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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 about Home

March 26, 2021
The Lockport Locks

 

"Writers, particularly novelists, are linked to place," Joyce Carol Oates has written. Home is "where you find yourself in your most haunting dreams. . . dreams most embedded in memory." For her, home is "upstate New York—the rural crossroads of Millersport, on the Tonawanda Creek, and the city of Lockport on the Erie Canal." I've long been aware of her links to my hometown.

 

Joyce Carol Oates and I were born four years apart in the same Lockport hospital. She attended early grades in a one-room schoolhouse near those rural crossroads and "between the ages of 11 and 15—through sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth grades," was a student first at John E. Pound Elementary School and then at North Park Junior High. John E. Pound was a short walk from my home. When she was in sixth grade, her classroom on the second floor, I was in second, my classroom on the first floor; we may have passed each other in the halls. Our junior highs were different—mine was Emmet Belknap—and she attended high school elsewhere. We never met.

 

Yet particulars of her Lockport life match mine so well I almost feel her presence in my hometown memories. She writes about the Lockport Public Library, "beside the dull red brick of the YMCA" (I swam there sometimes) and across the street from Lockport High School (replaced by a new building elsewhere when I was in junior high). She thought the library had "the look of a Greek temple . . . with elegantly ascending steps, a portico and four columns," set back past a gated wrought-iron fence and "very green jewel-like lawn." How often I crossed that lawn, climbed those steps, sometimes sat there with friends reading books we'd just checked out. I remember the spacious interior and the stairs to the basement children's section.

 

"What I most love about Lockport is its timelessness," she claims. She thinks the Erie Canal, "so deep-set in what appears to be solid rock, you can barely see it unless you come close, to lean over the railing of the wide bridge at the foot of Cottage Street," is what "resurfaces in dreams" of people who move away. She remembers the canal locks and boats passing through; recalls standing on the Big Bridge and feeling "a sensation of vertigo as you peer down at, or into, the canal 50 feet below." I crossed the Big Bridge alone on Wednesday afternoons for religious instruction at St. Patrick's, passing my father's Presbyterian church and a Ford gumball factory; with friends I clambered below it in search of pet baby alligators flushed into the canal.

 

She remembers being "a solitary individual mostly walking—walking and walking—along the streets of downtown, and along residential streets; over the wide windswept bridge above the canal at Cottage Street, and over the narrower bridge, at Pine Street; on paths above the towpath, winding through vacant overgrown lots in the vicinity of Niagara Street; and on the shaky pedestrian bridge that ran unnervingly close beside the railroad tracks crossing the canal." I too walked all those streets alone, crossed that footbridge with friends, and climbed onto the supports of the railroad bridge. One kid who jumped from there into the canal almost drowned. The footbridge shook when trains crossed above it.

 

Oates remembers "the dreary Lockport bus station, located near Lockport's largest employer, Harrison Radiator" where her "father worked as a tool and die designer for 40 years." My grandfather and his three sons also worked there. Perhaps one of them knew Fred Oates. My mother and I sometimes rode the Greyhound from that station to reach my eye doctor in Buffalo, crossing Tonawanda Creek and turning at Millersport. Watching movies before catching her bus home after school, Oates thought the Palace Theatre "a place of romance" because of "its baroque splendors—gilt-framed mirrors in the lobby, crimson and gold plush, chandeliers, Oriental carpets." She preferred it to "the less reputable Rialto," a grittier theater where I often enjoyed popcorn, two boxes of candy, a cartoon, a double feature, and a Saturday serials chapter. The Palace seemed too posh for me.

 

Oates' return to Lockport in 2009 to speak at the Palace Theatre likely occasioned those memories of her school years. Our youths in Western New York have a lot less in common if we step back from the article's focus and deeper into memoir. But often another's writing will not simply take me away into the landscape of her experience but simultaneously return me to the landscape of my own memory. As she says, "Writers . . . are linked to place" and sometimes, when readers are linked to the same place, it heightens the connection between them.

 

 

Note: More of Oates in Western New York

 

Oates, Joyce Carol. "American Gothic," The New Yorker, May 8, 1995: 35.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again," Smithsonian Magazine, March 2010.

Oates, Joyce Carol. The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age. NY: Harper Collins, 2016.

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