If you had asked me a month ago, I would not have guessed that an area as big as California could be entirely on fire, but here we are.
I'm from New England, where the states are mostly a manageable size, if you leave out the northern half of Maine (which is the largest county east of the Mississippi, and has a whopping population density of 11 people per square mile). California, by contrast, is just shy of 800 miles long, and unless you leave at 8pm, you won't make the drive in less than 12 hours. Here's the Bay Area, with the blue arrow pointing at my house. We're in the middle of civilization, so the fires don't threaten us directly, but the air is awful. Last night the usual pollution metric wasn't bad, but when I ventured to put the trash bins out, the air was full of eye-irritating ash, floating in the beam of my flashlight.
Really, my surprise just betrays my ignorance, or maybe just the tunnel vision of the endless global trauma that is 2020. Prior to the pandemic, Australia was on fire.
All these simultaneous fires come from an anomalous thunderstorm that moved slowly through the area. We don't get thunderstorms here to speak of, since they require heat and moisture, and normally it only rains in the chilly pseudo-winter. This was a legit thunderstorm, though, with louder thunder and very, very bright lightning, for about 4 hours. It did rain a little, but nowhere enough to stop the wildlands from igniting. They would be tinder-dry at this time of year anyway, but we had a stretch of 100º days that ensured everything was extra-scorched.
There is something worse than not being able to go out to coffee shops and dinner with friends and concerts, and that is not being able to leave your house at all because every place you'd go is closed, and the outside air hurts.
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