By Lloyd and Lesley Kahn

Saturday morning October 14th

We went to bed last Sunday night with no inkling of what was happening. About 3 AM, a fierce wind started blowing and we smelled smoke. At daybreak we learned that it came from fires some 60 miles away, mostly in neighboring Sonoma county. It’s been a grim week.

Everyone seems to know people or have relatives that have lost their homes. My brother was luckier than most with his farm in the Napa Valley: he lost a barn, tractor, Toyota Tacoma, and an accessory building, but his house was OK. He has 2,000 olive trees and they were not burned, but he’s not sure if they’ll be ruined by the smoke. It was his biggest crop ever.

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In 2003, after the Frankfurt Book Fair, I took a RyanAir cheapo flight from Frankfurt to Pescara on the Adriatic coast of Italy. From there I took a train south, then a ferry to Isole Tremiti, an archipelago of islands. I came back to the mainland and drove along the coast and spotted this shack, called a trabucco. Said to have been invented by the Phoenicians, trabucci allowed fishermen to cast nets without being tossed around in boats in rough weather. (Just ran across this in going through old photos.)

Fountain Grove, near Santa Rosa yesterday. We’re not in any danger (so far), but it makes me realize how vulnerable we are in this part of the world. 15 dead so far, Santa Rosa devastated. Winds down today but air still smoky here, 60 miles from nearest fire.

Photo: Ken Porter, The Press Democrat