As I opened the upstairs drapes this morning, I saw a tall plume of white smoke rising from a fire in the valley. No word on what it might have been: structure fire, trash fire, grass fire. But the remarkably arid air that is a part of autumn here has dried the land out thoroughly already, all discernible moisture from the summer rains long since evaporated.
It reminded me of the other marker that September is in this place: It aws nineteen years ago this month that the fire in the image above tore through the ridgeline and slopes on the east side of the Pueblo.
Wings was there that day at the start. Standing outside, talking with another shop owner, they both heard the crack: dry lightning, in the middle of a clear and cloudless day. Ignition was instantaneous, and by the time he had run to grab his camera and raced down the lane to get a better view, the fire had already begun its own race along the ridges.
It would turn out to be a catastrophic event, one that left burn scars, brown and bald and studded wtih whiskers of burned timber, across the ridgeline and down miles’ worth of mountainside. It’s why we were so uneasy at the prospect of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex burning for months on the opposite side; here, we know how fast a second’s shift in wind direction can send the flames spiraling out of control. As it is, it has taken all nineteen of those years for the burn scars to begin to green over again — just shy of two decades, a whole generation.
In that, the land has been lucky, and so have we. After so many years in the grip of a twelve-hundred year drought, the next fire will not be remediated anywhere nearly so readily.
In autumn, time telescopes here: Our workload increases even as the hours of daylight shorten rapidly. Even in drought years, there is much to do to get ready for winter at eight thousand feet. But fall is also a season for reflection and contemplation, for thinking back on the lessons of years past that we may better manage the cold winds of the new year to come . . . and such other elemental forces as may present themselves in the process. An alpine desert is still desert, and wildfire is always a concern, even as most of the rest of the world adjacent to us complains about the advent of cold and snow. And the events of not quite twenty years ago brought home, in the most real of ways, the degree to which we depend upon the grace of the elements for our own survival.
Such was not the case in this year’s two-fires-become-one conflagration on the other side of that same ridge. No, those two blazes, and the megafire they united to become as they burned through some four hundred thousand acres over a matter of months, were entirely down to human negligence — of, perhaps, the worst sort, the institutional variety. In both cases, Forest Service agents failed utterly in their duties, not just to the people whose taxes pay their salaries but to the land they presume to “manage”; in both instances, prescribed burns handled recklessly were the cause. Tere is, quite literally, no excuse for the fact of either fire’s occurrence, but once again, it’s a perfect example of colonialism’s stubborn refusal to listen to the wisdom of the peoples whose ancestors successfully managed these lands and their fires for millennia while the agents’ near ancestors waded ankle-deep through the public sewer that was the European streets.
And now we have nearly half a million acres of new burn scars, habitat destroyed, animals and birds killed needlessly.
But the fire in the image above? That was the exact opposite phenomenon: a sudden caprice of weather and climate, creating electricity in the air from no clouds at all, a bolt of blue-sky fire in the late green of fall.
Most of humanity’s problems are of its own collective making. But it’s good to remember that once in a while, what befalls us is beyond our control.
How we respond is not.
And the Earth seems determined to remind us of this lesson now: In recent weeks, more massive flooding in Pakistan, creating a displacement and refugee crisis on an epic scale; two days ago, a hurricane blasting into Alaska’s western shores, with its own attendant flooding destroying Indigenous homes and commmunities there; in Taiwan two nights ago, a massive earthquake; another hurricane swamping Puerto Rico on this, the fifth anniversary of the nightmare hurricane from which that Indigenous island has (through the negligence and deliberate malice of this country’s colonial government) still not recovered; and now, just this very day an hour or two ago, another giant quake in Michoacán, México, with a tsuanmi warning in effect and tremors rumbling beneath the streets of that nation’s capital on the anniversary of its own two deadly megaquakes.
Our response to every single one has been criminally inadequate. Our response to the underlying causes, the climate collapse that is coming for us all courtesy of two centruies of colonial mistreatment of the Earth, has been those same colonial governments and their friends in the corporate and nonprofit sectors pretending that their tiny unmedicated Band-Aids hve the power to heal both the cancer eating away at air and water and soil and the gaping wounds of the amputations caused by their ongoing extractive assaults.
That climate collapse is coming for them as well is no consolation whatsoever. The Earth is thrashing in pain, trying to survive; she weeps, and we weep with her.
And we work, and we watch. There is rain predicted for this place for the latter half of this week, although we know how erroneous, or simply deceptive, such forecasts can be. On this day, we have white clouds scattered all across the blue expanse of the sky, but some have begun to coalesce into something darker. A little rain now, or a lot, would certainly be welcome.
But the land is dry once more, and two months of intermittent rains don’t even put the smallest dent ina. twelve-hundred-year drought. It’s September. Autumn is already here, crossing paths (and perhaps a few arrows) with summer. And we continue to scan the skies, alert for any sign of blue-sky fire in the late green of fall.
Because the green on our burn scars, nowo already going gold? Needs to survive for the next generation.
~ Aji
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