In this place, summer is the season of flood and flame, of torrential downpours and fire in the sky. Or at least it’s supposed to be.
We’ve had precious little of the former, and so relatively little of the latter, too. Because what sets the sunset sky aflame here is the presence of lingering thunderheads, monsoonal cloud patterns backlit by the fading light.
Wings captured this particular twilight image late on a summer’s day some eight years or so ago. It was by then the aftermath of the storm, one we had been racing to beat as we tried to load and stack acres’ worth of hay, a whole barnload of it.
We almost made it.
We were actually fortunate that time, with five or six of us working at it all day. The rain held off entirely until the moment we backed the trailer up to the barn, and then, at first, it was only a few sprinkles.
That changed.
But when the bales are neatly rowed upon a flatbed trailer, it’s possible to tarp them until the storm passes. Had they still been in the fields? Not so much. And still, it was a gift, a blessing, because the same rains that contended with us for precious minutes and hours on that day were the same seasonal rains that had made all those hundreds of bales possible in the first place.
We have a newfound appreciation for that now.
Back then, several fields, spread across multiple acres, produced hundreds of bales of top-quality grass and alfalfa per cut. Most years, we got three full cuts. That was before the drought settled into the land, bone-deep.
Last week, we cut and baled only the two northernmost fields, once rich grass and a little grass/alfalfa mix, worth a couple of hundred bales across both fields. This year, we got fifteen.
Summer is no longer merely the season of fire in the sky. Increasingly, it’s the season of fire upon the land, too, in terms both figurative and frighteningly literal.
Yesterday, fire trucks screamed past, headed north along the highway. At this time of year, that’s always cause for concern. Now, though? It’s a blade to the heart — one made of the long, cold icicle of fear that sparks the fight-or-flight response at a deeply atavistic level. Because here, we know what wildfire means.
And there has been much of that already, in places insufficiently distant for comfort. Even if they’re not near enough for the flames to spread, the smoke turns the sky a muddy, bloody shade of red; the air is gray with particulate haze. And we are reminded once again of the existential risk of this season now, when there is not a drop of water to be had for any amount of love or money.
We have had plenty of the smoky wildfire skies this season, but almost none of the cleaner, clearer sort. The last two days have granted us short rains late in the day, but not sufficiently late to produce the sorts of skies we are accustomed to seeing now: only hot bleached blue banded with gray, limned in silver and, very late, thin wispy bands of coral and rose. But the thing about drought — not just “a dry spell” but real, genuine drought, a deepening of the 500-year drought that has dug itself in for the last quarter-century here — is that all you can do is wait it out: wait it out, ride it out, hope there’s enough alive and still standing on the other side.
We are there now.
And we find ourselves praying, daily, for those torrential downpours, and the fire in the sky they bring as a parting gift.
~ Aji
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