A Pandemic Journal
The coronavirus pandemic coincided with California’s worst wildfire season to date. In 2020, well over 9,000 fires burned more than 4 million acres in the state. The August Complex fire was described as the first “gigafire,” burning an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.
At the same time that Californians were hunkered down in isolation because of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of us had to flee the fires all up and down the state. Those fires were first set off by rare August lightning storms, but were also the result of years of drought conditions and climate change. The crisis peaked on September 9, 2020, “the day of orange skies,” when clouds of smoke covered the state and day appeared to be night.
I had missed the beauty of Sonoma County so much during years of impaired mobility, disability and pain. So I spent the pandemic rebuilding my once-broken body on daily walks. These images were captured as a kind of diary of those walks, recording the golden savannas that go without rain for half the year; the unremitting sunlight; portraits of traumatized trees in parks that burned during the Tubbs and Kincade fires; and the fragility of this poignant landscape.