On the morning of Sept. 9, 2020, Rodney Earl Jackson, Jr. woke up to the buzz of his cell phone. It was his mother, telling him to open his San Francisco apartment window and peer outside. It was late enough for the morning light to shine down on his Duboce Park neighborhood, but instead the streets were cloaked in darkness.

Where was the sun?

“Immediately I shut the window, and I said, ‘I’m not dealing with this right now,’” Jackson recalled. His mother, based a few blocks away in the Fillmore, asked if he knew what was happening.

He had no idea, he said, and tried to go back to sleep. “Because I thought I was in a dream. It felt like I hadn’t really woken up yet,” Jackson said.

More than a hundred miles north of the Bay Area, wildfires tore through towns, homes and forests. Winds

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