I've seen fires and I've seen tides

This morning, I've been on the phone with our friend Sue in California. She lives in the Sierra foothills — Gold Rush country — not to far from Sacramento. A major fire is burning about 20 miles from where she lives. It is 0% contained at this point. Everything now depends on which way the wind blows. I'm worried for her. She's lived in her house there since 1975. I first met her in 1975, in Paris. We met again when Walt and I moved to California in 1986, and the three of us have been good friends ever since.

 

Sue's last visit to France was in 2018, when she came and spend two weeks with us. In 2006, she came and spent three months with us, using our house as a base for train trips she took to Basque country and the Pyrenees in southwestern France. This morning, she said the worst problem for her right now is all the smoke in the air. She has a bag packed and is ready to go if the fire gets too close. She has a brother who lives a few hours south of where she lives, and she plans to go stay at his house if necessary.

This a photo of Sue that I took near Beaufort in October 2019. That was my last (meaning "latest") trip to North Carolina. Sue flew in from California and we spent a week together seeing the area. She had never been to N.C. before but had heard me talk about it for decades. The houses in the background are in Beaufort.

One of the things we did was take a "ferry" from the Morehead waterfront out to a place called Sand Dollar Island, which is really just a sand bar that is covered by water at high tide. The so-called ferry is a small boat with an outboard motor. It held about 15 passengers, I think. We went out at low tide and spent an hour or two looking for sand dollars in the shallow waters all around the shoal. It was about a three mile ride.

Here's what the "island" looks like. I took this photo looking across Beaufort Inlet toward Morehead and the N.C. Port Terminal complex (water tower, cranes) there. That square block on the horizon in the middle of the photo is a condominium complex on Radio Island, which I believe is a man-made pile of sand and which has been there as long as I can remember (I'm 73 years old and I was born in Morehead). Beaufort is toward the right, and the Atlantic Ocean is toward the left.