Smokey The Bear Says….

I love living in San Diego County.  I love the ocean and the mountains and the desert and all the cities in between.  When I lived in Iowa for 12 years I loved the Midwest, but I sure missed the land I had grown up in at the same time. 

San Diego is beautiful.  In one day you can spend an hour or two at the beach; drive an hour to the tall peaks of the Laguna Mountains (6000 ft tall) and visit a quaint old town that started as a goldmine town, called Julian, for another couple of hours; drive down onto the desert floor and race your dirt bikes for the rest of the afternoon; and still go back to your home in the evening and fall asleep on your own bed.

San Diego County isn’t known for getting a lot of rain.  And for the past 10 years or so, we have been in a drought.  Right now we are on water rationing.  With all the dryness, field fires are common. 

I live next door to my parents, and I actually live in the house my family lived in when I was four.  We moved next door when I was 5.  When I was a little girl, we were surrounded by empty fields.  Every summer we had small fires in the field, we think the twins down the street always set them off.  Amazingly, once they grew up, the fires quit. 

When I was 10, there was a huge fire in the Laguna mountains caused by a power line that fell.  That was on September 26, 1970.  The fire raged until October 4.  It burned 175,425 acres.  I remember the skies covered with smoke and standing in the backyard eating watermelon and trying to keep the ashes swept off it before my next bite.  We could see the fire from our house as it climbed over the peaks of the hills east of us.  After the fire, my Dad packed the family up in the station wagon and I will never forget the charred ruins of the forests and where homes once stood there were only stone fireplaces. 

The thing about forest fires is that they have been happening for as long as God made the earth.  A fire actually cleans out all the dead, built up growth and as soon as the next spring arrives, new green growth starts the life of the forest all over again.  Prairie fires on the Great Plains were the same way.  

In October 2003, I woke up on a Sunday morning and noticed the telltale sign of a fire --- the sunlight appearing very orange as it streams through the windows and lands on the floor.  I went outside and the air was eerie.  I could only hear muffled sounds, there was a smoke cloud slowly moving across the sky and the air smelled of fire.  Two days later the air was so thick with smoke it was like fog.  You couldn’t see the houses across the street.  People had to wear surgical masks because the ash was so thick.  This ash and smoke/fog lasted for 3 full weeks. 

I remember heading up to my daughter’s in Vista for Thanksgiving 3 weeks after the fire started and seeing the devastation from the burn in some open fields on our way north.  Amazingly, once we got past the valley I live in, the cloud of smoke disappeared and was replaced with beautiful sunny skies.

This picture is of the valley where I live during the 2003 fires.  I would stand out in my front yard and see the flames at night and pray the fire did not sweep into the city.  After the fires, we had an infestation of mice and other varmints who had run ahead of the fires into the populated areas.  Many mountain lions moved into neighborhoods at the foothills of the mountains.  We still have a family of coyotes that live in the ditch near our house.

What turned my thoughts to the fires of past today was on Sunday Jerry and I took a leisurely drive through the area where his family lived when he was in 5th grade called Eucalyptus Hills.  It is a really pretty area about a 10 minute drive from where we live now.  Lots of horses and country scenery. 

They had a fire today, thankfully it was contained right away and limited to a half acre or so. 

This picture looks towards the valley where we live.

So, as the last days of summer roll past, remember what Smokey the Bear says… “Only YOU can prevent forest fires”!!.  (By the way, Smokey was born 65 years ago, August 1944, as a public relation mascot for the United States Forest Service).