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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.
 
 
 

Writing Lyrics

September 18, 2020

 

I don't know how Facebook knew I might be interested—just recently it posted ads for online wine shops right after I Googled a couple different wineries—but it's been sending me notices about the American Songwriter Lyric Contest. Winning contestants might receive a very expensive guitar or a relatively inexpensive microphone, but the Grand Prize Winner would receive a "Round-Trip Flight to Nashville, a Professional Demo Session (one song), two nights at Union Station Hotel Nashville," and a "Dream Co-Write" partnership with a successful professional songwriter. The songwriter and the contest winner would collaborate on turning the winning lyric into a successful, recordable song. Perhaps the lyricist him/herself would become a professional songwriter and go on to fame and celebrity, like winners on American Idol or The Voice do. For a moment, I was alert to the possibilities.

 

I wasn't likely to compose a new set of lyrics by the deadline three or four days later—I hadn't written a new song for decades—but somewhere in a box of old writing projects is a notebook of lyrics I wrote and performed in my brief time as a singer-songwriter. I hadn't been much of a guitar player in college and not a composer at all, but when my first marriage broke up and I moved without a television into a small apartment in the town where I taught, I began playing guitar again, learning tunes in The Joan Baez Songbook and Greatest Hits of the Sixties and watching Laura Webber's Folk Guitar.

 

Eventually, I generated lyrics and tunes silently on the walk to work, mostly forgot them during the day, did more composing on the way home, then worked on them more in the evening. A former student planning to sing at a friend's wedding weeks away told me she'd been singing and playing guitar daily, to get her voice up to performance level after a long lay-off. I decided to do the same thing, hoping at least to sing my own songs in tune. A friend urged me to perform at a local bar's open mike night. With the university on end-of-semester break the bar was nearly empty, but I was encouraged when one of the two drunks in the audience asked me sing Gordon Lightfoot's "Early Morning Rain" a second time.

 

When the next school year started, I played a short set on a crowded street during an autumn festival. John, a new instructor in our department and also a singer-songwriter, heard me. We got together to play for one another, soon workshopped our songs with Barb, another singer-songwriter, and initiated occasional songwriter nights at a bar in a different college town. At John's house, I met the woman who is now my wife. After both my songwriter friends moved, I stopped writing songs and settled more deeply into my academic life, occasionally performing folk songs with neighborhood friends at a monthly sing-along, the Alma-gamated Song Group (we lived in Alma, Michigan). After the instigating musician of that group moved with his family to Maine, I seldom picked up the guitar.

 

I make the claim to having been a singer-songwriter modestly. I did, after all, write songs and sing them at people for a while, but the truth is I can't write musical notations, only mark chord changes above appropriate words in the lyrics. I taped some of them to recall the melodies later but haven't played those tapes in years. Even with the words in front of me I'd have trouble remembering most of the melodies. I remember writing songs for the woman I courted and married and for each of the children in our blended family. I know many lyrics were often about my situation at the time. One song, "When Does A Man Get Fully Grown?"—pretty folky, if I remember it correctly—was one Barb liked so well that I rewrote it from a woman's perspective and heard her perform it with her own songs.

 

I should find that folder of lyrics and read them through, find those tapes and listen to them. I wonder what I'd think about them as songs; more dangerously, I wonder the degree to which they would reveal the person I was at the time I wrote them. What would I think of him—of myself—as the person who needed to write those songs? To enter that songwriting contest, though, I'd have to submit a recording of myself singing my lyrics and playing guitar. That would require a lot of rehearsal. It would also require tuning the guitar.

 

I still get daily ads for that contest. I don't know why I haven't told Facebook to stop them.

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