What's Left Behind After a Wildfire

Camp Wildfire, California, 2019

 

I've read a lot of Americans tweeting that "2020 sucks!" Can you blame them? They've had to deal with President Trump's continuous barrage of outrages against norms, laws, and decency, the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump's criminally negligent mismanagement of it, Black Lives Matter protests, and counter protests, a proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the coming 2020 Election, with Russian and Republican attempts to sabotage it. It's all too much to take in, let alone process.

Sandwiched between the political unrest and advancing plague threat, we experienced an unusual array of weird weather events that seemed to come and then quickly go on our daily news feed.

• A bomb cyclone hammered Newfoundland, Canada, at the beginning of the year, prompting people to ask, "What the hell's a 'bomb cyclone?" The provincial capital St. John's was buried in 30 inches of snow, its highest daily snowfall on record.
• Plumes of hot and dry air laden with dust from Africa's Sahara Desert surged as far north as parts of the U.S. Midwest, leaving Omaha, Nebraska, with a taste of desert living.
• In Florida, Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Key West set over 120 combined daily records in 2020. The state had its record hottest and second driest March dating to 1895.
• An Easter Sunday outbreak spawned a pair of EF4 tornadoes (estimated wind speeds of 166 to 200 mph) in southern Mississippi, the first multiple tornadoes ever. The next Sunday, another EF4 tornado tore through an area only 20 to 40 miles south of the previous Easter Sunday tornadoes.
• Catastrophic 2019-2020 Australian bushfires charred more than 20% of the country's forests, destroyed over 1,400 homes, and killed an estimated 1 billion animals. In January, smoke from the fires circumnavigated the globe. The smoke plume rose higher into the atmosphere than ever previously documented. 
• Lake Erie was ice free from Dec. 29 through Jan. 17 and then again for four days after Groundhog Day. The lake was ice free for the season beginning on March 10. In an average winter, Lake Erie reaches a peak of 70% ice coverage in February, and isn't ice free until late April.
• Caribou, Maine, one of the farthest-north towns in the continental U.S., was one of the hottest places east of the Mississippi River. Temperatures soared to 95 degrees on June 18, then 96 degrees the next day. On June 19, the nation's only heat advisory was in Maine.
• On June 20, the temperature in Verkhoyansk, a town in northeast Russia about 260 miles south of the Arctic coast and about 6 miles north of the Arctic Circle, topped out at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Now, as the days grow short and we see September in our rear-view mirror, Mother Nature has gotten even nastier, demanding that we pay attention. With catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, typhoons, storms, tornadoes, and these weird weather gyrations one has to ask, "What is it that Mom is trying to tell us?"

 

I discovered a poet recently, who has something to say about the catastrophic wildfires decimating California. Her name is Molly Fisk (@MollyFisk). In 2019, Fisk was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She currently serves as the poet laureate of Nevada County, California. This is her poem inspired by what's left behind after a wildfire, and what lives on in those who survive it.

 

Particulate Matter 

If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.
Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, window glass, seat belt clasps.
The propane tanks in everyone's yards, though we didn't hear them explode.

R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store's plastic letters in puddled
 colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.
The laundromat's washers' round metal doors.

But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library—everything they contained.
 How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:
 how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild

hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final 
cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite
 ourselves we're inhaling.

Copyright 2018 Molly Fisk

Camp Wildfire Damage, California 2020