Just north of Napa Valley, famous for its picture-perfect wineries and inviting restaurants, lies a California county with a much less flattering reputation.

Lake County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco, with a population of about 68,000, has some of the highest rates of poverty, unemployment and poverty in the state. opioid deaths. The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2014 that the struggling rural province named after the gigantic lake that surrounds it looked as if it had been “plucked from Appalachia – with weeds and dirt streets, stray dogs and marijuana crops in the backyard.”

Bad luck has made matters worse. Between 2012 and 2018, a series of devastating wildfires raged through Lake County. burning more than half of the country.

But in the small mountain town of Middletown, population 700, an arts center has sprung into action to help the region recover from the wildfires — and, more recently, the pandemic.

Helen Whitney, a resident of Cobb, another small town in Lake County, told me that the exhibits, workshops and craft fairs at the nonprofit Middletown Arts Center have made it a “focal point for the resilience and growth of the area”.

Lake County residents typically don’t have much access to the arts, and “the MAC,” as residents call it, grew out of a call from local artists for a space to show, educate and create art, according to Lisa Kaplan . co-founder and director of the center. It opened in early 2015 in a renovated gymnasium.

A few months after the MAC’s first exhibit in March 2015, the Valley Fire, one of the most destructive in California history, tore through Lake County, killing four people and leveling more than a thousand homes were created. President Barack Obama has declared the province a disaster area.

Kaplan’s house burned down and many of the MAC’s artists and board members lost homes, studios or workplaces. But the MAC remained standing.

So instead of canceling an art class that was scheduled to take place a few weeks after the fire, Kaplan decided the center could provide a refuge after so much devastation. The lesson was a success.

She realized then, she said, that “this could be something very healing for the community.”

Fast-moving wildfires, fueled by a prolonged statewide drought, continued to ravage the region Mendocino Complex fire devastated the northern part of Lake County in 2018.

The arts center began hosting farmers markets and craft fairs with open-mic entertainment. In 2020, the MAC expanded its art workshops again, attracting a virtual audience so people could participate during Covid lockdowns.

“Zoom gave us a whole new landscape to work with, in terms of connecting,” Kaplan told me.

Over the years, the MAC has offered classes in photography, creative writing, painting and printmaking, in part to help people grieve or process survivor’s guilt. The center has held Valley fire anniversary shows, featuring local artists’ sculptures of spindly charred trees and paintings of orange infernos. And it has published books of poems written by community members about the trauma of the fires and how they survived. Right now it has a exhibition of Latino art.

When I recently visited the MAC, the road I took to Middletown wound through a beautiful grassy valley. Yet I was struck by the signs of fire that were still visible years later. On either side of the road were grazing horses, as well as groves of tall, scorched trees.

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And before you go: good news

On Valentine’s Day, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Birch Aquarium in La Jolla spent the day playing matchmaker with two sunflower starfish, members of a species that has nearly become extinct in the past decade.

The romantic encounter was facilitated, if you will, by Melissa Torres and her colleagues at the aquarium, and was covered in a recent New York Times article. The scientists wanted to see if they could fertilize eggs from the female starfish with both fresh and frozen sperm from the male.

Sunflower starfish are important to ocean ecology in the Pacific Northwest. They can keep the region’s kelp forests healthy by hunting sea urchins that eat the forests’ algae. However, since 2013, about 90 percent of the starfish population has become extinct, mainly due to warm sea temperatures.

But on February 14, love was in the air and the team in La Jolla managed to fertilize millions of eggs that have since been distributed to the aquarium and other research centers involved in conservation efforts. By late February, some of those eggs had already entered the larvae stage, and they are still growing.