It’s Being Called An “Angry Fire”

As the worst wildfire of the year chars a huge swath through wilderness north of here, burning hundreds of thousands of acres from its origin a few miles away, the Great Lakes of my youth come to mind and heart. 

I’m the oldest and only male of four siblings. Some years ago, on a visit to my native state of Michigan, my youngest sister called me “the blackest of the black sheep.” 

Though I have no criminal record, never did hard drugs or was a drinker, and didn’t indulge in the promiscuity of my generation when I was young, I was “weird” because I didn’t go along with the program. 

This painful personal reality came back after reading the opening line of today’s headline: “US Democrats have spent recent days trying out a relatively new attack line on Donald Trump: that he is weird.” If that’s the best they can do, they’re going to lose. 

There are simply too many “weird” people in America now. And even those of us labeled “weird” who retch at the sight or sound of the wretched man, know what it’s like to feel marginalized. Though we could never vote for the miscreant, we understand the cultural disenfranchisement Trump’s followers feel.

Although the roots lie much deeper, the family tree began scapegoating me as its rotten fruit at 19. Father told me not to come back when I took an opportunity after my sophomore year in college to be a counselor at a camp for speech and hearing impaired kids in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. 

At the time Michigan was about five years behind the counterculture movement in California, and given my long hair and rejection of their respectable, materialistic values, my parents were desperately afraid that I would be swept up in it. Though they denied it later, that’s as close as I’ve come to understanding why they practically disowned me for going off to be a counselor for a hearing impaired kid at a camp adjacent to Sequoia National Forest. 

I had never seen mountains before, thought they were called the “Sahara Nevada,” and was gobsmacked by the beauty of the drive up from the Fresno airport to the camp near the Giant Redwoods. 

To her dying day, my mother never forgave me for two things: leaving the Catholic Church, and coming to California. It didn’t matter that they bought a condo in Palm Springs, or that priestly pedophilia was uncovered around the state (though not, to my knowledge, in the family parish). 

The sky is whitish and there’s a faint smell of smoke today. And the half moon, the only visible celestial body last night, was orange in the smoky skies. The fire was started by some arsehole lighting a car on fire and pushing it into a gully at Alligator Hole in Upper Park (a short distance from where I take meditations). The winds have been out of the south, so most of the smoke, like the fire, has been driven north. 

I know quite a few people who lost their home in Paradise during the Armageddon six years ago, when, from sunrise to sunset, over 15,000 structures were incinerated and 85 folks lost their lives. That morning I saw people walking down the Skyway with burns on their arms, and heard stories of folks seeing their homes on fire as they sped away through curtains of fire. 

So the “Park Fire,” as this one is painfully called, is sending everyone reeling. But it’s PTSD’ing Paradise residents emotionally re-experiencing the misnomer of the “Camp Fire” six years ago. 

A wildfire stirs up a lot of ashes, even if one has worked through many painful experiences. Six years ago, as I stared up in disbelief at the purple and red pyro-cumulus cloud rising thousands of feet above Paradise, it felt like the harbinger of climate-catalyzed crises to come. 

The present fire, while less destructive to humans though maliciously started by one (thankfully no one has lost their lives so far), conveys less a sense of warning, and more a metaphysical feeling of finality.

Finality of what? For me, of family, since as of this writing I haven’t heard from any of my sisters. For America, despite the sugar high of Kamala’s first week campaigning, a sense of inevitability of Trump becoming president again. (I truly hope the Park Fire is clouding my perception.)

For the earth, that man’s blight will not be halted, that even the wilderness burning north toward the Oregon border provides no sanctuary for animals or human beings, and this is the future. 

And for humanity? A protracted dark age, at best. God save the earth. God save humanity. 

Martin LeFevre

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