Apocalyptic Picnic

Photographer unknown

Last night Hope Sandoval and The Warm Inventions played on a hillside winery in Sonoma, in a big barn. Some friends and I drove up to have a sort of night picnic. For a long time I have been a fan of her music, back when I only knew her as Mazzy Star. Her sound shimmers like a slow shaking tambourine, a trembling sitar, or a rasped maraca. With very little, she is able to summon a haunting, distinctly hazy intimacy that is both meditative and textured, existing somewhere between shoegaze, psychedelia and seance.

But halfway through her set, the wind became uncharacteristically stormy, and very dusty. A thick layer of it covered her microphone and glockenspiel, dulled the shine of the guitars. You could even see it in the length of light projected onto the stage. At one point, at the height of an especially powerful performance, as the drums crashed and guitars droned and she blew metal birdsongs out from a dusty harmonica, something unusual happened. I watched on, dumbfounded, witnessing that the harder she blew, and the more fiendishly the band played, the stronger and whiter the wind became, until it was impossible to separate the howling of the wind from the howling of her harmonica. And just as I thought my skeleton might explode under the weight of her song, the electricity cut out. The crowd sighed, then quickly cheered and clapped at the uniqueness of the situation. So heavy was the air with chalk that I wondered if it were really possible to be as dusty as it seemed. “See, San Francisco,” she said, this is what happens when you invite a witch to your town.” Soon the power was back on and they played a few more songs. The three soul singers were lovely, but it was the guitarist who stole the show with his soothing, psychedelic sound. Warm, round tones from his amplifier hung around us as our hearts turned to goopy honey. A demented grin spread across my face as my body seemed to spiral in a brilliant geometric whirl.

As the show ended, the wind grew far more ferocious. Trees began to creak and sway drunkenly around us. Big branches thrashed menacingly overhead. Garbage cans fell over and glass bottles rolled out. Napkins and papers streamed through the air as rocks and dirt kicked up from the ground stung at my eyes while we hurried down the path in the dark. Only a few yards ahead of us, people stood pointing and staring, taking photos of something in the distance. We approached and that's when I saw it. A rippling plume of dark smoke spilling itself terrifyingly across the horizon. And right above it, about to be extinguished by the colossal inky cloud, was an enormous red moon pressed against the stars like a lit cigar. Suddenly the gusts picked up speed and a group of nearby girls screamed as the smoke stole the moon from the sky. We reached the car and quickly took off away from the winery.

Idling at a stop sign, dead leaves swirled and cartwheeled madly over the car. How often do tornadoes touch down in Sonoma, I wondered. When I got back to San Francisco I began to notice, even there, chalky cones of light under the streetlights. From the sidewalks you could smell something was burning. I parked the dust-covered car and stepped out. Small bits of ash were falling down on me. On my phone I saw that a massive, 200-acre fire was burning across Napa and Sonoma. People were being evacuated. Walking, blinking my dry, sawdust eyes, I couldn't help but cough up dust and think of the ash raining down on me in the empty parking lot where I'd left the car. In the distance I heard the sirens of far away fire-trucks. My skin smelled like smoke.

This is what happens when you invite a witch to your town.

The winery where we saw the show has since caught fire, and the affected area, now exceeding 20,000 acres, has been reduced to smoldering rubble. Advisories were put into effect in San Francisco urging people to remain indoors if possible, to avoid respiratory issues that might arise from inhaling the particulate matter from the fires. Even now the air still stinks of campfire. This morning, a thick, sooty haze made a mess of the sunrise as it climbed, wincing and blushing, through mostly opaque ozone. A short while ago that same sun had swollen to five times its normal size, and setting, it hung low in the sky like a great red traffic light. STOP. It gave me a vague sense of unreality which I haven’t felt since back in New York, in the days after the towers fell. Although technically out of sight, and without any overt signs or evidence of hazard, calamity manages makes itself known; in the smell of fire, silence, a solemn sense of thankfulness - that you or your loved ones weren’t claimed, that you still have a place to call home. Misfortune encourages worry. Disaster convinces the mind to stop unsuspectingly turning corners, so that at every juncture you begin to anticipate an encounter with countless dangers, all liable to appear suddenly and with lethal, irreversible force.

Something else though. Bizarre happenings knock loose those hardened blockages inside the soul, alighting the mundane with possibility and relegating tedium, at least temporarily, to the wind. Those resultant sunrises and sunsets are not without beauty, I might add. Even the image of a rolling green vineyard wreathed in flames is not without a certain dark and devastating grandeur. An arsonist's wet dream.