icon caret-left icon caret-right instagram pinterest linkedin facebook x goodreads bluesky threads tiktok question-circle facebook circle twitter circle linkedin circle instagram circle goodreads circle pinterest circle

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.
 
 
 

Practicing Writing

Although I had enjoyed several of Ann Patchett's novels, I ignored her nonfiction, assuming This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage would simply be a cheerful memoir. But when, online, I happened upon "The Getaway Car," her essay about writing, tried to find a physical copy in my local library, and discovered it was available only in that essay collection I'd deliberately overlooked. I immediately checked out the book and have since renewed it four times. It's a good collection and "The Getaway Car" is a good, long article about writing, centered on her fiction ("consolidating the bulk of what I know about the work I do in one place") but applicable to creative nonfiction as well.

 

 "Every writer approaches writing in a different way," Patchett declares, contrasting approaches between "people who write in order to find out where the story goes" ("if they know the ending of the book there would be no point in writing it)" and people, including herself, "who map out everything in advance," (like John Irving, who "can't start writing his books until he thinks up the last sentence"). I haven't written fiction for decades, but I identify more with her first group than with the group she identifies with. I usually have the urge to write about something but need to write about it to discover why I want to write about it.

 

Asserting that "to get to the art you must master the craft," she advises, "If you want to write, practice writing." She believes, "I get better at closing the gap between my hand and my head by clocking in the hours, stacking up the pages." She emphasizes self-forgiveness as key: "I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself." When people ask her if writing can be taught, she claims, "I can teach you how to write a better sentence, how to write dialogue, maybe even how to construct a plot. But I can't teach you how to have something to say." Her observation reminds me of the challenge in teaching writing to students. Textbooks often center on grammatical correctness or, in subject matter courses, on approved interpretations of subject matter, both easier to evaluate than comprehension and individual understanding. Sounding like you know what you're talking about is different from actually having something to say.

 

Patchett also suggests that the influence of reading other writers is often unpredictable, because a particular work can somehow impact you "in moments when you are especially open." She was influenced by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, reminding me of how idiosyncratic responses to writing usually are. I remember college professors who completely dismissed writers I found inspiring, like Kurt Vonnegut, Wallace Stegner, and Ivan Doig. Feeling her two years at the University of Iowa (where I spent six years) was "an imperfect experience," she claims, "An essential element of being a writer is learning whom to listen to and whom to ignore where your work is concerned." (Once, in William deBuys' writing course, I listened to a discussion of one of my drafts and remember feeling only one classmate had actually read it. I followed her advice and ignored other remarks.)

 

Patchett's advice about writing fiction usually draws on experience. One example: "If you decide to work completely from your imagination, you will find yourself shocked by all the autobiographical elements that make their way into the text. If, on the other hand, you go the path of the roman à clef, you'll wind up changing the details of your life that are dull." Another example: "ranking everything in my life that needs doing," writing fiction always number one, then zooming through "a whole host of unpleasant tasks to avoid item number one." (I've operated that way myself.) She also recommends "picking an amount of time to sit your desk every day. . . without distraction: no phone, no Internet, no books. . .. Sooner or later, you will write because you will no longer be able to stand not writing, or" you'll give up altogether.

 

 "If I'm writing a book," Patchett claims, "I'm racing to be finished; if I'm finished, I feel aimless and wish that I were writing a book." One January, daily for thirty-one days, she spent at least one hour composing and usually wrote for more than an hour. When it produced "some of the best writing I'd done in a long time," she continued through the year. She concludes, "Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world." She's right. I really ought to follow Ann Patchett's example.

 

Be the first to comment