Thursday, September 10 Deaths 497 (+3) Cases 28,654 (+183)
After three windy days, today has been mostly dead calm. So of course it’s still smoky. Our air quality was rated as Unhealthy this morning but then deteriorated to Very Unhealthy. M finished off his outdoor painting chores while it was still relatively good. Otherwise we’ve stayed inside. But E and her Lemon Merengue Pie buddies are planning a brief meeting in the late afternoon despite the difficult conditions. H is hosting, A is the instigator, and E plays the role of perpetual guest.
Friday, September 11 Deaths 499 (+2) Cases 28,865 (+211)
Another smokey, windless day. We are back in the Very Unhealthy range, with occasional spikes into the Hazardous zone. No more orange glow or red sun poking through, just dirty gray smoke as far as you can see, which isn’t all that far. We’re so fortunate that there are no fires in the forests nearby. The closest fire to us is about 35 miles away. Much of the area between here and there is agricultural land, which does not offer much for a wildfire to chew on. That’s good since we hear that one fire last week travelled through 50 miles of forest in just a matter of hours.
We looked at an aerial video of the Talent to Phoenix corridor a hundred miles south of us. Sad to see whole neighborhoods gone. Amazing to find several places where you can see a row of houses all intact while across the street there is another row reduced to nothing but foundations.
The video showed both built up towns and semi-rural areas. It made us think of our old house in the forest. When we lived there, we used to fret about what fire officials called defensible space, a wide area free of trees and brush on all sides of a house. Looking at the aerial footage of this fire, we could see that space was only one factor. Some houses that were closely surrounded by trees and brush mysteriously survived. And though many buffered homes survived, some others were consumed. Nothing about nature is simple. Reported deaths from the Oregon fires are few at this point, but everyone is saying that it’s too soon to tell.
Saturday, September 12 Deaths 505 (+6) Cases 29,158 (+291)
It’s the 170th day of Pandemic Diary record keeping, which began in earnest way back at the end of March. The overall fatality rate in Oregon is up to 11.74 per 100,000. In the last ten days the average daily death toll was 3.7. That’s down from the previous 5.1. The current test positive rate remains less than 5%. Here’s the new chart.
Air quality today is in the Hazardous zone. It’s frustrating to be trapped inside by both pandemic and bad air. Also frustrating are the weather forecasts. In the middle of last week the prediction was that conditions would change by Friday afternoon. Didn’t happen. The next prediction was that conditions would change by Sunday. Nope. Now the prediction is for conditions to change by Tuesday. Harumph. Also, our house is looking shabby as hitherto invisible cobwebs are now covered with very visible black debris.
So it’s best to just stay in and watch Cable Girls. Unencumbered by pandemics, bad air or shabby looking houses, these four young women are really busy. Marga, for example, has had to deal with her husband’s twin brother coming to live with them. Pablo, her husband, is sweet and caring and she loves him dearly. Julio, the brother, is charming and lazily amoral. What could go wrong? Well, for one thing, she could accidentally have sex with Julio thinking he was Pablo. When she realizes it, she is horrified, especially as it was the best sex of her relatively inexperienced life. She feels terrible. Meanwhile she has been promoted out of the switchboard rooms to become a secretarial assistant for Carlos, who has just returned to the company as its new CEO. Carlos is the scion of the family who first owned the telephone company. In one of last season’s episodes he argued violently with his father, causing him to have a heart attack and die, thus leaving Carlos to manage the company under the watchful eye of his mother Doña Carmen. But just when he was getting used to that, he was aghast to find out that his mother was a repulsive manipulative monster who was trying to crush all his dreams and especially to separate him from Alba, the woman he loved, who is also one of the four cable girls and thus a good friend of Marga’s. So Carlos broke with his mother and left the telephone company to start a radio station. A new character appeared, Sr. Uribe, and he took over as telephone company CEO, eventually marrying Carlos’ sister Elisa to solidify his position. But Mr. Uribe was not sufficiently docile, so Doña Carmen had him killed and orchestrated a preposterous series of events that convinced Carlos to come back and be company manager again, catching him in a vulnerable moment because he had just broken up with Alba because he thought she was insane to keep on insisting that their baby daughter had not really died in the fire at the church but instead was being sequestered in a convent somewhere by Doña Carmen, which was of course true, but who would believe such a crazy story?
So while Marga has been having sex problems and Alba has been going crazy trying to get her baby back, what’s been going on with Ángeles and Carlotta, the other two members of the formidable foursome of cable girls? When we last checked in on Ángeles she had just rid herself of abusive husband Mario by means of an accident involving Sr. Uribe’s baseball bat, at which point she and her three friends had to figure out what to do with the body and so on. They did their best, but because of bad luck and the work of a determined–and handsome–police detective, it seemed like their efforts were futile and Ángeles was doomed to go down. But sparks were flying between Ángeles and Detective Cristóbal Cuevas and before he could really figure it all out there they were in bed together and he was smitten. But not so smitten that he did not follow up some leads that led him to finally decide that Alba was the murderer. (We said he was determined; we did not say he was bright.) So then Ángeles had to confess the truth to Cristóbal so as to save her friend. The good detective was anguished. Finally he gave her two hours to get out of town never to return. “If I ever see you again,” he told her, “I will arrest you for murder.” Off she went and stayed away for a while, but eventually she just had to come back to attend Alba’s wedding to Carlos. She came in disguise, but she was injured in the fire at the church and woke up in the hospital stripped of her disguise, and there was that handsome policeman again telling her she was under arrest. But then Cristòbal got all smitten again–or at least pretended to be–and told her that he would spare her from prison if she would agree to work undercover to help him trap a notorious underworld figure named Guzmán, offering to see to it that some schmuck already in prison would confess to having offed Mario. Ángeles was forced to agree.
And Carlota? She was a rich girl who was doing the telephone operator gig because wanted to be independent of her military father. But he didn’t go for it and dragged her home and locked her in her room for a month or two. But then she found out–via her friends who listened in to her father’s phone calls–that he was in a conspiracy to overthrow the king. In return for her silence, he had to let her go back to work, where she rapidly got involved in 1929 style feminism as well as an ongoing ménage à trois with another operator (female) and one of the company engineers (male). Her father had a change of heart, apologized for trying to suppress her natural rights, and conveniently died, leaving her very well off. Using the code name Athena, she became a well known radio personality at Carlos’s station and managed to attract so much positive attention to her cause that she was attacked and almost raped by the leadership team of a radical conservative group. Her anarchist friend Lucia convinced her to spend some of her money to hire some leftist thugs to apply some lead pipe to the guys who attacked her. This led to one of the men ending up in a coma on the edge of death, which made Carlota feel really bad at which point she tried to break off with Lucia. She also had to worry about her lover Miguel, one third of the ménage, who has slipped back into his old cocaine habit and been fired from the phone company.
Not to worry though, because at the end of Season Three everything works out. Unfortunately we cannot go into the details of how it worked out because of our editorial policy which requires us to maintain high standards of plausibility and strict historical accuracy at all times. Suffice it to say that Alba reunites with Carlos and finds her baby, Miguel gets a job in Alba’s old boyfriend’s nightclub, evil Doña Carmen gets arrested, Ángeles survives death threats from Guzmán and breaks up with the detective (who says he really loves her and in fact she likes him too, but she knows she can’t trust him), Carlota thwarts the worst of Lucia’s plans and feels a little better about herself, and Marga confesses to Pablo that she slept with his brother by mistake and sets about trying to make it up to him. Next up, Season Four.
Sunday, September 13 Deaths 511 (+5) Cases 29,337 (+181)
Another day of thick smoke and no wind. Reported air quality is still in the Hazardous zone, but hey it’s at the bottom of the Hazardous zone, which is better than the top and even more better than that time when it went past Hazardous and climbed right off the scale, well into the dreaded Zone With No Name. Okay in the house though. And in fact, at this moment, (4:00 P.M. Sunday) visibility is better that it’s been for days.
Our new neighbor across the street was out in the worst of it this morning, unmasked, using a leaf blower to clear ash from his driveway. This is, we believe, the worst possible method for cleaning up ash. (Do you have a problem with ash falling on your property? Just blow it back up into the air. You’ll be fine.) And why do it now, when the event is so clearly not over? Though he is blowing only a little of his ash our way, E is not pleased. If she wasn’t such a basically nice person, she’d shoot him.
Finally, here’s another way to think of ashes, a poem circulated by the Willamette Valley Friends of Wildlife…
Do not forget that the ashes falling from the sky are all that remains of the pine and grass and thistle and bear and coyote and deer and mouse that could not escape. Gather some up in a sacred manner. Take it to your altar. Offer prayers for these beings. Honor their death. Pray for life. Call in rain. Remind Fire that it is full, has gobbled enough, and can rest. May all beings be safe. May all beings be loved. May all beings be remembered. May all beings be mourned.
Copyright Sadee Whip 2020