I’m on fire.

 On August 16, at 10:05 pm I got a call from my mom. I awoke to her frantically telling me the police were evacuating my family and she asked if there were any photobooks I wanted her to grab. There was a wildfire burning about 500 feet from my parents’ back fence and my dad and sister had already left with the 2 family dogs. September 1st I got a call from my stepmom who live 3 miles from mom’s house that she was home alone while my dad was at work and asked which photo albums and paintings to grab from the house.

Thankfully both of my families were able to return home, but these close calls keep getting closer.

I grew up in Northern California and had the great pleasure of being able to explore the open spaces from a very young age. The only fires we saw were few and far between and usually we had regular controlled burns. I remember hot dry summers with the warmest days being this time of year around the beginning of school or a Labor Day camping trip to the coast. But not like this, never like this. Not unseasonably warm temperatures for a beach day in November. Not 8+ years of drought. Not go-bags and emergency rations in every car.

I remember as a kid thinking it was so silly to have “family fire drills” and to memorize so many peoples phone numbers: home, work, and cell. I remember having to put new clothes in my go bag each year and laughing about how I would pick the silliest colors for my emergency clothes. Now as an adult living in fire country, I feel the need to double down and make sure I know where my irreplaceable items are. In the same way a school lock down drill seems goofy and fun until there is an active shooter less than a mile from my school and my friends and I had to make barricades with desks and sit silent for hours.

I listened to a woman speak on the news about how she and her family lost 2 homes 3 years apart in 2 different states. Her advice was “grab your dirty laundry basket, it has the clothes you love and wear so if that is all you end up with, a least it’s stuff you love.”

I find myself plotting the best way out of my neighborhood, the safest way to the freeway, the side street ways in case the main street is too crowded. I have a mental list of the 1 minute, 5 minute, and 30 minute items to grab, depending on how much time I have to evacuate.

I know folks who are climate change refugees, their entire homes, their entire towns have been leveled by the blazes. And with little help from Federal or State sources; whatever help does come is usually after the fire is burning and can be a day late and a dollar short.

I was propelled into climate science by a love and appreciation for nature and an unwavering curiosity about my place in it all. From a young age in CA public schools, we learn that our state is home to almost every biome: evergreen forest, deciduous forest, desert, wetland, chapparal, you name it! I became obsessed with learning everything I could about the world around me.

By the time I got to college, we had a few drought years but the balance of wet and dry years, El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and there was talk of climate change affecting areas close to the ocean due

  

to sea level rise. As an oceanography student, climate change = sea level rise, and that became my focus.

By my Junior year of college, we missed days of school because the smoke from wildfires was so bad, it was unsafe to leave the house. We watched the Solar Eclipse through orange wildfire smoke while bit of ash rained down like snow.

Now as I sit sealed in my home, I can’t shake the feeling that climate change is personal, it is an assault on my body and wellbeing. And if this is affecting me, a white passing upper-middle-class woman with an education, then it sure as hell is distressing other folks around me.

My perspective has shifted from that of an oceanographer thinking about sea walls and saving glaciers to protect the human population from climate change. Now I see my work as a scientist to communicate the urgency of this crisis, my crisis. Climate change is here, it was on our doorstep and it seems the door was gladly opened.

I remember watching live footage of rescuers saving people from rooftops during Hurricane Katrina. My teacher had us start a fundraiser for Red Cross and she told us that by the time we were 30, we might start to see the effects of climate change in bigger deadlier storms. I’m 24. My family has evacuated their home twice due to wildfires and we spent months trapped inside while fires rages across the West. I watched year by year and kelp forests were decimated. I worked for 2 years as a climate scientist and was so disillusioned that my work, data, and effort was making literally no difference. I was measuring that change was happening while I could have been preventing further harm. I don’t have the patience to wait around and see what the next 6 years bring

I am an environmentalist at heart, but I am a storyteller in soul. I’m fucking scared and I’m fucking mad and I’m fucking gay. That’s why I study science.