To Love the Wind
This is a story about wildfire. Consider this a content warning, and a reminder to take care if you are sensitive to reading about this topic.
I am learning to love the wind again. It comes in great gusts down the mountains, animating everything it touches into a volatile dance—the desert shrubs, the birds in flight, and the fire that broke out this week just down the road. It was hot in the valley, and I was twenty miles from home, packing groceries into the cooler in my passenger seat when I got the text. Just checking on you. I heard there’s a fire nearby.
On the Cal-Fire map, the fire’s center was marked at the intersection of the highway and the road I live on, where I’d just moved three days before. The fire had burned five acres—I refreshed the page—now ten. My house isn’t far up the road, which is named for the dominant shrub in the area. They’d already given the fire a name: the Sage Fire.
My hands and head screamed with pins and needles as the blood drained from them, rerouted to my organs as my brain and breath entered fight or flight. I flew home, speeding down the highway, my boyfriend on the phone a hundred miles away reminding me to breathe, just breathe. Owens Lake stretched out to the east and a column of gray smoke rose up in the south. The longest twenty minutes of my life were drained from me on that drive.
Vision blurred, I turned onto my road, and with shaking hands, I somehow unlocked my gate. The fire wasn’t here. Not yet. While I was driving it had grown to thirty acres, and in that time the wind had picked up and changed direction—twelve miles per hour, due north. The fire was a mile or two to the south. I watched smoke rise from behind my house as the wind whipped my hair, carrying the scent of burning sagebrush closer.
Two airplanes and a helicopter flew in loops above me, scooping water from the reservoir across the highway and heading back over the low ridge which separated me from the fire. I ran back out to the road—I couldn’t believe how fast my feet could go—and down to my nearest neighbor, a lavender farmer near the highway. The gate was open, but no one was around. I turned back and paced the road, passed through a swarm of bees who had taken up residence in the shelter of a wizened sagebrush. A pickup was approaching, and the man inside rolled down his window, revealing two big dogs barking in the backseat. Shhh, shhh, he said. I’ve been texting with the sheriff. They’ve got that thing pretty contained.
He wasn’t far behind me when I dropped to my knees in the dirt, bees buzzing all around as all the blood rushed back to my head. I thought I might be sick right there on the roadside. A few seconds passed—or a few minutes, I’m not sure—before I got to my feet and shuffled home. I watched the billowing smoke from the south-facing window in my bedroom, refreshing the Cal-Fire page until eventually, finally, it read: forward progress stopped.
On hot, windy days my skin prickles with goosebumps. Summer here is relentlessly hot and windy. High Sierran air, cooler and denser, is drawn down the eastern escarpment by the hot desert air below—low and high pressure seeking equilibrium, inducing a westerly wind which blows every afternoon until the day cools off after dark. The curtain is whipping in the window behind me, and the wind sweeps across my neck and shoulders while I write. Since losing my home in a fire last winter, I’ve learned that pleasure can intertwine with grief’s pain. Strength is kept alive inside an outer shell of fear. Resilience and survival are teachers in the art of appreciating—even enjoying—the life we’ve been given, as they remind us how easily it can all be taken away.
There’s no air conditioning in here; I live in a closer dance with the elements. My skin bristles at the wind’s touch, which is warm, but a reprieve from the heat. I’m beckoned outside to pull some weeds from below the pomegranate tree I’ve been tending. The gate behind the tree shudders, and beyond it, the leaves of two great cottonwoods flutter in the wind. There’s a hammock tied between their trunks; I untwist the cords and fabric and climb inside. The canvas is clean and sun-warmed, and sunlight and shadow dance all over me through the canopy as I’m rocked gently, moved by the wind.
Thank you for reading Tinctoria, the newsletter from me, Erin of Berbo Studio.
I live in a similar climate. The summers are unbearably hot and dry. There used to be fires every summer when I was child, but not recently. I try not think about it, in case I summon the fires back. The worst part is that most fires here are started intentionally, but it is imposible to know by whom.