It’s tempting to call Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History timely, especially in California, where, in the wake of January’s Eaton and Palisades conflagrations, fire has ceased to feel seasonal at all. Gone are the days when Los Angeles might still be described, as Joan Didion noted in 1989, as “a desert city with only two distinct seasons: one beginning in January and lasting three or four months, during which storms come in from the northern Pacific and it rains—often an inch every two or three hours, and sometimes, in some places, an inch a minute—and one lasting eight or nine months, during which it burns, or gets ready to burn.” There are no fire seasons any longer, when every season is susceptible.
Such an idea sits at the center of Martin’s book, which is a mix of memoir and reportage, tracking four months during the lockdown year of 2020, when the author experienced two sorts of plague. First, there was the COVID-19 pandemic, which Martin and her partner rode out in a Sonoma cabin; second, the LNU Lightning Complex fires, which incinerated more than 300,000 acres between August and October.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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“Three years earlier,” she writes, “it had been unanticipated when I, a tattooed, die-hard city girl, moved to the woods and started wearing clogs instead of combat boots.” Now, two years after 2018’s devastating Camp Fire, faced with another set of firestorms, “you just couldn’t know anything anymore.”
Uncertainty, in The Last Fire Season, is not a source of reconciliation but rather its own form of reckoning. For Martin, that means learning how to live with fire. This is the first, most important lesson California teaches the willing—not that nature is an adversary, to be subdued or vanquished, but that it is indifferent and we are only a small part of processes we cannot control. “Humans are not the main characters in the great drama of Earth,” she observes, in a line that recalls Robinson Jeffers and his philosophy of inhumanism, which he once described as “a shifting of emphasis from man to not man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence.”
Martin recognizes this, but she’s not defeated by it. Instead, she takes a wider view. The Last Fire Season moves fluidly between personal challenges—the pandemic, her chronic pain from a broken IUD—and more collective ones. It takes place in human and deep time all at once. In the former, Martin does her best to remain grounded; she continues (what other choice does she have?) to live her life. In the latter, she considers the ramifications of our shortsightedness, while making a case for us to accept “cycles of damage and renewal.” That’s a difficult position to urge, but it is also a necessary strategy for living with nature rather than in opposition to it. “The history of the world,” she writes, “was so often the history of men not knowing how to respond to beauty.” The Last Fire Season charts a different course.•
THE LAST FIRE SEASON: A PERSONAL AND PYRONATURAL HISTORY, BY MANJULA MARTIN
