Wildfire

 Labor Day was clear and quiet. I spent most of the morning trimming back brush, raking up leaves and twigs, and making huge deposits to Mark’s compost area. He chopped up the compost and talked to the chickens.  We picked plums. The air was clear and bright, the sky blue. In the late afternoon, the phone rang. It was the emergency weather service, alerting us to a major weather event—strong winds from the dry east would be blowing in by evening. Fire danger was increasing rapidly, as the air currents would push the flames ahead of them. Be careful. I climbed our big ladder and looked east, over the houses in the neighborhood. I could see a line of grey in the distance, like a wall. By the time I returned from working at Stone Soup, the air was smoky and golden, but still. We went to bed with the windows open, as we had every night all summer.

When we woke up in the morning, the wind was whipping around the house, blowing dust and ash everywhere. There was a pile of debris in the tub, blown in from the bathroom window. We moved around the house, closing everything up. Mr Beezhold, our rabbit, wanted to run around, so I let him out. A few hours later, I found him cowering in the rosemary and placed him back in the hutch, behind a piece of plywood to reduce the winds. I vacuumed up dirt and ash that still retained a glimpse of the wood it once was, washed floors, went to meetings and wrestled with prep for online teaching. By mid-morning , the sky was a lurid orange and it was deeply unpleasant outside.

By Wednesday, the air was absolutely still. The sky was thick with smoke and haze. We brought the rabbit inside—Mark thought he was depressed and ill. We looked the cat in as well, so that she would not obsesses over washing her fur.  School began—a strange, short day—and the light was a weird greenish brown.  Because there was no sun or solar gain, the air grew cold and clammy as well as smoky. We all hunkered down. Even the chickens went to bed early.

By Thursday, evacuees were coming into town. First, large animals, because the Linn county fairgrounds was full. Then people, camping at the fairgrounds and in motels. They had all fled the flames, got out just in time, with a car full of quickly assembled gear. Torn between tears of loss and gratitude for surviving, they arrived. On Friday, they were shopping at the local grocery store for the basics, learning where to go for different needs. Parking together in the lots, cars huddled near one another for company.

Meanwhile, the world has been so still. No one walks their dog by the house. The bees and birds are somewhere, but not in the yard. Even cars are gone—it is like the first days of the pandemic, without the brisk walkers. Since March, we have consoled ourselves with “at least we can go outside, walk around, breathe in the air.” But, right now, we can’t even do that. We are inside—all of us, with our pets, our drying laundry, our families, yet again. The contrast between the stillness here and the violence of the fires is stark. We feel helpless. What can we do?

Outside, the ideological battles are heating up as the weather cools, the fires slow down—but not stop—and a bit of sun breaks through this afternoon. The fires are caused by bad management of the resource (we should be cutting down more trees and clearing up windfalls), by man being careless, by lightening strikes and the big winds. And this may be true, but…the underlying reason that the fires are so huge is Climate Change. Our winters and springs are wetter, so more growth sprouts up early. Then the summers are drier, pulling all of the moisture from that new growth and turning it into fuel. We have known about the science for thirty years, at least.  Science warns us—more and bigger fires, storms, floods. More chaos in the weather systems. When I was younger, I thought, we’ll do something about this before it gets to bad. We really won’t destroy our planet, our home, our lives. It won’t get that bad. But it has.

And so, there is a lot of mourning happening here in the Willamette Valley this week. Jobs gone. Lives lost—human and animal. Homes and fragile communities destroyed. Beautiful wild places burned until the soil is sterile. Some of this will return. I know the huckleberry fields will be amazing in about ten years. Some will not. Communities, ecological and human, if can so divide them, may be gone forever.  What we have really lost, although we don’t want to admit it yet, is the faith that the world will return to normal, be as it was before. Because it will not.