Vignette for the Fires

He gets waved through customs, steps into his country, sees the haze. Yellow sun and jaundiced sky. It could be interpreted again as an angelic gold. His small stream of social media sirens goes straight to seeing the smoke as sign and signal. Apocalypse mixed with the warm hues of a blade runner sky. He drives two hours home.

The next morning he sends a picture to friends back at university. You can see the smoke from Canada (that's how everyone was calling it, just "from Canada") and it's kinda beautiful. Terrifying, but beautiful. They respond, oh God...

Hannah Arendt's past and future – two titans locked in collision at the present – are the two vectors of his reaction; he is caught between imagining what preceded the smoke and what comes after. Terror is a foolish spark. Beauty is held in action, if you and your country are not burned by the match or the aftermath.

A few weeks before his flight, he had heard of the floods in the south of his adopted country. Rains had come over the valley and poured down, but the amount of rain was not exceptionally high. Cities that occupied reclaimed land – formerly marshes – put impermeable pavement over the floodplain. The water had no place to go except into their basements and ground floor apartments. Young people from around the nation came to help pump out the excess, and they were called mud angels. (This was not the first time it had happened in the last century.) But it wasn't the mud that caused all the destruction. The land had been floodplain, prone to flood; why had its citizens forgotten this tendency? 

The fires and the floods had been immediately attributed to climate change. From Canada. Unprecedented. Mud angels. Volunteers. Fire fighters. There was a clear narrative here. He wanted to find another one. And so he writes of terror and beauty.

The haze – sign of the fires to the north – blankets a metropolis. Many citizens' imaginations see it as a threat: concerned moms rightly lead the charge. White Noise just had a recent film adaptation -- oh, the irony: the "toxic airborne event," epitome of technocratic jargon, was entering real life. Not immediately toxic, but treated like it is, counting particulates. Airborne: uncontainable. An event, no doubt. Clear beginning, middle, and end. Will we forget it when it ends?

But follow it back to its source, and that's where his friends get terrified. It easily becomes a symbol of climate change, the larger toxic, uncontainable, and unforgettable event that we are within and becoming accustomed to breathing. He hears of it coming, from across the border. No one can do anything about the cloud of haze except hide and wait: there's no vaccine for smoke. We humans are lucky that it's more ephemeral than a virus.

The subtle terror that he wants everyone to be talking about, though: that's where it bucks the narrative. The terror of mismanagement. The terror of lost wisdom. Fire suppression as colonialism. Erasure. Building up corridors of single-species forest, kept in constant production. The dry spring and summer. At the blazing confluence of all these contingent choices is the conflagrant terror.

The things that he consents to far outweigh the things he assents to. He consents to timber plantations, but he does not assent to them. No one ever asks him directly. He does not say yes, but he never says no. He clicks on the check box that says I have read the privacy policy but does not give a spirited answer each time he trades away his personal data. He is terrified of consenting to colonialism, which stands for all the paper cuts of domination that have stripped away wisdom from this land. The terrifying thing is that he does consent. The haze is a sign of his consent. Smoke has happened to drift over from where the neglected privacy policy is feeding the dumpster fire. Damn it all if he is ever forced to give his assent.

There's beauty there, too. The smoke is not to blame. The woods did not ask to be carbonized and blown three states away, but they surely must feel light on the breeze as they permeate the city. The smoke from Canada finds its way into his lungs, and the lungs are next to his heart. One deep breath and he takes in the material of the northern forests. Incense for a damaged land.