We’ve now entered the wet season.

The light amount of rain we have had for the past few days has served to lightly green the burnt-orange and brown slopes of Mt. Manuel, which are opposite to our house, mocking the change of foliage of New England. As you may recall, there was a controlled burn down the slopes of Mt. Manuel during the Timber Fire.

The days are shorter, as we all know. The days and nights are cooler. The salubrious climate of the Central Coast is free from the extremes of our former home in New England. We were surprised at the balmy weather on Pfeiffer Beach the other day, as it was quite chilly at our home on the ridge above it.

I’ve seen hawks migrating south, and there seems to be less birds overall, but the buzzards remain, as there is never any shortage of carrion to feed them.

Post Update, just now at 1:03 PM, this appeared in our valley:

It is unusual to be a the same altitude as a rainbow, but here it is off of our deck.

We returned last week after a long trip to Asia. The picture below merely hints at the beauty of Japanese aesthetics, encapsulated in the term mono no aware. Motoori Norinaga, a famous Japanese literary figure from the 18th century, wrote:

Working with a bit of jet lag, which means going to sleep at 10:00 and waking up at 12:30.

Glad to be back.

We are now permitted to leave. It’s been a minute. Our neighbors hosted a shelter-in-place party on Saturday. I pulled my fiddle out from retirement, and with modest success recalled some fiddle tunes I learned during my childhood and generally joined in the merriment.

Big Sur is not back to normal quite yet—the Plaskett Fire on the South Coast is still expanding and south of us the road remains closed. The Timber Fire seems to be winding down for now, still burning, arguably a threat to upper Carmel Valley, but it seems to be over in Big Sur.

So, today we are escaping up the coast as I’ve busted a fiddle string and need to go to a music shop for new strings and we have things to do, such as wash our ash-covered vehicle, walk on the beach, and generally get out of here.

Watching the Timber Fire this evening from our porch, Baby’s on Fire just came to mind:

The verse goes, “Baby’s on fire, better throw her in the water…” If you listen to the above, you can hear the fire over the crickets…it’s a mile away.

When we see pictures like the above, the back burn set to prevent the Timber Fire from overwhelming Big Sur Valley, we have to recall millions of creatures are being burned alive to protect human houses and businesses. This evening we saw a woodpecker in distress, flying back and forth, unsure of where to go, visibly disturbed by the fire. The buzzards have also buzzed off. They will be back, but today they decided the going was good.

There were other flying creatures however:

Pfeiffer State Park is on fire as I write this.

It’s dramatic and sad and exciting and scary and exhilarating and worrisome and amazing and concerning and climate change and what the fuck and seriously? and oh my fucking god all rolled into one. There is just no way to parse this sanely…

Today, I spent the day editing a translation of a text while my neighbors prepared to defend our homes. We also prepped our surroundings, just in case, moving flammables off our porch, because should the fire come up the ridge, our house is first in line. Pictures don’t do justice, not even videos, even so:

At this point, the top of Mt. Manuel is dark. But the Timber Fire rages away, and communities in the Upper Carmel Valley are preparing for the fire to come their way.

As river levels fall, Hungary and France are having to shut some nuclear power plants because they can no longer safely cool them; oh, and a sunken Nazi warship has reappeared along the dwindling Danube in Serbia, so that’s nice.

Today our fire district (MRY-F021b) was subject to a shelter in place order, not an evacuation per se, but between an evacuation warning and an evacuation order.

The reason? Various agencies have decided to shut down Highway 1 between Molera State Park and Gorda to allow fire fighting crews unfettered access to the highway. Backfires have been lit in Pfeiffer State Park to keep the Timber Fire confined to the Ventana Wilderness. As I write this, a line of fires marches down the slopes of Mt. Manuel. It kinds of looks like the smile of a Jack-o-lantern in some places.

Tomorrow is supposed to bring rain, which would be helpful. It snowed ash today once they set the fires. A concern is falling embers, which can generate spot fires. Our job, should it come to that, is to keep the slope around our house wet with hoses.

PG&E might de-energize the lines, that is, turn the power off, if the burn looks like it will threaten power lines, but we are prepared with battery generators, etc. We will be able to keep in touch with the world beyond Big Sur Valley. It’s a dramatic turn.

We had a big show outside too:

There were lines of huge bulldozers, excavators, etc all along Highway 1.

We are quite close to the beach, but we can’t get there from here right now.

It’s all ok, we are fine.

.

Across the way from my deck, the smoke hangs in a thick layer, but the air quality below it is moderate. Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish smoke from the marine layer.

At some point later today helicopters will move in, making the valley echo with the sound track of a Vietnam Era war flick.

Meanwhile, Highway 1 has reopened. Most people have returned to their homes. Bixby Bridge is closed, much to the relief of locals and those who make their living in the hotels and restaurants in Big Sur. State Parks remain closed, however.

Life in Big Sur is slowly returning to normal, but the fire won’t stop for weeks.

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Just moved in…

Osa and I moved to Big Sur in March—nice weather, scary road, and nice accommodations.

We’ve firmly decided to make our home here because, aside from the natural beauty of the place, people have been extremely warm, and have graciously welcomed us into the small close-knit community that is the genuine heart of Big Sur.

I’ve started this journal to record my impressions of this storied place, the home of Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, the location of Esalen, and so on. Big Sur is a place many people feel is familiar to them, but which they do not truly know, a place they drive through—selfie at Bixby, wait for an hour+ to have lunch at Nepenthe (which has a fantastic wine program), maybe visit Pfeiffer Beach State Park, and continue south or turn around.

Given the nature of Big Sur, I thought it appropriate to start with the Timber Fire.

We took our time in moving in and settling in, moved our belongings from the East Coast, put our Massachusetts house on the market, and set course for the next chapter in our lives. People keep warning us about the nature of Big Sur—the floods, landslides, and the fires. Being a tough Yankee from New England, I’ve dealt with blizzards, ice storms, and hurricanes, even a tornado or two. I am not put off very easily, and I am stubborn.

While attending teachings with Sangye Khandro in Alameda over the weekend of August 7th, on the morning of August 9th I received notice that a fire had broken out in Big Sur at the Timber Top Camp in the Los Padres National Forest. Driving up our road to our house, we observed this:

As of this writing on August 15th, the fire has not been put out, and has expanded from the initial 300 acre fire to more than 4500 acres. Fortunately, neither lives nor property have been lost. The fire is for now confined to the back country in the Ventana Wilderness. But it is not over.

We’ve been watching the efforts of Cal Fire and other agencies to deal with the conflagration, which has the potential to match any of the large fires here in the past, such as the 2020 Dolan Fire on the South Coast, which took five months to contain. Today there were many water drops over a ravine in Pfeiffer State Park:

We walked up the hill tonight to look at the sunset over the Pacific. Right now, we would not want to live anywhere else.