Margaret Elysia Garcia

[00:03:12] Host: We're in the Sierras, kind of foothills into the mountain region. Yeah?

[00:03:19] Garcia: So Plumas County is known for, it's a gorgeous, gorgeous county. It is at the end of the Sierra Nevada range, so the northernmost tip of the Sierra Nevada and the beginning of the Cascade range. It's an old gold rush county. There's a lot of closed mines. I think the closest one to me was the old Angle Mine. And yeah, that's kind of, it had a mining industry and then it had a timber industry. And of course, both of those industries are really not viable anymore. Plumas County was full of second and third growth trees, all the big giant trees long since taken out. One could argue very successfully that if we had old growth forests out there, it would have been able to deal with fire much better than the spindly little trees that are left and were replanted. So that's Plumas County in a nutshell.

I found myself up there because my mother and her partner, after they semi-retired from Monterey County area, had moved up there and my ex-husband and I were pregnant with our first child and I decided that I wanted to at least stay home half the time. And I knew that was not a viable option in San Francisco. No one can really be a stay-at-home parent in San Francisco. But at the time I moved to Pumas County, rents were still like $700 a month for a house on 10 acres and you could raise your kids out there and feel comfortable. So that's why I was out there for 20 years and it's a very small town feel.

[00:05:08] Host: When you moved there, it was affordable, but it was also that bucolic kind of beauty, I imagine, of being on that property and having deer come down and the birds and the flowers and the trees. That's a part of the draw.

[00:05:27] Garcia: Mountain lions, bears, bobcats, yeah, it was definitely a draw and my best friend lives in Redondo Beach and I recall the first time, her kids are my kids' ages, so they were six months apart, both of them. And I remember when they came up for a visit, her daughter very astutely said, “Mommy, the leaves change colors here.” And then she was like, just floored when they saw a squirrel. My best friend was like, yeah, well, we do live in Redondo Beach. So I mean, my kids really had that sort of childhood and when they started kindergarten and preschool, I sent them to a little hippie one-room schoolhouse for kindergarten through like fifth grade and they could do a bunch of things I couldn't do. I'm the daughter of a zoologist, biologist, but my kids can identify plants, they can start a fire, they can put out a fire, if they were alone overnight in the wilderness, they would not die. That is all because of the education they got living right by the great outdoors. One of the last places we rented, which didn't burn, that's the only place we rented in the area that didn't burn, was right next to a campground. And so like literally the first house outside the campground. So my kids had a lot of growing up, like immersed literally outside the door in nature. And I thought that was great.

[00:07:04] Host: When you moved, was wildfire or the potential of wildfire disaster, was that on your radar? Was that something that you were warned about?

[00:07:14] Garcia: It wasn't like it is now. We moved there in the early 2000s and fire is always a possibility in California. And our town of Greenville had been founded during the gold rush and it had burned down in like 1890 or something. It's always a possibility that that's going to happen. It's not like it is now. When I first moved to Plumas County, if it got 85 degrees in summer, that's the hottest it got. Never got above 85. 2021, which is the year of the Dixie Fire, it had been over 100 degrees for two months. And 20 years ago, that just wasn't heard of. So those kinds of changes are the big changes where before we're like, oh, a fire could happen, but fire's natural in the Sierras. And so while it's on our radar, it wasn't like we're not going to survive or our town's going to burn down. That wasn't how we were thinking. And certainly in the 20 years I lived there, I'd seen many a fire caused by many a thing. And our fires most frequently were pre-Camp Fire that took Paradise out, which was a PG&E based fire. The utility company, for those unaware, PG&E, there'd been things like, well, one I was witness to was Union Pacific Railroad going too fast through some of the turns and slamming on the brakes and the brakes sparking a fire. We've had plenty of tourists who there's signs that tell you to not drive your vehicle off road, but will off road and then dry grass and a truck are like a recipe for a fire. We've had that happen. A big one that would happen to us was the Pacific Coast Trail runs through Plumas County as it does most of the Sierra Nevada counties. And we'd have hikers not put out their campfire during wind. It's not like we don't, we all have that Smokey the Bear thing. It's not like we don't know that all these things could happen, but on this massive climate change scale, it was like a whole other experience and a whole other way of viewing the world. And now that's the only frame I have. I can't, I don't look at anything with any other frame than that.

[00:09:56] Host: The Camp Fire you mentioned that destroyed Paradise, I mean, that was kind of creeping up, for those that don't know, Paradise is kind of right outside of Plumas County. So that was creeping up towards you.

[00:10:10] Garcia: Well, the Camp Fire started in the exact same canyon as the Dixie Fire a mile down. It's one of those, I don't want to blame the PG&E employees because this is a very difficult canyon for anyone to walk into just because the grade is so steep and it's an incredibly hard place to try to fight a fire except from the air. For the campfire, the wind blew west and it blew west and it hit Paradise. And Paradise was one of those towns, there's like gorgeous tree canopied, like anytime I drive through Pasadena or- I'm from Whittier down here and we have all those rubber trees that meet and it's gorgeous. But now my mind thinks of fire when I sleep, I don't think of-

[00:11:00] Host: I live in Pasadena, by the way, and that's all I think about, yeah.

[00:11:07] Garcia: Yeah, I no longer have that like, I mean, it's the only argument, because I can't stand Irvine, but it's my only argument ever in favor of Irvine, like Tustin, where there is no tree but stick trees. I'm like, well, they won't catch on fire, but yeah. And so that same canyon, the fire that both times it was PG&E and their old, not maintained equipment that caught on fire, but for the campfire, the fire blew to the west and for the Dixie, the fire blew to the east.

[00:11:43] Host: Kind of walk us through what happened in that July of 2021 and what your experience was, you and your family and what you did in that traumatic moment of an entire town being wiped off the map.

[00:12:06] Garcia: Um, well, it's literally a slow burn. So, July 13th, when the fire started, we are very, very used to there being a fire somewhere, right? If you have a lightning storm, you're going to have a fire somewhere and we've got fire lookout equipment everywhere from the Forest Service.

[00:12:28] Host: And there was the Complex Fire the year before that was kind of around that area as well.

[00:12:34] Garcia: Yeah, so it is very common to have a fire. And I think unlike our experience down here in Southern California, like with the Eaton fire or the Palisades fire is that, you know, these canyons, while they're close to us, they're also far away at the same time. So you typically in the Sierras and the mountains, you can have a fire start and you still go about your business because it's close, but it's not that close. It's three mountain ranges, three canyons over whatever you can see it far away, but it's not immediately affecting you. And so that July, my daughter had gotten, she was in high school. She just finished her junior year and she was going off where a smart kids who want to be lawyers someday program in DC, but she was flying out of LA and her brother had just graduated as had his girlfriend and they were moving down to Southern California into the house that my husband and I just bought. We were waiting for my daughter to graduate before we all went down, but we were at least moving those two kids down. So none of us left as if we were evacuating, long story short. So none of us had, except for my daughter, she had her passport because she was traveling, but none of us had like important papers with us or like things you're supposed to.

[00:14:03] Host: Right, photo albums.

[00:14:05] Garcia: We had, they were moving. So we had, I have a Prius. Every time somebody went South, we took a load of stuff. And this time we took a bunch of summer clothes and I distinctly remember they had too much stuff for the car. And I had an office for 11 years in downtown Greenville, which was a block from Caitlin, my son's girlfriend's house, parent's house. And I said, you know, just stick your winter things in my office. We'll get them next trip. So they did. And then we headed down South and then a few days later we couldn't get back because the sheriff had announced evacuation and we were stuck in Southern California. We couldn't get back. My mother and my ex-husband were still in Plumas County, but they could leave. Once you're under evacuation, people can leave, but they can't come back. So we were stuck.

I was a reporter at the time. So I was the only one of us. I had a press pass. I was the only one of us who could come back into the county. But I set them up for school, set my daughter on her trip. And my husband has a conference he goes to every year in Vegas. And so we were in Vegas, and then we were going to head back up North and see what we could do. And that's when the Dixie Fire, it had already taken the neighborhoods of Indian Falls, which was like a little quaint little neighborhood, no real goods or services there, just like a little community of houses and a farm. It had burned that place down. And I had, since I was a reporter at a time, I just did like four different stories of things having to do with Indian Falls burning down, you know, the historic significance of things going away, the Maidu local Native American tribe, things that they had lost. And so my focus was on that, not Greenville. I wasn't thinking about Greenville burning.

I was following, because I was reporting from out of town, I was following our supervisor, our district supervisor on Facebook. And I distinctly remember looking at a post he made saying, pray for Greenville. I was like, why are we praying for, you know, and I'm doing all my due diligence trying to figure out things. And I can see the sheriff had, he had called back an evacuation because it looked like the wind was going in a different direction. So everyone, including my mother and my ex-husband had come back into Greenville. But less than 24 hours later, the wind conditions had changed. Everything had changed and people had to go back out again. And one of the reasons I think a lot of people lost things is they were evacuated for two weeks and came back. And so everyone kind of like was like, decompress. My mother did laundry. She, you know, did the dishes, all that stuff. Everyone let their cats and dogs out after they'd been in crates, you know. And then the evacuation came back on and people just left haphazardly. Like they just weren't focused anymore on what to bring, what not to bring. Caitlin's mom couldn't get the cats back. Like the cats were like, no, we've been in crates a long time. We're not coming back. So it was just mayhem.

And then in the afternoon, like four o'clock in the afternoon on the 5th, the town completely burned down. There was about four structures left. The town was built between the gold rush and really 1920. So anything, any building from 1920 back burned. There was a couple structures that went up in the late 90s, early 2000s that were made of, you know, more hardy material and stuff. And those didn't burn. Most notably, there's a gazebo in the middle of town that looks like a wood gazebo. But if you get closer, it's this laminate stuff that doesn't burn. That survived until where everything else around it burned.

The firefighters really, when they knew they were going to lose the town, they retreated to the schools, which are like in a row at the edge of town, as well as the market and defended those spaces, figuring if the town was going to build back, that would be the hardest stuff to come back. So they kept that pretty well. But the other part about Indian Valley burning, it's notably the most gorgeous valley up there in like a three-county area. It's just absolutely gorgeous because you have this flat valley floor, and then the mountains just shoot up to the sky. So it's not rolling hills. It's just this massive mountainside that looks gorgeous. And I always talk about like, it's like Julie Andrews, like singing in Sound of Music at the beginning, you're like, whoa, this is gorgeous. But because of that geography of being flat in the valley with those stark elevation, the fire, if you look at fire maps, literally surrounded the valley.

[00:19:31] Host: Oh, wow.

[00:19:32] Garcia: I always really want to tell people in Indian Valley, when we experienced the Dixie Fire, and the days afterwards, we had a lot of like, you know, armchair firefighters, people online talking about how they would have got the fire and saved the town. And there was no, we had intelligent, very experienced agencies working on the fire, managers, people working on stuff. This fire was overwhelming. It is the largest non-complex fire in California history. We had incredible winds that would have made the Santa Ana winds look like a walk in the park. We had flames going up nearly a mile high in that wind, that anything survived was a miracle. And we had almost a million acres burned between the five small counties, with the majority of it being Plumas County. So for any conspiracy theorists out there, of which there are many who listen to podcasts, no, you could not have saved this town. Saving the town would have been to have different practices 100 years ago leading up to this fire.

[00:20:52] Host: Absolutely, yeah.

[00:20:53] Garcia: Be not relying on fossil fuel. It would be the Forest Service in the 20s, having different practices, not killing off porcupines, all of these things added up to the fire. We do ourselves, we do science, we do firefighters, all a disservice when we think about things in terms of, I could do it better. No, you can't. And the moment we get into that space where we're more of like, we're all in this together, and we're going to solve this together, the better it's going to be for California. We need everyone on board, regardless of their political leanings to realize that we live in a state that always catches on fire, always did, always will. We do have finite resources, and we're up against crazy things that we've never seen before.

[00:21:52] Host: I'm really glad that you were able to kind of translate this traumatic experience into two books. Burn Scar and Red Flag Warning. I mean, it is, not everybody has a way to process this, and it is a trauma that you go through, even though you weren't there when it happened, you're still experiencing that trauma.

[00:22:19] Garcia: And my choice to still live there for, like I think I said, it was right before the beginning of my daughter's senior year, and we had already planned for her to go finish school where she grew up. And so, yeah, we had a good deal of aftermath experience of the fire because we were there completely for another year while she was in school. And that was no fun.

[00:22:47] Host: I'm sure, and for her and all the other students as well. Yeah. I want to talk about Red Flag Warning because there was so much that this book covered that we don't really talk a lot about when we're discussing these wildfires here in the West, or really everywhere at this point. But let's start by talking about how Red Flag Warning came about, how you and Dani came together to kind of curate these stories.

[00:23:21] Garcia: Yeah, so Dani and I knew each other from online writing groups that we had done before, and we have a mutual friend in common who had, I don't know, solicited essays from us before. Dani had done an anthology a few years back before that, where she had taken one of my essays for it, one called All of Meon PM Press. And every fire season, we would read the news together or something like that and just get pissed off at the stories that weren't being told. And, you know, she actually had experienced the Tubbs Fire. And she had been going through, she teaches at Santa Rosa College, and she's taught at Sonoma State. But she's kind of originally from my area. She's from Red Bluff, which is the town along the five on the way to Reading. And her housing kept getting worse. So we were like, where are the essays about how you survive one fire, but you lose your housing? So then you go on to find housing again, and it's half the square footage it was last time and twice the price, and then you lose that. And she was to a point, and this happened like earlier last year or this year, where she had taken all of her classes online, and she'd always wanted to go to Greece. And so she actually taught all of her online classes for Santa Rosa College from Greece, and traveling around Eastern Europe for three, four months was cheaper than trying to live in Northern California. It was literally cheaper for her to have a European vacation for four months than to live in Northern California. But these are the kind of stories we would like tell each other back and forth, right? About like, this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous. And I think one of my breaking points after the Dixie Fire happened because some LA Times reporters, we had a bunch of like national news come down and, you know, arrive and say a few words, characterize us in strange ways that didn't resonate with us and then leave. And that happened over and over again. We had like Caitlyn Jenner came, which she was running for governor and said some stupid things about how much she related to us. And we're like, yeah, I think we're in a different tax bracket. Like, I don't think we're talking about the same issues.

[00:26:02] Host: Well, and then there's a lot of trauma reporting at that time too, of like, let's show the disasters.

[00:26:09] Garcia: Right. And then people were like, Golden Rush Town and all this stuff that we didn't really, I mean, that's not how we were looking at ourselves. And then the Los Angeles Times sent two reporters who weren't from the area at all. They weren't even from LA either. They were originally from other places, other states. And they came to a town festival, right? We're in recovery. They come to our town festival and they could interview anybody there. I'm there. They could've interviewed anyone. They decide not to, you know, our town was like half Native American. They decide they're not going to interview anybody from the tribe. They're not going to interview any of the old hippies that they see with the organic food stands or anything. No, they're going to go straight to the two guys who are drunk and don't have teeth and are sitting on the porch of the bar with red MAGA hats. And that's who they're going to characterize as who lives here. And then when their stories came out, their stories were about like, should our tax dollars really be going to saving these towns? And I was pissed because I was like, you deliberately delivered a story that ignored 90% of who's here so you could write this story.

And, you know, I make jokes about Plumas County all the time. I taught there for many years. You know, we have a phrase we use called welfare Republicans. A lot of people up there who are on SNAP, who are on all sorts of social services, and they always vote Republican because they don't recognize the welfare they're on as welfare. They only recognize it as welfare if it's a person of color on it. Plumas County is like Native American and white and with a handful of people of other ethnicities. So this is our demographic. I was floored that we were going to be represented that way. So I kind of made it my personal mission, and Dani made it her personal mission to, you know, solicit stories from writers that were talking about who was really there and who's really doing stuff.

One of my things I love about Dani's is she was responsible for getting a lot of the essays around UndocuFund and looking at Napa and Sonoma County, not just as wine regions, but as regions where people actually live and work. And it's not just rich wine vineyard.

[00:28:53] Host: No matter how many times I tell someone I'm from Napa, almost 95% of the time they say, so you work with wine, or is your family in wine? No, majority of us were not. Right, right.

[00:29:06] Garcia: So she, I mean, she took it upon herself, like, we are definitely going to be pushing that in this book.

[00:29:14] Host: Your book touches on the concept of mutual aid. And a lot of times, I think for a lot of us, when we hear mutual aid with relationship to fire, we're thinking about the actual fighting of the fire. We think of the mutual aid of multiple different agencies coming together, or different counties from the state sending in support, or people from out of state coming into support, or different- Or out of country.

[00:29:42] Garcia: International, right, yeah.

[00:29:44] Host: We had the Mexican firefighters here for the Eaton fire and the Palisades fire. But what your book looks at is mutual aid of recovery, and mutual aid of relocation, and this concept of communities coming together, and also mutual aid of prevention through cultural burns and conscientious logging practices. And that's the element that I think does not get talked about enough when we're looking at the fire problem.

[00:30:23] Garcia: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was very intentional for us, both having experienced the beauty of mutual aid, because really, the only thing that gives you hope in humanity or anything afterwards is the coming together. And one of the writers in the book, Jane Braxton Little, she may have said it in her essay, but she says this all the time now, that she was ambivalent about Plumas County. They had moved there because of her husband and her husband's job. But that after the fire, even though she comes from a Quaker background and progressive environmentalist, she's an environmental journalist, even with all that background, the fire made her fiercely defend rural, conservative Plumas County. And in a way, that's happened to me as well. I am very much defensive of who we are up there and how we do things. And I think I tried to get that coming across in the book and the kind of essays we got.

I like to tell people that one of the most important reasons for mutual aid is that government is just not equipped yet, whether it be in their budget or understanding or imagination as to what climate change has done to fire. And we are, on a governmental, state and federal level, we are ill-equipped and we don't understand how to deal with the fire. So it becomes the people themselves who are living through these that have to make some crucial decisions during the fire, after the fire and rebuilding. And one lesson I learned, my first lesson I learned through fire, the most heartbreaking one, is I kept waiting for the Dixie Fire to have a federal state of emergency. Because the day after I'm like, our town burned down, where is our FEMA? Where's the process starting? Well, there's an equation for FEMA. Trees don't count, land does not count. You have to lose a bunch of million-dollar houses before FEMA kicks in. You are not an emergency if you are poor, you are an emergency once a dollar amount is reached for what your property was worth that it burned. And so during the Dixie Fire, the Caldor Fire started in Lake Tahoe. 48 hours later, they’re deemed a federal emergency because a few of their million-dollar homes burned. So we have tons more acreage burning, but all of our houses are worth $80,000 to $300,000. So we're not an emergency because FEMA is not by how many houses burned, but by the dollar amount for it.

And so to me, once I digested that information, you get it in your head, like, no one is coming to help us. We must help ourselves. There's nobody coming. Nobody gives a shit about us. We can wait, but we're going to wait for two weeks, or we could start helping each other now. And so I think I was a bit naive going in thinking we were going to get some help. And this fire is during Biden's administration, towards the beginning of it. And he never came. Kamala Harris never came.

Gavin Newsom came as soon as it was safe to land. He was there immediately to declare it a state emergency and then work on the feds to open it up. But it took the better part of two weeks to get that a distinguished thing of national emergency. And for any help to come in on the government level, you need that distinction before anything happens. And it could be the barest, stupidest things that you wouldn't think of, like little things, like we didn't realize that there was no food for all the people who were fighting the fires. They were given kid-sized brown paper lunch bags with an apple, a granola bar, and a bottle of water. Here, fight the largest fire in California history.

[00:35:07] Host: Go exert all of your caloric energy.

[00:35:13] Garcia: There was a couple of businesses that were still open because they were in trailers, they were like food trucks, right? And everyone in our county was putting money into one of our friends, Mary Shiro, we were putting, she ran this like German food truck and the market was still open for anybody who was left. And so everyone was just giving her money into her Venmo account so she could go buy food to feed whoever was left and to feed the firefighters. Like once the fire left Greenville and went to, you know, and burned it down, went to other things, her truck followed and people still gave her money and she kept feeding people until they ran out of food. You know, it's just like these sorts of stories that don't really get told, but like most of the people sending her, Venmo-ing her money, were all people who lived in the county when we couldn't get back, but we were trying to help out the people who were still there. There's all sorts of things that we did mutual aid wise, that it's just the government wasn't equipped to do it.

[00:36:20] Host: But that's the beauty of these stories is you're watching, you know, the community come alive in its time of need. And that's kind of a through line through each of these stories is that the best of people come out in the worst disasters. Why do you think it is that people have a hard time remaining in that place of compassion, of empathy, of selflessness, of giving when that disaster is gone? I watched it here. I mean, how many people were giving toys to the children that didn't have anything, you know, that lost all of their Christmas presents after the Eaton fire. But when that danger is gone, that the recovery is still needed, but kind of that empathy dissipates from the rest of us.

[00:37:15] Garcia: I mean, I would argue that those of us like in Plumas and, you know, in other places in Northern California, we still see it to this day, although it looks different. It's not quite the same. And I know that we've kind of in Indian Valley, where Greenville was, we've kind of developed a for better, for worse, a kind of us and them mentality. Like, you know, if you would have told me 20 years ago, that I would be defending the rights of my conservative neighbor who doesn't agree with me politically on anything, like my right to, you know, reproductive rights or my rights for anything, I would be like, there's no way. But for many of us from Indian Valley, we are for better, for worse, we're in it together for life. Those of us who stayed, and didn't flee. There was a lot of fleeing after the fire. There's a lot of people who were elderly, who's, you know, adult children were like, that's it, you're coming in, you live with me or, you know, so we lost a lot of population that way, where friends and relatives were like, you're too old to be there in this situation now. But for those of us who stayed, we're very much bonded still, and we're still doing things for each other. And now we do things like we fight the county or we fight Quincy, the neighboring town, you know, and, and stuff like that, you know, we're still bonded in that way. But I think there's two ways you could go either you become a fierce defender of the area, and you write books about it and that kind of thing. Or you try to forget what happened and move on because it's too overwhelming. And it's too tragic. And there's too much trauma for you to deal with on a daily basis. So you try to forget, either from moving, or from not helping anymore, or because the help helping is exhausting. It is just exhausting to be in that survivor mode all the time. And I completely understand when people are like, I need a break from this. I can't. I mean, activists have it all the time, right?

There's a thing activist burnout, where you just have to take a step back for a while. And Dani has always been a big activist in Northern California. And she's talked a number of times about activist burnout and having to, like, you know, take a step back for a while before she goes back to do something again. And that's totally a real thing. And I think people down here experience that too, in different ways. Because, because I think in Northern California, we are always aware of our surroundings, right? I mean, you could just take the word water, you know, and I write about this in in burn scars, like, in Northern California, you are very much aware all the time of where your water came from. And you can drive past the Feather River, and you're like, it is too low right now, it should be higher, but we didn't have enough snowpack. And so, you know, in Northern California, you think of those things, you think of drought, you think of snowpack, you think of all these things, all the time, and you think about, like, I can only take a five minute shower, you know, and then you feel guilty for taking that five minute shower when you should have just taken a three minute shower. And, you know, I feel like I can say this, I'm originally from Southern California, we have no clue down here of where our water comes from.

[00:40:42] Host: Right.

[00:40:43] Garcia: We, it is not in our mind to convert.

[00:40:46] Host: Because you can't see it, you see the ocean, and that's it.

[00:40:48] Garcia: You see the ocean, you turn on your faucet, stuff comes out of it, miracle, it's magic, and then you take a half hour shower, you know, and a Northern Californian in Southern California, seeing somebody take a half hour shower, you know, that's like littering, that's like, you know, you may as well have committed murder, you know, like, you were such a bad person for doing that. But the Southern Californian has no clue about why what they just did was that bad. We just don't have that mindset. There's not that many of us in the urban wilderness, like, you know, dividing line, they're not enough of us to really think about it all the time. So we, I really feel as Southern Californians, we need a better education, and it comes upon ourselves to better educate ourselves as to, you know, the flora, the fauna, the climate change, the disaster, and how all this can come in at any moment. We are very precarious here.

[00:41:50] Host: You know, I mean, you would think after the Palisades and the Eaton fire, and all of the fires, I mean, Orange County regularly has something happening. Like Santiago Canyon, I mean, there are constantly threats and reminders, but I want to finish with kind of going, looking at where you started and where you are now. And what was the most interesting thing that you learned? Or what was the greatest thing that you took away in putting this project together, this book together?

[00:42:27] Garcia: I think this project, on a very personal level, made, and I think I can speak for Danny on this one, made us feel less alone. Because a lot of what we talk about in the book is psychological, and it's a lot of the stuff you, the things you think about alone, and you think you're the only one feeling this, or you're wanting to check, you know, like, is this where we are now? Is this how we feel? And I felt like in speaking with the other writers, and the interviews Dani did, and the writers I solicited stuff from, it really made me feel like, as Californians, we were all in this together. And that there's strength in numbers. We may have had different experiences of fire, of smoke, of whatever. But there's a similar thing running through it all. And in it is that we need each other, right? We need each other to survive this. We are not going to survive fires as individuals. As individuals, it will, you know, bankrupt us financially. It will, you know, physically, we need to know all the things.

Like, one thing I don't write about in the book, but I have done interviews about before, is I went through, apparently, I now have fire trauma that I didn't know I had. Because for the first year after the fire, anytime I was tired or stressed out, I'd start smelling smoke, you know? I didn't know that was a trauma response. I thought I was going crazy. And I finally, I smelled fire when I was on a plane, and I was sitting by the wing, and I'm like, nothing's on fire. This is me. This is just me. But it took, like, talking to other writers in that book to realize, like, oh, no, this is a response. And, like, them pointing me in the direction of, like, know that you're, this is a PTSD thing, and, you know, you can seek out help for this. So I think that's the takeaway for me from the project, is that we're not in this alone. We have each other as resources. And as far as I'm concerned now, especially in living in Southern California, is I want to be a resource for my fellow Californians. I don't mind it at all when people email me asking me a question about fire. I'm happy to point people in the right direction of what they can do, who they can talk to. And I think it's incumbent upon all of us that have survived these things to show the path forward for other people.

There's a guy who survived the Paradise Fire. His thing now, I've been blanking on his name, but his thing now is he's retired. When he finds out that there's a town going through this, he goes, and he has some sort of fund set up, and he goes and buys gas carts. And then he goes to these towns or the, you know, the makeshift camps for evacuation, and he gives out, no questions asked, gas cards, like 50 bucks, so people can buy a tank of whatever to get out of the area or whatever they're going to do. And that is such a great example of mutual aid. You can imagine if you were doing that on a government level, the people would have to prove they lived there, and then they'd have to wait two weeks, and then they'd have to like fill out some other forms. And that's what a lot of private, you know, mutual aid can do, where someone can just say, you know, here, take this gas card, get the heck out of here, you know, go somewhere else, or whatever you need to do, or here's a hotel room, here's this, that instead of that governmental response, that's like, prove who you are for the next three weeks, and then we'll consider your application, and then we'll get back to you two weeks after that. So you've gone two months where you really needed help, and you never got it, you know, that the mutual aid response is immediate. And I've heard people say, like, well, how do you know, how would you know if the person legitimately needs whatever? Why do you care? It's just like, you know, nine times out of 10, they're going to need it. And if one person didn't need it, oh, well, you helped nine people who did. So cut your losses and don't be a jerk.

[00:47:05] Host: We'd like to thank Margaret Elysia Garcia and AK Press. If you'd like to continue the conversation, visit chapman.edu/wilkinson to learn more. To access recommended books from our guests for further learning, and for more socially conscious content, visit us at pastforward.org, or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.