(CNN)Monday morning, by the time I woke up, the poet Brenda Hillman, who lives up the hill from me in Kensington had already posted a picture to Instagram of the eerie sky out over the San Francisco Bay: a layer of low-lying fog, blanketing the hills, a small gap of sky, and then above it a huge dark plume of looming smoke, lurking like a dark genie over the metropolis.