![]() So - their flyway can sweep this far west, and they rest at Lake Merritt or Lake Anza or Temescal. I love looking out at Oakland and seeing a crane extend itself over the city. Once, on Ostrander, I stood amazed at the center of a storm of birds - hundreds of robins, jays, and chickadees - flying touch-and-go, on and off treetops and roofs and grass, circling and crisscrossing singly and in schools, and never bumping into one another - better than the Blue Angels. They walked ahead just so far, as if leading me, or as if I were giving chase, then took off running into the bushes, and flying up into the lower branches of the oaks and pines. On my walks to and from the Village Market, families of quail would surprise me. No." Ostrander is - was? - a one-way road through a small woods on a hill. Parallel streets - big Broadway Terrace for cars, little Broadway Terrace for walking - eucalyptus and pine trees and apple trees between them - a tree-high, two-street-thick wall of flame. In the middle of my U-turn, the radio said that Broadway and/or Broadway Terrace was on fire, and that there was looting on Ostrander Street. Ashes from a forest fire were falling and blowing in downtown Oakland. Leaves of burned black paper wafted high and low among the buildings. It was the middle of the afternoon, about two o'clock. When I got off the freeway, I was somewhere in downtown Oakland, and driving too slowly through complicated traffic. "This card is to be carried on your person at all times." He carried it safely for over fifty years. If only I had driven faster, I might have saved the book, and my mother's jewelry, and my father's watch, and his spectacles, which fit my eyes, and his draft card, which I had taken from his wallet. ![]() They are setting up the roadblocks moments ahead of me, I thought. I drove fast to the next exit, which was blocked by a Highway Patrol car and flares. helicopters and available cropdusters chemical-drop the Claremont Hotel." "If the Claremont Hotel goes, explodes, the fire will burn to the Bay." "No cars have been trapped in the Caldecott Tunnel." Once, a propane truck had exploded inside the tunnel - a giant flamethrower pointed at Oakland.Ī police car was parked sideways across my exit, Broadway Terrace. " I would have to look up "foehn," which sounds like "wind" in Chinese, as in "typhoon." "The fire has jumped the junction of Highway Twenty-four and Highway Thirteen." It's blown over and through ten lanes. "Forty-five houses have gone up in flames." "About a hundred homes." "A hundred and fifty structures have burned." The numbers would keep going up - nine hundred degrees, the temperature of molten lava twenty-one hundred degrees, the temperature of kilns thirty-five hundred houses. Here the winds and all seemed normal I had no evidence that hurricanes of fire were storming on the other side of these hills but for the radio. Some windmills turned, and some were still. In a half-hour, halfway there, forty miles to go, I was speeding over the Altamont Pass (where there be ghosts and accidents it is the ground upon which the stabbing happened at the Rolling Stones concert, after Woodstock), and through the windfarms. Cindy, who is not Chinese but Arkie, ran out of gas at Tracy. Like all the Chinese members of our family, I have an instinct that left is right and vice versa. My family believed that I didn't know about the fire, and would drive into it, and not be able to find my way out on the altered, burning streets. Impossible that it cross ten lanes of freeway and take over settled, established, built city.īehind me, my sister-in-law Cindy was chasing me at ninety miles per hour. I have seen it at night - red gashes zigzagging the black. I pictured wildfire far up in the hills - ridgelines of flame spilling down, then running up sere-grass slopes. North of the Caldecott Tunnel, south of the Caldecott Tunnel, east, west of the Warren Freeway. The perimeters of the fire were different from station to station, from taped news to live news. It's not my poor sense of direction, I told myself, but the newscasters in confusion. I turned on public radio for the intelligent voices, and heard that the hills were burning, toward Moraga, toward Walnut Creek. Never before had I driven by myself away from Stockton and my parents' house. He's gone less than a month we were having the full-month ceremony early, Sunday day off. I was driving home from funeral ceremonies for my father. ![]() I almost reached my manuscript, typescript, printouts, and disks in time. A firestorm blew over the Oakland-Berkeley hills in October of 1991, and took my house, things, neighborhood, and other neighborhoods, and forests. If a woman is going to write a Book of Peace, it is given her to know devastation.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |