Jolly Mountain Fire Evacuations Underway All Night

Photo by Jill Sawicki

It’s 12:42 a.m. here in Tacoma, WA but my heart right now is in the hometown I grew up in from age ten to twenty: Cle Elum and surrounding areas Roslyn, Ronald, and Jolly Mountain.

 

I’m looking at the map put out by the Sheriff’s Department and seeing that the fire that’s raging is just one very close ridge away (a hop, skip and jump essentially as the crow flies, across I-90) from East Nelson Siding Road, where the house that my parents and their three offspring (including me) built. (We lived about a quarter mile west of what is now Sun Country Golf and RV, which you can see on the map.)

 

Some residents are under immediate evacuation orders as I type this; and Roslyn and Ronald residents have been told to gather their most precious belongings (and beings, animal and human) and be prepared to evacuate IMMEDIATELY upon further notice…  I can just imagine what it must be like to be over there right now, sitting up all night, gathering what’s essential and worrying about what might happen to them as time passes.

 

It’s very hard to relax enough to shut my eyes and go to sleep with this impending disaster hanging so heavily on my heart.

 

I was in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California when a devastating Malibu fire occurred. I could see the whole ridge between Malibu and the San Fernando Valley ablaze from my condo in North Hollywood.

 

So I know what it feels like to be “too close for comfort”, watching and wondering whether a conflagration of such size would be contained in time to keep hundreds of homes from being destroyed. With the winds and the dry brush, I knew it wouldn’t take much to send sparks into the valley where I lived and worked.

 

The Kittitas County fire fighters say they need rain–lots of rain–to help knock down the Jolly fire. There is none in the immediate forecast and temperatures will be in the 90’s for at least the next several days.

 

I’m praying for rain, nonetheless.

 

Houston is drowning as a result of Hurricane Harvey. My 1960’s home town is close to burning up.. And another (even more powerful) hurricane (Irma) is building in the Atlantic, threatening the Caribbean, while Tropical Storm Lidia is threatening San Cabos.

 

These disasters are not “business as usual”. They’re “hundred year” events that seem to happen every few years these days.

 

It’s time to wake up to what our activities are doing to this planet. Climate change is REAL.  And it will only get worse as long as we allow the  powers that be to stick their collective heads in the sand and pretend human activities aren’t negatively impacting the one and only habitable planet in our solar system.

 

Native Americans  had (and have) it right. We need to live in and with nature and stop despoiling it with clear cutting, fracking, oil pipelines, manufactured chemical toxins, over population, and other hostile activities.

 

We have the technology to stop killing ourselves. Do we have the political will?

 

We’d better!

 

 

 

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