Because of the Fire in the North
On the highway north of Warm Springs everything is different now. A fire has been burning on the Res for days, and last Friday it tore along the eastern edge of Route 26 for several miles, leaving the terrain scarred and black. Even now, smoke thick as London fog hangs in the air, and reeks. Most of the fire is down in the canyon now. You can drive to the mountains if you want.
I’ve crossed that terrain hundreds of times over the years, so often that the trip is boring, and rote. But today it was entirely different. There’s something arresting — hard to say what — about seeing something as unalterable as the landscape totally changed. The earth seems smudged, as if by an enormous eraser: trees, once green, are scorched black and tilt, waiting for a wind to knock them down; miles upon miles of ochre scrubgrass are now the color of graphite. And then, out on the high range, small miracles: houses, untouched, ringed around by unburnt lawns.
I no longer have patience for poetry, really; I don’t mind reading it, but when I try to write it I grow suspicious — of my ideas, the tiny rhymes of both language and meaning that give poetry its charge. But the palimpsest that lies in the wake of a serious fire tests me on that score. I begin to think — maybe I could? Oh, probably not. I’m out of practice, and don’t have the energy to get back into practice.
It’s been a strange week marked heavily by mistakes. I crossed the mountains maybe eight times in total, though usually by the southern route, because of the fire in the north. I’m beached in the middle of two Joan Didion books, both beautiful and awful in equal measures. I wish I hadn’t just reread Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because I’d like to re-read it again, the way I do once every couple of years, having forgot some of it, so it seems new again. Tomorrow I work at KBOO. My novel will be finished before the end of September come hell or high water.
Back on track.