We are glued to the news of California, watching the Palisades fire expand to become two, three, four, five, six, seven additional fires. I'm updating my maps every few seconds to watch the boundary lines expand, a graphical miniature of devastation.  

My friends live in Santa Monica, one row of houses away from the evacuation zone. Their friends just down the street have just lost everything but their cat. They tell me the rental prices in the area, already high because it's not far from the beach, skyrocketed since the fires started, and my friends are getting calls from their real estate agent who is telling them it's a good time to sell. Climate refugees are, at this moment in time, buyers, with money to burn. My bones are rattled. Can't rest. I try to draw a mental map of all the people I know in the LA area. Too many. Are they safe? Check social media for calls for help. The thing about disasters is that they're localized. You can be one house away from a fire or flood zone, and if your home is fine, it's business as usual.  

I was reading a website created by some conspiracy theorists who posit that the climate emergency is a hoax. Isn't it just too coincidental, they said, that C02 is invisible? And the so-called melting glaciers are always where nobody lives? If they can't see it, from wherever they're standing, it's just not real. But that kind of thinking is common amongst non-conspiracy theory people too. Ontarians have no idea how deeply entrenched into everyday life of Western Canada the climate crisis is. Except when wildfire smoke blows into the skies here, they just can't imagine that this world, just next door, where people need to plan their exercise routines in the middle of the night or the dead of winter because during "fire season" it's too dangerous to breathe outside, is also their own world.

I was surprised when I first learned that annually, viruses are able to traverse the Pacific and Atlantic oceans and remain infectious, or that annually, dust storms from the Sahara blows into the US and Canada disrupting visibility and creating breathing challenges for birds, small mammals and humans alike. Everything is connected; I take a breath and the molecules of a tree that burned on the other side of the continent enter my lungs and then my bloodstream. I breathe out and a tree on the other side of the continent soaks some of me in. We're connected and so everything is at stake.  

Stephen Pyne writes:

I scour the literary tradition for wildfires. Floods are amply represented. Fires less so. When they do, fires appear as a symbol, a metaphor, a backdrop, often to romance novels and poems where "sparks fly." But there seems to be no body of literature that acknowledges fire season, single file lines on the highway, evacuations to overpriced motels with dark brown bedspreads and curtains and that stale cigarette smell, starting over with just the shirt on your back because insurance companies won't or can't pay up. Who would want to know about the condition of the climate refugees who seasonally must evacuate their homes and sometimes cannot come back, who must navigate organizations that don' t answer the phone, and navigate miles of bureaucratic red tape that never makes sense.  

The only person I've found who kind of gets it is Joan Didion, in a New Yorker article written in 1989 about the same area currently burning, so non-fiction not literature. She says:

People who live with fires think a great deal about what will happen “when”—as the phrase goes in the instruction leaflets—“the fire comes.” These leaflets, which are stuck up on refrigerator doors all over Los Angeles County, never say “if.” When the fire comes, there will be no water pressure. When the fire comes, the roof one watered all the night before will go dry in seconds. Plastic trash cans must be filled with water and wet gunnysacks kept at hand, for smothering the sparks that blow ahead of the fire. The garden hoses must be connected and left where they can be seen. The cars must be placed in the garage, headed out. Whatever one wants most to save must be placed In the cars. The lights must be left on, so that the house can be seen in the smoke. I remember my daughter’s Malibu kindergarten sending home on the first day of the fall semester a detailed contingency plan, with alternative sites where, depending on the direction of the wind when the fire came, the children would be taken to wait for their parents. The last-ditch site was the naval air station at Point Mugu, twenty miles up the coast.

But it's actually her kid's "autumn" poem that she concludes the article with that is the real stunner:

“Dry winds and dust, hair full of knots,” our Malibu child wrote when asked, in the fourth grade, for an “autumn” poem. “Gardens are dead, animals not fed. . . . People mumble as leaves crumble, fire ashes tumble.”

-M

Sources