On the way to Quincy we lunch roadside at the Rock House on Yankee Hill. A wooden cutout of Bigfoot ambles across the gravel lot; there is one valiant, buoyant woman behind the counter.
These are my favorite places. I like some kitsch on the walls, some saran-wrapped muffins in a basket, a menu in Comic Sans—italic. “It’s perfect,” I announce, before the food has even arrived. “We’ll have to come here again.”
Back home two days later I’ll watch the incident map as the Camp Fire crawls inexorably toward this spot, hitting the refresh button every hour until there’s no denying the line has jumped the highway. A year later we’ll drive past the little restaurant’s namesake stone walls, all that’s left.
But today we sit on the back patio, hands and sandwiches striped in the shade of a new trellis roof.
Highway 70 after Yankee Hill has been plucked from a model railroad layout. Pylons perch above the road as it winds through rough-blasted tunnels, past power stations trimmed in fall color. Alongside us, the Feather River is by turns glassy bottle green and churning white, strewn with house-sized boulders as if by petulant gods.
When we arrive in Quincy there’s a small crowd of people standing in the median holding up signs and American flags. In the gathering dusk I can see only white skin and hair under red baseball caps and “TRUMP” scrawled on poster-board. My stomach lurches. They are hit and miss, these old mountain towns, after all. You can only guess how each will manifest its particular nostalgia for timber or mining or dinner on the table at six.
But as we get closer I can make out the small print. The sign says “TRUMP LIES MATTER.” The red caps are embroidered with the seal of the U.S. Marine Corps. The midterms are next week.
The house flips, but Paradise burns. I’m aware my N95 is too big and not sealing properly; I wear it anyway, imprinting it with lip gloss. The tightness in my chest might be from smoke or from first-world guilt—from knowing perfectly well that the apocalyptic yellow curtain hanging over my street would constitute a great day in Delhi.
Nevertheless I flee because I can, to midweek-rate motel rooms in South Lake. While waiting for the days to warm and my friends to arrive I watch, for some reason, the BBC rendition of Daniel Deronda—a sort of Victorian drawing room drama with a surprise dose of Jewish mysticism. One thing leads to another and there I am, not so much working on job applications as Wikipedia-ing Purim and shaking my fist in the name of Vashti, who also did not care to dance for the king.
Hiking alone above Fallen Leaf Lake I step aside for a couple going the other way. The woman has dropped a bandana from her pack, which I retrieve from the trail and offer back to her. “Hey, is this yours?”
“Oh,” she says. “Yeah.” She snatches it back without meeting my eyes or saying thank you, then turns on her heel and jogs back up the trail to where her partner is sniggering into his elbow. I’m puzzled and offended by the entire interaction until, months later, I read a Backpacker Magazine blurb espousing pee rags.
The best ride of the season begins with several hours of pushing my bike up Van Sickle, proceeds to a miserable interlude of backache and altitude-induced puking, and finishes, inexplicably, with my hands in the fur of three golden retrievers unattended at the end of the trail. The first two acts are as likely as the fires to be repeated; the last will presumably never happen again.
A close reader will notice I’m writing, in this case, more than a year after the fact—beginning on a backlog that forces awkward, ungrammatical contortions of temporality because I don’t like to write (read: live) in anything but the present tense. My clairvoyance is only hindsight, and even from one future, what do I know about the next? What does anyone know, of what will befall us, what wind may change?
So dum spiro, spero, I say, for more surprise dogs—through that red-kissed respirator mask or not.
e.alia.salim 