[jyl]

Well, that was kind of the most discombobulated vacation I’ve had in a long time.

We headed down to South Lake Tahoe for two weeks in a lakeshore cabin with a group of good friends. The day before we arrived, the Caldor fire started and was 1000 acres. A day later it was 6500 acres. Then it blew up overnight to 30,000 acres, about 30 miles southwest of the lake, and winds from the west were carrying smoke into the basin of Lake Tahoe. I’d brought two HEPA air cleaners, and went to the hardware store and bought box fans and furnace air filters to make more air cleaners. We spent the rest of the week mostly inside, venturing out when the air was less bad and trying to enjoy ourselves.

When the AQI was 150, any exertion made my chest hurt. At 220, just sitting outside with a cocktail for fifteen minutes had the same effect. I stayed in my room, working (the market was demanding attention all week), with ash drifting in through the cracks and coating my screens and computer. I bought painters’ tape and taped up the cracks, now it was hot, ashy and stifling. Sometimes it was 300-400 AQI outside.

By the end of the week, I convinced my wife we had to bail and tell the rest of our friends not to come up to Tahoe, even if that meant eating the $2500 we’d paid for that second week. The cabin owners wanted to refund us and our friends wanted to pay their share, but I refused - my call, my loss. The main highway from Tahoe to the Bay Area was closed, so we all took the long route around the lake to get to Berkeley.