Items

• 2020-09-07

  Pandemics & Wildfires

  The year 2020 was challenging for me in a couple ways. Like so many others, the pandemic lockdown kept me home for several months. I continued school online with my local university and waited for it all to be over. As summer rolled around, my family had decided that if we were going to be isolated from others, we might as well do it somewhere we love. We spent the better part of our summer at my great grandfather’s cabin at Huntington Lake in the High Sierras. It was a fairly quiet season at the lake considering California was still under many restrictions. Shortly after our last visit, the Creek Fire started. The fire burned nearly 380,000 acres of the Sierra National Forest for about four months. Within a week of the beginning of the fire, we lost our family cabin and the historic general store, Cressman’s, that our cousins had just taken over. Our family was devastated, and it is still a very painful memory. I am, however, incredibly grateful for the last summer we got to spend there. In a strange way, the COVID-19 pandemic offered our family a small blessing in disguise. Since the lockdown required many to reduce work hours, a number of friends and family members had the opportunity to visit the cabin one last time. This photograph is a reminder of a very bittersweet summer. Although 2020 proved to be an especially challenging year, the pandemic allowed my family to make its final memories of our second home before it was gone.