Dixie is burning Plumas County and bringing out the best in us

Plumas

This dang Dixie. I feel utterly helpless. I’m trying to not let my grief over my community’s epic loss turn to rage. I may be a transplant from Texas, but I love the Sierra Nevada and the beauty of Plumas County. It’s my home now.

The last few mornings, I’ve wakened to blue skies and felt surges of hope. Then the wind comes, and my feels turn to fear. Another neighboring community is in Dixie’s crosshairs. It’s truly a monster.

Quincy is spared … so far. I feel guilty enjoying the beauty of its nearby wilderness when so many fellow residents have lost theirs. I weigh whether to post the beautiful images I capture here against the possibility of hurting those who’ve lost everything.

The images encourage me. Maybe they do the same for others. So I post. Photography and writing are my therapy. So is hiking and gravel biking in these lovely forests that surrounded us a mere few weeks ago.

Some days it feels like the other day; at other times, it seems months ago that we were gearing up for post-COVID camping trips, lake outings, and Sierra fun. It was the “new roaring twenties” here in paradise. Then yet another fire crashed the party.

Yet, it’s not all bad. Amid the fears and tears, horror and sorrow, many are showing amazing love and kindness toward their neighbors. I’ve realized that Plumas County is home to some tough and loving people. Who says the Old West grit is gone?

Plumas people are fiercely protective of their forests and the folks around them. It’s been a joy to behold the ways in which so many are helping others. When people are tried by fire, fear, loss and grief, the result is usually love.

Plumas Strong. It isn’t just a cute sentiment—it’s for real, man. Let’s roll.

Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind: California and its epic wildfires

California

Like the 2018 Camp Fire, California’s Dixie Fire is truly epic. It has burned more than 220,000 acres and at least 40 structures. It’s the largest conflagration since the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise. Sadly, California wildfires are becoming as common as Florida hurricanes. Why is this happening and who’s to blame? In a word, California.

By mismanaging its forests and water sources and enabling a power provider to place profits over people, the Golden State has sown the wind and is reaping the whirlwind.

Why is every California fire season scarier and more destructive than the last? The reasons can be boiled down to these:

    1. Decades of forest mismanagement caused by environmentalists shaping policy
    2. Co-opted Northern California watersheds and water supply diversion
    3. Hotter temperatures and historic drought conditions caused by climate change
    4. Failing PG&E infrastructure
Forest mismanagement

We live five miles from the southeastern edge of the Dixie Fire. Our little mountain town of Quincy is under an evacuation warning. Many of our fellow residents live in areas of mandatory evacuation and some have lost their homes. Local firefighters and forest experts have known for years this was inevitable.

It’s common sense, really. When forest undergrowth and dead limbs and logs are allowed to pile up between trees, you may as well stack logs at their bases and wait for a lightning strike or stray spark from a train or campfire. To counter all these possibilities, wise forest managers remove forest floor fuels and keep forests from growing dangerously dense.

Foolish forest managers allow undergrowth to flourish in order to “protect” ecological environments of certain species at the expense of overall forest ecology. This hands-off approach is pushed in Sacramento by those who think we’re only one species sharing our environment rather than caretakers of our environment.

Wise gardeners prevent weeds from diverting moisture from produce plants by removing them. This ensures a healthy garden. Why wouldn’t smart forest management include removal of undergrowth and dead or dying trees?

Water diversion

A few years ago, state biologists “gill-netted” vast quantities of fish in our local Silver Lake in order to prevent them from feeding on a certain frog. This decimated the fish population in favor of the frog population. How is this an ecological balance?

Similarly, allowing natural water sources to feed rivers and streams provides better hydration for trees—and raises critical moisture levels for forests. Diverting water from Northern California sources when levels are low exacerbates the deadly dryness of moisture-starved Sierra forests. Shouldn’t there be a balance based on water levels?

As climate change continues to affect moisture and heat, smart and balanced water management becomes more critical. Yet California continues to base policy decisions reactively rather than proactively. If Northern California watershed areas burn for lack of moisture, poor water management will be partially to blame.

So will California’s reliance on hydroelectric power over traditional (and more effective) fossil-fuel plants. The state gets nearly 2/3 of its power from non-fossil fuel production, which is why it has to buy electricity from states like Oregon, Arizona and others.

Failing PG&E

Failed PG&E power lines are responsible for devastating California wildfires for the last five fire seasons. According to PG&E’s initial report the day the Dixie Fire started, an employee responding to an outage noticed a blown fuse at Cresta Dam in a heavily forested area of Butte County around the Feather River Canyon. He found two blown fuses and a tree leaning on a power conductor. He also found a fire on the ground near the base of the tree.

When the 2018 Camp Fire erupted, a PG&E employee noticed flames caused by a faulty transmission line in Feather River Canyon. Many of these lines are supported by electrical towers from the early 1900s. PG&E customers pay modern rates for modern electricity delivered via century-old towers.

In fairness, PG&E is finally taking steps to modernize its infrastructure with underground line burial and other measures. Sadly, these measures are long overdue and are too little too late for victims of the Camp Fire and now for those dealing with the Dixie Fire. Worse, PG&E seems to be continuing their foot-dragging regarding reporting system failures when they point to a wildfire start.

Closed market

According to the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), PG&E ignored regulations that require it to report wildfire-related infrastructure failures within two hours of the event. PG&E took five days to report the Dixie Fire-related failure to CPUC. As a state agency, CPUC answers to Governor Gavin Newsom and Sacramento politicians. PG&E is supposed to answer to CPUC, yet is still failing to follow the rules.

Not only is there a lack of meaningful accountability, the relationship between California and PG&E is dysfunctional. The average citizen wonders why Sacramento continues enabling a repeat offender of a power company. Another question is why California refuses to open up its utility market to competitors in order to force PG&E to modernize its infrastructure.

Something has to change or California will continue to burn every fire season. Close to home, people in our community love living in Northern California, but the Golden State will lose even more citizens if residents have to flee the flames every summer.

Cali Crazy: A Texan’s Take on the Golden State—Weed wars, wicked words and wacky women

pot

Howdy, folks. I know it’s been awhile, but I’ve been awful busy. This Texan has been in a real-live (seemingly) Alamo—over pot, no less. Except this time, our side’s got plenty of big guns and ammo and just as much gumption.

In our battle against local pot growers bringing commercial cannabis into our little county via the ballot, we’ve more than held our own. But for the duration of this war (three more weeks), we’ve still got work to do.

But we just came away victorious in a debate put on by a local nonpartisan yet partisan group. We did real good. Not bad for a few old retirees who were just gittin’ started a year ago. In case, you don’t know—I’m our Webmaster, social media admin, and marketing/opinion writer.

Now, look at us. We got a website, yard signs, banners, brochures and over a thousand like-minded fellow voters.

Wicked words this way come

Our group is a lean, mean fightin’ machine, but we need all the armor we can get. Seems like every day we get ambushed by the silliest of accusations. The latest is that we signed up a bunch of dead people in the 1,000-strong names list we published in the local paper.

During the other side’s social media hissy fit, they tell each other strongly that these dead people oughta complain to the county and to the paper. Somethin’s gotta be done, they say. Dang … a year ago, things were a lot more friendly.

No more. In the months since I got into this fight over whether to allow a bunch of growers to write our pot laws for us, things have taken some nasty turns.

The growers and those in their posse call me: a liar, transplant, a lonely man with a computer, impotent, idiot, stupid, ignorant, a horrible person, a propagandist, a f…ing moron, a parasite, a sneaky rat, a media whore, a crybaby loser, a stupid sh*t, a cretin, a manipulator, deceitful, a public nuisance, a menace to the community, a hypocrite, a fraud, and dangerous. Period.

These are pretty good, but my favorite’s gotta be this:

I’m a gaslighter.

I had to look that one up. As gaslighter is a rascal who uses repetitive lies to get people to doubt their own reality. It’s like mind control. Evidently, dictators and psychopaths use it to control others.

According to my Facebook enemies, when I’m not on my Xbox (got an Xbox One, by the way), I’m mind-controlling a bunch of old folks to oppose the growers makin’ it legal to grow up to a million pounds of pot every year. That’s enough bud to supply each county voter with up to 88 pounds.

And it’s not like all that weed will stay here. These growers want to use our land to grow it and then sell most of it out of county. California produces seven to ten times as much as it can use anyhow.

And the weird thing about everything is this: The majority of the abuse is coming from local women. Now, I get that Facebookers are primarily ladies, but the ladies I’m used to—the ones in God’s Country—act a little more ladylike.

Ahab’s after me.

There’s one in particular who really has it out for me. I’m like her White Whale and she’s my Captain Ahab. She even comes to this blog to try to dig up some dirt on me, I guess. Then she posts my posts on the local growers’ Facebook group page.

Shoot, woman—keep ‘er comin’—there’s nuthin’ like free air time and more exposure. I guess it goes to show you that obsession ain’t all that strategic.

If this spitfire wants to shut me down and save the community from the menace I’ve become, sharing my Texas wisdom with her gang of growers ain’t the best way to go about it.

Not only is she a mean one, she treats my opposition to her group’s goals as a personal attack. Instead of just chalking it up to strong disagreement, it’s like she’d like to tan my hide in the public square and run me outta Dodge.

Everything’s a conspiracy to this woman. She recently accused a fella on our side of being a paid operative. Heck, I don’t even get paid. If he’s on the take, where’s mine?

She even questioned his county credentials by lining ’em up next to hers. When push came to shove, it turns out his family’s been in these parts since the 1880s. He beats hers by 40 years.

I’m a good guy. Ask my posse.

C’mon, now, lady—as the song goes—there ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy. There’s only you and me and we just disagree. Ooh, Ooh, OOH, oh, oh, OH.

Just because I don’t agree that cannabis cures EVERYTHING doesn’t mean I’m a liar and gaslighter. My strong opinions and disagreements with you and yours over pot, doesn’t mean you gotta be so ugly. And the only gaslighting I ever done was in high school with a lighter and a belly full of beans.

Just relax. Once this whole crazy cannabis thing is done and decided, we’ll still be neighbors . Heck, we’ll see each other at the Safeway, at county fairs, while getting gas, and maybe even at softball games—if the wife and I ever get around to having a young-un—or ten.

Well, anyways, that’s all I got. The celebrated cannabis kerfuffle in my little ‘ol California county is about to be decided by us voters … for now.

It’s been a big, bruisin’ battle. Here’s hopin’ it won’t turn into an all-out weed war.