Back home from two weeks in fire-scorched California. How glad I am to live in England’s moderate, rarely dramatic, climate. The Mediterranean climate has its points for holidays, but who wants endless sunshine, endless yearning for rain? Certainly not me. Why do so many sports originate – or certainly flourish – in Britain? Because there are relatively few days in the year when it’s not a pleasure to be outdoors
The wine-country hills north of San Francisco last month were a terrible sight. Normally its rolling grassland, scattered with spreading trees, has the air of a park done in Van Gogh colours: tawny-gold grass; dark silhouettes of widely-spaced oaks. This year the grass, tall after good spring rains, was tinder. A windblown spark could start a new fire hundreds of yards away. Wildfires race from field to field, then from hill to hill, almost as rapidly as your eye could follow – and there are dwellings everywhere in this golden country. Your life could depend on whether you parked your car facing the way out to the road.,
The climate of coastal California depends on winds from the benign Pacific alongside. Its cold water, icy currents from Alaska, sends walls of fog, ranging from gauze to blanket, daily creeping inland. Coastal hills block them; such gaps in the hills as the Golden Gate give them access. The fertility of the Golden State; and certainly the quality of its wine, depends on them. But drought is its default condition, and fire a constant hazard.
It spares no one. Meadowood is a country club at the upper end of the Napa Valley. Of its social structure, too. Its scores of bedrooms are scattered in ‘lodges’ among the trees. The fires burnt three quarters of them, and the main building, to the ground. Undaunted, what was left was in full swing only a few months later.
It is a two-hour drive west from Napa to the ocean, through placid pasture, redwood ranch-houses and herds of cows – even the occasional cowboy – to Bodega Bay, where long Pacific rollers crash on the rocky coast. A hundred and fifty years ago all this land was forest, to be felled in the 20th century to build the houses of the Bay Area. It’s hard to imagine the process of felling and transporting trees 300 feet high – with axes. A few token remnants of this vast woodland are preserved: Armstrong Woods is one: its 1,800 acres of sequoias still maintain their fragrant forest humidity, thanks to the Pacific fogs, but even here the colossal trees are scarred by fire.
