Falling stars

As the upcoming Resonance concert* approaches, the talk list has carried a lot of discussion among chorus members about the meaning of some of the songs and some of the lyrics. Some of this discussion has focused on poetic descriptions of nature—the meaning of phrases like "orange sticks of the sun" and "ponds ... like black cloth on which are painted islands of summer lilies." Another, but related, thread has explored the relationship between ourselves and nature—specifically the notion that we humans are responsible for great damage done to nature through our own acts. Especially, I have to say, the acts of the wealthiest and most powerful humans. Which includes (at least most of) us.

To me, these two topics seem connected. They are linked by their attention to the two sides of our (ambivalent) relationship with the natural world. On the one hand, we cherish and celebrate nature in all her wild glory. And on the other, we seem driven not to cherish but to claim, tame, and own nature's bounty. The reverence is seen in our striving to find words that can capture nature's magnificence. The sense of dominion is seen in our tendency to ignore even the messages so clearly written in melting ice caps and rising temperatures, in displaced and vanished species and increasingly frequent extreme weather events telling us, shouting at us, that our relationship with the planet is in deep trouble, and we bear the responsibility for that trouble. In the past few weeks, I've come across several articles about this general domain that seem particularly compelling. Which is to say that it's hard for me to imagine that we wouldn't be compelled by these stories to at least think about our responsibility vis-à-vis the planet. (If you harbor any doubt about that responsibility, check out the most recent report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.) 

So, three stories that might give us all pause ...

The first story may seem obscure at first glance, but not so much when you consider the implications. The basic story is that scientists recently discovered a 30,000-year-old virus preserved in the Siberian permafrost. Since this virus apparently infects only single-cell organisms, it's not a direct risk to humans. Still, this finding raises the possibility that as the climate warms, ancient viruses of other sorts might emerge that could infect humans. Consider, for example, what might happen if ancient Neanderthal viruses melted out of the thawing permafrost (or not-so-permafrost). Our immune systems haven't evolved to deal with these archaic viruses, so humans could be at huge risk. This could be a mighty high price to pay for our refusal to notice what we're doing to the planet.

A second story might also seem remote from most of us—in space if not in time—but it turns out not to be. We've heard for years that glaciers and polar ice are melting at increasingly rapid rates—faster, even, than the rate predicted by most climate change models. Glaciologists have recently suggested that one of the factors leading to this rapid melting is small particles of dust and soot that darken the ice and snow. The darker color absorbs more heat, thereby increasing the speed of melting. One source of this "dark snow" is distant forest fires. And, to take the next step, we know that the overall pattern of increasing temperatures and increasingly frequent and severe wildfires is associated with climate change and with human incursions into wildland areas. Again, our role in the spiral of increasing damage to the earth is not hard to spot.

Finally, the recent tragic mudslide in Washington State provides another cautionary tale. In this circumstance—as in situations where wildfires claim lives and property in the wildland-urban interface or floods do the same near bodies of water—we have chosen to locate our lives in the paths of danger, even as we exacerbate that danger by our own actions. In the case of the Washington slide, a major landslide had been predicted in this location for some time—in fact, this same hill had slid several times in the recent past. Yet, questionable logging practices continued, and folks continued to live in this lovely valley at the beautiful foot of this precarious hill. As if we weren't at risk. As if we weren't responsible—either for what might happen (the "act of nature") or for how we deal with known "natural" risks. In this case, as in many, we can add to the (perhaps naive or misinformed) denial of danger on the part of homeowners the persistent, intractable politics of avarice and greed: the fear that land will lose value if you tell people it’s dangerous. And the equally obstreperous egocentrism of the libertarian call for freedom from government regulation. Just how large a role is played by these forces was recently documented in a story about political obstacles to landslide mapping that underlines again our collective role in all this.

There's a line in one song, "Requiem," that refers to our having “fallen from grace.” One chorus member suggested that this "fall" may lie in our failure to be proper stewards of the marvelous planet we're privileged to inhabit. When I read her comment, I agreed immediately and wholeheartedly—and perhaps self-righteously. Still, as I reflect on this now, I’m reminded of my own easy disregard for the environmental costs of my daily activities, of my tendency to ignore some personal violations of that stewardship when convenience beckons. Or to write off some such acts (unnecessary driving) by appeals to my conscientious attention to other areas (recycling CFL light bulbs). Even though I know full well that I am, in fact, responsible for both acts.

As I wander around in this topic, I keep thinking about the surprising connections among apparently disparate elements of our experience. I think of the connection between fires in Colorado and ice melt in the Arctic. Between 30,000-year-old viruses and future health threats, linked by the 200-year-old industrial revolution. I think of a town buried or burned or flooded in a slide or wildfire or storm surge—nature thrown off balance in the wake of individual convictions and collective policies based on misinformation, disinformation, and monetary myopia. And I also think of the connection between nature and ourselves. Which is actually an absurd thing to say, now that I think about it, since we are, after all, part of nature.

And with this, I return to the stars. I wrote about this before, and it comes back to me often: We are all—every virus, person, creature, plant, rock, snowfield, and planet, every flame and slide and flood—made of the stuff of stars. Maybe if we could just remember that, we’d treat one another and the planet better.

But we’d have to remember it. Really.

------------------------------------- 

*For details about this concert, check out the recent blog on the topic here.

© Janis Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to the post.

To comment on this post, click on "No comments" (or "2 comments" etc.) below. Comments from "anonymous" welcome.

Weather, Mars, and wildfires ... who knew?

I've always loved weather. I love the kinds of weather than many folks hate. I love wind. I love desert heat. I love snow, falling so hard I can barely see through it. There's something in weather about being connected to this huge cosmos, (temporarily) surrendering comfort to the openness of it. And there's something about its freedom—not my freedom in it, but weather's freedom from me, from us. Its indifference to our wishes, its refusal to yield to our control. It schools us, humbles us. Reminds us of our inevitable limitations. And usually welcomes us, provided we enter on its terms and not our own. I'm reminded of the message on a friend's t-shirt: "Skiing is the ultimate dance, and the mountain always leads." To paraphrase: Weather is the ultimate dance partner, and she chooses the music.

I mention my love for weather as an entree to another topic—actually, two other topics, both weather-related. But lest I lose your interest because you're thinking this is going to be nothing but an overdrawn, totally naive paean to weather, let me qualify my enthusiasm. I also recognize the terrible side of weather's indifference to human wishes and human interventions. And I have to admit that my affection for weather has been challenged in recent years by the stark realities of its extreme versions both locally and worldwide: record drought, record wildfires, record rains, record tornadoes, record flooding, record hurricanes, record typhoons ... the terrible side of weather.

Weather is unquestionably a force in our lives, both marvelous and terrifying. And knowing more about it can only help. Fortunately, balancing my naive affection for strong wind and dessert heat are calm, scientific approaches of folks like the atmospheric scientists at the University of Colorado and at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), both located in Boulder, right next door to my weather innocence. Which brings me to my actual topic: My concept of "weather"—the kind I love or curse—is so much narrower than "weather" science tells me it could be. I learned this by happenstance. In the past week, I've read about two scientific undertakings that happily merge my interest in weather with other topics about which I am just about as enthusiastic: space and fires.

First, and most immediate, is today's launch of a new Mars orbiter whose scientific payload is the MAVEN, which stands for "Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission" (I know, the acronym is a stretch, but it actually does describe, in an obscure sort of way, what the orbiter will do). I actually just watched the launch live on NASA TV. The timing of the launch was crucial, because Mars isn't sitting still waiting for us to send a spacecraft up to visit. So missing this time window might have sunk the mission. But off it went on an 11-month trip to Mars, where it will put itself in orbit and hang around for a decade or so.

Assuming all goes well en route, MAVEN, whose lead scientist is at CU, will be studying Mars weather (ah, there's the connection!) in an attempt to figure out what happened to the water that clearly used to flow on Mars. Now, this undertaking may seem really remote (well, it is really remote .... but I mean it in a different way here), but this information could tell us a lot about how Mars evolved differently from Earth, losing the atmosphere that retained water and therefore sustained life. This in turn, will tell us something (more) about how planets nurture life—important information as we try to determine whether life exists (has existed, will exist) on other planets. If you've followed at all my interest in cosmology, you can imagine why I find this fascinating, especially with the weather connection, another passion that you now know about. Weather! on Mars! How cool is that?

The other unexpected weather connection I just learned about is a link between weather and fire. Not in the way you might think. This isn't about how fire is affected by weather—factors like aridity, heat, and wind. Instead it's about how fire actually is weather. This time, it was scientists at NCAR (working with others at the University of MD) whose thinking stretched my own. Fire behavior has always been the province of forestry scientists, who have tried to explain (and, ideally, predict) how fires will act based on phenomena related to forests and weather—type and distribution of fuel, terrain, natural barriers, humidity, wind, and so forth. But it seems that when atmospheric scientists brought a new perspective to the question of how wildfires behave, the game changed. It's testimony to the value of interdisciplinary work (and to the problem of academic "silos") that their different "eyes" saw something new. 

It turns out that fire behavior looks a lot like weather, perhaps especially like thunderstorms. As the fire consumes fuel, it produces moisture and heat, which rise—much like heated air in a thunderstorm. This draws in air at the base of the fire (much like thunderstorms do), creating multi-directional winds of the sort that may cause wildfires to "blow up" and that catch firefighters unprepared. The combination of this model of wildfire behavior and improved satellite weather data may change the future of wildfire management. If so, this view of fire as weather may save some lives.

I've always loved weather. It's one reason I love Colorado—the weather here is so varied and so changeable, so wonderful and so humbling. So free, despite our wish to control it. It turns out that the very word "weather" has the same quality. It just keeps morphing, changing. I love that about language. It's so free, despite our wish to control it.

“The fine line ...

… between nature’s beauty and her indifference.”

It’s a phrase I read in a Time magazine description of movies featuring a single protagonist caught on this line (“Cast Away,” “Into the Wild,” “127 Hours,” “Gravity”). It’s a perfect description of our ambivalent feelings about nature: our delight in her beauty and diversity and our ultimate powerlessness over the magnificent forces that we still can’t control. (Although we do influence them … more on that in another blog, coming soon). Being a weather freak, I think about this a lot.

It’s been an amazing year in Colorado weather-wise. Of course, folks in Colorado (and in New England and Michigan and San Francisco … heck, folks everywhere) are fond of saying of the local weather, “If you don’t like the weather, just wait a few minutes. It will change.” Still, it’s true that Colorado has all the makings of dramatically erratic weather. The high altitude and low humidity combine with that amazing wall of mountains bisecting the state from north to south to stir up some complex and only vaguely predictable weather patterns. But this year has been one for even Colorado’s record books. Over and over.

Only slightly belaboring the point, it went like this. A very dry winter that left the snow pack far below average was followed by record-breaking precipitation in April and May, raising the snow pack in the mountains to normal levels in a few weeks and bringing much-needed rain to lower elevations. Then the rains ended, and a parching drought set in that lasted all summer. With it came record-breaking fires, fires that reached new levels of intensity, speed of growth, and degree of devastation to wildlands and property. The early rains added long grasses to the fuel—but there was already plenty of fodder for the fires. (More on that in another blog, coming soon.) Then this summer of virtually zero rain slid toward fall, culminating in record high temperatures in early September. Ironically, news coverage of that record heat wave predicted a “welcome” cool-down and increased chance of rain a couple of days later. The cooler weather was welcome, but not (for a change in Colorado) the rain. In just 10 days of record-breaking rain, the early-summer fires receded from the weather news to be replaced by the late summer floods. The “thousand-year rain,” the “hundred-year flood,” the signs of which were still all-too evident on walk near my home earlier this week.

             

Then, remarkably, nature’s indifference gave way to her beauty, and we’re suddenly gifted with this amazing variegated fall with its spectacular morning skies—a chance for some pictures, which have been missing from my recent, more text-dense blogs. Not that I’m finished talking, of course. But before I start, an interlude:

Fabulous fall …

  

... and its spectacular morning skies

  

 

A fine line, indeed.

Fire, rain, and the marvel of human resilience

Since it became clear that Boulder—and then Colorado more broadly—would have major flooding, I’ve been wondering what I might be able to say about it in a blog. As I start writing, I’m still not sure … but that’s nothing new.

Thoughts on the flood …

Many of you have undoubtedly seen the slide shows and videos, read the coverage, and heard stories on the radio. Those of you who live around here have probably swapped tales with family, friends, and coworkers. It’s all stunning: streets running like rivers, houses vanishing into the creek, flooded basements, damaged and destroyed cars, shops and their wears flattened, tiny streams spreading over acres of land, sewage backing up through manhole covers and basement drains. People startled from sleep by the sound of boulders crashing into their homes. Neighbors helping neighbors to lay a futile line of sandbags, cross a swollen stream, dig through mud and debris to get to a buried home. Rivers leaving their decades-old (or centuries-old) beds to carve new paths through land that used to be farm or lawn or parking lot. People stranded on hillsides, in shelters, at friends’ houses waiting for rescue by a National Guard helicopter. Promises that roads and bridges will be rebuilt to restore access to isolated towns before the snow falls.

Nothing I can say matches all that. These “reality” TV-esque events, come paradoxically to life, are commentary enough.

But then there are the less-told stories, shared among those of us who—by sheer good fortune—were spared these experiences. Louisville, where we live, is farther east and significantly higher than Boulder—both characteristics that spared us the raging torrents that roared down the mountain canyons west of Boulder and straight into town. Imagine rocky funnels gathering water from torrential rains over miles and miles of already drenched mountain slopes, channeling it all into narrow canyons that empty into the western edge of a college town nestled right smack against hills. Add the rain that’s falling in sheets over the town itself, and you get a hint of Boulder in this epic storm. Climb a significant rise to the east, away from the mountains, to a plateau overlooking the valley that cradles Boulder, and you get a hint of what it’s like in Louisville. It’s like a different world, mostly.

I say mostly, because now, almost a week after the flooding began, I’m beginning to hear stories about damage even up here. I spend a fair amount of time doing my editing work at the local coffee shop, and the chatter there over this past week has followed an interesting trajectory. For the first few days, everyone who came in was talking about how lucky they (we) are to have escaped any (or severe) damage. Then stories started rolling in about the nearby creek that overflowed its banks, closing several roads and causing flooding in some Louisville neighborhoods. With those stories came tales of people helping other people to clean out flooded basements and clear mud from streets and driveways. Then yesterday, I heard about a buddy of one of the regulars who had been evacuated from one of the canyons, but had gone back to collect his stuff. Today for the first time, I heard someone in the coffee shop who had himself backpacked out, leaving his house and most of his stuff behind in a flooded canyon west of Boulder.

But still, for the most part, we regulars at Paul’s are a privileged lot. Mostly, Louisville came out pretty well. And that feels strangely surreal. One person told me he feels a little guilty, and I completely understood what he meant. When I look out my window, I can see that it’s been raining a lot lately. On the day of the worst part of the storm, I looked out my window and saw that it was raining really hard. Period. That’s it. No flooding, no fear, no worry, no damage. Yet I know that just a few miles down the road, all heck broke loose that night.

For several days, following the guidance of emergency workers, my partner and I stayed near home and didn’t venture into Boulder. Then over the weekend, when travel restrictions were loosened, we went in to do a couple of errands and check on my partner’s private practice office. Amazingly, it’s fine, although it’s located quite close to Boulder Creek, which overflowed its banks big time during the height of the flooding.  But then yesterday, when I went into Boulder for a medical appointment, I found that the first floor of the medical center where my doctor’s office is located was flooded. Outside, the streets looked like newly abandoned river beds, full of mud and rocks, with the water’s flow traced along the edges, and the grasses and flowers bowed down, pointing the direction of the flow. It’s all so spotty. We’ve talked to friends who live in Boulder who had mild damage, others who had serious damage, and others who had none. Even in Boulder, high and dry can co-exist in the same block with heavy flooding. It all depends on the whims of the rain, the wind, the currents, the local layout. 

And through it all, after each trip to Boulder, I come home to the comfort of a dry, intact, unchanged home. I look out the window and can see that it rained a lot in the last few days. That’s all.

Today, I ran into a friend at the dentist’s office. Her basement flooded the first night, and she had tales to tell about hurried 1:00 am efforts to save her teenage daughter’s stuff as water filled the basement, followed by a day’s labor cutting up and removing soaked (brand new) carpet. That will be followed by the long slog ahead of tearing out, rebuilding, and refurnishing. “We were lucky,” she said. “We’re all fine.”

Yesterday, I noticed that assorted requests for flood-relief funds have begun to crop up—in the grocery store, in the dry cleaner’s, even on national online sites. Seeing these reminded me of similar pleas during the Four Mile Canyon fire just three years ago. On Labor Day 2010, a major fire broke out in the hills just west of Boulder, ultimately burning thousands of acres of forest and destroying scores of homes. Some of this week’s flooding happened in areas affected by that fire. The fire, like the flood, left many people homeless and many more with seemingly unending cleanup and repair lying ahead. In the fire, too, neighbors showed up to help neighbors. And then, too, people—even people who lost their homes—said, “I was lucky.”

Part of this feeling “lucky” is the sheer relativity of it all: Most folks can count themselves lucky in comparison with what might have happened or what happened to others. I can easily say I’m lucky. All I notice is that it rained really, really hard. My partner can say she’s lucky because, although she had to drive, white-knuckled, through blinding rain and rising waters, her drive was relatively short and she got home safely. My friend at the dentist can say she’s lucky because, although her basement flooded, they’re all safe and the house is generally intact. The guy I heard today at the coffee shop feels lucky because his house is still there, although currently inaccessible and likely damaged, and he’s safe. I read interviews with people who had to be airlifted out, who had lost their homes and everything in them, who said they were lucky because everyone in the family got out alive. “Lucky” is relative. This is a great coping skill, to judge life not in absolute terms but in context.

Now, I realize that some folks don’t feel lucky in any way. Some people died. Some lost loved ones. Some lost treasured possessions that are irreplaceable (for any of a million reasons), some lost a way of life that they cherished and will never be able to rebuild. Some came to the tragedy with too few resources—monetary, physical, emotional—to come away feeling OK about coming away. But many people who could well be feeling overwhelmed, bitter, powerless are instead feeling “lucky.” Why, I ask myself.

There’s something more to it than just feeling OK relative to someone else, some hypothetical worse outcome. After the Four Mile fire, I came across a blog by a woman who lost her house in that fire. She’s a wonderful writer, and I got totally engrossed in her journey back from that tragedy to building a new home (in the same spot) and moving forward in new ways. She challenges the easy conclusion that, in the long run, the fire was a “good” thing, losing her house and rebuilding were a “gift,” etc. Sure, she says, she learned a lot, made new friends, emerged from the tragedy with new strengths and new promise in her life. But that doesn’t make the fire or the loss of her home a “good” thing—and she’s troubled when people frame it this way. Instead, she believes that this interpretation of such tragedy says something else entirely … I’ll leave it to you to consider her thoughts about that. Here’s her blog on the topic.

I love what she had to say about this issue … but what her discussion made me think about today was this: It’s not the fire or the flood that was a good thing. No, the “good thing,” the “blessing” in such moments is that folks realize their ability to tap into this amazing reservoir of resilience that so many people bring to these awful moments, these unbelievably daunting, disheartening, even devastating circumstances. Not everyone does this, I know. But so many people do. Part of this is personal, gut-deep inner resilience whose origins are undoubtedly complicated and varied. And part of it is the upwelling of what the German’s call Gemeinschaftsgefühl—a sort of untranslatable word that means something like “community feeling” or “feeling for humanity.” It’s what we mean when we say that in crisis, everyone pulls together, neighbors take care of neighbors. (Would that it didn’t require a crisis! But then, that personal store of resilience is often hard to find except in crisis, too.)

I don’t want this to slip into some sort of positive thinking pop psychology thing: "Stand strong! Work together! Hang on! Draw on your innate resilience! … and all will be well." Nor do I want to disregard the very real and irredeemable losses that some people have faced.

I just want to pay homage to this marvelous thing that comes alive when we are stretched beyond what we believed we could handle. So far, I have only observed and marveled at this in others. And for that, I realize I am truly lucky. I understand that my turn may come, and if it does, my hope is that I might find such resilience myself. And if not—or if it’s not enough—I hope I have a community willing to bring on that Gemeinschaftsgefühl.

Fire!

A while ago, I talked about a book called Fire on the Mountain, which I read for my class on "The American West." It's a truly gripping story of the events of July 6, 1994, when 14 young wildland firefighters died on Storm King Mountain just west of Glenwood Springs, CO. After I read the book, I decided I had to walk the trail to the site where they died. Once I knew their story, not doing so would somehow feel disrespectful. My partner and I made plans for the trek in May, and when the weather foiled that, we scheduled a return trip this week.

So I climbed Storm King this morning. Now, I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Glenwood Springs resting my aching knees ... with my mind full of what I saw, what I know about Storm King from my reading, how it felt to be there where 14 people died late one July afternoon. It just rained here. I'm thinking, "If only that had happened on that day." So now, I've decided to finally blog about a topic that has consumed my consciousness for the past several weeks.

The topic is fire. Wildfire. Fire on Storm King Mountain in 1994. Fire in Colorado Springs last year and in Fourmile Canyon near Boulder two years ago. Fire in the wooded hills of Colorado's Black Forest a few weeks ago and in the piñon scrub of Yarnell, Arizona, right after that. Fire in the wild land–urban interface, or WUI (pronounced “woo-ee” in wildfire circles). Fire that risks and consumes lives in exchange for mountain views, open desert skies, solitude, a “return to nature.”

Fire—wild land fire—has been so on my mind  these past couple of weeks, as Black Forest and Yarnell burned and I anticipated my pilgrimage up Storm King. During that time, I've worked sporadically on a blog about this topic. I've hesitated to post it because it's so ... um ... difficult. From my perspective, it's full of deep sadness about the firefighters' deaths and vague outrage over how they died—protecting homes built in the WUI. From others' perspective, it may seem like a rant, might appear to disregard the complexity of the situation. So I postponed it, waiting to see how today's walk would speak to me. Now I have the answer: deep sadness and vague outrage.

I'm troubled about two things here: the tragedy of these people's deaths and our collective inability to think about what their deaths mean for how we live our lives. Before I talk about these issues, I need to have a full-disclosure moment: This issue has a very personal meaning for me, although I only recently made the connection. For most of my adult life, I lived in the WUI, in the mountains just west of Denver. I loved it without reservation. I loved awaking to the absence of city noise and the quiet presence of birdsong and wind in the aspen. I loved sitting on the deck and watching the sun set behind the familiar line of ponderosa pines. I loved watching the fireweed grow up in the meadow and the birds sitting on the deck railing. I loved walking out the back door to take the dogs for a walk every evening on public land. So I know well the draw of living on the edge of "civilization"—close enough to enjoy the resources of a city yet distant enough to enjoy the beauty and peace of the woods. I understand people's attachment to their spot in the WUI. This is personal for me, and my reaction to it is complex.

With that as background, here's how Storm King spoke to me today:

I started my walk early to beat the heat, and I immediately noticed the paradoxical beauty of morning in this place. Yesterday's rain drops on the leaves, beautiful red cliffs in the morning light, wildflowers along the trail—and even, as I reached the valley where the fire had raged, burned stumps as lovely as sculptures. 

I was also struck as I climbed by the odd reality that just below the hill where fire took 14 lives, the traffic on I-70 sped busily along, and rafters floated happily down the river. Of course, this is how the world is: beauty often keeps company with horror, and the everyday business of the world continues in the face of death. But the contrasts heightened for me the impact of this place and its story.

I was passed on the way up by a group of young men. The writing on their t-shirts identified them as Forest Service firefighters. I met another such group on my way down. I wondered whether this is a regular part of training for (at least local) potential wildland firefighters—a difficult hike to a place where the worst outcome possible in their profession happened. To learn about fire from this scene, to get clear about the dangers of this work, to pay respects to fallen comrades. The first group were at the observation point (which provides an overview of the fire scene and marks the end of the steep and rocky but "maintained" trail) as I approached. They seemed to be in deep thought—maybe even prayer—so I hung back for a while.

I stopped at the observation point to read the interpretive signs. Across the valley I could just make out the thin, horizontal line—now largely overgrown—that marked the fire line, the route of the futile attempt to outrun the fire. I continued along the (not maintained, extremely steep and rugged) trail leading to the sites where some firefighters escaped and others died. This part of the hike truly felt like a pilgrimage. I was climbing the very hill where the firefighters worked and died. The hillside is now overgrown with dense stands of oak, nearly impenetrable except for the narrow path created for access to the memorials. Occasional bare trees suggested the piñon forest that grew here before the fire. 

I climbed to the ridgetop where the attack on the fire originated, some distance from where the fire began farther along the ridge. On the other side of this crest is another drainage (shown in the picture on the left)—a division that became literally a matter of life and death. As I approached the ridgetop, I remembered sections of the book describing what happened here, and my heart slipped deeper into sorrow.

At the crest was the first of many monuments to the firefighters. This one, like the others, was surrounded by random items left behind by other visitors—coins, flowers, flags, water bottles, snuff cans, a garden elf. I moved on past the spot where many of the firefighters escaped over the ridge and dropped into the east drainage just before the flames overtook them. I recalled the stories of hair on fire, burned arms, shelters used as capes to protect from the licking flames, screams to "Run, run!"

Walking along the ridge, I came to "the tree"—a skeleton of a tree that served as a meeting point, marking the top of the fire line that the teams were carving through dense underbrush, oak, and piñon. The tree, like the memorial I passed earlier, was festooned with all manner of mementos—small items like before, plus shirts, caps, knapsacks, boots, jackets.

Near the tree, I found the start of the fire line, which dropped directly down the steep slope and into the oak. A burned stump here framed the firefighters' view of Canyon Creek Estates, the development that their work here was intended to protect. 

                                                           

Just a short distance down the fire line—maybe 20 yards below the ridge—I was startled to see the first memorial, a lone cross, decorated with an assortment of pilgrims' belongings. I knew the memorials would be here, but I hadn't quite imagined what it would be like to see them. This, I thought, is how close one firefighter got to safety before the flames got so close he deployed his shelter. And died, alone, facedown, head toward the ridge. 

After spending some time there, I moved on down the hill, now anticipating another memorial. After a few yards, I looked up to gauge what was ahead, and my heart stopped as I saw cross after cross after cross dotting the hill below me, all surrounded with mementos. I stood fixed to the spot, tears running down my cheeks. Slowly, I regained enough presence to ease my way down and visit them all. Other than the first memorial, all of them were in groups of two or three. People died with someone they knew nearby. They wouldn't have been able to talk over the roar of the fire. Lying in their shelters, they would have been alone, unable to touch one another. But nearby would have been another person who knew them, knew where they were and what was happening. Who could witness—as all those who have come since have tried to do—their sacrifice. I took pictures to record for myself the immensity of what I was seeing. I knew right away that I wouldn't post the pictures of individual memorials here, opting instead for the collective, spontaneously evolving ones shown above. To show the individual crosses would feel to me like I gathered them as souvenirs. But I wanted to take something of the place with me. I want to remember.

As I started back up the fire line, up the hill toward the ridge, I tried to imagine the terror that fueled those people's effort to "Run, run!" for their lives up this impossibly steep pitch, this God-forsaken hill. When I reached The Tree at the top, I understood totally the impulse to leave something. To say, "I was here. I came to pay my respects. I want a part of me to stay here as witness to what happened." The hike back to the trailhead was one long meditation on what I'd seen and what they must have experienced that day.

And now I'm back in Glenwood, comfortably ensconced in a coffee shop and settled into telling this story. Just as important as this one, though, is the broader topic I've been stewing about for weeks: wildfire and its disastrous human costs.

Several things contributed to this preoccupation. First, of course, was Fire on the Mountain. Then came a guest speaker in my class on "The American West." And then came Yarnell and its media aftermath. Together, these things provided a new (and totally unexpected, un-sought-after) frame for me to think about fire.

Late in the class, Dr. Limerick had a guest speaker, Mike Daluz, who used to work for the U.S. Forest Service, initially as a “hot shot” crewman and later as a fire ecologist. Daluz was also involved in the follow-up after the fire on Storm King Mountain. Having seen up close the personal costs of the task these young people had undertaken on behalf of other people’s property, he had some very strong views about the growing tendency to build in the WUI—and to do so expecting that, in the case of trouble, someone would come along to save the day. About people's apparent indifference to the fact that, in Patty Limericks words, they were betting young people’s lives against their enjoyment of living in the WUI. To illustrate his point, he showed overhead slides of homes that had been, in his words, “surgically implanted” in the midst of dense stands of trees. Looking at the pictures from the recent fire in the Black Forest, I could swear his pictures were taken there—before the fire. People know there’s a risk in building there, living there, he said. They agree to take that risk, insisting at meetings intended to teach fire mitigation that they are willing to take the risk in exchange for the beauty, the peace. But when fire comes, he said, they want something done, by someone else, and fast.

With these earlier experiences as background, the media coverage after Yarnell was almost mesmerizing for me. So much of it echoed what I’d learned from that class and from reading about Storm King. The New York Times ran several really excellent articles (I recommend them highly; read them here, here, and here). The first of these addressed very directly the question that should be on the mind of everyone who chooses to live in the WUI: “What did they die for?” The author, Timothy Egan, writes:

Once again, the question hangs over another of the oft-lovely places where fire is at the top of the predator chain: what did they die for? Young men trained to be the best of the best are not supposed to take their last breaths inside the oven of a foil shelter, facedown in hot ground, gasping through the roar of a blowup…

Every homeowner in the arid lands owes these fallen men an answer. More than ever, wild land firefighters die for people’s summer homes and year-round retreats. They die protecting property, kitchen views, dreams cast in stucco and timber.

You can’t blame people for living amid the chaparral and piñon pine in the sweep of Arizona where the land rises up from the ceaseless heat of the valley to the cooler air of the plateau…. Nor can you blame people in Colorado for living with the sweet fragrance of a forest at 9,000 feet. 

The homeowners know that living in fire country is different from living in the heart of a city. They know the elements—timber, grass, brush, wind, heat, lightning—and the difficult terrain mean that shiny fire trucks cannot arrive at their smoking doorstep on a minute’s notice. They’ve made a pact with combustible nature, a gamble.

And yet, once a galloping afternoon wind transforms a smolder into a sprint of flames, these homeowners expect the best of the best to be on the scene…. In a panic, homeowners rage and scream: do something! 

Folks know the risk, and they say that they’re willing to take that risk, the possibility of losing everything, in exchange for living in their chosen idyllic place. Yet, when the risk becomes reality, when the danger actually arrives, they want to hand the risk off to someone else. Perhaps they assume that wild land firefighting is like city firefighting—the people in charge have the personnel and the equipment to handle it. Injuries are rare, deaths rarer still. But that is simply not the case with wild land fires. In remote fires, wild land firefighters have to carry all their gear, all their food, all their water with them as they hike to these places. And no matter how well trained they are, their only means of escape if the fire gets out of hand is to "Run, run!" Unfortunately, that moment doesn’t announce itself. The moment when the fire overcame those young men in Arizona earlier this month or the men and women in Colorado nearly 20 years ago—those moments came on suddenly and without enough warning for escape. The sudden waves of flames that overtook the firefighters in Arizona earlier this month and at Storm King in 1994 were both estimated to be moving at 24 miles per hour. No safety plan can protect you from flames moving that fast.

For me, this already personal issue became more personal today as I walked Storm King. I recall all those years living in the mountains when I didn’t even think about this issue. I was never confronted with the immediate possibility of wild land fire near my home. We prepared for the eventuality—cutting down some trees because of beetles and others specifically to reduce the threat of fire. We cleared brush near the house and stacked the firewood away from the house. We even planned what to do in case a fire came close enough that we would have to evacuate—how to get the pets out to safety, how to get various vehicles to a safe place, what to take along. But we never had to worry, because no fire ever got that close, whether we would lose all of the possessions we had left behind.

But more to the point here, I never even considered the possibility that young people might be called upon to defend the little corner of paradise where I had put down roots. It’s not that I dismissed it as unimportant—it simply never crossed my mind. And it never crossed my mind that, even if that happened, anyone would be put at risk. I hadn't thought about it much since, except to empathize with people who lost their homes to fire.

How would I have felt, I ask myself now, if I had lived in Canyon Creek Estates, the enclave at the base of Storm King that 14 young women and men died trying to protect? If I had been watching from Yarnell, Arizona, as the flames were kept at bay, my home protected at the expense of 19 more young lives. How did those people feel? My partner and I found one answer to this question when we drove to and through Canyon Creek Estates. The neighborhood association has built a memorial park, with 14 plaques carrying the firefighters' names mounted on large stones. At the entrance is a dedication plaque. The small print along the top reads, "This special area is dedicated in memory of the firefighters who gave their lives while protecting our homes."

"Their lives" ... "our homes." It was chilling. As my partner pointed out, the equation just doesn't work. Honoring them as heroes does not free us from our responsibility to see the grotesque inequity of this trade-off. Heroes they may well be, but they were also martyrs. And to what cause?

Still, I know it's more complex. Any of these people would likely have insisted, before and after the fact, that no structure is worth a life. Yet, the potential for that very trade-off is exactly what we sign up for when we live in the WUI. I can't condemn these people because I honestly don't know how I would have responded in a similar situation. Would I have said, "Do something! Fast!" had that moment actually arrived?

When I lived in the mountains, I expect I would have done just that—because I simply hadn't thought about it deeply enough. And how would I have felt back then, I now ask myself, if I had learned that someone died trying to protect my home in the woods? Could I ever be simply, deeply grateful to them, honor them as “heroes,” install a monument and move on? Or would I forever feel a sense of pained, futile responsibility for their deaths?

I’m not saying that everyone who lives in the WUI should abandon their dream homes. But I am saying that we need to think about this differently, think about it deeply. We need to take responsibility for the gambles we’re taking, the bargains we’re making. In the immediate future, that means much more careful planning for new construction, much more careful fire mitigation for existing buildings (even though it’s not a sure fix, it might help). 

Then we need to talk about how we can change our policies and our practices so that others’ lives aren’t lost protecting our dreams. And we’d better hurry, because the problem is only getting worse, what with climate change, the reduction in money for fire mitigation and firefighting, and the growing number of homes being built in the WUI.

Today, I stood in tears before the memorials for 14 people who died saving "our homes." Although they didn't die saving my property, they might have. And given what I know today, I’m certain that if I were faced with this situation, I would struggle mightily with the possibility that I could be betting my property against someone else's life.

I wonder if it would be a good idea to require a hike to Storm King as a prerequisite for living in the WUI.