Orange Sun over The Orange

Posted on October 27, 2003 in Disasters Folly Watch

Enroute to Barnes and Noble for a writing discussion, a fire truck came out of the station on El Toro. The line of cars I was in froze. We all turned to look, at the men in navy crowding the cab, over our shoulders back at the mountains for grub-like orange flames or a cancerously pregnant black cloud. I fought off the impulse to make a U-Turn there at Jeronimo. The cats, our wedding certificate, the photos, the icons, my notebooks, the laptops, the main computer’s CPU, and my collection of Day of the Dead figures all remained unpacked. I calmed myself and turned on KNX instead.

Governor Davis asked Arizona and Nevada to send fifty fire squads each. Things were getting out of hand for our hotshots, especially in chaotic San Diego County where conservatism failed to provide well enough to avoid eleven deaths. While Ahnold absented himself on a trip to Washington (this, I think, is a time for an incoming governor to be at the side of the man he is replacing, learning the ways of command), his wife Maria Shriver showed up in San Bernardino with t-shirts for the refugees.

I thought “Ahnold spent millions getting himself elected and all he can come up with for the fire victims from his personal fortune are t-shirts?” If this had happened before the Wreck-All, we might have seen Gray Davis for the competent administrator that he is and Ahnold for the opportunist that he is.

Musing over this cruelty of history, I pulled into the parking lot and had dinner. Then, inside the air-conditioned comfort of the store, I could still smell the smoke. The air was clear, the colors vivid, the lights unscreened by the pall I sniffed. Yet between me and every person was the scent of cremated sage and chamise. The only odor powerful enough to mask it was the purple mist flavored perfume of an adolescent girl who came to neck in the Travel section because she and her boyfriend couldn’t find a room.