Written on September 18th, 2020
I haven’t been outside in four days. In 2020, that hardly seems like an anomaly, but these last four days have been the most suffocating.
Like many other knowledge workers, my husband and I moved out of our Brooklyn apartment in May. Nomadic, we are slowly making our way to a new life in LA, stopping through Montana and Wyoming, down the west coast through Washington and Oregon, finally arriving in California.
We have been wrestling with wildfires for two weeks. The Almeda Fire sprang on us, forcing us to evacuate from Jacksonville, Oregon, a cozy town where we planned to spend our first anniversary. We woke up to Halloween winds. The sky quickly turned pewter, and ash began to fall into a glass of water on the patio. By 2pm, towns next to us were evacuating, and I-5 was closing in larger sections. Neither of us wanted to leave. We decided to pack all our things, just in case. Updates came every 15 minutes. We had a decision to make — we could either wait and let the fire dictate our circumstances, or define our own by leaving early.
Deja vu snapped me back to another moment on another couch. It was early March in NYC, when coronavirus first had us grappling with our health and freedom, making rough calculations about hospital bed availability and our age group’s death rate…
