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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.
 
 
 

Hwaet! Some Luck

Beowulf Manuscript

 

Jane Smiley's Last Hundred Years Trilogy follows one Iowa family for generations. I was reading Some Luck, the first novel, aloud at dinnertime when, in a chapter about Henry Langdon's life at the University of Iowa, I started this sentence: "The real benefit of the class, though, was that he met Professor McGalliard, and now, in the second semester, he was having a private tutorial in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, or whatever you wanted to call it." The next sentence mentioned Beowulf. I stopped reading and exclaimed, "What?! What!?" Sue turned questioningly and I declared, "I studied Beowulf with Professor McGalliard at Iowa twenty years after Henry did." Except, of course, Henry was fictional and Professor McGalliard and the Beowulf class and I were real.

 

Jane Smiley, younger than I, earned her MA and MFA at Iowa when I was completing PhD and post-doctoral studies. We wandered the same hallways, studied with some of the same professors, but never met. The real-life professor in her novel, John McGalliard, was taught me to read Beowulf in Old English.

 

In Some Luck Henry meets McGalliard in a literature survey course running from Chaucer to Oscar Wilde, and later studies Old English texts with him, including The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, "The Seafarer," and Beowulf. Smiley tells us, "After Christmas, he had brought that stolen copy of Beowulf back to Iowa City with him, and he kept it under his mattress." I studied those same titles at Iowa, several of them with McGalliard, and I suspect Jane Smiley did as well.

 

Professor McGalliard made a lasting impression on me. The mere mention of his name triggers lines from Beowulf: the very opening of the epic poem, "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum" ("Lo! We Speardanes in days of yore"); the statement "Beowulf mathelode bearn Ecgtheowes" ("Beowulf made a speech, the son of Edgethow"). I can still recite them with something close to the correct pronunciation, though I alter the orthography—the original text has different accents and letter combinations. McGalliard made his students read passages in Beowulf aloud, to get a sense not only of pronunciation but also of rhythm and meter. Those two alliterative lines (out of over 3000) have stayed with me for decades.

 

Late in our semester, McGalliard gathered his students in the Iowa Memorial Union to hear a discussion of ancient languages between our professor and a professor from Coe College, in nearby Cedar Rapids (whose wife was in our class). At one point the Coe professor read a long passage of Homer's Iliad in ancient Greek and then McGalliard read a long passage from Beowulf in Old English (or Anglo-Saxon or whatever you want to call it). We all recognized similarities in the nature of oral transmission and composition in ancient languages that we would have imagined had nothing in common. The occasion fostered an appreciation of the epic poem that our silent reading had not made apparent.

 

Around the time I took McGalliard's course, John Gardner published his novel Grendel, taking the perspective of the creature Beowulf kills in the epic. Gardner, it turned out, had been a student of McGalliard's. Ten years older than me, he was born in Batavia, New York, one county east of where I grew up, and earned both MA and PhD at the University of Iowa. Grendel, his third novel, was published in 1971. Someone in our class raised the topic of Gardner's book, and McGalliard spent a good part of that session inveighing against Gardner's interpretation. The discussion later made me read Grendel and, because it was about Batavia, I also read his novel The Sunlight Dialogues. I no longer recall what I thought of Gardner's fiction, but I confess that, since taking McGalliard's class, I've read at least four subsequent translations of Beowulf.

 

McGalliard was given passing reference in Smiley's Golden Age, the final volume of the trilogy. He retired about the time I finished my studies, a couple years before Jane Smiley ended hers. Gardner's Grendel was published almost two decades after he took McGalliard's class, Smiley's Some Luck roughly four decades later. Now I write this, almost five decades after Beowulf, Grendel, McGalliard and I met, just one passage in Smiley's novel merging my memories of graduate school with memories of her trilogy, John Gardner's novels, Batavia, western New York and eastern Iowa. All those things squirreled away somewhere in memory, somehow able to occasionally meet and mingle.

 

Notes: Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Translated by Seamus Heaney. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999; Gardner, John. Grendel. Ballantine Books, 1971; Smiley, Jane. 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2005; Smiley, Jane. Some Luck. New York: Knopf, 2014.

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