When I first moved to California, I would tell my family that of course, we had seasons—they were just not as extreme as those in New England, where I was raised. In an essay about Los Angeles, I listed some of them: pilot season, baby lizard season, Coachella, jacaranda season, June Gloom, stone fruit season, Santa Ana season, jacket season, holidays by the pool. Such glibness feels more dated by the day. Like everywhere in a world subject to climate change, California’s seasons are getting more extreme each year. Manjula Martin’s memoir, The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, explores a year in which fire became such a permanent condition that it began to transcend the very notion of seasons.
Setting the book over four months in 2020, Martin takes us back to a time that seems both immediate and distant. Widespread pandemic restrictions are in full effect, which means that as fire season starts, masks serve a dual purpose. Martin and her partner, Max, a union organizer, have relocated from San Francisco to a cabin in the Sonoma County forest near where her family is staying. The author and her father—who oversees an organic gardening apprenticeship at UC Santa Cruz—collaborated on the horticulture book Fruit Trees for Every Garden (2019). Her work is already remote, so she is able to heal in her garden after a botched medical intervention owing to a faulty IUD.
Like much of life in California, the surface is idyllic and the depths are treacherous.
The Last Fire Season opens on an August morning as Martin wakes to a dry lightning storm. “Above the redwoods,” she writes, “fathomless clouds lingered like silence. From inside them the furious sky hurled its energy at millions of acres of dry, deep wood.” Thus begins her exploration of our relationship to the land and the natural forces that sustain and imperil us. “Despite my feelings of comradeship,” she goes on, “past storms and human history showed that the trees and I were in fact liabilities to each other, not guardians; anyway, we couldn’t protect each other from this.” Martin and her partner evacuate in anticipation of the fires they know are imminent and head for Santa Cruz. “The world was flexing its power over me,” she remembers, “and I knew from experience that when this happened it was important to be quick, be ready, then be gone.”
Martin’s narrative traces the cycle of displacement and return as the 2020 Lightning Complex fires encroach and abate over the next few months. It also offers a deep dive into how we reached this crisis point: the personal and pyronatural histories promised in the subtitle. The author demonstrates an impressive command of both the story and its stakes—the mix a good memoir offers—as well as the engaging research of the best narrative nonfiction. As the fires rage, we follow her as if on a well-planned hike through an uncontrolled landscape.
Through Martin’s eyes, we witness the multibillion-dollar industry of wildland fire suppression in action—“equal parts military strategy and manual labor [e.g., poorly paid incarcerated firefighters], with a generous dash of theatrics.” We learn how colonization, development, and the climate crisis have led to California’s dysfunctional relationship with fire. As early settlers and conservationists encroached on Indigenous lands, they turned their backs on long-standing practices of responsible land stewardship that had allowed Indigenous populations to work with “good fire” instead of solely fearing it.
Discussing John Muir and the Sierra Club’s fetishization of wilderness, Martin writes, “The history of the world was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty.” This irresponsibility and arrogance led to fire season becoming “a sort of catchall to describe not just the weather but the state of the world in general.” The hope that the “season” would someday come to an end was a fallacy: “Fire wasn’t going away.” Instead, we were “living with fire.”
Martin’s text incorporates the voices of Ursula K. Le Guin, Barry Lopez, Ana Mendieta, Masanobu Fukuoka, Donna Haraway, and others. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Tom Waits make appearances, as well. We learn about the spiritual communes of 1970s California, the environmental history of Santa Cruz, wine harvests, and pruning as a form of jazz improv. The prose is beautiful, and digressions on fire poppies, smoke, Rosh Hashanah, devil winds, and incendiary dresses are pure pleasure in the midst of this grave inquest.
One particularly arresting sequence recalls a moment from our recent collective history—the day the sky over Northern California turned the vermilion red of apocalypse. “This was a sky told of fables and omens, cave art and science fiction,” Martin muses. “The red sky was a sight that might only make sense in a world of many gods, or maybe a world of no gods. It was the color of a sky from classical poetry, a color for high priestesses and jaguar kings. This was a Dante, Odyssey, war-ending red, it was dust storms over a burning oil well in Kuwait. It was a color to put people in our place, inside history.”
Early in The Last Fire Season, Martin cites Amitav Ghosh, who refers to the present moment “as one in which the biggest, most obvious thing to ever happen on this planet—climate change—was, bizarrely, not the primary topic of most literature or art.” Martin’s book seems almost like a Trojan horse of genre, using personal narrative as a vehicle for necessary information about the future of civilization. Reflecting on Ghosh’s claim that this absence of cultural reckoning is a failure of imagination, she insists, “Anything that ever happened to anyone had been unimaginable at one time, until it happened.”
At one point, Martin reminisces with a friend about how it used to rain on Halloween. I recall when it used to be sweltering in January on my birthday. “Anyone,” Martin notes, “who paid the smallest bit of attention to the world around them could see clearly what was happening.” The Last Fire Season wants us to see also—to recognize that our seasons in California are not only extreme but are becoming unrecognizable, and that we need new strategies “to inhabit the new shape of these cycles of damage and renewal.”•
Chris Daley has written about books, cults, and heartbreak in the Los Angeles Times, Air/Light, Essay Daily, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Collagist, Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, and elsewhere. She publishes the Submission Sunday newsletter on Substack and designs author websites at chrisdaley.com.
