Dixie Fire near Paradise explodes across 1,100 acres in less than a day
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Gerard Van der Leun
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Damn…
As of 9:00 AM (your time) the fire had DOUBLED, and increased to 2250 acres. That was 2 hours ago, so it’s probably 2500 acres by now. https://www.chicoer.com/2021/07/15/9-a-m-update-no-containment-yet-on-dixie-fire-now-at-2250-acres/
Also from the ER today- a nasty report about all the toxic and deadly crap we all inhaled for weeks during and after the Camp Fire. I suggest anyone suing PG&E (like myself) for damages from the camp Fire also go for a “future medical” clause in their settlement.
Another suggestion- I was shocked to find out that the majority of claimants suing PG&E have NOT provided their attorneys with a “target amount” for their damages. Most have only submitted “loss amounts” for their personal property.
My target amount is $2.25 million. I don’t expect to get that much, but the number at least sets a benchmark to work with.
Good luck, Gerard- I hope they get that one contained and out before it turns into another 11-8-18 scenario.
Keep us posted.
Bad news. Unfortunately, wild fire is everywhere. Going to be a bad bad summer on the left coast
VI
Good luck Pete.
Fyi air quality in Dakotas is edging into bad category due Canada wildfires and the NWS COC forecasts are not good- above average hot and dry next 60days.
Thanks Foo. We’ll see what the settlement amount is about the same time as when the cows come home. As for air quality, no luck needed where I’m at- Ohio.
We’ve gotten so much rain & thunderstorms here lately that our air here is pretty pristine. And as long as we don’t paint a Fentanyl Floyd mural on the wall, no worries about getting hit by lightning.
And yeah- I’ve seen the fires in Canada, WA, ID, OR, UT, MT, and other states. Kinda “Biblical proportions” stuff.
UPDATE on the Dixie Fire-
Now at 5000 acres, about 7% contained as of 5:30PM Thursday.
https://www.paradisepost.com/2021/07/15/9-a-m-update-no-containment-yet-on-dixie-fire-now-at-2250-acres/
Some evacuations are going on.
Gerard, here’s hoping that you and Olive won’t need your bug-out bags– but as Casey said, keep us posted.
Yes, please keep us posted, Gerard. This must be upsetting
for you.
At this time Oregon has 7 fires burning with the Bootleg fire in Klamath County being the largest at 227,000 acres. In Northern California there are 3 fires that I know of with the Beckwourth Complex being the largest at just over 100,000 acres. Here in the Rogue Valley we have had minimal smoke to deal with as the wind has been predominantly out of the West. A nice change from last year but its early. Hope all of you stay safe.
UPDATE 7-16-21 9:30 AM PT-
More bad news on the Dixie Fire.
It’s now grown to about 8000 acres, gaining around 5000 acres over a 24 hour period. It’s continuing north towards Tobin Ridge.
https://www.chicoer.com/2021/07/16/930-a-m-update-dixie-fire-pushing-north-toward-tobin-ridge-now-mapped-at-7947-acres/
Temperatures in the 100s, low humidity, and winds of 10-14 mph over the weekend will add to the fire danger.
I just finished a backpack through the Sierra Nevada, that included a section that had burned last year. Within that section, there were parts that were mostly a ground fire, it killed the small trees and almost all of the needles on the larger trees. The largest trees had charcoal-black trunks , black branches down low and green branches way up high. The forest floor was completely covered with all the dead needles that were brought down in the last winter.
In other parts the fire had crowned and killed everything, all that was left of the standing trees were black charcoal spires, every branch was consumed. All that was left of the old stumps were holes in the ground, and the old fallen trees were just lines of ashes in the dirt.
There was a chokepoint in the canyon, and I think the firefighters were able to stop the crown fire there with suppressants and water drops, else the fire would have marched all the way to the timberline meadows at 11,000 ft.
This summer, there are scattered ferns and other opportunistic sun-loving plants sprouting through the ashes, even though this was a low-snowfall year.
In three years, the crowned sections will be a luxurious fairy meadow of low flowering bushes with black spires everywhere, a beautiful ghost forest.
In eight years, if the Federals don’t actively maintain this important trail through the mountains (and it’s not clear the feminized NPS and FS will do so), it will be an impenetrable and brutal thicket of buckthorn, manzanita and deer brush, interlaced with a pixie stick jumble of fallen charcoal trunks.
I’ve lived long enough to see exactly that progression, first the fairy meadow, then the thicket where the only way through is to climb on top of and walk the fallen charcoal trunks and hop from one to the next. And woe to that guy (me!) who wearing a backpack slips off a trunk and falls into the buckthorn.
Western forests must burn. Let them burn often. The largest, strongest trees will survive the ground fires. Don’t suppress the fires. To live in western forests, a person must clear a zone around their dwellings, an adequate defense against the ground fires. But people don’t and they won’t, else why live in the forest, the big trees march right up to their houses. It is inevitable, suppress the fires and some day the crown fire will come; nature abides, men not so much.
STILL more bad news- the fire is now over 15,000 acres.-
https://www.chicoer.com/
HUGE UPDATE-
Ready for some deja vu? According to the Chico ER headlines, “Some ‘California utility company’ MAY
BE LINKED to the Dixie Fire.”
In other words, the bastards at PG&E have CAUSED ANOTHER HUGE FIRE, and the ultra-liberal Chico ER is too freakin’ pussified and milquetoast to actually come out and SAY IT. I’ll say it for them-
PG&E CAUSED THE DIXIE FIRE!
https://www.chicoer.com/2021/07/19/pge-utility-linked-to-dixie-fire/