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]")
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
FSA/8d22000/8d224008d22491a.tif
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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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/