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Friends, let me tell you about San Francisco.
There were three things that I, as a Midwestern transplant, had trouble adjusting to when I moved to San Francisco.
One was the lack of any basements, anywhere – it was over a year before I convinced my hindbrain not to freak out when there were no basements to be found, ready and waiting to be hidden in, in the event of a tornado. (There are no tornadoes here. The need is not, shall we say, acute.)
Another was how drastically different San Francisco's neighborhoods are, how sharply delineated, and how small and stuck-together. This is a place where walking two blocks will frequently make you think you've stepped through some kind of warp in spacetime and ended up in an alternate version of your city.
And the third was that, compared to the midwest's dramatic 120°F yearly temperature variations, San Francisco does not appear to have seasons, or weather.
The temperature in this city varies a little by neighborhood microclimate, but for the most part, it's in the 60s (all temps in Fahrenheit), and sunny or vaguely cloudy. In winter, its most dramatic dips tend to be into the high 40s, overcast and rainy – though what's considered a storming deluge here would be a steady, moderately heavy rain by Lincoln, NE or Iowa City, IA standards. In the summer, temperatures may hang out in the mid-70s for days at a stretch. When it reaches 80, the city starts sending out alerts about knowing the signs of heat stroke and checking on your elderly neighbors. Thunderstorms are, if not totally unknown, an every-few-years kind of thing. I think there have been two or three since I first moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago.
Now let me tell you about this week.
Over the weekend, we had a heat wave. Temperatures started off in the 80s and climbed into the 90s. At one point I looked at my phone, and it reported the weather in SF to be 98°F. This lasted through Monday, about; yesterday was a still-distressing-for-SF high 70s, but notably cooler.
Yesterday we also got enough ash from the wildfires that the sun rose neon-red.
I tried to get so pictures of it, but my phone refused to capture the color. It was deeply disturbing: a baleful red orb in a yellowy-green sky. (I keep trying to look at the sky and dissociate it from the pea-soup green of tornado weather. I'm having limited success.) I was at work when I noticed it – I tend to walk to work when it's still dark out – and I stared at it for a good 30 seconds before I realized that I was looking directly at the sun and I should probably not. But there was enough ash between me and the sun that it took me that long to notice and correct.
We didn't have a blood-red sun today, which was good.
Instead, we got the ninth plague: darkness.
For most of the morning, it looked like the sun had simply failed to rise. By midmorning there was a dim orange haze to the sky; we were stuck in twilight all morning. By 3:00, when I walked home, there was a bit more ambient light, but it was all a sluggish yellow color; all the cars on the street still had to use their headlights.
My phone camera is once again useless at capturing the actual sense of the day, but to picture it, imagine taking a photo of a nice, normal day. Swap out the sky with a blank grey. Then apply a sepia filter. Fade that filter to somewhere between 50% and 70% opacity, and that's reality, right now.
Blue wavelengths of light are a thing of the past. (Hopefully also the future, but it's 2020 and I'm not counting on anything.)
Apparently – what I've heard – is that we're under the marine layer at present, which is why the air yesterday and today hasn't smelled like smoke despite the apocalyptic appearances of the outside world. (This is at least a change from late last month, where it smelled like a campfire every day, and I got a second air purifier for my apartment so I could have one in each of the major rooms.) Though even with our protective barrier of air, little flecks of ash keep drifting down, blowing in through open windows and collecting on cars, sidewalks, the tent villages, and people.
Who wants to bet on what's going to happen tomorrow?
There were three things that I, as a Midwestern transplant, had trouble adjusting to when I moved to San Francisco.
One was the lack of any basements, anywhere – it was over a year before I convinced my hindbrain not to freak out when there were no basements to be found, ready and waiting to be hidden in, in the event of a tornado. (There are no tornadoes here. The need is not, shall we say, acute.)
Another was how drastically different San Francisco's neighborhoods are, how sharply delineated, and how small and stuck-together. This is a place where walking two blocks will frequently make you think you've stepped through some kind of warp in spacetime and ended up in an alternate version of your city.
And the third was that, compared to the midwest's dramatic 120°F yearly temperature variations, San Francisco does not appear to have seasons, or weather.
The temperature in this city varies a little by neighborhood microclimate, but for the most part, it's in the 60s (all temps in Fahrenheit), and sunny or vaguely cloudy. In winter, its most dramatic dips tend to be into the high 40s, overcast and rainy – though what's considered a storming deluge here would be a steady, moderately heavy rain by Lincoln, NE or Iowa City, IA standards. In the summer, temperatures may hang out in the mid-70s for days at a stretch. When it reaches 80, the city starts sending out alerts about knowing the signs of heat stroke and checking on your elderly neighbors. Thunderstorms are, if not totally unknown, an every-few-years kind of thing. I think there have been two or three since I first moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago.
Now let me tell you about this week.
Over the weekend, we had a heat wave. Temperatures started off in the 80s and climbed into the 90s. At one point I looked at my phone, and it reported the weather in SF to be 98°F. This lasted through Monday, about; yesterday was a still-distressing-for-SF high 70s, but notably cooler.
Yesterday we also got enough ash from the wildfires that the sun rose neon-red.
I tried to get so pictures of it, but my phone refused to capture the color. It was deeply disturbing: a baleful red orb in a yellowy-green sky. (I keep trying to look at the sky and dissociate it from the pea-soup green of tornado weather. I'm having limited success.) I was at work when I noticed it – I tend to walk to work when it's still dark out – and I stared at it for a good 30 seconds before I realized that I was looking directly at the sun and I should probably not. But there was enough ash between me and the sun that it took me that long to notice and correct.
We didn't have a blood-red sun today, which was good.
Instead, we got the ninth plague: darkness.
For most of the morning, it looked like the sun had simply failed to rise. By midmorning there was a dim orange haze to the sky; we were stuck in twilight all morning. By 3:00, when I walked home, there was a bit more ambient light, but it was all a sluggish yellow color; all the cars on the street still had to use their headlights.
My phone camera is once again useless at capturing the actual sense of the day, but to picture it, imagine taking a photo of a nice, normal day. Swap out the sky with a blank grey. Then apply a sepia filter. Fade that filter to somewhere between 50% and 70% opacity, and that's reality, right now.
Blue wavelengths of light are a thing of the past. (Hopefully also the future, but it's 2020 and I'm not counting on anything.)
Apparently – what I've heard – is that we're under the marine layer at present, which is why the air yesterday and today hasn't smelled like smoke despite the apocalyptic appearances of the outside world. (This is at least a change from late last month, where it smelled like a campfire every day, and I got a second air purifier for my apartment so I could have one in each of the major rooms.) Though even with our protective barrier of air, little flecks of ash keep drifting down, blowing in through open windows and collecting on cars, sidewalks, the tent villages, and people.
Who wants to bet on what's going to happen tomorrow?
