Wesaam Al-Badry
Thousands of lightning bolts illuminated the California skies on Sunday, August 16. Early that morning, one of them touched down in a patch of chaparral in Monterey County’s Sierra de Salinas, a low mountain range abutting the valley that produces more than half of the lettuce, almost half of the broccoli, and roughly a third of the cauliflower grown in the United States every year.
Sixteen-year-old Magaly Santos, whose father works on an irrigation crew and whose mother drives a tractor for a cauliflower company, first saw the flames as pinpricks of orange light in the distance. Over the next two days, dry winds propelled the blaze in the direction of her home just outside of the farming town of Gonzales. “It was the most devastating thing ever to see our mountains in flames,” Santos says. “My sister and I were like, ‘Oh my god, what about all the animals? And the houses—the people that had to evacuate?’ It was just totally scary.”
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