Smoke over Santa Fe, New Mexico
It was bound to happen. It happens every summer during these years of drought, and we should be thankful it didn’t happen until last week: two fires, one the Rio en Medio about ten miles north and east, and a smaller fire to the southwest that blazed up earlier today. Santa Fe is about in the middle between these two, not threatened by the fires themselves—crews are struggling to keep them both contained—but smothered in a thick blanket of white smoke, full of particulates, flame retardants and so forth, invisible but hard on the lungs and eyes.
I remember hiking along forest road 101, now in the midst of the fire, a rocky, precipitous jeep trail with great stretches of national forest on both sides. It never occurred to me then that it would become a boundary—or at least a hoped-for boundary—in a wildfire.
In a strange way I welcome this interruption of my blessed routine: no more hikes, and only short walks outside. In the midst of such a good life, I’m not sorry to be reminded of the perilous state of the world we all share. I doubt if there will ever, now, be a summer season without wildfires—and the Medio fire is stopped in the north by earlier prescribed burning, which I have often criticized. Fire does appear to help to control fire.
We must concede more and more control of reality as the world bounds on toward climate crisis. It has helped a little that people are driving less now—there’s nowhere to go, although we remain full of tourists from states with worse COVID counts than ours. And the refusal to wear masks, nearly always on the part of men, makes me wonder if this is another example of the literally death-dealing male ego… As we strive, and must strive, for unity, is there a way to incorporate the essential changes that also tend to drive us apart?
Change of heart. Change of mind.
How welcome is the presence of the small creatures who do not know to fear what is happening although it affects them drastically: the tiny Horny Toad that scrambled across my path his morning, the beautifully patterned small Skink, and even the pretty little mouse caught by one leg in my new-fangled trap and dying a hideous death.
I am learning not to complain. My stinging and streaming eyes and my perpetually runny nose hardly count in comparison with what the helpless small creatures are enduring as we move on rapidly toward burning up our world.
Oh yikes, Sallie. How many more calamities can we take? More reasons to “shelter in place,” I suppose. The nasty hurricane hitting Texas right now is named Laura. MY Laura thought that was very funny.
Sarah