The only time I drive on the windy road is when I’m not in a hurry. On school mornings I choose the straight road, where I can go gaily forward without navigating tight turns. Today I drove home on the windy road.
I saw what the columns of smoke were coming from, the plumes that my kids had seen outside when they were playing this morning in costumes with cloaks and swords.
They had come inside and asked if I should call the fire department.
Last summer and the summer before and the one before that, we breathe smoke from wildfires, I download air quality apps, we cancel yard parties, we don’t go to the lake to swim, we stay inside, or we go outside and watch the hills for plumes of smoke.
I could feel the tension in their voices when they pointed to the smoke and asked if I should call. I did call and I reported what I saw. The dispatcher asked what color the smoke was, was it rising in a cloud or a column, and I told her it was a column getting darker and darker.
On the way home this afternoon, warm inside from friendship and a new book and the ridiculously blue sky full of puffy clouds, on the windy road, I saw the smoke plumes. And I knew what they were.
The price of lumber is way up, so people who control wooded areas are having trees cut down. On the windy road there are huge slash piles, the branches of trees-turned-lumber mounded up in piles much bigger than my car, maybe the size of my little house. The plumes are the smoke of the slash piles being burned.
Dark smoke rising up on purpose.
As if there isn’t too much carbon in the atmosphere already. As if the smell of smoke isn’t scary now. As if there’s no such thing as a wood chipper and combustion is the only option. As if the trees don’t matter. As if habitat doesn’t matter. As if the shade and the musty decomposing smell of the woods aren’t necessary. As if we can just spread and consume and combust.
Now I’m home and I’m reading The Cold Millions where I find this quote:
“I fell in love with my country – its rivers, prairies, forests, mountains, cities and people…. It could be a paradise on earth if it belonged to the people, not to a small owning class.” – Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
I want that too. I co-sign with the Rebel Girl.
The city’s suburbs are spreading across woods and agricultural land and meadows. People are buying land and sculpting it into lawns. My family sculpted into fields and built barns on it. It’s what colonizers do. What they’re doing isn’t new, except in the sense that colonizing this land is new.
What are we going to do? I know, organize, organize, organize. Do the best we can manage in our own lives within the systems that we live in, while we try our best to dismantle the systems and transform the big picture. But I want the woods to be protected now. I want no more burning slash piles now. The only time I can bear to think about the damage to the earth is when I can’t escape reality confronting me.
spurred by the experience and the prompt "the only time I..." from @tellherco
