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| Halfway Hill Fire from Dry Creek, July 8, 2022, Steve Brown |
The muddy water whirled along the bank sides and over crept up the banks until at last it spilled over... Then from the tents, from the crowded barns, groups of sodden men went out, their clothes sopping rags, their shoes muddy pulp. They splashed out through the water, to the towns, to the country stores, to the relief offices, to beg for food, to cringe and beg for food, to be for relief, to try to steal, to lie.
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939
April 29, 2023
Today is a big day in my average life. I am a gardener, and the heat is on. It's been a long, wet winter, the wettest we've ever had in Utah since records have been kept. We received more than twice our average snowfall. And spring is finally here. Today it will reach 79 degrees. I woke up at 4:30, itching to get out into the soil.
Yet, I know the warm weather isn't necessarily a good thing. Last summer much of the Pavant Range burned. Although we weren't evacuated, there was the very real possibility our home might become part of the inferno. We were busy getting ready for a wedding until we weren't. Fire took over our lives. It had to. In one afternoon, everyone's focus instantly changed. I went from worrying about whether the yard would be ready for the wedding to wondering instead if all around me would be ash in a matter of hours.
There is an odd calm that sets in when you realize you might lose everything. You switch from the low-level frenzy that rules so much of our lives--always rushing to meet the next deadline (work, social, or self-imposed) to doing whatever needs to be done in the moment and letting go of any expectations of the outcome. To expect things to go a certain way with a fire outside your door would be foolish, so you just do. So, I rushed around, packed up what could be hastily packed up and put in the car, took photos of everything else for insurance purposes, and then went outside to watch the world burn. Up at my mom's house, they did the same thing, as did everyone else in town. Lawn chairs lined a good portion of 500 South. There were oo's and awes. Despite the undercurrent of dread, the movie was the biggest, brightest, awe-inspiring, suck-your-whole-heart-and-stole-out-of-you production any of us had ever seen. Until the moment you combust into flames, fire feels more like a seducer than a foe. With every stand of trees that explodes, you want to cry for you know what has been lost, yet you anxiously wait for that next burst of orange because for that moment you have become the fire, and its life is your life, and for both of you to carry on, you must be fed. All you want is to be dazzled no matter what the cost. Or at least part of you does.
Another part is anchored to hell with a good sturdy chain of dread.
But the one thing you aren't is frenzied. The experience is too far out of the norm to be connected with any emotion you feel in daily life. You are free from the petty worries you allow to rule most of your days. There is no clock, no calendar, no deadlines, very little sleep--only fire.
Next came the flood. Or a small taste of what a flood does. My brother, with a lot of help from Marci's family and me, had worked for weeks at preparing the small, oak and maple filled canyon that runs through our property for the wedding of our son Rio and his fiancé Eden. We trimmed trees, cleared fallen branches, widened a trail, and raked and mowed an area around a gorgeous Rocky Mountain Juniper that they had picked out as the visual alter of the ceremony. It looked gorgeous.
But we were worried. The county had let us know that a fire increases the amount of water run-off from a mountain thunderstorm by five times. An extremely rare one-inch super soaker becomes five-inch catastrophic event. That wasn't likely, but some flooding was. We were in the midst of the worst drought in 1200 years, yet our prayers for rain had changed. They became very specific--Please Lord bring us rain, but please, please give it to us in small doses. No longer did we yearn for the heavens to let loose.
In the midst of the push to be ready for the wedding, I found out a life-celebration for my former boss and mentor, the poet and publisher Bobby Byrd, who had passed away a couple of months before, was taking place in El Paso. He was just way too important to me to not go. Like so many others, I loved the man. So, just a few days before the wedding, Marci and I dropped everything and headed to the border.
The monsoon season had been very good for the drought-ravaged Southwest. New Mexico was lush. Even the sagebrush took on a darker luxurious green than the normal pale blue-gray tint. And between the sage, long blades of dark, almost black, grass swayed in the unusually moist breeze. We hit several downpours that thundered on our roof, the wipers slapping madly to keep the highway visible. Small waterfalls rushed down the grassy road banks, and little rivers galloped along the roadside, bucking and bouncing joyfully along the way.
It was awesome to see. But we kept saying things like, "I sure hope it isn't doing this at home." And then we got a phone call from Lloyd. It had done exactly that. Not much rain had actually fallen at Dry Creek, but up on the mountain, a cloud had let go.
My brother said the flood sounded like a freight train. A torrent of ash, mud and debris came charging down, gouging the creek bed in places to twice its depth, and in other places twice its width, and spilling over the banks in one place and spreading a layer of black-ashy-mud a couple inches thick all over the ground.
As luck would have it, the particular place it spilled over was exactly where Lloyd and the rest of the family had spent so much time prepping for the wedding. On the phone, my brother was optimistic. We were not. But so much had happened, I didn't really care. I was on my way to celebrate a man who was like a father to me, and that fact together with the gloriously lush landscape out the window was all that really seemed to matter. Rio was getting married. Spending his life with Eden was all that really mattered to him--whether he knew that or not. The wedding would take place, and it would be great no matter what happened. It's not the day that counts, but the years that follow.
Although we worried about another flood right up until the wedding ended and everyone moved to higher ground, all went well that day with only a sprinkle falling. Summer ended, winter came, and we received record amounts of snow over that charred terrain now so prone to flooding even under the best of conditions.
These are our days. This story is not unique to my family and me, except perhaps, that so far everything has turned out well. That so often is not the case. Environmental catastrophe has become a common part of life. Almost nightly, we see entire towns wiped out by tornados, fires, or floods. Not everyone's lives quickly return to normal.
We need to tackle the problems--of that there is no doubt. If we don't, more and more of our lives will be devoured annually by what were once-in-a-century events. In Steinbeck's time, floods mainly inundated and consumed the poor whose lives were relegated to the mining camps and flood plains, unprotected from the elements by sturdy homes and reinforced riverbanks. Global warming has upped the ante. Nobody is insulated from environmental catastrophe anymore. And climate change is too large to be dealt with one person at a time. Individual actions like recycling or riding a bike to work might feel good, and if possible, one certainly should make those choices, but because your efforts don't necessarily translate into your neighbor doing the same thing, any real solutions must happen collectively. What we really need are politicians committed to doing what's right for humanity in the long run rather than seeking short-term political success pandering to corporations and constituents who put short term profit and comfort ahead of long-term sustainability. We need laws to govern how our electricity is produced, what cars we can and cannot drive on our highways, and what we may and may not plant in our yards. Not only must we be willing to vote for and support politicians willing to make those hard decisions, but we also need to demand that those are the only politicians who stay successfully in office more than one term. There is no other way. We simply cannot change the trajectory of global warming with societies continuing to function as they are. We need collective action on a grand scale. We need to be willing to sacrifice together for the future the way we did during World War II.
Yet, we still have our small individual lives that unfold one day at a time. That's where things get difficult. I can change all I want, but if only I change, when it comes to climate change, everything remains the same--a bullet train headed towards the collapse of not only humanity but life as we know it.
In the meantime, I have my own life, and the lives of everyone important to me. We need joy. We need to do. We need to be. Lives need to be lived. Vacations need to happen; families need to gather. Life can't just stop until we have the collective willpower to change our collective destiny. There is no future without hope.
Here's what I think needs to happen. If you aren't ready to go completely green now, cling to the carbon-producing vice you enjoy most, that makes you feel most alive--whether that be a fuel-guzzling 4x4, jetting around the world to exotic destinations, taking a cruise, or getting a fountain drink in a giant Styrofoam cup daily, and do it with joy, but swear to yourself that in every other aspect of your life, you will do whatever it takes to cut down your own carbon footprint, and then follow through with that.
Then, promise yourself, that the moment someone proposes banning your particular treasured vice, you will support that measure against your own interest for the greater good of not only humanity but all of the species around you.
Back in the 1980s, it became apparent to me driving without a seatbelt was just simply stupid. Yet, I would forget to buckle-up more often than I would remember. Then something miraculous happened. They outlawed driving without a seatbelt. Somehow the threat of getting a ticket was enough to push my brain to remember to buckle-up my seatbelt until it became habit. Now, I buckle-up without ever thinking about it. I never pull out of my driveway unbuckled. Was that law really an infringement on my freedom? I don't think so. It gave me greater freedom to stay alive amongst the crush of metal.
This is what freedom is all about: the right to think, express, and worship as you choose--to be who you are at your core and express that freely. It's not about the right to crap on someone else's lawn or in the park or playground. We can save humanity and all life on the planet without infringing on everyone's basic rights to be. We should all be willing to give up everything except those basic rights in order to live without the fear of being swallowed up in the next record-breaking storm, flood, or fire--that next once-in-a-1000-years-event that happened last just four years ago and is now happening again.
For most people, there is very little freedom when displaced and desperate due to environmental catastrophe. Most will do whatever it takes to survive and feed their families. Choice is reduced to instinct. Freedom is a luxury. It is bought not only through the sacrifices of democratic participation, but also through the collective efforts of a society to protect individuals through the power of the whole, for individuals to be willing to give up something dear to them for the greater good. There is no freedom when every man acts on his own only for his own good. There is only anarchy, fear and suffering.
There will be no freedom if we do not collectively work together to solve climate change. There will only be each individual against the world. If we want freedom, we must collectively fight for a sustainable future. When economic systems collapse, so do social ones. Most individuals will do anything to provide basic necessities for their families and themselves. Freedom is but a dream on the doorstep of starvation except for the rare Buddha, Christ or Dali Lama who know and have trained the spirit to rule the mind, and the mind to rule the body. For everyone else, there is no freedom before extinction.
