“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
So many floods and fires and so many more to come. Our nation voted for a president who has pledged to accelerate climate change. The fires taking place in Los Angeles, the floods that inundated Western North Carolina earlier this year feel Biblical in scope and ferocity. But we know now that it’s the science of a warming planet, not a vengeful God making these happen. We could change our systems, but we chose more fossil fuels and the wrath of climate change. When the fires and flood are first raging, they dominate the news. But our attention spans are short and hungry. We move on if it’s not impacting us directly.
I recently finished reading Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafek, a novel that threads through three main characters lives via water, particularly rivers: the Thames, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. It traces a raindrop through time and space and the lives different characters. The author wrote: "Water remembers. It is humans who forget.” It also talks about the different personalities of rivers. Some fiercer and some tamer. I’ve felt this way about bays I know most intimately. Water is cycled through time and a keeper of memory, and fire is consumer of memories.
On Christmas Day 1993, less than three months after novelist Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature, a stray spark from the fireplace ignited a fire at her Rockland County, New York home and burned it to the ground. "When I think about the fire, I think I may not ever, ever, ever get over it," Morrison later said. "And it isn't even about the things. It's about photographs, plants I nurtured for 20 years, about the view of the Hudson River, my children's report cards, my manuscripts."
There are thousands of people in Los Angeles reeling with this loss right now. It’s beyond my capacity to comprehend their collective loss. From the incineration of personal memories to the leveling of communities and their collective memories.
But both floods and fires teach us a new language. The Palisades windblown fire left “movement patterns” on natural objects like plants, rocks trees and other objects that offer clues to how the flames spread. By hunting morels in patches that had burned, I learned how fire moved, like rivers through the forest, burning some trees and sparing others. But if the fire burns too hot, it will destroy everything in its path, the nutrients in the soil, and even kill the morel mycelia. There are ground, surface, understory and crown wildfires. There are four stages of fire: Incipient, Growth, Fully Developed, and Decay. There are behaviors of fire: rate of spread, fireline intensity, flame length, and flame height. There are so many personalities of fire and water. These disasters are teaching us about them.
We should all be a little jittery. Replenish our flight bags. Tag our pets. Get our extinguishers checked. And learn about fire. To understand water. I bought the book How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea by Tristan Gooley. He wrote, “Look very closely at a glass of water and you will notice how the surface of the water in the glass is not flat; it curves up at the edges. It has a “meniscus.” This meniscus curve is caused by the water being attracted to the glass. It is being pulled by the glass and then sticking to the edges. The attraction between the water and glass turns what would otherwise be a flat surface into the gentlest of bowls with a tiny rim.
What is the use of noticing that? On its own, perhaps not very much. But by drawing a few pieces together it can become a stepping stone to helping us understand why a river will flood.”
Nature is telling us her story all the time. We are just a small part of that story, not the whole narrative. We have come to a time when we need to learn how to listen to what she’s telling us.
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