The call came. We were in the evacuation warning zone of the River Fire. I wished I’d paid more attention when my hiking friend, Virginia, mentioned she had a go-bag ready. I thought about it, then forgot about it. Now my husband and I were scurrying around, struggling to get the suitcase from a top shelf in the basement. What should I pack? Then I remembered the email from Placer County Supervisor Cindy Gustafson I’d skimmed the day before, meaning to read later. It contained her newsletter: “August is Here.” Immediately visible is a link to a CAL FIRE pamphlet entitled: WILDFIRE IS COMING … ARE YOU READY TO GO! The email arrived one day before the River Fire exploded at the Bear River Campground, fewer than 5 miles from our house. I packed a suitcase. We waited, watched and listened. A KVMR radio station host confirmed evacuation areas, read zone numbers and each street within those zones. Pascale Fusshoeller, editor of yubanet.com, provided real-time fire updates for the station and on the website. I perk up whenever I hear her distinctive accent. On an internet site, I located a map of the River Fire with evacuation zones listed – all in Nevada County. I couldn’t see zones listed for Placer County. Considering these frequent wildfires, shouldn’t all areas have zone numbers we memorize like our zip and area codes? I now know I should have checked the Placer County Sheriff’s website for Placer information. Two days later, the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office lifted the evacuation warning for our area. Now out of danger, I could focus on others. I knew they evacuated some Chicago Park residents. In years past, I volunteered at the Colfax Winterfest as one of Santa’s Elves. Santa had a summer home in Chicago Park. I phoned him. No answer. I phoned a mutual friend, Sharlene, who owned and operated a beauty salon in Colfax for decades. A cheerful voice told me the number was not in service. I contacted another mutual friend, Debbie. Before she and her boyfriend received the all clear to return home, his appendix burst. He was being operated on as she spoke. I’ve learned since they’re both safe at their homes, and he’s recovering well. I located Sharlene, and she invited me to lunch in Colfax at Grandma C’s Kitchen on Main Street. Sharlene and I sat across from each other in the cozy restaurant, relieved neither had to evacuate, and heartsick by the number of homes burned to the ground. Were it not for the swift actions by Placer County Fire Chief Brian Estes, who called in the massive air support, and the heroic firefighters, the River Fire could have been even more catastrophic. What about Santa, I asked Sharlene? He’s joining us, she said. And in he walked – out of uniform. Santa had received an emergency alert, and left his house as ordered. He stayed with his lady friend in Grass Valley. What about Mrs. Claus? She was back home safe in Colfax. Her Facebook post thanked a kind friend who looked after Mittens, her cat, during the evacuation. The day of the fire, our landline rang repeatedly. Cell phones beeped. Emails and Facebook messages flooded in from family and friends offering safe havens and assistance. Callers know we are not as nimble as we used to be. Jim sends me an estimated time of arrival from the basement man cave to our dinner table. I’m lucky if I can bench press a 5-pound bag of ice. Among the emails was one from my well-known yoga teacher, Suzanne Grace. She was on her way home from out of town when she heard news of the fire. Although she was on an August break, she invited her students to an impromptu, complimentary yoga session. Suzanne’s decades of yoga and meditative training calmed her stress, and she wanted the same for her students. The night of the fire, I couldn’t sleep. We were safe for now, but what if the wind changed? I’d read that fires make their own wind. I slid open the bedroom sliding door and stepped out onto the deck. The night sky was surprisingly free of smoke. Among the twinkling stars, there was one moving slowly. A red light blinked. My vision blurred. It was a helicopter. One of our guardian angels.

The question came from my husband, a man who proudly carries a flip phone. Jim was responding to my request that he adjourn to his basement man cave during my podcast interview with Doug Devaney, the British producer-presenter of the “The Plastic Podcasts” – a series of interviews with members of the Irish diaspora. Podcasts, I explained to Jim, are audio broadcasts available to stream over the internet, or download onto computers, phones or tablets to enjoy at a listener’s convenience. Remember a few years ago, I said to Jim, when you pressed your nose against the front window wondering why I was sitting in my car in the driveway. Or the time I tripped over your legs rushing to turn on the radio so I could hear the end of a public radio interview by Terry Gross? Now with NPR’s podcasts, I can listen to Terry’s episodes on my iPad, anytime. When Doug contacted me about being interviewed, I checked him out on the internet. First stop was his podcast www.plasticpodcasts.com. I listened to several of the interviews and was flattered he invited me to join this cadre of accomplished artists. Doug’s a talent in his own right. He’s appeared in award-winning radio programs, is a writer, playwright, actor, TV and radio personality. I also learned that during a local arts festival a few years ago, Doug appeared in a one-man show that became an international news story. I asked him about this. He laughed. The show, “Mein Gutt,” was a comedy about a man battling obesity. Organizers of the festival insisted he alert audiences that a prop chicken would make an appearance. He could offend the vegetarians. A newspaper quoted Doug’s response: “I’ve heard of strobe lighting or nudity being cause for audience concern but never roasted chicken.” Another internet search revealed a photograph of Doug and an actor friend, Karl Greenwood, on horseback, shirtless. After six hours in a makeup chair, Doug was transformed into Donald John Trump, and his friend into Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The pair rode around on a horse in London promoting the launch of a political betting platform known as Paddy Power. Very funny, I thought. Doug, a British/Irish guy, is based in Brighton, a resort on the south coast of England. When I was growing up in Britain, going to Brighton for a summer holiday was quite the thing. Our family never went; too many kids and not enough money. But I heard about others going, and they bragged about staying at a Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Billy Butlin built a number of these camps around the country. One of my favorite authors, Bill Bryson, mentioned the camps in his book, “The Road to Little Dribbling.” The United States-born Bryson wrote, “Campers were awakened by a loudspeaker in their room, which they could neither turn off nor turn down, summoned to meals in communal dining halls, harried into taking part in humiliating beauty contests and other competitions, and ordered back to their chalets to be locked in for night at 11 p.m. Butlin invented the prisoner-of-war camp as holiday, and, this being Britain, people loved it.” When I first read what Bryson wrote, I thought, ‘cheeky bugger.’ Then I recalled Bryson has such affection for Britain he’s lived in England for decades and has dual American and British citizenship. Back to the podcasts. During a Zoom meeting, I asked Doug why he got into podcasting. He was, he said, always fascinated with the radio and the spoken word. What advice would he give someone interested in doing their own podcast? Do your research, he said. There’s lots of information on the internet. Decide what you want to talk about. The recording equipment isn’t that expensive. Anyone can download Audacity, the audio editor and recorder, free off the internet. What about ambient noise? Doug held up a portable curved, sound-absorbing shield he purchased. I had recorded an audio version of my memoir in a makeshift recording studio. My dear husband assembled plywood panels around the armoire in our dining room where I house my computer. He covered the panels with horse hair blankets from U-Haul to provide a sound barrier. If a plane flew over, I had to start from scratch. Same when the garbage truck backup bell sounded. Jim flew down to his man cave one morning when the microphone picked up the sound of his rustling newspaper. We unplugged the humming fridge. I forgot to plug it back in one day. And to think I could have avoided all this with a sound-absorbing shield! I almost cried. I told Jim that for a fraction of the price and effort, I could have been all over the internet like a meme. Jim asked, “What’s a meme?” Then he shifted his hip and pulled out his beeping flip phone.

“The explosive TV chat.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you have to surrender your Britbox subscription. I activated the British streaming service in time to watch Piers Morgan, the co-host of Good Morning Britain, come unglued about the Oprah interview of Prince Harry and the Duchess of Sussex, the former Meghan Markle. Piers Morgan, you may know, is a provocative English broadcaster-journalist, who people either love or hate. Decades ago, he was the youngest editor of a national newspaper, the tabloid News of the World – known in my day as “news of the screws” – a salute to its salacious content. The only formal sex education I ever received. American audiences know Morgan from his Celebrity Apprentice win in 2008, and several years later as a host of CNN’s Piers Morgan Tonight – the former Larry King Live talk show. King was on the air for 25 years. Morgan lasted for three. Morgan blamed the show’s cancellation on his outspoken opposition to America’s gun culture. On Good Morning Britain, Morgan was in fine fettle. He stayed up to watch the Oprah interview live. His reaction: “I’m sorry, I don’t believe a word she said, Meghan Markle. I wouldn’t believe her if she read me a weather report.” When a colleague blasted him for his ongoing attacks of the Duchess, Morgan walked off in a huff. He later tweeted, “Freedom of speech is a hill I’m happy to die on. Thanks for all the love, and hate. I’m off to spend more time with my opinions.” I’m not a fan of Morgan, but I saw merit in one question he raised. During the Oprah interview, the Duchess dropped several bombshells. One was that during her first pregnancy, her mental health declined to the point she considered suicide. Her character was being assassinated in the press, she was not being defended, and she felt isolated. In addition, there was talk that since her baby was not to be given the title “prince,” he would not receive security protection. Markle said she appealed to a senior member of the royal household for counseling assistance. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, help her. Morgan raised this question: Why didn’t her husband, Prince Harry, arrange for her care? He publicly admitted to receiving counseling and was affiliated with several mental health charities. The Duchess also revealed how distraught she was about racist articles in the British tabloids. Several atrocious headlines flashed across the screen during the interview. I sympathized with Markle, but her surprise mystified me. It’s well known that the press relentlessly pursued Prince Harry’s mother, Princess Diana. And it doesn’t take much digging to uncover the British tabloids’ long history of bashing the royal family. The gloves came off back in the early ’70s when the press attacked the Queen’s “rebel” sister, Princess Margaret, over her various romantic liaisons. Tabloid journalists described the Queen’s daughter, Princess Anne, an accomplished equestrian, as looking “rather like a horse.” They labeled an ex-daughter-in-law of the Queen, Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who struggled with her weight, “the duchess of pork,”… and these are the mild quotes. Markle dropped another bombshell when she revealed that before her son Archie was born, someone in the royal household raised concerns about how dark-skinned the baby might be. Oprah gasped. The Queen may have clutched her pearls. The royal had raised the question to Prince Harry, who valiantly stated during the interview he would never reveal who said it, thereby casting suspicion on every member of the royal household. Everyone, that is, but the Queen and Prince Philip, who Harry and Meghan asserted several times were not the guilty parties. Like Meghan, I’m biracial with a white husband. I have three children. Before I gave birth, those around me had the decency not to mention my baby’s skin color, even if the thought occurred to them. Before my second husband and I had our child, our one concern was that he might look like my husband’s late father. That thought may have occurred to Markle. Before Archie’s grandfather, the Prince of Wales, married Diana, the press dubbed him one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. And it wasn’t because of his looks. Harry could have responded to the baby’s skin color question with, “Have you seen my dad’s ears?” And followed up with that after centuries of royal inbreeding, Markle’s African ancestry is a healthy infusion to the gene pool. And speaking of grandparents. Markle’s father, Thomas Markle, responded to the same question by saying it could have been just a “dumb question,” that when, “… a Black person marries a White person, what you get, you get a baby. That’s what you got. You got a baby.”

“It’s not Buckingham Palace,” my daughter teased – a reference to my English upbringing. We were in Washington, D.C., travelling with Tina, her husband, Brian, and their two friends, Alicia and Joe. Tina heard the White House was small and a little shabby. She didn’t want me to be disappointed. We were thankful the tours had not been cancelled. This was 2014, when President Obama was in office. The weeks preceding our trip there had been calamities, from fence jumpers to riots that could have shut down the White House tours. I loved the simplicity of the White House. I’ve toured European palaces and stately homes, and while these places were more grand, the style of “The People’s House” fit the spirit of the New World – elegant, but not too royal. A visit to D.C. wouldn’t have been complete without a punt on the Potomac. On the boat from Georgetown to Alexandria, we pointed like excited children to the magnificent monuments we had seen the night before. From the boat dock, our group sauntered up the cobblestone hill to Alexandria’s old town and stopped at the Visitor’s Center. The petite, grey-haired woman behind the counter was helpful but followed each of her suggested tourist sites with an “Oops, it’s closed today,” or with a worried glance at the clock on the wall, exclaiming, “It closes in 15 minutes.” One place that was open for at least an hour, she told us enthusiastically, was the Apothecary Museum. A white-haired docent with a charming southern accent greeted us from behind the museum’s long marble counter. “This museum was originally a pharmacy – one of the oldest in the nation,” he began, “founded in 1792 by Quakers who,” he said, followed with a dramatic pause, “purchased slaves so they could set them free.” Tina and I exchanged smiles. Glass cases and shelves were filled with bottles of all shapes, colors and sizes. “People would leave a lot happier than when they came in,” the docent said as he pointed to a shelf of mysterious concoctions. Our guide was an entertaining storyteller, his voice rising and falling for effect. My excitement mounted as we followed him up the narrow wooden stairs to the second floor and entered a small, empty room. We stood enraptured, listening to more history. The docent paused, and with a flourish, slowly slid open a door that looked like part of a wall. We entered a wizard’s workshop. I expected Harry Potter to pop up at any minute. Dusty, hand-blown glass jars, once filled with secret potions, lined the shelves. Tiny drawers were stacked to the ceiling and labeled with herbal remedies that sounded more deadly than healthy. This was the apothecary manufacturing room. The workshop looked exactly like it did when the pharmacy owner turned the key and walked away in 1933. Museum staff discovered this hidden treasure just a few years ago when they were preparing for restoration work. The museum curator had the good sense to forbid any reorganization. Before leaving D.C., we had one more place to visit: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. On our last evening, the six of us walked silently alongside the 10-foot-high black granite walls. Small circles of light from our miniature flashlights, thoughtfully supplied by Alicia, flickered across the etched names. We were searching for one name among the more than 58,000 soldiers killed, and the 1,200 who remain missing. “What was the name again?” our daughter Tina asked her father, reaching into her purse for her iPhone. “Eddie Butler,” Jim said. “He was in the Marines.” Eddie was Jim’s friend. His parents had died, Jim remembered. As teenagers, they spent many lazy sunny afternoons fishing down at Erv’s Boat Landing on the Sacramento River. “How will we find him?” I asked. “There are thousands of names, and they’re not in alphabetical order.” Tina began reading from her iPhone: “PFC Edward Wayne Butler. Born on July 11, 1945, Sacramento, California. He died July 22, 1966, in Quang Nam.” “That’s Eddie,” said Jim, standing several panels away from the rest of us. Marine Pvt. Edward W. Butler enlisted in the Marines in October 1965 and was shipped to Viet Nam six months later. He served for three months before dying from a gunshot wound to his chest during an ambush. He was 21 years old. “He’s on Panel 9E, Row 55,” Tina said, scanning the black marble with her light. “Let’s see where we are.” She walked toward her father. “I don’t believe it. Dad’s standing in front of Panel 9E.” The rest of us crowded next to Jim, and each shone a light up, down and across the list of names. “There he is,” said Jim. He reached out and touched his friend.

I'm so stupid, she said. Olga was telling a story to me and other members of Auburn's Newcomers & Neighbors walking group. Hidden Falls Regional Park was the subject. The name was familiar because of the public outcry from residents impacted by the park's expansion. Olga, however, was not talking about the expansion. She was talking about the hike she took three days earlier. A long-time member of the walking group, Olga regularly joins the twice-weekly hikes. Because of mobility issues, she and her fluffy 12-pound Pomeranian, Chloe, stay in the back of the pack. They typically take the less challenging route of a hike if there is one. That option was available at Hidden Falls. While the rest of the group navigated down the trail to the waterfall, Olga took the easier path to a bridge. After she and Chloe rested and enjoyed the view, Olga, who may not have read about the Donner Party, decided she'd take a shortcut. Instead of returning the way she came, she crossed the bridge, reasoning that the trail along the creek would lead her back to the car park. After walking on the trail for longer than she expected, she asked directions from two cyclists who had ridden up behind her. They replied with three words no hiker wants to hear: "You are lost." They advised her to turn around and go back to the bridge. Olga is 79 years old. She emigrated from Czechoslovakia 50 years ago, and she and her husband owned and operated a local restaurant for 15 years. Olga trusts her instincts. She ignored the cyclists. She continued on and eventually came to a directional sign. Although it was difficult to read without her glasses, she realized the cyclists were right. She should have turned around. Now, she decided, she had traveled too far to go back. On she trudged. Olga's knee hurt, her feet hurt, her head hurt. She was exhausted. She had no water, and no phone. But, she said, I knew I had to keep going. After reading a second park sign, she realized just how lost she was. Olga had walked further and further away from the parking lot, and deeper and deeper into the remote area of the park. Olga eventually reached another bridge, and to her immense relief, saw a small group of people. They were a family from Folsom. They gave Olga and Chloe water and crackers. Hopefully, in that order, I thought. They had walkie talkies. One woman contacted her husband, who was cycling up ahead, to request he use his cell to call for help. The family was wonderful, said Olga. They stayed with her, and one woman carried little Chloe. Help was on its way. But it took a while. Hidden Falls Park, even before the expansion, is over 1,000 acres with 30 miles of trails. A ranger arrived in a pickup truck 45 minutes later. The wait showed how far into the park Olga had strayed. I was so thankful to see him; she told us. And very grateful for this rescue service. Curious to find out how many hikers get lost, I telephoned Casey Lyons, Senior Supervising Parks and Grounds guy. He didn't have the numbers, but guessed the people who request rescue rides are unprepared, rather than lost. They underestimate the hike - a mile and a half down to the falls and a mile and a half back, uphill. Often they have no water or dress inappropriately for the hike or the weather. The Parks and Ground supervisor had the following advice for potential hikers: Pick up a trail map from the kiosk in the parking lot, dress appropriately, carry water and a snack. Mountain bikers and equestrians, not to mention sun-bathing rattlesnakes, share the trails, so it's important to stay alert. Hikers should keep their dogs on leashes and out of the brush, to protect them and their owners from ticks and poison oak. Casey also said additional signs are in the works. One by the bridge would have helped direct Olga. Her one and a half-hour hike had lasted over four hours. You must have been so relieved to get back to your car, I told her. I would have, she said, if I could have found it. So many vehicles had arrived since she'd parked that morning, that she couldn't see her car. Neither could her hiking pals who assumed she'd doubled back from her shortened route and had left. "I don't blame anybody but myself," Olga repeated several times. As Olga wandered around the parking lot before finally locating her car, she recalled muttering to herself, "This is just what I need. More walking."