The Los Angeles fires are terrifying. In my case, I can’t help but think of the Peshtigo, Wisconsin fire of 1871. I read two books about it, the first because my daughter, in late elementary school in Oconomowoc, heard about the fire in class. Embers of October by Robert W. Wells is one of the scariest books I’ve ever read. After we’d safely moved out of Wisconsin I read Denise Gess and William Lutz’s Firestorm at Peshtigo. Frightening stuff. I feel for those suffering from the Los Angeles fires. America is particularly vulnerable to such things since, according to books I read when writing Weathering the Psalms, the western half of the nation exists in, for the most part, a perpetual drought. (Those who live in Seattle may disagree.) Rain doesn’t fall evenly across the country. I grew up in the relatively moist eastern part (we get a lot of rain), but even here fires are a possibility. We had a very dry October, and a very dry May the year before.
Global warming will only increase the problems, I fear. Too long too many people in power haven’t taken it seriously enough. The weather is a large, extremely complex phenomenon that we still don’t understand. I sit shivering at my desk on a cloudy January day looking at weather apps that tell me it’s sunny outside. One thing we do know about it is that if we tamper with it in one place, it affects the weather everywhere. What if, instead of posturing and fussing with people who live in other countries, with larger entities trying to control them, we all turned our attention to that sky we hold in common? Trying to understand its needs and temperaments? Realizing that if crops fail in one country there will be shortages everywhere?
The fires aren’t just Los Angeles’ problem. Large nations posturing about who has the biggest leader has proven ineffective time and again. We need cooperators and collaborators, not nationalists. Embers of October, especially, paints a Hell on Earth. One that couldn’t be escaped by many of the people in this small town that was utterly wiped out by a natural disaster. Such things should be required reading. Instead, small-minded people ban books claiming ignorance is bliss. Trying to avoid a metaphorical Hell, they introduce a real one here on earth. And yet, some use even this to divide people against each other. And people who have no will to help one another is Hell indeed.