I love the start of the trip as much as the trip itself. The possibility that comes with the on ramp, the open road, leaving home in the rear view. Was it a good idea to stay up late reading climate news the night before I headed north to meet Kwame in Washington to make our way around The West visiting family? Maybe not so much. Floods in Vermont, extreme heat across the south, high temperatures predicted for the Bay Area over the weekend.
Blasting music (I’m still on a bit of Jenny Lewis Joy’all kick), clear skies and driving a hybrid assuaged most of my worry until I approached the Washington/Oregon border, thirty miles from my destination for the day. A sign flashed ‘vegetation fire,’ a pink sign read ‘emergency scene ahead',’ traffic slowed to a crawl and we funneled into one lane, then to a standstill. My anxiety started to creep up.
During the previous week, we’d been doing a bit of a song challenge, sending each other lyrics for, minimally, a verse and a chorus for the other person to make into a proper song, and send back a recording of the updated song. In park on the I-5, I dashed off some lines, including:
What is there even left to burn?
You think by now we would have learned
But here we all are
Here we all are
Eventually I saw the source: a now smoldering husk of a semi-truck which a fire crew was hosing down. The hill behind the truck was blackened and swarming with another couple dozen firefighters. More lanes opened up and we all made our way forward. Everything looked under control… for the moment.