In this case, yes. My eyes are burning, scratchy, irritated. The Sun is setting, mercurochrome pink, as the Moon rises into the thick smoke of thousands of acres of southern Appalachian woodlands burning. We came into fall fire season with a serious rain deficit and were not lucky. We rarely are. There are too many people who think they can burn off that field or take care of that brush pile only to discover an awakened wind and a land so dry that everything is tinder. There are also people careless with cigarette butts and campfires. And there are sick people who start fires for fun.
All those factors have led to air quality so poor that anyone with a compromised pulmonary system had best stay inside if they can. My Goddess-daughter went to class yesterday at Western Carolina University with a scarf around her throat and a mask over her nose and mouth. She’s staying home and inside today because it’s worse. Much worse.
This is profoundly triggering for me and I addressed that in an essay that can be found in my first book “Staubs and Ditchwater.”
This—
Weather patterns change. Now we blame global warming and over-development and in my youth adults always wondered if the preacher had been properly paid. But whatever the reason, seasons aren’t what they were when I was a child in west Buncombe county. It may be hard for newcomers to believe, but back in the 1960’s, Enka-Candler was far away from The City of Asheville, so far away that children and grannies would venture out on Saturday morning to catch the Starnes Cove bus into town. The grannies warned us of strangers and cars, as though we’d never seen either. And when I was older–in high school–I’d come into town to visit my grandfather at his barbershop in the Flat Iron Building.
We were far from most city services out in the cove, but we did have city water whose pressure was so low by the time it got to the top of the hill that my dad built a concrete reservoir to catch enough of the drops to do laundry or wash dishes or take sponge baths in the kitchen. And in wet weather there was a little stream that ran past the garden and the barn. My brother and I used to dam it up and when the stream was running we didn’t have to carry buckets of water up the hill to the ponies. There was more rain when I was young and the stream often saved our labor. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I haul buckets of gathered rainwater out to the eggplants and green beans, waiting for rains that are sporadic at best.
In the autumn of the year, we had dry days–a change from the afternoon thunderstorms of summer. We’d watch the process of the changing trees as we came up the road from school. The maples high on the mountain colored up first and the rest followed in the fiery shades that brought the flatlanders up from wherever they lived, to see “the color”. I guess there were years of incredible glory when I was growing up but that is not what I remember this time of year. When the trees start to change along Kimberley Avenue as I drive home from work, it’s not the vivid orange or gold that brings it back to me. It’s a smell, rare now in a world of lawn bags and vacuum-bearing trucks–the scent of dry burning leaves.
Our house was surrounded by woods and brush on three sides–a log and clapboard structure that lay uneasily at the top of a steep bank. To one side and above us were woods that connected directly to the shaggy back of the mountain. The kitchen door opened directly onto these woods, affording us cool breezes in the summer and visitations of possums, mice and spiders hairy and large who carried their young upon their backs.
In the fall, we watched the skies at dusk to see if any wisps of smoke rose near us, gazing as far as Benson-town and Spivey to the left and Starnes Cove to the right. A wildfire on the mountain was a serious matter in those days when the only people who would likely be there to fight it were our daddies and our neighbors–men who had worked a full day and would work again tomorrow. Men whose experience in firefighting had more to do with burning off a field than suiting up in protective gear. I imagine there was a volunteer fire department somewhere but I only remember the phone calls in the night, as the men assembled with rakes and hoes and axes, going to take care of the fire. I would lie in my bed, watching the red glow through the window, smelling the smoke. I still sleep uneasily in the autumn and I trace it to those fitful nights in the wooden house, listening for the phone, watching, sniffing the air.
There was always a chance that they couldn’t stop the blaze, these subsistence farmers and truck drivers, especially in the driest of Octobers. We knew that we might have to take what belongings we could haul down the narrow steps beside the woods–the one-eyed bear, the sixty-four box of crayons–and load ourselves into the pink station wagon and get out of the cove.
We lived with Nature then and we knew that sometimes there was nothing to be done in the face of this immense and often uncontrollable force. Fire and wind, rain and ice. Often, with hard work and stubbornness, they were manageable and the crop was saved and the house still stood and the sick child did not die. But there were occasions when we bowed our heads to the inevitable and knew there were forces at work that were larger and more powerful than a hoe and a homemade tonic and a rake.
Now I live in a different world–developers can shear away great swaths of timber and stone and dirt and perch a multi-million dollar home at the very top of a ridge, a home that can only be accessed by a SUV, shimmying its way up the switchbacks and curves of a paved drive. What happens to them during fire season, I wonder? Are they secure in the knowledge that they live in a safe and gated outpost, where rescue is only a 911 call away? I’d be willing to bet that they don’t watch the ridgeline at dark or pace their wooden decks peering toward Benson-town. But I fancy that there might be a little girl, with her stuffed bear and a box of new crayons in a cardboard box under her bed, who lies in the darkness and smells an old scent–bitter and sweet–that grows stronger as the winds pick up.
But are they safer than we were? Maybe. Maybe trained firefighters can get up there and get them out in time. Maybe they have perimeter smoke detectors to warn them of impending wildfire. The nightly news brings us shocking footage from the drier heights of California–crying women clutching half-dressed babies, babbling about the wildfire that ate through their exclusive development. As the drought lingers on here in the Appalachian mountains, I again watch the sky at dusk, though Benson-town is too far away to matter now. I wonder about the homes on Spivey, the trailers that creep along the creek in Starnes Cove. Nature, as we often say but rarely heed, always bats last.