The Summer of the Thousand Fires

All across rural Northern California folks are breathing a bit easier today. As I write heavy rain falls, with God's help putting an end to what for many was a truly disastrous summer. At various points in time hundreds of fires raged across our land, from Trinity County to Butte, from Napa to Mariposa, and just beyond the edge of my world...in Big Sur, the San Fernando Valley, southern Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. There was so much smoke it darkened the sky. For a month or more in June and July the sun burned blood red and shades of orange that make me shudder to think of them. Entire towns fled. Roads closed. Homes burned. At times our state felt like a war zone. I remember seeing small fleets of helicopters racing north, convoys of firetrucks from as far away as Arizona (I even dimly recollect seeing one from El Paso!) streaming through our towns, off duty firemen crowding markets and restaurants. The citizens often waved to them like troops going off to war, which in many ways they were.

Smoke and ash filled the air. Some of us developed breathing problems we had never had before. And for asthmatics and others it was murder. I myself was fine for quite some time before succumbing to the coughs. It was if the soot had gradually built up in my mouth and lungs and trachea, like a film no mouthwash could extinguish. This summer made smokers of us all.

The buttes of Chico and the forests of the north coast are still scarred by them. Some people bear scars that will not soon heal. At least one friend of our family lost his home. He evacuated just in time, as the flames advanced on his mobile home in the hills above Oroville. He was just far enough away to hear his propane tank explode, completing the ruin of everything he had.

And the source of all was the very geography that we love so. It is such an odd thing, that the beauty around us can be such a peril. The very warm dry weather we love the West for can become our very doom. Our lovely forests are a tinderbox, our rich chapparal and grasslands a powderkeg. At the height of the danger, and occasionally even still, we all eyed our surroundings with caution and dread. I more than once looked out at the grassy fields behind our house with unease. That which is usually a delight this summer was a source of alarm.

Yet we should be surprised not at all. Ours is a dry climate. Ours a world that in natural course is nourished by fire. The forests will regrow. And those Chico buttes will be covered in wildflowers the likes of which we've never seen. But it will still be dry, and the danger will ever be there. One of the great ironies of the West is that a land so expansive and inviting is really so ill suited to support any great population. Even now drought has drained our lakes, lowered our rivers, and raised our water bills. That is, if it is a drought at all. Here in the West there is no reason to believe that wet is normal and dry is not. If anything it is the wet years that are strange. But we are just not conditioned to think that way. Our ancestors arrived during good years. The mid-19th century was particularly wet and lush, from the Pacific to the Great Plains. All those sodbusters in Oklahoma, ranchers in Montana, gold-miners and settlers in California had every reason to think it was normal, they had never known everything else, at least not here in their newfound home. If anything the dustbowl was the harsh reality...the bounty of the West comes with a price.

But there is something deeper, something more profound at work. For some reason or another we humans always expect geography to be stable. We expect that lake to always be there, that hill to always be in place, that mountain to remain unmoved, that river to keep its banks, those trees to stand tall there forever. And we build our towns and spread out our homesteads by those rivers and on those hills and amid those trees. But geography is never stable. Even the barest most boring desert is not stable. The earth itself moves, the faults shift, the weather changes, the hills slide, the rivers flood, the lakes dry, the trees die and burn. Sadly enough, we often blame God for this, for our inability to see that life changes, that the earth itself shifts under our feet, that all creation pulses with life and that the only stable thing in it is the love of God.

So now the rain falls. The Summer of the Thousand Fires comes to an end. Our land soaks it in, our trees and grasses drink it up, our reservoirs begin to refill. We all sigh with relief...and hope it lasts.