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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.
 
 
 

Puzzling

 

A few years ago, responding to my inactivity and slowing memory, my daughter sent me a book of mixed puzzles. Supposedly, doing puzzles helps your brain stay active and engaged. I obligingly worked my way through most of them.

 

I now have a first-thing-in-the-morning online routine: three different crossword puzzles, then two (or three) jigsaw puzzles, then the day's weather forecast, all before checking my email account and then—too often—Facebook. I claim knowing the weather helps me decide what to wear and it's remotely possible I'll have a personal email message or find an urgent Facebook post. I delete most of the messages out of a sense of tidiness and scroll quickly past most Facebook posts. I claim that this routine prepares me to start the working day, but other than editing and re-editing an entry to post on my blog on Friday morning or revising my check list of things I might be doing during the coming week or composing biweekly notes to record what I did or didn't do in terms of writing, editing, and reading, my concrete accomplishments in any week are likely to be various household chores and curbside errands.

 

Online jigsaw puzzles appeal to me, especially the plentiful array of nature scenes and historical sites available at Jigzone and Jigsaw Planet. Those sites give me a range of patterns to work with. The Jigzone puzzles range between 6 pieces and 247 pieces, in over a dozen shapes (zigzag, birds, polygons, stars, lizards, triangles—in one option you piece together a map of the United States); I almost always do the 48-piece Classic version. The Jigsaw Planet puzzles have eight shapes to choose from and generally range between 24 and 300 pieces; I mostly choose 24- or 30-piece puzzles in a fairly simple shape. Most of the puzzles I pick show places I've sometimes but most often never have been.

 

Crossword puzzles—AARP's The Daily Crossword, The Daily Word Search, and Scramble Words—appeal to me more. They involve words that call upon powers of memory and interpretation. The Scramble Words puzzle is a timed event in four rounds with three to five or six blank spaces to be filled with certain letters randomly presented below the puzzle. If one of the letters is an S, chances are good that one or more three-letter or four-letter singular words will add it to become a plural: tip, tips, pit, pits, port, ports, sport, lime, limes, guy, guys, dent, dents, gent, gents. I almost always make it through the third round, but I've only completed all four rounds three times. I can look up the words I've missed when the game ends, which usually makes me certain I would have guessed them if I'd had more time.

 

The Daily Word Search centers on the trivia theme of finding words about that day in history. Words are variously arranged in a puzzle grid, to be read up, down, forwards, backwards and diagonally. The words are listed beside the grid, two of them hidden for extra points. I generally try to find the hidden words before they're exposed but pay no attention to the score I rack up.

 

In The Daily Crossword the words are either horizontal or vertical, roughly 80 or so intersecting one another, with a numbered list of clues for up words and down words alongside the grid. You need to figure out what a clue is alluding to: a historical figure or event? a familiar expression? an alternative meaning? I avoid the more complicated crosswords—the Anagram Crossword, the Cryptic Cross, the Daily American Crossword (which took me over half-an-hour to complete yesterday)—and stick to the Daily Crossword, which I can now complete in six or seven minutes. My speed relies on how repetitive the words are. I can almost count on certain words showing up: Ella, elle, ella, ell, ells, els, Elton, Eddie, Reba, Alec, Alecs, Eric, Erics, area, arena, Erie, eerie, lama, llama, aper, icer, and how Shakespeare would write "never" or "ever" or "evening". The repetition makes the puzzle easier, of course.

 

As I confess to the frequency with which I work at crosswords and jigsaws, I'm aware of how insistently I opt for the less challenging approaches. More challenging versions take more time and the prude in me resists playing games that long. I suppose the question might arise as to whether the time I'm spending and the level of challenge at which I'm spending it is sufficient to keep my brain active and my memory operational. Maybe the more urgent question is whether this blog post is proof positive that the crosswords and jigsaws I've completed have helped keep me as intellectually proficient as I used to be.

 

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