Desperation Reef

“You’re messed up, man. See you at the Feather Fire. You should help this miserable world for once, instead of only yourself.”

Casey pictures Brock, his minutes-younger twin brother — lanky, dark dreadlocks, inked to the max — in every visible way Casey’s opposite.

Casey worries about him. Always has. Worries about the body that Brock drives to physical extremes in order to ride immense waves. And the angry heart that Brock so eagerly displays. The fights he picks, the scars he wears, and the weapons he collects. The way he thinks he can save the world, one disaster at a time. Playing God instead of worshipping Him.

“There’s bad karma at Mavericks, Brock. Pray to God for protection. Valley of death and all like that.”

“I dread your God, Casey. Just shut up.”

5

Beneath a billowing gray sky pocked with red embers, Brock Stonebreaker and his wife and his Go Dogs — in a motley battalion of pickups, utility vehicles, and vans — have encamped within the eye-burning haze that chokes the Feather Fire evacuation center on the Mendocino College soccer field.

The hills surrounding them are limned in wind-driven flames that launch embers into the sky like fireworks.

The fire was zero percent contained when Brock, Mahina, and the Go Dogs got here two hours ago, and it’s zero percent contained now.

The Go Dogs are the activist wing of Brock’s Breath of Life Rescue Mission in Aguanga, California, a sprawling, state-licensed and accredited house of worship. The buildings and acreage are gifts from the Random Access Foundation, run by a young Silicon Valley billionaire and her husband. The foundation continues to make modest monthly contributions, mostly earmarked for the Go Dogs rescue operations in the US and in Mexico.

Now sheriffs, police, and an alphabet soup of fire department vehicles prowl the perimeter field with their headlights and searchlights, as if looking for something more to do than keep their eye on the flaming, not-very-distant, timber-studded, tinder-dry hills around them.

Brock drips sweat. The tattoos all over his sinewy body are black, slick, and island themed. Got his first one at age twelve, much to his mother’s annoyance, which was half the point. The other half was he liked sea turtles like the ones they’d see surfing on Maui. He’s dark-skinned for a man of his ancestry — some Black Irish way back, his mother told him — your great-grandfather Devon Byrne had that, and blue eyes like yours. Brock’s dreads are short and tightly woven. He’s stripped to the waist because of the record-busting October heat wave, and he’s drawing foul breaths through one of the two hundred cheap “tactical” gas masks donated to the Dogs by a manufacturer down in Orange County.

He’s handing off forty-bottle flats of donated water to thirsty evacuees, many of whom have lost their homes or are losing them this very moment, losing almost everything they love, basically — houses and horses and dogs and gardens — as they tear open the bottles of fresh warm water for their children first, then themselves, quaffing then pouring it onto their upturned, smoke-blackened faces to quench the ember stings and the fires in their terrified eyes.

These are people who have lost it all, Brock thinks. And there will be no regaining what is gone. Only substitution.

He leans into the back of his flagship Go Dogs van, an old black Econoline with the goofy-looking dachshund emblazoned on the sides in Day-Glo green.

Mahina, whose name means “moon” in her native language, is all the way inside, hefting the flats into Brock’s waiting hands two at a time. She’s Hawaiian big, strong and imposing. When they first met, Brock had to really work to beat her at arm wrestling, and she was a stronger, more buoyant, and better swimmer than him. Good surfer, too. She looks like a post-apocalyptic Pacific Island warrior with her hair up in a tight bun, her XXL Day-Glo green and black Go Dogs T-shirt, the gas mask, and goggles. She posts and blogs like crazy for the Breath of Life Rescue Mission. Doesn’t say much out loud, but when she does, her words count.

“We need more water,” she mouths from within the mask.

“Another run to Ukiah,” says Brock. Their third run of the day.

“Thank the gods for Ukiah,” she says.

Ukiah and its roads have so far been spared by a change of wind direction. The Feather Fire — the experts were saying, like so many of the new “super fires” — was so big and so hot it was making its own weather. One expert said the change of wind was a miracle. Another said that the super fires were spawned by the megadrought, which was caused by global warming, which was caused by greenhouse gases.