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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.
 
 
 

Telling Everything

 

Years ago, when I was teaching writing in an Ohio graduate program, I would spend two summer weeks on its campus—we taught online in fall and spring semesters—where the far-flung faculty would get to know one another and meet other visiting poets, fictionists, and nonfictionists. In summer 2016, I was assigned to co-present a craft lecture with a new faculty member, Erika Krouse, she a novelist, I a memoirist. We planned to discuss our genres jointly in a dual presentation. At the start of our talk, "The Value of Vignettes and Other Variations," she explained that we both "use vignettes a fair amount in our own work" and would talk about our particular strategies. I mentioned a couple of my essays and my recent memoir Happenstance, she mentioned some of her short stories and her recent novel Contenders, and we alternated giving examples from other writers in our genres. The talk went well.

 

That was my last year with the program and, like all but one of the people I'd known there, Erika didn't remain on the faculty either. She continued teaching in the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, a solid writing program I once (briefly) taught in. I tended to keep track of Colorado writers I'd read and eventually discovered that Erika Krouse had recently published a memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. I learned about it because she posted on Facebook about its imminent publication and mentioned her appearances at various venues to read and discuss it. By the time she posted an image of a long review in Slate for March 14, a brief review declaring it Book of the Week in People for April 4, an article in The Week naming her Author of the Week for April 15 and quoting a Colorado Sun review, and a half-page review in the May 8 issue of The New York Times Book Review, my wife and I had already read the book aloud to one another at supper time and thought it truly merited the attention it was getting.

 

There are two ways to interpret the subtitle of the book. The primary narrative is a story of a specific private investigation, following the author's recruitment as a detective working for a lawyer representing the victim of sexual assault by college football players. That story tracks the author's development of her abilities to interrogate subjects and witnesses and essentially exposes a network of abuse and covering up evidence. The personal private narrative that is interspersed with that story involves the author's childhood victimization by her stepfather and its long-lasting impact on her sense of self and outlook on the world she moves through.

 

All of these elements are drawn from her life, altered in some details for personal and practical reasons, but otherwise emotionally and intellectually observant and honest. As Patrick Hoffman points out in his review of the book, the case centering on football players, coaches and recruits and the story of Krouse's sexual abuse "become the two threads that compose this beautifully written, disturbing and affecting memoir. This is literary nonfiction at a high level." A private investigator himself, Hoffman claims to have initially "worried that the dual narratives of Krouse's personal story and the football team's rape case wouldn't coalesce. Sadly, they fit together all too well."

 

In the introduction to her interview of Erika in The Colorado Sun, Kathryn Eastburn calls it "the tale of Krouse's work from 2002 to 2007 as a private investigator on a rape case against a Colorado university football team that evolved into a landmark Title IX civil rights case. It's also a blistering account of the toll of childhood sexual assault on her life." Krouse herself points out that "this case in Colorado changed the perceived responsibility of the university toward its students, saying the university is responsible for the safety of its students, no matter what."

 

"It is not the detective who creates the culture of the crime, like Sherlock Holmes fiddling with his matchbooks, watermarks, Dutch cigarette butts, or the fading scent of white jasmine perfume," Krouse tells us. "The culture of the crime is defined by the culture of the place where the crime is committed." Through her perceptive and conscientious prose, we come to fully understand the culture of the crime and its lasting effects on its victims.

 

I lived some dozen miles from the university when the case went to court and media reported it, and met Erika briefly a decade later, but have only just learned about her role in the case. The book has been optioned for TV. If the adaptation can capture what she has created on the page, it will be a very powerful viewing experience. I look forward to it.

 

 

Notes:

 

Eastburn, Kathryn. "Sunlit Interview: Erika Krouse couldn't ignore own sex assault in a broader investigative story," The Colorado Sun (March 20, 2022).

 

Hoffman, Patrick. "Trust Me," The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, May 8, 2022): 19.

 

Krouse, Erika. Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation. New York: Flatiron Books, 2022.

 

Miller, Laura. "The Unreliable Narrator," Slate (March 14, 2022)

 

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