The Latest Californian Fire

When we broke up, Mark called me sorts of hideous names that you call the person who just spent the better part of their twenties with you.

But fellowships don’t exactly fall from the sky, and I wasn’t going to waste an opportunity to get my Ph.D, even if my university was hundreds of miles away from him in Washington state. My first love was earth science, after all, and unfortunately, getting drunk with Mark just didn’t seem to offer the same, uh, experiences as seismic monitors and conference papers.

But where I only had my notebooks and my soil samples, Mark had his parent’s money and his capricious dad’s love. Let's be frank, those are two things no woman could ever give him.

Stuffing what remained of our lives together in the back of his pickup, Mark quickly moved to his family’s farm in the back hills of the Angeles mountains, far away from Eugene, where I had been finishing my Master's and he was working part time as a bartender, ignoring his dad's phone calls.

Why did he move back to that part of California? Well, it was an attempt to set up a vineyard. It was his dream after all, he’d been talking about it since we started dating, after too many kayaking trips down the Willamette and the McKenzie. It was time for a southern version of Napa Valley, he said. He'd be a millionaire, and create a new way of doing things.

I had tried to explain to him that the hills were dry, that the grapes wouldn’t grow in that arid climate. But now that I was out of the picture, I and my warnings became so much easier to ignore.

Besides, he had a new one, his brilliant and kind Melanie, shorter, thicker, prettier and more agreeable then me. She agreed that he was smart to plant vines, to spend his inheritance and the computers I left behind one creating a new wine, a new way of drinking.

Melanie–this new girlfriend of his whom I had never heard of but apparently all of our friends had. After all, they had met her while Mark and I were still together, during one weekend when I was out doing field work. They all loved her, and it explained why they all immediately disappeared the moment I packed my half of the apartment and moved to Washington.

I cried more over the loss of them than the loss of Mark.

I watched their new life, Mark and Melanie, with envy from my new monitors, studying their Instagram when I should have been updating our dew point scales, which was showing a drier year ahead. Meanwhile, Mark took more pictures of innocent, college dropout Melanie, cavorting with whatever doe-eyed, blonde hippie had offered to work in the vineyard for the season, clipping the vines by day, sleeping in the barn at night, and occasionally wrapping herself around Mark when Melanie was busy dealing with the business of the vineyard.

A few months later, it began to collapse. Melanie eventually ran off, wanting an actual job where she could use her degree from Berkeley–though it probably had to do with the fact that the pretty German hitchhiker they hired to help manage their storage was caught with Mark in their bathtub–with Mark, of course, in there with her. Whether or not it was because she found my message regarding the fire hazard, I could not tell you.

Now, Mark was alone, on the phone with me. What he wanted, I couldn’t explain. But I offered him this much.

“I’m watching the fires, they’re on my monitor,” I warned him, sitting in my lab, “You need to get out.”

“Why would I listen to you?”

Even though we were on the phone, I could practically smell the scent of booze on his breath, a light mist of whisky on his thick brown beard. Back in ancient times, they would leave fate up to the gods.

I pulled up the maps we followed on my monitor. Maybe the gods would be merciful. But Mark made his choice before I did.