Reality feels surreal, as people living in the fire zones are literally running for their lives.

Evacuations at this scale feel totally surreal, even as the danger is realer than ever. 

Greetings. 

What a wild time this is, where one disaster supplants another. I almost forgot today that I was still supposed to be paying attention to mask-wearing requirements and coronavirus transmission, until a friend showed up at my door wearing a mask. Emily Underwood lives in Cachagua, and arrived at my place in Seaside to deliver her cat, Mitze, before she knew whether she and the four other people she lives with were evacuating. 

Everything was changing fast, and they’d been through two other fires—the Tassajara Fire in 2015 which, retrospectively, seemed like a blip. (They were staying with friends, and received multiple false reports that their house had burned down.) Then there was the Soberanes Fire in 2016, which felt relatively far away, burning on the other side of Cachagua. 

This one feels different. “It’s starting to feel a little bit like we’re being closed in on,” Underwood says, noting the River Fire and the Carmel Fire raging on either side of them. (And also noting her gratitude to the volunteers with Cachagua Fire.)

She packed up a few things—a suitcase full of photos and her passport, and her late mom’s cello, “one of the only things I have left of hers,” and put them in my garage. It was only after she left Mitze and those few belongings that she found out their house falls in the evacuation area for one of three fast-moving fires. 

At 2:24pm, maybe an hour after she’d left her cat at my house, Cachagua Fire reporteda civilian was being evacuated with severe burns from the Asoleado area, just up the hill. A few minutes before, at 2:18pm: “Structures are being lost at Sky Ranch.”

The stakes are so high, and the threat is so real it almost feels surreal. Mask-wearing and hand-washing to battle an invisible foe, the coronavirus, felt like the things we had to do to protect ourselves just a few days ago. Today, many members of our community are literally running for their lives. 

We can’t take stock of the full extent of the damage quite yet, but please: Obey evacuation orders, look out for each other and be safe out there. 

-Sara Rubin, editor, sara@mcweekly.com