Six years ago, in Boulder Creek CA. We lived in a surprisingly normal-looking house in a tiny group of houses on the other side of this bridge. If you didn’t like this bridge, or your gps had misled you, there was another bridge over the same creek like a quarter mile away - the road definitely went through someone’s back yard if you went that way.

The surprisingly normal looking house was a rental, by a widower who’d moved in with his new partner. Back when he’d lived there with his family, he’d hand-dug a tiny basement under the house, set it up as a movie room, and hidden the entrance behind a bookcase in the garage. It was still a quite normal house for BC, all things considered.

One of the neighbor houses was located on the other side of a seasonal creek from its driveway, so they hiked across with their stuff. Another neighbor house was red tagged, then sold to a nice fellow who probably had his life ruined when he found out it had absolutely no septic and not enough footage on the lot to put anything in. It was a tiny cabin, from the summer cabin sundowner days - back at the turn of the 20th, BC was turned from a logging town to a “summer cabins for the whites of Oakland” town, and it really showed.

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It was such a great place to live when we believed in the climate. When we lived at that house, there was the Bear fire six miles (iirc) from our house.

(It was arson. This absolutely psychotic looking tweaker was living at a property with a bunch of other tweakers where they’d strip stolen cars and twitch. He got in a fight with somebody else and set the goddamn forest on fire. When they arraigned him, he pointed at the DA and mouthed “you’re next” 😂 He got 27 years in jail and I can’t say I’m unhappy about that.)

We loaded our go bags, but we didn’t evacuate. I honestly can’t remember what I was feeling, but I almost always dissociate through really stressful situations.

The Bear fire started about a week after the Camp fire destroyed Paradise. The Camp fire was still burning when that fucker set our forest on fire. What the fuck, y’all.

Anyway, we told ourselves that our fire was different, because there wasn’t an evac order for our area, because redwoods live in a temperate rainforest where it rains a lot, because there hadn’t been a really big fire there for a hundred years.

(You may note some extremely dangerously wrong conclusions. Herd mentality is *wild* when it works.)

nostr:npub1zt30rymrqvm3vtdxq4wnknpsy6arkzcttkehwqttympk7ww7ezfqqg0v09 I didn't know that about Boulder Creek, but I guess it makes sense. It's surprisingly white and non-Hispanic.

Don't you have to disclose something as important as not having a septic tank?