America is still burning.
Three months ago I wrote about America burning here.
The America burning I wrote about back in June was more on the figurative side of things. In the wake of George Floyd's death, conversations about racial injustice and systemic racism dominated kitchen tables from coast to coast.
Opinions ran hot.
The flames of revolt and revolution raged.
Today, as I sit here typing these words trying to wrap my head around what's happening in my region with enormous wildfires burning out of control, the entire inside of my house smells like a campfire gone bad.
Outside, it's even worse.
The air is thick and yellow with smoke.
It's also heavy, still and cloying, a stark contrast to the ferocious winds roaring across the West like a giant bellows only 48 short hours ago.
When the winds blew, the sky was still blue.
There is no blue today.
America Is Still Burning...
And there's no relief in sight.
The weather app on my iPhone teases us with the chance of rain on Tuesday, what feels like a long, long time from today.
No guarantees, of course.
Everything is changing moment to moment and yet nothing seems to be changing at all.
Between now and then more sunny days are predicted. Higher temperatures above the clouds. And no wind.
No wind is a blessing, of course. The quiet air is allowing firefighters to get back to work after being ordered to stop fighting the blazes because the winds were too strong.
With high winds in the mix, their lives were at greater risk than what comes in the job description in that line of work.
A Patient Etherized upon a Table
I'm lucky not to be close to the big fires burning right now. I am not on standby to evacuate at the drop of a text telling me we've hit Level 3 which means get out and don't look back.
Still, like so many of us who make our home here in the greater Portland area, the effects of these fires are very real.
I took this photo yesterday afternoon around 4:45 pm PDT.
It looks like the backdrop to Apocalypse Now as well as a scene from T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in which Eliot describes his world at the turn of the 20th century where "the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table" and the people all around him believe there will always be more time for whatever suits their fancy which, of course, Eliot emphatically suggests is a dangerous illusion:
"And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea."
Revisiting this poem after almost thirty years since I first studied it has me wondering:
Have we been collectively anaesthetized as a country for too long about obvious issues, lying on a table numb to the severity of droughts and extreme storms, signs that climate change is indeed real?
Have we convinced ourselves that there's plenty of time to take care of the problems, let us take our toast and tea in peace right now, thank you very much?
Will these fires finally get our attention so that we act in ways that find solutions instead of pretending as if everything is fine because it's not happening in our backyard?
Well, it's definitely in our backyard now.
America is still burning. People are evacuating their communities. People I know have lost their homes and everything in them to the flames.
Facebook has become an endless photo collage of orange skies. Spooky shots of the sun glowering red and angry through ash and smoke fill the newsfeed. Cars packed with provisions and pets and people looking back at billowing clouds of smoke are common.
At Least We're Accustomed to Masks
The masks we've been wearing since the Covid19 pandemic hit feel less like an inconvenience or intrusion on our personal freedoms now and more like an absolute necessity for being able to breathe.
Air quality in Portland, Oregon as of this morning has been rated the worst of any city in the world. The habit of mask-wearing is more important than ever.
I honestly never imagined I'd hear myself say those words out loud or type them in a blog post, but there you are.
I never thought I'd use the word "apocalypse" to describe this beautiful place called the Pacific Northwest where I live or reference a poem that has been the bane of many an English student since it became part of the literary canon.
I never believed so many fires would have the entire West Coast in flames, taking out entire communities like one big "Fuck you" from Mother Nature to humanity.
That's Right, Mother Nature Is Not Happy
As a mother myself, I get why she's mad. I wrote about that, too, in the early days of the pandemic.
Her updated memo now reads:
"America is still burning. And I'm still on leave until further notice."
I can't blame her. With so much of what we once believed to be true about ourselves only a few short months ago now up in thick clouds of angry, orange and yellow smoke...
I can only hope that when the rains do come, they will cleanse not only the air, but our parched souls, too.
