September 2020
Part One: The Fires
It was late August when my thirst for life and natural interaction surpassed the caution and fear cast by the great pandemic. I set out with the rental camper van for the northwest with the intention of making connections with the people behind the growing number of Ecosystems Restoration Camps in California.
The mere act of liberating my mind from the restraints of state orders, ‘bad timing’ and social taboos, had an immediate rejuvenating effect. It was decided that Bella would catch up with me by plane in Montana ten days into the thirty that we had. What was in store for me on the journey was a massive affront to my unquestioned assumption that any tomorrow will be like today.
The first night on the road, I camped at a spot I found by intuitively following a ‘beach access’ road sign to a perfect hideaway that was, in fact, a Chumash outdoor museum. The panels describing the indigenous way of life seemed somehow prescient, and I studied them the next day with special attention. The deep knowledge of plants, the sensitivity to the animals, and the artistry embedded in the things they made stirred a longing in me for that kind of belonging. “Longing” is defined as an “aching desire for”, and “belonging” as an intensified desire for “properly relating to”.
The lightning and distant thunder that woke me that night were igniting the fires in Santa Cruz that I would come to see billow up along the Santa Cruz coast by noon. I spent the next 10 days witnessing these fires as they progressed along my route north. By the time I got to Montana six hundred fires were reported in California alone.
My two nights in Santa Cruz were marked by the progressing wave of dense smoke hovering high in the sky, with the last bit of blue eclipsed by the time of sunset. The color of the light shifted to a dark and ominous orange that would descend over each town as I traveled north, from Santa Cruz, to Palo Alto, to Santa Rosa, and all the way up to Mount Shasta at the Oregon state line, through Washington, Idaho and Montana.
I pulled up to my brother’s home in the late afternoon as the same eclipse descended. Ash rained on the pool water where we splashed about with the kids, as if life would carry on as normal. These kids and their parents were already learning to adjust to the Covid-19 restrictions, schooling at home, not seeing friends, and wearing masks as a way of life. They have questions about the Black Lives Matter uprisings and wonder where they fit into the story. They witness the tension around the elections and see their parents fret about the end of democracy. In their allotted computer time, they study illustrated Bible stories and seem to seek something to make sense of it all.
My family is scattered throughout Sonoma county. Some were evacuated that night. They seemed to take it in stride, since losing homes to the Camp Fire two years ago.
At a stop for gas, I ran into a couple of guys local to the smelly, and not-so-clear, Clear Lake. The inside news was, “Don’t use Interstate 5, it’s likely to shut down any minute.” I redirected for the recommended 101 North.
I stayed just ahead of the smoke-line that day and on tiny route 20, I found the beautiful Blue Lakes where I simply got naked and dived in. As the sun lowered over the placid water, I was completely taken by my senses—all six or more of them. I went from a world of senselessness to what felt like the full embodiment of what makes sense. Trees bent to the water’s edge were visited by darting birds and insects, and there was hardly a man-made sound to be heard. It was all so life-affirming. I spent the night there on the delicate shores of sense-making.
The next day in Humboldt County I took the notion to pass through Hydesville where the people on my father’s mother’s side first came to America. The story goes that Captain William Cooper was born in Scotland in 1786 and went to sea at 11. He became a captain by age 23. In 1818 he moved to Prince Edward Island, Canada. After 30 years of toiling the soil and surviving the cold, he was preparing to move the family to Australia when he heard news of the Gold Rush in the American West.
He built his own ship, The Packet. With 26 people on board, mostly family, and two years worth of supplies, they headed out for California. His wife Sarah gave birth somewhere off the coast of South America. After eight months at sea they made it to San Francisco. The cholera epidemic drove them off in four months but not before six of the crew died, including Sarah and the baby. Captain Cooper sold the boat and returned to Prince Edward Island to live out his days. The rest of the offspring moved to the newly established Hydesville, where they settled to farm.
As I am searching for the house they built in the 1850’s, which still stands, I’m thinking about their pioneering history of hardships contrasted against the comfort of my modern urban life. In a few hours, I’ve sped across country that took them months to travel by foot and wagon. The trip cost me no more than lunch money and a leg cramp. They risked everything and their losses were dear.
I imagine their future of possibility and freedom, driven by a story of independence and conquest which was fostered by the Bible stories that would have been dear to them. My well-intentioned ancestors were beguiled by the allure of gold and land, free for the taking. Fortified by the great myth of Manifest Destiny, they would have believed that it was their moral duty to establish dominion over this unshaped wild. In 1845, John O’Sullivan wrote this in the NY Morning News:
“And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”
Settling into territory of the Yurok and the Hupa people meant clearing land forested with great Redwoods, and to plow the fertile soil. This romantic conviction to clear people, clear forest, and plow soil continues now, and is what has created the conditions for the fire and devastation I am grieving today. (In the next edition I will illustrate this claim.)
What seemed like another summer of routine fires, has become a primordial scream to stop, look, and listen. As I drive through the valley of the shadow of death, I wonder if others hear the scream. Will this summer be the one that marks the great turning?
