Excerpt: ‘The Last Fire Season’

The night of a dry lightning storm in Northern California I woke up terrified, and from my bedroom window I watched relentless spears of lightning shatter the sky, Zeus or Jupiter very upset, fire from darkness splintering the land, and I knew immediately we couldn’t all survive this. People. Critters. Houses. Trees. Max rolled over in bed next to me. There’s going to be a fire, I said. We got up. It was four-thirty a.m.

I lived on the north slope of a thickly forested hill with Max, my partner, in a small white house under large red trees. Our road was a single-lane dead-end. Down the hill there was a ramshackle neighborhood of cabins. Upslope, past the leaning fence of our yard, there grew three hundred acres of mixed evergreen forest, which was privately owned and chronically neglected. From here the woods spread west into thousands more acres of Northern California landscape: more trees, more hills, small groupings of homes perched between. Farther west, where the coastal range stopped, shrubby slopes descended to the Pacific Ocean. My extended backyard.

Wind had woken me before the lightning; it rattled the single-pane windows in our bedroom. Above the redwoods fathomless clouds lingered like silence. From inside them the furious sky hurled its energy at millions of acres of dry, deep wood. I had never seen so many lightning strikes. The blades of electricity bisected the air, the earth, everything. My insides were set abuzz. My lungs contracted like they’d just hit cold water; my jaw compacted into itself; my eyes searched for purchase in the uneasy dark. Every muscle in my pelvis, from psoas to sphincter, felt as though it had been turned to wood. Somewhere inside my brain every synapse fired, and I was thrust into a whorl of anxiety: go, go, go.

The storm continued. Max and I ping-ponged between each window in our house, trying to track the lightning and gauge its proximity to the roof; the large, open yard; the 150-foot-tall redwood trees surrounding it; the thousands more trees in the hills. We opened the door and stood on the back porch beneath the eaves and looked up. The canopy blocked our view of the dive-bombing sky.

Redwoods were the tallest plants on the planet, older than almost everything. Since childhood I had felt safe beneath the shelter of these grand trees. I often thought of them as my protectors, and myself as their comrade. The redwoods where I lived—coast redwoods, Sequoia sempervirens—were second- and third-growth, as most in the area were, due to past logging. They were probably over a hundred years old; just babies, in redwood years. The trees lived together with us in mutual silence, and when it was windy they swayed gracefully above the roses I’d planted in the clearings between them, as though they were keeping watch. Despite my feelings of comradeship, 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. Lightning was inescapable, an elemental force unleashed. It struck and struck, splintered and shone. My skin bristled as the atmospheric pressure plummeted, but bizarrely this lightning had arrived without rain. The storm was near to us, very near, and every time the thunder clapped I counted one, two, three inside my head to clock its proximity. But the expected crescendo of every thunderstorm, the deluge, never came. Instead, electric spears kept plunging toward the earth and fear kept rising inside my body, and the two connected in my brain and, perhaps, never came untied.

We went back inside. Max looked online for reports of new fires, and I put on a sports bra, in case I had to run from something. I then walked to the closet where we kept our camping gear and started to take stuff out. Although we’d evacuated from a wildfire the prior year, we didn’t have an emergency kit—a go bag, in disaster-preparedness parlance, which was fast becoming everyday lingo all over the world. Here, fires didn’t usually happen until autumn. In recent years I had noticed less predictability to the seasons, but by August the land was reliably dry, the hills a mélange of browns and yellows. August nights, however, were moist; in the mornings the fog crept out of the valleys and back toward the ocean like it was hungover. By September the marine layer would relax its grip as the Diablo winds, named in part for their capacity to do bad things, began to roll over the mountains from the east, and the oak leaves and fescue would then shimmer like hot gold. Historically, in summer in coastal Northern California, it did not rain. It did not thunder. Lightning was for other seasons. But there was so much fire in that sky. It had to land somewhere.•

Join us on Tuesday, June 17, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Manjula Martin will sit down with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Last Fire Season. Register for the Zoom conversation here.