On 13 October 2024, I jaunted 20 minutes south down Interstate-5 to the Cosumnes Nature Preserve, whose toy swamp I used to visit with my parents and my daughter Lisa; they are all dead now, and so was my pleasure on that Sunday, thanks to a haze that looked merely dirty until I opened the car door and realised it was smoke again, more smoke, my eyes beginning to burn and my chest to ache: poor sad California! In recent years I sometimes wake up choking; is the house on fire? Oh, no, merely the planet.
One of my homeless Republican friends (who stopped speaking to me once he realised that I thought differently) used to explain that if we simply listened to the president (meaning Donald Trump, who by then was out of office), we would log our forests and solve that fire problem for good. Climate change was a Chinese hoax, he instructed; and so was the Covid 19 virus, of which (according to those lying socialist doctors) his ladyfriend died in his presence – preposterous!
Fortunately, 2023 had been tolerably breathable, and 2024 pleasant, aside from some unseasonable and therefore deniable heat.
