California Wildfires

A good friend of mine lives in San Diego. I visited her several years ago and fell in love with the area. So much so, that I brought the real estate section home with me to read and dream on the plane back to Philly.

My friend Karen has built a business working with local and county governments across the country helping them devise state of emergency plans to work with the healthcare organizations in their areas. And yes, she did work with the several of the counties now ravaged by fire.

In an e-mail to me this morning, she wrote:

It is really really bad. My emergency response training is no longer fiction in SD - the worst possible thing that we trained for is actually happening.

A quarter of a million people have been evacuated from their homes so far. From the dessert to the sea some 40 miles of million dollar homes. But, the worst is that no one can breath the air with all the ash and smoke, so the hospitals are packed with wheezing and shortness of breath patients including my parents which I have advised to move up to San Clemente (fires from Fallbrook are now in Camp Pendleton).

AND, I am in Minnesota running a curriculum retreat for the School of Medicine and have been on the phone and internet for the last 24 hours with family, friends and the 19 year old UCSD student that is house sitting with Torrey. I just called her and told her to go up to Pasadena (she has an aunt there), but the traffic won't allow it. The temperature inside my house is 85 degrees since it is all closed up (outside it is 90, even though the fires are 10 miles away). Don't have air conditioning, cause I "live on the coast" ! Never saw anything like it.

I am tired, very sad and really want to be home.... I will be back on Wednesday night.

I am sharing this with you because of the reuccuring truth that plagues all of us. We cannot control or escape nature. But it is also nature that, over billions of years has evolved to provide a planet onwhich human nature has prevailed.

I recently completed two of James Michener's epic novels, Alaska and the Caribbean and am just in the opening chapters of Hawaii.

Two truths have emerged from my readngs:

1. It is, sadly, human nature to seek, destroy, overcome and rule others that are not like them.
2. The earth is constantly reinventing itself and although it can/may/will take tens of thousands of years for a cataclysmic occurance, every volcanic eruption, every storm that destroys, and every fire that devours what we have built, is one tiny step towards the next big life altering event.

I don't know where this is all leading except that I know I'm headed to Alaska next summer---I want to see it while the pristine beauty and the wonders of the glaciers are still with us.