Southern California writers have long used distant blazes to create atmosphere. Worsening fires have changed all that.
In “Poets on the Beat,” a collaboration between Capital & Main and the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, distinguished California poets provide new perspectives on such topics as climate change, inequality, the immigrant experience and police violence.
Some poets and writers, especially Southern California writers, have introduced heat or distant fires to invoke a mood, a mood of disquiet or danger on the periphery, fire as a sort of haunting. Climate change, the resulting calamities and threat of more to come have rather spoiled all that. “Civilizational collapse,” a phrase I recently heard for the first time, is not a mood. Unlike, say, fire season, it would not make a good name for a perfume.
In my favorite Joan Didion novel, Play It as It Lays, Southern California’s fire season, together with the protagonist’s neurotic melancholia, colors a landscape that seems part experienced, half dreamed.
I read the novel for the first time shortly after I moved to Southern California in the late ’70s, and though I’d lived in many climates, never a climate like this one. One scene of Didion’s Play It as It Lays captured the nocturnal ambience that, for me, could only belong to Los Angeles, never the mists of San Francisco, the frozen Sierras where I grew up, London, where I lived for a year and most definitely, even with dry heat as a common factor, never Fresno.
The character Maria Wyeth (long “I” in Maria — that’s important), affluent on the outside but disturbed on the inside, struggling, in fact, to hang on to sanity, must justify to herself why it’s OK to do something a bit out of the ordinary: sleep out by the pool.
“The beach towels had a special point. Because she had an uneasy sense that sleeping outside on a rattan chaise could be construed as the first step toward something unnamable (she did not know what it was she feared, but it had something to do with empty sardine cans in the sink, vermouth bottles in wastebaskets, slovenliness past the point of no return) she told herself she was sleeping outside just until the heat broke, just until the fires stopped burning in the mountains…”
The heat that prevails through these pages produces a woozy, narcotizing effect. I miss that bygone decade when those fires in the hills remained so far away and so very manageable, just a glow in the distance suggesting a disturbance more psychic and internal than empirical and immediate — like cannon fire miles removed — a reminder that somewhere all was not well, but we’re fine here, for now. Or at least, our houses will be. And the low, soundless warning of those fires, more imagined than seen, enhanced that fever dream of strangely hot nights during fire season in Southern California.
Elsewhere, in poetry, because we’re now pestered, hounded, by a new unwelcome knowledge, a particular moment in a poem might land on us differently. In my 1995 anthology, Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, I published a poem by Pamela Gray in which the fires, and even quakes, flow into a languorous sensuality:
in the same month the fire
swept the hills, in the same month
the earth rumbled and shook, we sit
in the still harvest moon night
sheltering each other
from the cold Marina air
lights wink in the hills,
fireflies sparking the water
a white owl, oddly out of place
flies onto a tree branch above us…
it’s October and there is fire
in my thighs, the earth slips away
from my feet when you kiss me…
(from “October”)
This poem comes to us from an age when forest fires were still perceived as most often caused by lightning strikes or other natural causes (and somewhat less often by arsonists or careless campers), the “good fires” that regenerated the earth and cleared the way for new plant life. Only with this understanding can the fire sweeping the hills, the fireflies sparking the water and the white owl work in tandem to produce this dreamy, opiate effect. And now? Never again in our stories, our poems, can the fires in the hills together with the warmth of the night air or briskness of the sea air invoke that swooning Southern California mood, nor an edginess either, that interesting sense of unease. Now, we’ll know we’re breathing the equivalent of cigarette smoke, nanoparticles testing the fitness of our hearts and pulmonary systems. Not sexy. We can’t, in the spirit of the Cole Porter song, break every rule with our babies tonight, but not because It’s Too Darn Hot. We can’t because we’re being wheeled into emergency, where medical teams are treating an overload of cardiac patients.
That doesn’t mean we won’t find beauty in this new age of back-to-back environmental catastrophes. In my poem “Eurydice Finds a Working Phone Booth,” the wife of Orpheus, who is stranded in hell, notes that even when the atmosphere is “no fun to breathe/we get these killer sunsets.”
June was my bicoastal friend’s month to live in New York, in one of the boroughs. Though they’d heard about the heat advisory, she and her husband thought they could risk a shorter version of their morning walk. They got as far as the end of the block, short indeed, before turning back, retreating inside, shutting all windows, turning on all fans, and lying down. The AQI was 342. AQI, that means air quality index. Three-forty-two, that means hazardous, even if one isn’t a toddler, an aged person, or someone made vulnerable by a heart or lung-related ailment. Oxygen — another of those elements we take for granted till it’s running low or going, going, gone.
On TV, the video footage showed a New York sky that was the shade that in my childhood box of 64 colors Crayola had named burnt umber.
Smoke had flowed down from the north, from the boreal forests of Canada, a gigafire. That’s a fire covering a million acres or more, and something new, a new word, at least for me. In this case, more than one gigafire — often started by lightning from more frequent than usual thunderstorms, striking a drier than normal tree, and the flames, hotter than ever, higher than ever — outnumbered the resources of the first responders and sent smoke rolling over the border into dozens of these (arguably) United States.
As I write this, more than 100 people have just died in wildfires in Hawaii — the historic town of Lahaina burned. Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke has a word to describe these fires, and this one isn’t new; in fact it’s getting old: unprecedented.
In Phoenix, Arizona, where a record-breaking heat wave of temperatures of 110 and above lasted 31 days, emergency room staff were busy with skin grafts. People who fainted in the heat then burned themselves on the pavement. Some who arrived safely home without fainting nevertheless had to turn around and drive themselves, steering with one hand and an elbow, to the hospital, where they got skin grafts on the palm of a hand.
Deadly hot doorknobs. That’s relatively new.
Unusual numbers of squirrels have been seen trying to lower their body temperatures by splooting, lying spread-eagled in shadowy areas or on grass, bellies to the ground — that’s new to me.
Since early June, the headlines have rolled in from every direction — Severe Weather, Extreme Heat, Air Quality Alert. It’s worldwide: People in Spain Flee Wildfire. People on Greek Island Flee Wildfire. People in Quebec Flee Wildfire.
In Valencia and Zaragoza, Spain, drivers struggling to steer through waters rising on the streets suddenly found themselves and their vehicles moving rapidly backward, carried by the currents as lightly as chunks of lumber. Forces bigger than us have begun to make a mockery of our day’s itinerary.
At least we still have something left — the moods of classic film noir and those shots of stark, empty, rain-lit backstreets. Or — oh, but that suggests storms and will remind us of inclement weather. Never mind.
It seems we’ve flowed, undocumented, over a borderline and into an era when we’ll have to wait longer for the heat to break, and it’ll be hotter until it does, the flames higher, the splooting squirrels increasingly numerous. But finally, one day, it will break.
And then, it will begin to rain.
Copyright Capital & Main 2023
