With a staggering number of missing and a rising death toll, the fires in California, as Bay Area poet Tess Taylor described it, look increasingly like the end of the world: "I do want to say to anyone listening: This year's apocalypse is worse than last year's apocalypse. And what I recognized in myself this year -- even as this past week of bad air has passed -- has been a strange, terrible, low-level resignation, rattling around in me like the low burning in my lungs."