This morning I awoke to the acrid, smoky smell of the unwashed flannel shirt you wore to last weekend’s camping trip. Outside the smell of smoke was much worse, and I walked quickly to and from the coffee shop to get back into the house. Today is the first day the smell and smoke have been so overwhelming in my neighborhood, which is very close to downtown San Diego.

The fires are north and south of the city, but they are everywhere. I heard rumblings of the fires over the weekend, but I didn’t realize the seriousness of the problem until I reported to teach a class Monday morning. “Is the class canceled?” the first woman asked as soon as she got off the elevator. The workshop coordinator hadn’t arrived, and students were arriving quickly, literally buzzing about the closed highways, the views of the fires from the road, the thickness of the air up north, the threats to their families and homes. When the other instructor arrived to teach his class, he had all of his belongings with him. He had been asked to evacuate, along with about 500,000 other San Diego locals by today (Wednesday).

Monday night I went door to door to collect blankets, bottled drinks, sunscreen and more for evacuees who ended up in Qualcomm Stadium, where the San Diego Chargers play. I dropped everything off Tuesday morning, and the scene was quite calm. I walked around for a while in the hallways where people slept. Everywhere you looked, people were watching televisions, listening to radios, glued to all media for news of their homes.

I took these pictures of the stadium with my cell phone. They’re not so good, but you get the idea of the piles of donations, mountains of information, daily life and relative calm.

Servers at breakfast

Piles of newspapers for Qualcomm residents

Sleeping in the corridors

Breakfast at Qualcomm

Diaper donations

Sunrise over the Qualcomm parking lot. The glow is the sun, but you can see the black smoke to the right of the sun over the mountains.

I’m fine, and where I am is fine. But I don’t know anyone who is not affected by this natural disaster. Both of my former bosses had to evacuate with their
families, and one of them had a close friend whose house burned to the ground. When I went door to door, many people said they had evacuees staying with them, or they were fostering pets, or they were going down to volunteer the next day. I think I heard 1500 homes had been destroyed so far. Some parts of the fire are better, and some are not. All the schools in the area are closed for the week. All the courts are closed. We’re supposed to stay off the highways and off our cell phones as much as possible.Sorry I’ve been so quiet this week. I didn’t mean to leave the blog on Sunday with such a downer post, and I had planned to write a list of the things that had been going right here at Avenue Z as a follow up. (Lots of things are going right, by the way.) But the fires have stolen my attention, and it’s hard to concentrate. Today I’m back on track.

By the way, every single volunteer agency here has a waiting list. The Red Cross says the best thing anyone can do now is to DONATE MONEY. Thousands have lost their homes and businesses, and, once the fires are out (which they aren’t), the real work will begin.

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