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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.
 
 
 

Hometown Stories

 

For the next few years after I graduated from college and married, I lived in an apartment in my hometown and taught 11th and 12th grade English classes in a small town on the Lake Ontario shoreline. Memories of those years flooded back when I started to write about two short stories composed while I taught at that high school and lived in that apartment and, in an earlier draft of this post, much more came out that didn't relate to the stories and had to be deleted. Most of my family still lived in my hometown then and we often visited them and enjoyed their company, but I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the rest of my life in my hometown. My college had been only 70 miles away, an hour and a half's drive south, and my work now was 16 miles away, a half-hour's drive north. I'd seen little of the world beyond western New York. Actually, it was only because New York State required me to earn more than a bachelor's degree to keep on teaching that we ended up moving to Iowa so I could study writing in graduate school.

 

My first year of high school teaching had sometimes challenged my temperament, but over time, as I attempted to behave more like myself rather than pretending to be an authoritative and commanding figure, I began to feel pretty much at home in the role. My habit of writing often allowed me to step aside from my pedagogical persona. I occasionally published short reviews of television shows for the weekend edition of the Buffalo Evening News and continued to compose short fiction. Material I've unearthed from a folder of old typescripts from that period reveals that I drew on both my working environment and my residential situation for inspiration. Two completed stories I've found both remind me where I was then and what I imagined about my circumstances at the time.

 

"One of the Guys" is set in a men's faculty room in a small-town high school. Reading the opening almost instantaneously makes me envision both the setting that prompted it and the faces of the men I spent free periods with there at the time. The school had two separate faculty lounges, each gender-specific, on opposite wings of the building; rather than go into the faculty room just down the hall from my classroom, I quickly learned, I needed to navigate two long hallways to use the bathroom in the men's lounge. The short story centers on a young English teacher, newly hired, as he tries to connect with other male faculty, some of them military veterans his father's age, one young enough to have been their student who identifies with them completely. The story centers on the new teacher's frustrations with his peers and ends with him giving up on becoming one of the guys and finding community with his wife's elementary faculty friends.

 

"Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" was a completely different story, centered on an older woman's solitary life in a second-floor apartment and her efforts to interpret the lives of the people around her with whom she has no actual social contact. In my real life, the older woman who lived above us only complained about the noise in our apartment once, and we had little interaction with her, partly because we left early in the morning for our jobs in that country school district many miles away and also because we often spent free time elsewhere with my brother and his family or my parents or with friends we eventually made at work. Agnes Dunrose's hobby is spying on neighbors and culminates in her efforts to get a reaction from the newlywed couple downstairs by interfering with the temperature of their shower water. The young husband lurches away from the suddenly overheated flow, loses his balance in the bathtub, and dies when hits his head in the fall. The story ends with Agnes moving out of town to a retirement community where she might not be so isolated as in her apartment and perhaps less inclined to engage herself in a problematic hobby.

 

"One of the Guys" draws heavily on my own experience; "Agnes Dunrose's Hobby" arises out of imagining a fictional life. As I consider them together now, I discover some familiarity with their themes: individual isolation in different settings, one mostly social, the other mostly psychological, both ending with the main characters altering their environments. I have a strong suspicion that there may have been some kind of link between those main characters' behaviors and the mindset of the newlywed teacher who created them. I don't remember ever attempting to publish either of them. Reading them now, I don't have an urge to try.

 

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