![]() Sadly, I have plenty of time to contemplate these devastating changes. ![]() Like natural disasters everywhere, this fire has upended entire communities. The historic sheriff's office is just a series of naked half-round windows eerily showcasing devastation. The fire left our downtown with scorched, bent-over lampposts touching debris-strewn sidewalks. It reduced house after house to rubble, leaving only chimneys where children once had hung Christmas stockings, and dead century-old oaks where families, spanning four generations, had not so long ago built tree forts. It razed Greenville, my hometown since 1975. Today, I see only slopes studded with charred stumps and burnt trees jackstrawed across the land like so many giant pick-up-sticks.Äixie did far more than take out entire forests. They were so green then, pines, cedars, and graceful Douglas firs mixed with oaks pushing through the thick conifer foliage in a quest for light and life. Today, stuck at the bottom thanks to endless road work, I try to remember what these hillsides looked like before the Dixie fire torched them in a furious 104-day climate-change-charged rampage across nearly one million acres, an area larger than the state of Delaware. ![]() The anguish of living in a burn scar takes a toll. ![]() From the top of that grade, I've sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in California's Sierra Nevada range. Half a mile south of what's left of the old Gold Rush-era town of Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. ![]()
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