on my skin. Finally, I burst through the automatic doors, felt the bright, wholesome rays fill my snow boot and parka clad soul, breathed in a huge breath of fresh air, and almost gagged. What was that acrid smell in the air, smoke?! Although faint, that all too familiar scent reminded me that I didn’t come home to paradise, but a state under mother nature’s fire. All of the nice weather Southern California had been having this winter had laid the path for brutal destruction, and San Diego’s atmosphere still held some ashy remnants.
The subtle stench triggered my sense memory prompting past fire evacuations to flood my thoughts. In living in Southern California, my family and I have had our fair share of fire scares. My Orange County native grandparent’s shed and stables have repeatedly been burnt down and reconstructed, and my mom's sacred family photo albums have, on numerous occasions, been packed in the getaway car for the evacuation. One year my AP testing was rescheduled, and another, we had to stay with my grandparents a whole week before returning home. My mom told me the story of how, once, at fourteen, she had to drive a trailer full of horses, pigs, and dogs out of her burning back yard stables to safety, narrowly escaping the flaming trees lining the dirt road, and fighting to breathe through the dense smoke. One of my earliest memories is breathing through a hospital mask, playing on a jungle gym under red-gray tinted clouds of ash, and my mother yelling at me to get inside and save my lungs.
The smell of a wildfire is not in the slightest comparable to that of beach bonfires, lit matchsticks, fireplaces, or backyard BBQs. The heavy smoke which clouds the atmosphere from a massive mile wide fire, has the all too acute aroma of an 80-year-old ash tray full of mildewed, stale, decrepit, rotten cigarette butts. The color of the skies during a forest fire resembles sallowed pale skin you could only see on the body of a corpse, with the addition of more brownish red murky undertones.
Every time I smell the acrid smoke, see the scene broadcasted on the news, and feel my lungs weighed down by the unwanted soot, I can’t help but think that it's all our doing. Homes are burning, millions of acres are lost, and people die, but we can’t blame mother nature for these tragedies. We humans try our best to conquer nature, and in doing so we face retaliation for this rapacity.
In the chaparral, the climate of most of Southern California, the native plants have adapted to the seasonal fires that have persisted for decades. Without even a brain these plants have made changes to their own anatomy to deal with their climate’s persistent drought and harsh fires. Many plant’s roots can generate regrowth from the underground up, even when their top half has been scorched beyond repair. Other plants seed pods crack open when exposed to extreme heat in a fire, scattering their offspring in hopes to preserve their survival at their own demise. So why, have we not, as humans with very capable brains, been able to coexist with our environment and live with our surroundings?
We think building houses out of wood are meant to last, and consume water as if it were a replenishable resource. However, our place of settlement is clearly not meant cater to this lifestyle. These “catastrophic” yearly cycles of drought and fire actually promote regrowth and clear dead brush for new vegetation come spring time. And the little rainwater provided is cherished by the plants who conserve every last drop, even if it means growing hair like cilia follicles on the outside of their green flesh to trap and collect moisture particles from the air. We haven’t learned these strategies yet, because we haven’t got the mindset for it. Instead we fight tooth and nail against our conditions and even worsen them for ourselves in this process.
Although the cycles are natural for the chaparral climate, their recent severity is not. Our human intervention into these systems has managed to wreak havoc on the weather and natural balance of the delicate ecosystem. Climate change has altered the way weather patterns and ecosystems operate, and is leading to mass extinction. Last year, Southern California got huge amounts of precipitation in the winter and spring months. Many said this would reverse years of drought, and replenish dwindling reserves. The growth from this rain was spectacular. Everything was green, and wildflowers bloomed in abundance. It was all wonderful until everything died after a hot summer. With little fall precipitation in the past months, this luscious flora turned dead brush became easy bait for the heat to birth spark, and everything went up in flames.
Southern California hadn’t seen rainfall like last year in decades, and hadn’t had a drought as bad as it did in the years leading up to it. These fires are a product of these skewed and erratic weather patterns, changes we’ve created. I don’t think we deserve to have everything destroyed by these fires, but we should learn not to rebuild in the same way, over and over again. If we want to live with our chaparral climate, not against it, we need to be more conscious of the way it works, and take a lesson from its years of experience.
