Last July, the Carr Fire burned almost 400 square miles and forced nearly forty thousand residents of Redding, CA, including myself, to evacuate. The center of it was Whiskeytown Lake, about ten miles from my abode, and five months later there are wide swathes of landscape that look as if World War I passed over it, as the accompanying photos indicate.
Bad as this looks, the Camp Fire demonstrated just six weeks ago that it could have been worse. Unlike the twenty-six thousand residents of Paradise, CA, about ninety minutes’ drive south of Redding, at least I got to go back to my home.
