Where do we go from here?

Dispatches from the smoke

The whole forest seems to hold its breath. The sky above, a murky grey. The mountains, barely visible. The dense smell of smoke seeping into our pores.

This, a direct result of a low snow winter that some celebrated. Oh, the spring rains will come, they said. But the spring rains didn't come.

In my yard, the mock orange bushes I carefully transplanted are drought stressed. The forest floor, crunchy. We are bracketed by fires in all directions. Scooper planes fly over the lake, scattering tourists in their kayaks. A fire camp springs up in a farmer's field. It hasn't rained in a long, long time.

Fire season hits differently when you're no longer a firefighter. When it was part of my job, before fires went so nuclear on the regular, I loved the sight of a smoke column. Most of the time, those fires did good: mosaic patterns, clearing out choked brush. Sometimes they were the Big One. Sometimes, people died. I grew to realize it was not as simple as I had thought. (But still. Unless you've walked through the woods with a chainsaw as part of an intensive thinning project, like I have, people need to cool it on the war cry of “forest mismanagement!”It’s not as simple as they might imagine.)

Anyway. We notice the birds have fallen silent. I look it up and it's true: birds sing less in heavy wildfire smoke. We hike for three days and see only one person, the fewest ever in my memory in July. People come for the rodeo, but they don't want to hike in this. I don't either.

I know that my temporary recreational suffering is no match for what firefighters are facing, or people currently evacuated, or people losing their homes. But we all have our own hard. And mine is this: if our winters continue on their downward spiral, if our alpine summers are full of smoke, what is left? Is it time to move somewhere else?

I want to live where birds still sing.

We bash our way through what a fire has left. It's been four years, I think, and we haul ourselves over massive blowdowns and search for a trail that is effectively gone. An optimistic trail crew is headed out here soon, but maybe it would be better to leave it alone.

My eyes burn from smoke. I think of my first fire. I was 22, maybe 23? We were sent to a fire in central Oregon. I knew nothing. I was directed to stand in thick smoke with a pulaski, “holding the line.” It was difficult to breathe; the cotton bandana I pulled over my mouth and nose did little. Nobody talked about smoke inhalation then. It wasn't as simple as I thought, back then.

The forest holds its breath. Here we are again in the smoke. What will happen this year? “Were you sad to give up your fire gear?” Jeff asks. He is on his three days off from the line. He says a young woman snatched up my fire boots. I am glad about that. But sad too, in the way you are when you've reinvented yourself, but you still taste the bitter hidden in the sweet.

The smoke settles in at night. I close the windows, but it comes in regardless. The rodeo goes on. Life goes on. Where do we go from here? Nobody knows. But there is this: the memory of my mom, hopefully planting bulbs in the fall, knowing she had melanoma, but banking on the fact she would be there to see the flowers.

She wasn't. But I saw them. Her small act of bravery makes me cry, but also smile, because what else can we do? We peer through the smoke. We believe it will end. We remember the rain.

My memoir about firefighting