Nonfiction by Ryan McFadden (originally published in the Los Angeles Review)
August
The vacation rental was a few miles outside Healdsburg. The road to it—at first open, corrugated with grapevines—crested over a rise, and sank into a bowl overgrown with dead grass and bone-dry oaks. At the far end, a security gate opened to a quarter-mile private drive that wound steeply to the house itself, and the whole property backed onto unincorporated wilderness, just over the ridgeline. It was the fifth day of a record-setting heat wave, four months since the last drop of rain, five consecutive years of drought. Trump had the nuclear football, and the virus raged on.
We’d come here for a break, but I was too twitchy to relax. While by day I floated in a foam chair sipping a Pimm’s Cup, at night I lay awake watching my four-year-old sleepwalk to the bottom of the pool, meth heads bust in with knives, tidal-waves of fire loom over us. Fire, most of all. While I was physically living out some bougie asshole’s long weekend of privilege, inside I was spinning like a top.
Yes, 2020 had me tense; me and everybody else. But also, I have anxiety. I mean OG anxiety—the clinical kind. Obsessive-compulsive tendencies, a salting of cyclothymia, and a panic disorder (without agoraphobia). I’ve been counting bathroom tiles and tracing figure eights since I was six; I thought it kept the world safe. I was here long before you all gentrified the place with meditation apps.
Yet despite a lifetime with these mental dormmates—along with two decades of psychotherapy, and a strict daily regimen of supplements, meditation, exercise, and sleep hygiene—I’ve never been able to shut them up. At best I can train the hyperconscious eye back in on itself, breadcrumb a perceived threat back to its source. While I can’t stop the somatic effects of anxiety I can, with a little interior looking, at least tell when I’m making stuff up.
This was not one of those times.
In less than a week the fifth largest fire in state history would burn to within a mile of our wine-country hideaway. It would char 350,000 acres, destroy 1,500 hundred buildings, and kill five people. Ash from this fire—and dozens more—would combine to blot out the sun. And while the fires were fueled by the very warning signs I was looping on, their trigger was totally novel.