It was the best of weeks. Mornings were cool, low 60s, and no humidity. There was a strange hint of Fall, in mid-August, in the south. So my handy husband Bob decided it was time to paint our six month old fence. A cedar fence can be allowed to grey gracefully over the years; OR you could preserve its beauty by painting it a color (like the black fences that dot Virginia) OR if one prefers, staining it with a natural wood pigment. And so the hunt began.
After much searching and trips to Home Depot, Lowes, and our local Sherwin Williams (SW) store, we picked a stain in its natural cedar color – an oil-based, transparent brownish/red. Bob power washed the fence in preparation and made a deal with a college neighbor to help. We bought 10 gallons of stain, pads, rollers, and all the accoutrements. On Thursday morning we drove to SW to pick up the stain, only to learn from a helpful young salesman named Hunter that a 40% off sale was starting the very next day! Believe me when I say I pleaded with him to sell it to us then and there at the reduced price, but Hunter said, “No can do.”
Meanwhile, in Maui, the death toll was rising from a horrific wildfire. I watched online interviews with people who escaped the inferno by jumping into the ocean and dodging embers for hours. I couldn’t turn away from the drone video of a charred, barren landscape; the historic town of Lahaina looked like the end of the world. In my lifetime, I’ve experienced a flood in NJ, an earthquake in VA, and right before the Covid lockdown, a tornado in TN.
But I’ve never experienced a fire, wild or otherwise. I thought of Hawaii as a uniquely American paradise. I loved climbing over black lava and watching the volcano on the Big island. I loved its people, its food, its culture. I felt a kind of existential, primitive grief for our Mother Earth that triggered my limbic system. Is climate change accelerating – was safety just an illusion – what state/country would be next?
And sure enough, in the middle of staining our fence, a once in a century hurricane was headed for Southern California.
The Grands came over to help Pop Bob for a bit, I frog-taped the iron hardware and ran back to SW since we needed double the amount of stain for our 2,700 sq ft backyard. Ingeniously I picked up a dozen donuts on the way back. Waiting, wondering if the torrential rain heading toward LA – toward my son and his wife, their dog and two cats, living in a beautifully renovated home, on the precipice of a hill overlooking a canyon in LA – might precipitate a mudslide.
Bob and I met our rollers dripping with stain in the middle of the fence on the east side of the yard Sunday morning. A job that was supposed to take a day, took three. But the fence is finished, the fence that can only protect us from prying eyes and not natural disasters. Our Mark Twain weekend ended with an undertone of terror. Did you know there is a name for the kind of wind that can boost heatwaves and spark wildfires? The wind is called FOHN.
It’s a word that, in German, also means “hairdryer”. And that’s just what it’s like. A hot, dry wind that sweeps down a mountainside, baking everything in its path. It is powerful enough to raise air temperatures by many degrees. This is the strange, and sometimes dangerous, weather event known as Föhn. This year, it has cropped up many times, including during heatwaves where it has pushed temperatures up to unbearable levels in local, literal, hotspots.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230817-the-weird-wind-that-can-supercharge-heatwaves-and-wildfire
This week we will see record high temperatures in Nashville, and the humidity is returning. No rain, all sun for our fence to dry. I will return to my meditative daily pool workouts, and I will listen to our Governor try and change a gun culture by focusing on everything but guns. Can we save our schoolchildren with bullet-poof backpacks? Will this be the best of weeks?
MountainMornings 