Flames

Oregon and Northern California are on fire.


This is my and M.'s first wildfire season in Oregon. It is awful and it is mesmerizing. In terms of the danger to us, let me quickly reassure you: We're fine. We do not live in a heavily wooded area, and we're miles and miles and miles away from the nearest fire. At the same time, we are also several thousand miles closer to a wildfire than we've ever been before.

M. and I decided to drive to Crater Lake National Park a week ago. As we approached the lake, M. gasped. "Oh, wow," he exhaled, nearly skipping toward the rim, and soon I saw: It was the stuff of epic poetry. I was aware of the volcanic creation story of Crater Lake, of the very technical geological processes that gave birth to this beauty, but no scientific text could capture the balladry of the view.

View of Crater Lake from Rim Village

After leaving Crater Lake, we started home, pulling off the road for stops at trails and sites that caught our interest. We got to see our first Oregon waterfall...

Mill Creek Falls near Prospect, OR

...and a section of the beautiful Rogue River that featured a natural bridge and fascinatingly complex lava tubes.

Rogue River near Union Creek and the Rogue River Gorge viewpoint

As we descended the mountains, the air became hazy. "Is that fog?" I asked M., because that's a bit what it looked like. The sky was nowhere to be found, and the lower we got in elevation, the thicker the air became.

And then we smelled it. M. opened the car window just to be sure, and there was no doubting it: Fire.

We later learned that just north of where we were driving, a 6,000+ acre wildfire was burning. As we gathered more information about it, we learned other wildfires had been bursting up across the Oregon and Northern California landscape. We could drive to the north, east, or south--not that we would, but we could--and eventually reach a wildfire. My eastern mind couldn't latch onto just how extensive these fires were and just how strongly they impacted the entire surrounding regions. It seemed almost like fiction. It was a horror movie to me, especially when internet news provided such intense visual representations.

Firefighter battling the Stouts Fire in Southern Oregon, (c)Associated Press

Of course I heard on the news in the preceding weeks word of fires in Northern California and in stretches of Oregon far from my immediate surroundings. Of course I tsk-tsked them with a click of the tongue. I spent decades, though, in areas where fires were concentrated in one spot: One apartment building. One home. One car on one street somewhere. One couch some college kid set aflame to express his displeasure with his favorite sports team's loss. Sometimes, in very grave circumstances, the fire might spread to the house next door or the tree in the yard, and that would be a rare and tragic occurrence. My brain was used to treating fires as isolated, far away forces that consumed inanimate objects like the bricks in an apartment building and a dingy dorm room couch.

Smelling my first Oregon wildfire made it real. Inexplicably, my eyes welled with tears. All I could say to M. was, "That's so sad, that the forest is on fire. I find that very, very sad." It took a few days before I realized: Of course it is sad. Couches and bricks are objects. Forests are living things.

I have begun looking at the forest firefighters as medics, doctors, and nurses in a disaster zone. They face the grim reality that many of their patients will not survive, and they do what they can to minimize the misery. They must amputate a limb from the forest to save its heart.

*****

The smoke from the fires settles on the valley where we live, and the past week has been marked by hazy, smoky skies of indeterminate color. There are plenty of moments that I find myself frustrated with the inconveniences of this: I cannot enjoy any significant time outside, right when the outdoors is finally getting through to me and beckoning me toward it. The air eventually chokes me, causing my eyes to run, my nose to stuff up, and my throat to rasp. I cannot walk around for longer than a few minutes without the smoke permeating my clothing, making me smell like a mix of grandpa's corncob pipe and Junior's boy scout campground. The adventure bug that has bitten me, and that I transmit to M. like a happy virus, is stymied by closed roads, walls of flame, clouds of smoke.

"I have cabin fever," I complain aloud to M., who just sort of shrugs and continues eating his breakfast.

No one from here seems overly concerned. This is a way of life to them, something they are familiar with. "I wouldn't run in it," one of my coworkers, who is a marathoner, remarked to me this past week. "But where I live, the smoke isn't that bad." On the morning news, the weather man makes clear but brief mention of the air quality. To the communities near the fires, where the air quality is particularly bad, he urges people to stay indoors with their pets and their children and their elderly. I find a guilty laugh escaping my mouth as I imagine an average, adult woman opening her back door to let her small child and her hobbling grandmother run loose and free in the yard.

It's obvious that we are not in any danger, but I remember: Some people are. Some people might lose their homes. Some people might lose their belongings. Some people could lose their lives.

I am in no morally justifiable position of annoyance.

The fires continue to burn, though all news sounds positive, and progress has been made. Maybe we'll head for the coast. Maybe we'll find a cave to crawl into for a few hours this weekend. Maybe we'll recall our pre-move life, which was a little less wild and a lot less green.