A Big Sur Podcast
A Big Sur Podcast
An ongoing conversation with people from near and far about Big Sur's past, present, and future. A Big Sur Podcast interprets “community” to mean ALL people from around the world who are curious about, and who care about, the preservation and restoration of the wild and rural character of Big Sur. Stories are told by visitors and residents, plumbers and linesmen, musicians and authors, dancers and jugglers and others. Sometimes we drift (way) off-topic into the arts, sciences, personal stories, gossip, politics, philosophy, ornithology, Henry Miller, and our zeitgeist in general. We like that!
The opinions expressed here belong to the people who express them. They may or may not line up with yours, mine, or your neighbor’s — and that’s exactly the point. Different perspectives, lived experiences, and even wildly clashing views are what make conversations worth listening to: enriching, infuriating, life-affirming, and sometimes all three at once.
If you are planning a visit to Big Sur and you listen to some of the folks on this Podcast talk about their love of the place your visit will probably be a lot more rewarding. Please email magnus@henrymiller.org with any comments, critique & suggestions.
Music intro clip courtesy John Holm: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DZ06evO0Rh2QU
Sound editing software by Hindenburg: https://hindenburg.com/
Please support the podcast by making a donation to the Henry Miller Library, a 501(c)3 nonprofit arts organization. Thank you!
A Big Sur Podcast
# 133 Living With Fire: Big Sur Kate — Information and Trust
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
How do we know what we know when Big Sur is burning?
This is the third conversation in Living With Fire: Big Sur, an ongoing A Big Sur Podcast series examining the Timber and Plaskett Fires from different points of view—and asking what they can tell us about living with wildfire in Big Sur.
Previous episodes:
# 131 Living With Fire: Big Sur - Marcus Foster on the Timber Fire, Local Knowledge, and What Comes Next
# 132 Living With Fire: Big Sur — Lucas Handy, When the Fire Came South
LINKS:
Watch Duty
Big Sur Fire
Community Association of Big Sur
Fire Adapted Big Sur
&
Big Sur Kate Online
Kate Novoa—known to almost everyone around here as Big Sur Kate—started her blog during the 2008 Basin Complex Fire. What began as an improvised way of getting accurate information to her neighbors has become an extraordinary running record of Big Sur: fires, storms, slides, Highway 1 closures, government decisions, community disputes and everyday life.
During the Plaskett Fire, however, Kate suddenly found herself on the other side of that information system. Away from home and unable to return because of the evacuation, she received word that her house had burned. For a short time she believed it. Then she began doing exactly what she has done for the rest of us for eighteen years: checking the source, withholding judgment, finding someone closer to what had actually happened, and waiting for confirmation.
Her house had survived, although the fire damaged her water system and burned frighteningly close.
That experience opens into a much larger conversation.
We talk about rumor and verification; how Kate decides whom to trust; the difference between official information and local knowledge; why the first hours of an emergency are so difficult; her work with Watch Duty; what a deeply local reporter can contribute that a national emergency-information system cannot; and why knowing who knows may be just as important as knowing the information yourself.
Kate also talks about the archive she has unintentionally created. Thousands of posts dating back to 2008 now amount to something close to a contemporaneous history of modern Big Sur—and she is beginning to think seriously about who will preserve and continue it.
And, inevitably, we talk about Highway 1, the coming winter, burned watersheds, the possibility of renewed slides and isolation, and the peculiar Big Sur habit of fighting with one's neighbors right up until the moment something terrible happens—at which point everybody helps everybody! (-:
Near the end I return to something Kate told me years ago about falling in love with Big Sur.
After fires, evacuations, slides and nearly losing her home, I ask whether she still feels the same way.
Her answer is very simple:
“More. I love it even more.”
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More Living With Fire: Big Sur conversations are coming, including Monterey County District 5 Supervisor Kate Daniels, biogeographer and ecologist Nikki Nedeff, co-founder of Watch Duty John Mills, and others involved in the fires, the response and the larger question of how Big Sur prepares for what comes next.
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This podcast is a production of the Henry Miller Memorial Library with support from The Arts Council for Monterey County!
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