A meteor bursts over my head. It’s not a shower but a strike, a high fly ball hit hard. August is the month of the Perseid meteor showers. Twenty-eight years ago I watched them from the deck of a broad-beamed gaff-rigged schooner. They looked like the orchids my mother grew in the house, though secretly I thought of the “falling stars” as eyes searching the sea, attracted by our boat’s running lights.
Now I’m landlocked and drought-stricken in Wyoming, my husband gone for the summer, my longed-for solitude having spoiled to lethargy. Every thought feels like an accident; how remote I am, sitting on the edge of this one galaxy where planet Earth and its little sun do their whirling dervish to no one’s astonishment or applause.
Even the sky’s clarity, in which I’ve rejoiced tonight, is not what it seems: a thousand tons of galactic dust falls into the atmosphere every day, galactic debris of all kinds—chunks of comets snatched out of the Oort cloud, hurled toward Earth and heated to incandescence, with ionized tails so long and bright they cast shadows, shades bigger than any ghosts I know.
I think of Tanabata, celebrated this month in Japan when two stars, Altair and Vega, cross the “River of Heaven”—the Milky Way—and meet like the legendary lovers who are allowed only one night of love a year. Up and down the Kamo River young girls write the names of those they love on strips of rice paper and tie them to stalks of bamboo that are fastened to the eaves of the house.…
In the dark, in the wind, I scrape my ink block, apply brush to rice paper, and write names.…
August 18. High up on the mountain slope I snooze, the stone tablets to the northwest shrugging their shoulders above my head. When I wake, I’m eyeball-to-eyeball with a thumb-sized fern curled under a rock. With no water since June 12, how has it survived?
From my nearly vertical perch I feel a sense of apocalyptic gaiety as I watch smoke from new fires billowing. For almost a hundred years, park and forest managers have enforced a policy of fire suppression, “to preserve natural beauty,” because under “beauty” there is no slot for burned ground. Now nature has put her match to over a million acres of unnaturally preserved timber whose beauty has always eluded me. So thick, so monocultural, it is but another kind of screen: green, not gray.
By mistake a pilot drops slurry on the Wyoming town of Buffalo, and an arsonist reverses the mistake by setting fire to a Main Street store. El Nino gives way to La Niña, her cold waters humping warm streams northward, pushing the jet stream that brings rain too far into Canada to do us any good.
I call a friend at Yellowstone Park’s headquarters. We talk dew points, moisture profiles, the fact that these fires are nature’s way of burning excess fuel, and ponder for a moment the possibility of the entire West going up in flames as a result of spontaneous combustion.
At night I lie on my humble blanket, made in Mexico of twisted rags. Usually it’s the moon that is the lantern in the sky, and I feel wind taking part of the waterfall and laying it softly on my face, shunting rushing-water noise into vertical waves as if a radio had been turned on. But tonight the whole sky is an unlit lamp, a hanging weight, a tide of heat waves ramming my abdomen and lungs.
It was another year but the same day when a spell of breathlessness overtook me. I met a man who had already “given his heart away.” Our coming together was like being slugged in the gut, and the deep inhalations that began racking me were silent yelps of surprise and despair. For weeks after, I thought myself pregnant when I wasn’t, as if the body were free to follow its own loving course. I imagined multiple fathers for one insubstantial child, or else one father—him—for the many children I hadn’t had, all conceived before we met.
Conjoined, oblivious, love turned into hyperventilation—Boreas blowing out of every cheek until he fainted and my breathlessness congealing into anguished sobs. “Impossible,” we said to each other, as though saying another kind of vow. The winds that blew us, first in the direction of oneness, reversed, quickly erasing the marks of love with exhaustion’s hopeless velocity.
Morning, the nineteenth. By seven, it’s ninety degrees. In a monastery where I once stayed, a monk warned me about asking too many “historical” questions. But I say what Pedro, a sheepherder, says: “La vida es muy histórica”—life is history, full of stories. The monk quoted from the Chinese: “Too many steps have been taken to the root and the source. Better to have been blind and deaf from the beginning … dwelling in one’s true abode, unconcerned.”
Walking home from the waterfall, I argue with myself. Isn’t one’s true abode any wild place, any fire storm or night of discontent, and isn’t a book of essays truly a book of questions? As I walk smoke is supplanted by brightening clouds; the moon—and all desire for what is not—rides out of the sky.
August 20. Some 160,000 acres burn today. (Later it would be dubbed Black Saturday.) This added to the 273,000 acres already burned over within park boundaries. But when they say burn, they mean simply that fire has passed through, burning some spots hot and only blowing sparks through others.
Visibility has dropped to zero. In town, people drive with their lights on. No longer a thing of the sky, smoke rolls along the ground. There is no sun. Fire rearranges light the way light reorders landscape. I stand in the middle of a field and try to see … anything. The apple tree, full of fruit, shakes. The air is red, and the white falling everywhere is not snow but ash, as if decay preceded fruition, or night, day. Something hits my face. I hold out my hands: the burnt casings of pine cones, charred needles, and burnt twigs from a hundred miles away rain down.
My neighbor Joe and I recompose weather bulletins. When the radio says “Scattered clouds,” we change it to “Continued hot, scattered forests, heavy at times.”
September 3. Fire moves: elk and bison run before the wind. Fire jumps canyons and grizzly bears’ den sites and flies over shaky-legged oxbows where swans swim unalarmed. Flame builds to massive walls; it gathers whole forests with double-jointed arms, laying down life as ash, or else takes only what is green, leaving behind ideas about what a national park should be, and even those are charred.
Friends—one of them a colonel who taught English at West Point—arrive to take a pack trip with me. “What war am I in?” Pat, a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, asks as he gets off the plane. The Tetons, a quarter of a mile away, cannot be seen.
The Jackson Hole airport resembles a war zone. Army helicopters—twin-rotor Chinooks and the smaller Hueys—are lined up at the far edge of the field. They’re being used for troop transport, cargo, medevacking, and water drops—a thousand pounds at a time—but today they’re grounded by smoke.
A makeshift, boxlike lookout has been constructed out of blue tarps and two-by-fours on top of the terminal roof and is manned by someone with binoculars, who reports the movement of military aircraft to the controllers keeping track of commercial planes. A battered white station wagon pulls up. The sign taped to its door reads: FIRE SHUTTLE. The terminal is packed. It’s a crowd of uniformed men and women from the Army, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Game and Fish Department, plus exhausted and fresh-faced firefighters including Apaches and Sho-Raps (Shoshone and Arapaho), the Mendocino Hotshot Crew, firefighters from Alaska and Hawaii, all mixed in with bewildered tourists, who have just flown in from places with bluer skies.
I’m handed a Fire Status Update Sheet for 9/3/88. It tells me that 877,805 acres have burned; total personnel fighting the fire is 9,069, and the cost so far is $63,183,400.
Before I even get to the mountains I ask this question: Why are we spending roughly three million dollars a day on a fire that everyone but the politicians have agreed cannot be put out by any human effort? Is it because we are so vain, so enamored with technology, that we can’t admit something is bigger than we can comprehend? The firefighters I talk with agree: “We dig hand lines—bulldozers aren’t allowed, they’re not ‘natural’—and then hike five miles out, knowing that in an hour or two the fire will jump our line. So what are we doing
here?”
Another firefighter said with a wry smile: “You want to know what the human role is here? To do what the animals do—run the hell out of the fire’s way.”
After gathering at the trailhead, we ride north from Brooks Lake, following Cub Creek into the wilderness on a route not far from the eastern perimeter of the Mink Creek fire. A water ouzel—John Muir’s favorite bird—flies low and fast upcreek as if to lead our long packstring away from the conflagration. Six miles in, we make a quick overnight camp. Because no open fires are allowed, we cook on a fold-up sheet-metal stove and watch the pencil-point flame extend beyond the stovepipe: fire pointing to fire.
The next day. We ride up finger meadows walled three thousand feet high with conglomerate rock—volcanic debris spewed from huge vents and taken away in rivers of coarse-grained hot rock that were later widened by water. Now we’re in and out of shade, through patches of trees. A marsh hawk eyes us. Elk thistles are dead stumps; the grasses are sun-cured. Only fireweed catches my eye: where its red leaves turn back in dryness, a delicate pale pink shows. Above me are patches of timber whose deadfall looks like white legs hanging down; vertical clefts in rock are waterfalls gone dry, and overhead, smoke streams blow endlessly.…
At the confluence of two creeks, ten miles from the edge of the Mink Creek fire, I finally see flame: a salmon band at the western horizon, that’s all. Then smoke, my constant summer companion, unfurls itself at my feet, spreading across the valley floor, holding me in its troubled lens.
That the fires are a benefit to plant life is indisputable. Two hundred years of deadfall is being cleaned up, meadows are cleared and widened, the monoculture of lodgepole pine is broken apart so that other species, like whitebark pine (whose nuts are an important food source for grizzlies), can grow. The grass will come back with vigor, as will berries and shrubs, though the regrowth of trees in this arid western state will take years. With plant diversity comes animal diversity—that’s the ladder on which flora and fauna have coevolved.
Native Americans used the Yellowstone area for ten thousand years (maybe more), but until 1972 national park policy favored fire suppression instead of allowing natural fires to burn in order to clear timber, improve vegetation, and flush out game for hunting, as the Indians had. With our racism intact and our obsession with what is new, it was thought that nothing useful could be learned from their “old ways.” Native Americans—the Tukarika (Sheep-eaters) among others—had been expelled from the park in 1882, ten years after its inception, because it was thought their presence might deter tourists. If burning—Indian style—had been allowed all along, we might not be running from what is fast becoming a single, holocaustal fire now and hiring Native American hotshot fire crews to put it out.
Nature and culture. How confused we’ve become. Being human, we’re part of nature as well as being culture makers. Yet the messy, living, vital interconnections elude us still.
September 6. We’ve moved our camp to higher ground, and today I walk atop the Buffalo Plateau, a treeless landscape strewn with rock. I lie on my back, letting the stones warm me. Ash falls on my face like powdered sugar, my feet pointed west toward flames. Fires above; fires below—Yellowstone burning doubly. The ground under me is the child of fire: massive volcanic flows of welded tufts, breccia, rhyolite, basalt, obsidian; tubes of fire cutting through the earth’s crust like an acetylene torch, hot magma pressing upward through faults, molten rock heating groundwater to boiling, erupting, dancing on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, which rests in the arms of a caldera.
Sitting cross-legged on my bed of rocks, I open my mouth: an ash alights on my tongue. I swallow.… This is the body of … What have I eaten? A piece of tree, of fire; a piece of this island universe, or just ash, that solid residue of combustion? I no longer contemplate the sky; it kneels down on me: smoke works the landscape into invisibility.
All summer I’ve tried to escape darkness, the smoke-induced gloom, but in doing so I’ve only blocked out light. I’ve endowed smoke with solidity. It has clothed me, it’s been my faulty lens. But form does not imply a restriction, a limitation. Like the geophysicists who are trying to “see” into the core of the earth, I must learn to see the open dimension of form—to move through, not against, the obstacles I set up for myself.
Walking back to camp, I realize I’m lost. Smoke has swallowed all landmarks. But why must I see to know something? I let my feet take me. At sunset the gray flannel sky turns red. It’s a thick broth made of rubies and plasma—comet tails, plant seeds, human and animal blood rising up from fire. I think, as I walk, of the way I put up smoke screens, distancing myself so subtly from what is real, intrinsic, primordial, the ways in which I keep ego’s circulation smooth, adding smoke to smoke.
When the red goes out of the sky, I know the sun is down. A long, traversing trail leads me to camp. There will be no campfire to comfort me. Instead I crawl into my bedroll. Night is the backdrop against which desire for what is not has been thrown like a dart. Against night, against all progress toward morning, the sparks that drop from my forehead are not the eloquent words I’d once hoped for but only pieces of thought—what is left over after grammar and syntax are burned away.
September 9. Woke feeling warm even though there is ice on the creek. For two days we’ve been checking grizzly tracks near camp. I can see the deep gouge the grizzly’s heel made, the lines on the palm of his “hand,” and the arc of claws. “When I’m following tracks,” Jack says, “I feel I’m only seeing punctuation and nouns, not the actual thing, the verbs, the animals who made them.” Farther up the mountain we cross a moonscape—a dry lakebed of cracked earth and rocks shaped like the fish who once swam here. From the top we see fire. It is closing in on us, and we may have to run. During the night we take turns checking the flames. Saffron and pink light balloons inside gray smoke clouds; golden trout jumping in the lake below look like pieces of fire.
Later, back at camp, a wind that smells like snow carries the stars into place. From my sleeping bag I watch the Milky Way roll west.
September 10. I wake to rain. Rain, for God’s sake. Rain that turns to snow and keeps coming, quietly extinguishing the summer-long wildfires. Smoke begins to clear out; smoke and steam rise together, entwined.
Newly bathed, the planet gives off vapors. Down from the high country, fording rivers, I ride through dripping trees for eight hours. Trees are midpoint between seed and ash, always rising, always fighting for sunlight. Yet the literal shade they make with their dense canopies darkens the ground. I try to imagine the places where fire has been, where trees are no more, how landscape is bathed by rain and will soon bask in sunlight, and wonder if barren ground is the end of fruition, if it is, to quote Wallace Stevens, the “fertile thing that can attain no more.”
Late September. La bufera infernale blows less frequently now, and for the time being, Boreas’s cheeks are flat. Stillness gives the illusion of longevity, even immortality, yet I clock the days as if clocking the length of human life. The ground is rain-soaked, but days are bright: the planet is a burning ember that will not go out.
In October my husband and I ride to hunting camp. At ten thousand feet, his white-wall tents are set in pines and backed up to a ledge of pink granite that topples into a gorge. Lanterns hang from the ridgepole of the cooktent. They swing and hiss in the wind, but when I blow them out, the aurora relights my bed. Bright spires stab, pulse, and plume diagonally, pinning us to the ground, then explode like scarves being dropped. I think of Dante clutching his beloved Beatrice’s hand as they move from the sphere of fire to Paradise. Folds of blue and green are taken over by reds that deepen in hue: electrons colliding with atoms and molecules.
The Labrador Eskimos thought the aurora borealis was caused by fire, that the lights were torches held by spirits taking the souls of the newly dead to the afterworld. In the morning Press shoots a dry doe so we’ll have meat for the winter. It’s not a happy moment watching an animal go down.
; “Forgive us your suffering,” I say, kneeling by the deer, and wonder what a soul looks like as it lifts out of flesh. As I watch the knife cut through the brisket, then down the length of the animal through the udder, where the milk would have been if she’d had a fawn, the euphemism that calls this act “dressing out an animal” seems obscene. It’s more like an undressing in the extreme: steaming guts in cool air, all those intestines … then the legs cut off at the knee, and finally the head.
In Japan’s northern Honshu, people think the dead go to one mountain, and in some provinces relatives climb the roofs of their houses to call the soul back. I arrange the dead doe’s severed legs, then face the detached head, pointing east. The sun is going down in the west, where the fires once burned and the first snow of the season has already been laid on the ground, yet her flesh is warm and her thick ear soft. I lean down. In death, her eyes have turned aquamarine.
We ride out at dark—three hours. In a meadow after a steep drop down a trail, the leggy white trunks of aspen look like spires of light—spirit streamers or torches carrying the wild soul of a dead deer and lifting it to a place over the roof of my head onto which my voice climbs, calling.…
ISLAND
I come to this island because I have to. Only geography can frame my mind, only water can make my body stop. I come, not for solitude—I’ve had enough of that in my life—but for the discipline an island imposes, the way it shapes the movement of thoughts.
Humpbacked, willow-fringed, the island is the size of a boat, roughly eighty-five feet by twenty, and lies on the eastern edge of a small man-made lake on our Wyoming ranch. I call this island Alcatraz because I once mistook a rare whooping crane that had alighted in the lower field for a pelican, and that’s what the Spanish alcatraz means: pelican. But the name was also a joking reference to the prison island I threatened to send my saddle horse to if he was bad, though in fact my Alcatraz was his favorite spot on the ranch to graze.
Islands, the Universe, Home Page 4
