The Summer of Smoke and Fog
I don't remember when or where the fires started. All I know is that most of the west has been living under a blanket of smoke for what feels like this whole summer. We tried to drive up to Montana to get out of it: smoke, the whole way. A ten-hour drive through the sepia haze, then ten hours back, and then a week later we drove out of Utah, across Nevada, and into California: at least ten more hours of the same.
Aside from the depressing aspects of not seeing the sky, there is of course the under and overriding sadness knowing how many people are encountering the loss of home, safety and, for some, life. There have been times in my life when I've thought or said that I wish everything I have would burn up in a fire, and I could start all over without the burden of possessions. I would want warning, though, and I would want to not be there, and I would want for no one to get hurt or lose anything they didn't want to lose.
There were glimpses of reprieve as we came over the Sierra Nevadas but it wasn't real until we hit the Northern California coast. Particularly Pacifica, the town of my adolescence and the town where Deanna Lambert confronts herself in Story of a Girl. A town that has an annual Fog Fest to celebrate the lucky fact of its geography that brings in morning and evening (and sometimes all day) fog through much of the summer, and maintains a mild temperature nearly year-round.
A town that, in all probability, I will be moving back to in 2019. Or, close enough.
When we moved from San Francisco to Salt Lake in 2000, we never ever imagined we'd be here for eighteen years. We told ourselves and our friends it was a two year experiment, an adventure. We'd be back soon enough. It's a way of thinking about a big change that allows you to take it in small bites. Or perhaps a kind of necessary denial that helps you get through it. We're approaching the likely move back in much the same way. Small steps and loosely planned increments. It started with a job and will probably end with a move, but in the meantime we are both/neither here and/nor there.
There's a writing quote from E.L. Doctorow that I always get wrong: "Writing a novel is like driving a car in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." The actual quote is about driving at night, not in the fog. But having driven since the age of 16 over the hill where Highway 280 connects to Highway 1 and the Pacifica exit, and over Devil's Slide a hundred times before they built the tunnel, I hear that quote and I picture fog and the way headlights barely penetrate and all you can do is look for the painted lane marker a few feet ahead of you.
The decision about moving back and the way we are executing that decision feels a lot like that. Making only the choices we have to make as they come, making no pronouncements or plans that are not required, closing no doors and saying no goodbyes. The road isn't as clear as I'd like, in a way that sometimes feels gentle and familiar like fog and sometimes feels more like smoke--harsh, hazy, a little frightening.
When I was in Pacifica at the end of July, I thought about how strange it is to think about living in the town of my adolescence as an adult. It's not the town I think of as having "grown up" in. For me, San Francisco is that place, where I lived and went to school from age 2 to about 12. Pacifica felt like I place I endured, probably because 13-17 feels like a time that is endured more than lived. I couldn't wait to get out, and there were moments being back there when I had to remind myself:
Just because you're back in a place from the past doesn't mean your life is going backwards.
It's a thing I've had to remind myself a lot in recent years, as I encounter familiar emotional and physical territory and fear I've stalled or regressed. Maybe life is about a kind of movement that doesn't fit into a backwards/forwards or even circular paradigm and our metaphors fall short of describing the experience of both always and never being the same you.
This hazy summer full of change and stagnation, this strange kind of movement and non-movement of midlife while I wait for things to become more clear, is part of why it's been so long since I've written you this way. I'm in that kind of season where I'm on the brink of something yet to be identified, in the process of shedding skins so I can get there, letting go of so much I've held on to so that my hands are free to receive something else.
I've attempted to put it all into words more regularly, but it resists and the idea of articulation sometimes seems counter to the mystery of it.
MEANWHILE, may I recommend...
Speaking of enduring age 13: the movie Eighth Grade, which truly is as wonderful as everyone says it is because writer-director Bo Burnham takes this girl's life seriously. The things that are funny (and they are really funny) are not over-the-top or made absurd or cartoony, and the things that are emotional are not maudlin. They’re just accurate and farce is not necessary when portraying junior high, and neither is melodrama. The other thing that makes this movie is Elsie Fisher’s performance and presence. My heart.
Speaking of Pacifica: the movie Colma: The Musical. Colma is a real place full of cemeteries, fog, and pastel stucco homes and Asian American culture, especially Filipino American. In a month with a couple of big wins for overdue stories that center on Asian American / Asian characters and performers (Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before) it’s fun to go back to 2006 and see how an indie filmmaker did it for $15k. Like, it was literally done by friends who met in high school drama class.
Two books that will scratch an itch you didn't know you had: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup and Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal They did for me what books about serial killers do, but without me feeling guilty for being entertained by death. I did both of these on audio. (Bad Blood is new but apparently Hatching Twitter has been out since 2013.)