Maunderings on a smoky morning

The smoke from Northern California had not touched the area below Big Sur until the last day or two, when the air has become thick. Our air had been bad from the dust for several days, anyhow, from jack-hammers on the house. I feel no effects of the burning of marijuana farms--it's too far away. Anyhow, marijuana fumes are not as bad as cigarette fumes, as I found out at a San Francisco Bob Dylan concert a few years ago. You think what you would grab if you had time to grab anything and were not 100 years old with a 97 year old wife. A 64GB flash drive, I guess. As Depression Okies we had very little in the way of possessions, and I got in the habit of giving away whenever I moved anything that would not go in my 1952 tin suitcase, or the book satchel I hitchhiked with from Port Arthur to NYC. I gave away my 22 pistol one time, and my short wave radio another time. I got out of that habit, and now hundreds of people up north are stripped, whatever their habits. Who pays to level the rubble? And then what? I think a lot now about what keeps you going when you are young despite illnesses that often kill, TB for example. There really is a kind of blind life force that drives you on when you are young and you don't have any idea how pathetic your struggles look to normal people. How resilient can the older refugees be? I'm thinking a lot now about refugees or pioneers, all the European seekers on this continent, those who wore the Great Wagon Road, those who sold out in western NC and started into the mountains with Daniel Boone in 1773 but were turned back (one daughter on a horse in the river carrying a small brother), those who went down the Elk River in flatboats 400-strong then were burned out (and then burned out again) from what became NW Alabama, or the old half Choctaw woman who in the early 1840s, late, harnessed her ox in Yalabusha County, Mississippi, and set out for western Arkansas, and got there, and the Model Ts and Model As that criss-crossed the south and west in the 1920s and 1930s. A lot of us traveled light for a very long time, but we are out of the habit.