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Date: 8/17/2021
Last week, my brother called me. “Did you hear about Greenville?” he asked. I said no. He then explained the town was gone due to the Dixie wildfire in California.
The news hit me unexpected hard.
Greenville was a very small town nestled in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of northern California. It was a mining and lumber community. It was also a gold rush town and a place where people reported seeing Big Foot.
My grandparents lived there and are buried there. My mom went to the high school there and in the mid 1960s my mom, brother and I lived there as well with our grandmother.
I had very pleasant memories of it. I finished out my fifth grade there. Many of the buildings there dated back to the 1800s. Behind my grandmother’s house was thick old forests divided by logging roads. Deer used to come down to her back yard looking for food.
To reach Greenville from the south you drove up a winding state highway built on the edge of the canyon created by the Feather River, a river that figured into the California gold rush. I used to get carsick regularly as we made the journey to Oroville, a town where my grandmother’s brothers lived. My Uncle Ad taught me to suck on a lemon as we weaved on the road’s curves and it worked.
The hardware stores there still sold gold pans in the 1960s and as kid I tried my hand at panning for gold. It’s more difficult than it looks. I still have my pan, by the way.
It was a sleepy little town and the biggest thing that happened to it in years was Clint Eastwood filming part of his 1989 film “Pink Cadillac” there.
Now, Greenville is rubble and memories.
The wildfire took most of the town, which had about 1,000 residents. I’m assuming that one of the few areas to survive was the cemetery where my grandfather and grandmother are buried.
The news of this event truly shook me as it brought the issue of climate change to a truly personal spot. It’s not just part of the news. It’s not just academic or the subject of arguments on talk radio.
The West Coast is undergoing a “mega-drought,” as it has been described, and the wildfires have grown in frequency and intensity over the past few years. Needless to say I’m worried.
I’m worried about not just the water for the west coast in the form of rain and snow, I’m worried about our food supply. Southern California and other areas of the west and northwest is a huge supplier of food for the nation. If the drought continues it will affect food production.
A recent article in the National Geographic looked at the Maine lobster industry and reported the warning waters in the Gulf of Maine are worrying people because of its effects on lobster production.
Could you imagine what would happen if lobsters become endangered in terms of jobs and the regional economy? Now think of all of the fruits, nuts and vegetables produced in California and shipped not just around the country, but the world. The impact is almost beyond understanding.
Now I know some of you will be getting ready to send me a letter telling how wrong I am: “There is no such thing as human-affected climate change and what we are experiencing something that is natural.”
I’ve heard that mantra many times. I get it. Some of us don’t want to change our habits. We don’t want to alter our lives. We don’t want to reconsider some of our choices.
That’s human nature.
I would like to think this season of fires and this on-going historic drought would change some minds and cause some changes. We’ll see.
In the meantime, my thoughts go out to all of those in that small town who lost so much.