Previously I talked of Winter as a time in which things cooled down and slowed down, potentially providing an environmental impetus to switch gears in one's personal life, for example heading inside at the onset of cold rains, snow, and frosts, with one's thoughts and activities turning inwards and towards contemplation. The image of a world slowing down under a blanket of cold is just that though: an image. Which though is derived from something that actually occurs, and which is sometimes applicable to one's personal life, can make for a fleeting aspiration, fulfilled in stops and starts, due to the multitude of other dynamics connected to it. Especially on an earth that is constantly warming.
In particular, air is always moving, all of it connected and moving together as it moves across lands that are heating and cooling at different rates and magnitudes, and over bodies of water that are heating and cooling differently as well. And air that is growing colder must settle, sometimes coming down off of a mountain, accumulating and picking up speed, becoming wind.
So the Winter is made up of not only areas of cold and calm and quiet, but also of areas in transition and given to storms. And taken all together, you have warmer air in general holding more moisture, which then goes cold, and so you can have heavy snow storms in the east and in the north. And there are reports of this slippery, sleety snow, not sticking well, which melts in the day, and then the day turns to night and that melted slow turns to ice, causing another set of problems altogether.
And in the west and in California in particular, it is fairly warm year-round, with a constant drying out of the land amidst a drought, and there is now a year-round fire season, and year-round air quality warnings and red flag warnings. And this year in particular the combination of wind and drought and fire hazards produced a series of raging infernos that emerged very quickly and swept into very dense areas full of built ladder-fuels.
Which given California's density and the vigor of its economy, and the accumulated dense wealth in its bounds, makes for a ticking time bomb that is just about done with its ticking: the fires in these dense wealthy neighborhoods are acting like a sort of market thermite, melting through the heart of the very basis of home-owner's insurance and the vast wealth tied to it, and by implication the burning up of the remaining trust and patience in a collective remediation based on insurance.
And in the coming years, I imagine California will hemorrhage a new kind of domestic climate refugee. There is a lot of mass to hemorrhage: its population has exploded in the past couple of decades. And California produces and reproduces a certain kind of person, owing in part to its chaotic and poorly managed growth and sprawl.
And for over a decade the rest of the country has learned to become very suspicious of the fleeing Californians. In countless other states I've been, if someone learns I've grown up in and have come from California, more often than not the response is a new air of suspicion and reluctance.
At any rate, still dreaming of that cold and quiet. Enough! Let me rest! Well, not so fast.
