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Robert Root

Fire Weather
February 12, 2025
 
As the old year ended, we celebrated part of the holiday season with close-by daughter and grandchildren and intermittently spent time online with more far-flung offspring. The new year began quietly, our Wisconsin and Florida daughters and their families settled into post-holiday employment and pre- and post-graduate schooling. Our son in California left home for a short Asian holiday, enjoyed wrestling events in Japan and wandered briefly in Taiwan. I didn't hear from them often but, as usual, I calmly checked up occasionally on whatever localities they were experiencing. It didn't take long to raise my continental anxiety level.
 
Big storms were predicted for coastal Florida—we'd experienced some in our most recent autumn visits there—and I scanned the news daily, mostly to relief. But then, barely a week into January, alarming news about fierce fires in familiar California locales sent me online several times a day to locate where they were emerging and how they were expanding. The fires were widespread, though when I found our son's neighborhood on whatever telecast maps I located, I was at least briefly reassured. I couldn't know how much he learned in Asia about the Los Angeles fires, which were still raging when he soon returned home, but he then reported that his neighborhood was safe. Until the fires were finally subdued, and rainstorms eventually reassured us of their unlikely resurgence, I still checked in daily, mostly calming whenever he told us what conditions were like nearer to him. His neighborhood avoided the most ferocious blazes of the multiple fires surrounding it, but even after he was confirmed safe, I couldn't stop thinking about them.
 
By chance, among end-of-year birthday/Christmas giftbooks, I'd received John Vaillant's recent Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. Reviewer Robert Macfarlane describes it as "a landmark in nonfiction reportage on the Anthropocene, or what Vaillant here calls 'the Petrocene'—that epoch defined primarily by humanly enhanced combustion." In a recent book of my own, I'd tried to replace the familiar term 'Holocene' with the more appropriate 'Anthropocene' but Fire Weather soon convinced me that 'Petrocene' should be the more accurate term. I quickly became deeply immersed in the book.
 
For me, Fire Weather was a long read: 359 pages of text in small print in three parts, with nearly fifty additional pages of Notes and Bibliography. The narrative's primary setting is Fort McMurray, a once thriving oil industry community in Alberta Province, due north of Montana between British Columbia and Saskatchewan, In May 2015 a tremendous fire devastated the area, sweeping over a vast portion of Alberta and some of Saskatchewan for several days. Vaillant sets up the background of the oil industry there in Part One, provides a deeply detailed account of the fires throughout Part Two, and in Part Three gives us an expansive overview of the future the oil industry and Canada's climate will have to face. I confess I was alarmed throughout the book's first two sections, continually in suspense over the fire's expanding growth and consequences, and then, in the third section, constantly distressed over implications regarding the future we all face because of the approach to climate that we've been engineering throughout the Anthropocene Epoch we're living in.
 
In the past, I suspect, most of us who decided to read about some calamity or another tended to approach the event as something occurring distantly, something one-of-a-kind, notable for its power and its scale but essentially remote from the rest of the world—from the daily living most of us experience. Vaillant acknowledges that, until recently, such stories were seen "as glimpses of a frightening and aberrant event outside normal time, in a place safely far away." He now suggests that they were—and are—"in fact . . . messages from the near future and from very close to home" and asserts that "extraordinary changes have taken place across the entire climate file": atmosphere, energy, forestry, and especially "fire itself". He reports that "a host of states and countries"—he specifically names 32 places from South Africa to North America, from Europe to Australia—where people would find themselves living in a landscape susceptible to fire. "Since 2016, even places we never considered capable of burning"—he mentions the Arctic, the Amazon, the moors of Britain, Notre-Dame Cathedral, Boulder, Colorado—have caught fire and burned.
 
Reporting on the history of the "kind of disruption" occurring "in the context of drought and rainfall," Vaillant informs us that it is "now referred to as a 'phase shift': a dramatic, effectively irreversible change in a region's climate regime. There is abundant evidence that phase shifts are now under way across much of the planet." The example of fire behavior he offers comes from California: "in the 1950s, the state's fire season lasted about four months; today, it is effectively year-round, and the acreage burned during the most severe seasons (1950 versus 2020) has increased eightfold (to say nothing of lives and property lost)." "In New Mexico," he adds, "fire weather days have increased by 120 percent since 1973." His book was published before the January 2025 fires in California.
 
The most discouraging aspect of fire's increasing presence and possibility is that, from a historical perspective, there was a time when fire at such a scale did not take place and only the intervention of human industry and the exploitation of natural resources have brought us to a time in history when reversing the climate change that we persist in keeping in motion may be impossible. Even if we stopped the relentless development of industry, we've likely gone too far to change its potential impact. The Anthropocene, the period of Earth history overwhelmed by human exploitation of natural resources, has probably actually become the Petrocene; the chemical impact on the climate everywhere has overwhelmed the period when people had charge and could have made better choices. In America, as confirmation, the current president has vowed to concentrate on industry and has thoroughly dismissed climatology.
 
Despite how troubled I am by what it portends, Fire Weather is a book everyone should read. As my grandchildren set out into the world of grownups—one will graduate from university this year, one will become a college sophomore, one become a freshman in the fall—I try not to cast my imagination too often into the future of the world they—and their children and their grandchildren—will be living in. For a while still, that's where, attentively, I'll be also be living.
 
Notes:
O'Connor, M. R., "Line of Fire," The New Yorker February 3, 2025: 12-16. An Annals of Disaster essay.
 
Vaillant, John. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024: 252, 354-355.
 
 
 

Making a Memoir

July 24, 2020

 

I appreciate the advantages of working with a clear narrative structure, having a straightforward story to tell—"Here's how it started; here's what happened next; here's how it ended." For my first two books of creative nonfiction, Recovering Ruth and Following Isabella, the structure of earlier works determined the structures I built, even though I didn't write my portions as chronologically as Ruth Douglass and Isabella Bird wrote theirs. It's good to follow a straightforward path, the road most travelled; those of us without one can end up on a long and winding road, bushwhacking and breaking trail most of the way.

 

The subject of my memoir, Happenstance, wasn't entirely one I'd ignored. Decades earlier, I'd written vignettes for broadcast on my local Michigan public radio station based on boyhood memories triggered by adult events: renovating the hundred-year old house where my wife and I now lived brought to mind the dank cellar and stripped walls of my parents' house; watching my children play reminded me of childhood neighborhood friends; and so on. Some vignettes showed up again when I encouraged composition students to write about their childhoods—the street map I modeled to help them reconnect with memory ignited my own memories; the guided imagery exercise leading them into past places propelled me toward mine. One student's story about his mother meeting his father because of a fly ball at a summer softball game haunted me: what if the batter had bunted or struck out? What kind of happenstance brought my own parents together?

 

Curious about my own family history after researching others', I began researching a family memoir. The material invited a chronological history but didn't answer questions about my own parents and my own life; everything that surfaced seemed connected with everything else. Though I wanted to write a book that would say something to my children about how their father turned out to be who he was, I plunged deeply into genealogy. After months of research and drafting, my wife asked how it was coming. When I told her I was almost up to the birth of my grandfather, she said quietly, "You know, if this is going to be a memoir, you should probably be in it." I loved all the research, but she was right—I wasn't in the book I was writing to explain about me.

 

I discovered two different ways to focus my attention. Before I assigned students to write caption essays about their family photos, I attempted the exercise myself and was startled by what it unleashed in memory, based on my greater distance from the events. For the memoir I began interrogating family photographs, describing what I saw in them first as a viewer and then as an interpreter. Leafing through family albums, I wrote about the pictures that most interested me. To avoiding a chronological narrative, I also decided to write about the first hundred days of my life that I remembered, in the order they occurred to me. Surely, I could write one a day over the next hundred days. On the eleventh day my father died. I stopped writing but scribbled down a list of possible subjects in case I ever started up again. The list ran well over a hundred items.

 

Life, and other books, intervened. What stayed with me was the experience of the first day I had written about, a day in elementary school when I ran home from school feeling exuberant. Why had I remembered that day first? Why could I remember no other exuberant days? I soon realized this approach could help me find formative moments in my life. I'd begun teaching memoir-writing to graduate students online and felt I should revive the memoir. To the Album entries and Hundred Days entries, I added a third strand reflecting on the nature of happenstance and the nature of choice. In time I realized happenstance was the dominant theme of the memoir. It also became the title.

 

Some of the 57 completed entries in the Hundred Days series got in; many Album entries got in; items I thought of as literary remains from my father, mother and grandmother got in; reflections on the nature of happenstance got in. Some days I would lay all these entries in a circle on our dining table or in a straight line on our carpet and hover over them, trying to feel some sort of sympathetic tuning among them, weaving them together through juxtaposition and association, the reverberations one piece of writing picks up from another piece, the synchronicities ignited by experience and memory. It's a memoir but not entirely narrative; it's more the prose equivalent of a medieval polyptych, a multi-paneled altarpiece, made up of words and photographs.

 

I'm amazed at all the time, energy, false starts, missteps and perplexity this book put me through. No book ever becomes the book you intended to write, of course. When I tell students that the writing will tell you what it wants to be, this is what I mean. It was the only way I could write it—the only way this book would let me write it.

 

 

Note: A slightly different version of this entry was first published on Michael Steinberg's Blog on February 9, 2013 as "The Long and Winding Road: A Memoirist's Journey" at  http://www.mjsteinberg.net/blog/archives/2013-02.

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