The Fall Of Fall

What happened to October? The entire month felt more like late August with temperatures in the 80-degree range, while a ghostly, apocalyptic shroud of wildfire smoke hung – stale and motionless – over the city, forcing us to remain indoors despite the warm temperatures. The AQI just last week was scary. 273, very unhealthy. A reading of 28 more units for concentrations of particulate matter would’ve put us in the hazardous zone. We kept our air purifier going the entire time. Lord knows what the filter looks like. Most of the smoke came from fires to the east, chiefly the Bolt Creek Fire.

“Fire crews cleared out fuels while others bulldozed and hand-cut containment lines. They also relied on and monitored existing barriers like roads, rivers and streams, to act as containment lines.

Small planes and helicopters have intermittently dropped buckets of water on problem areas, Johnson said. The fire has mostly burned freely on the north side into the Wild Sky Wilderness.

As the sun began to set Monday, Kris Pflugh of Chewack Wildfire was using a pickax to pull up hot ash and dirt, exposing orange embers. Beside him, Kenny Dickinson sprayed down the hot earth. They were mopping up hotspots as they made their way down Beckler River Road, north of Skykomish.

Soon, crews like this one from Spokane, will get to go home. Officials hope the rain will subdue the fire until finally snow snuffs it out later in the year.”

-          Isabella Breda for the Seattle Times, October 19, 2022.

I see the firefighters in France, who fight fires with a passion, a ferocity that matches the roar of the fire itself, and wonder what sage design there is to their strategy, as the aggressions of the fire go wild at night, radiating into the sky like the fingers of an insane deity. I’ve never had that experience, that devotion to conquering an entity so huge and overwhelming the trees crack and thud to the ground in abject defeat.

The crisis in which humanity finds itself – endless war compounded by the catastrophes linked to climate change – is one of tentative survival, wholly dependent on the caprices of a gas. It’s an existential crisis, a crescendo of angst in the face of chaos. There’s a weird thrill to it, the lifting of a veil of familiarity in which the reality of forces working in a manner that doesn’t serve our interests has become cruelly vivid. I feel akin to it, it’s what brought me into existence, but also outside it, alien to it, which may be a fault of culture, a moldy, anthropocentric view.

But what then am I? A thing which thinks.

A thing which doubts, tries to understand, conceives, affirms, denies, yearns, wishes, strategizes, defies, refuses, negates, squats, scrapes, scrawls, and can use a fork in the proper mode, pointing the tines down in the continental style.

I interact with a body and do what I can to satisfy its needs, give it food, slather it with soap and keep it clean, exercise it to prevent it from getting fat and frail and allow it repose when its muscles ache and – this above all - keep it dry and warm when it rains and the air bites shrewdly against the skin. Reproductive interactions come and go like snow. At first you’re not sure if it’s going to snow, you sense it, and then one by one a flake falls, and hours later the world is white and soft and uniform. Some form of magic has occurred. You don’t know how it happened so that the formula may be repeated again, at will, and this is life, the errancy of it, and emporium. 

In exchange for these services, my mind is given a room at the top in a spherical dome called a skull, two windows with which to view the world, a tongue with which to mold and chisel words, ears for hearing, and a nose for breathing and smelling.

Sensations are ephemeral as mosquitoes in Mukilteo, but when they rub shoulders with the muscle of knowledge, they agitate – wildly - like the flapping of a scarf.

When particles with one or another degree of spin interact with the nerves of the retina, they cause those nerves to jiggle in a certain way. This jiggling is conveyed to the brain where it affects the animal spirits, depositing these things into the brain where they lay around like puppets and stuffed animals until the mind stops rowing its ratatouille around in a never-ending circle and extends its annoyances into furrows of color. This causes light particles to spin into sensations of shape and jelly. The mind grows wide-eyed with wonder, catches a train of thought to New York City where all the museums are, and delicious Reuben sandwiches, and flickers like a hiatus high on medication. When the theatre is closed, the mind (which has been asleep for some time now) is asked to leave, informs the body of these intentions, which is somewhat slow to apprehend them, and together they rise and make their exit into the world, where there’s significantly less traffic due to the lateness of the hour, and philosophy in the sting of the air.