ANXIETIES. WET/DRY, FIRE/FLOOD ?

Always look behind you?

What goes around comes around?

or, Urns are round, idiot!

The arrow doesn't disappear into thin air. It comes back at you...got to pay attention.

Events that we think happen only elsewhere don't anymore.  They happen here, there, and almost anywhere.  Climate change changes the odds on everything.  No one is immune.

 

DRY/FIRE

 

The first time I saw the aftermath of a major wildfire was in November 2017.  I was passing through Santa Rosa, California, on the way to Napa.  Just weeks before, the Tubbs fire had burned some 36,000 acres had destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings­ there, almost reaching Napa Valley.  Entire residential areas were destroyed. Along narrow winding roads through forests with downed trees and others blackened by fire I got glimpses of driveways at the ends of which sat burned out cars, half melted pickup trucks, and piles of debris that had once been houses.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like, navigating roads like this through burning forest where one fallen tree could block the only way out. This was the first time I’d fully grasped how wildfires could eat up entire residential areas.  Not just forest.  The next year another fire ate up the town of Paradise.  But that was in California, too, I thought.  Then a fire in 2022 leveled an entire subdivision called Sagamore, in Colorado. “It was 200 yards from a Costco,” a resident said, “Why would I have to worry about fire. It’s, like, suburbia, you know?”  It burned to the ground in minutes. But that was in Colorado. In 2023 it was the town of Lahaina in Maui.  It also burned to the ground in minutes. Maui!

 

Near Santa Rosa, California, November 2017

WET/FLOOD

It was a humid and hot weekend.  Dinner was outdoors.  Two houseguests, singers here for the opera Fidelio at the Town Hall Theater joined a summer spread of barbecued ribs, salads–an ordinary hot day dinner.  It was Memorial Day weekend, nearly June, and a day that usually opens a summer of hot sunny days. It turned out to be one of maybe a handful of days that I had dinner, or any meal, for that matter, outdoors.  The first days of summer were sunny, but later in the month the sky often became a hazy gray.  You could smell the air.  It was smoke from the many wildfires far away in Canada.  Then there came rain, and more rain.  

Early in summer I had asked the farmer who mows our field to wait until after the first of August because of endangered meadowlarks and bobolinks.  These birds nest in open fields in June and July, but at that very time there are few fields that aren't being mowed.  Farmer Dan often waits until August anyway, having many other acres elsewhere to deal with.  The rain brought one gift, however.  As showers continued in July they gave birth to what was probably one of the best display of wildflowers I've seen in the field.  Then came the mosquitos, beneficiaries of all those pools of water. It’s well after August first now, the field is still soggy, and mowing isn’t going to happen any time soon.

 

  

 

On July 11 there were serious floods in Montpelier, Barre, and Ludlow, Vermont, making national news, FEMA intervention kind of bad news.  But many smaller towns had flooding too. Some people had water in their basements.  Culverts were washed out.  Landslides happened, one nearby in Ripton. Farmers lost hay crops, and most of those hay crops have stayed lost. A local blueberry farm never opened for picking. 

The falls at Middlebury, July 14

The falls in Vergennes, July 19

The annual Addison Field Days went on as usual, despite the wet. I had to wear my most mud-friendly shoes at our annual Addison Field Days fair. Parking is in a grassy meadow which typically turns into mud after a rain. Fairgoers are used to mud, the Addison County sticky clay type of mud, but this summer “It was wild,” as someone said. Hundreds of cars got stuck and had to be pulled out by tractor.  Each day it got worse. A single tractor driver was the only person pulling cars out of the mud, and it went on non-stop. I heard horses were used on at least one occasion.    Weeks afterwards it looks like a partially plowed field.

Parking at Field Days

Worst than mud:  a destroyed house on Route 125 in nearby Ripton after a landslide

 

Way beyond our local universe, an ocean way toward the east and a continent away to the west the wet and the hot and the dry were in extremis.  Temperatures in the high 100’s in the south and southwest in this country, and in much of southern Europe. In all too many of these places, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Switzerland, and the Canary Islands, fires followed.  For the far southwest, as I write this, hurricane-driven floods are predicted.  “I’m bewildered,” said a guy from Palm Springs, where it might ordinarily rain one day a year, who wasn’t sure just how to protect whatever it was that would need protection. It is definitely bewildering.

 

 

DRY/FIRE

 

Dry spells make me feel uneasy, especially when there's wind. (Winds are famously unsettling.  The mistral, the sirocco, the foehn–none of these I think are anyone's favorites.) Here in the dry the clay soil becomes even more resistant than usual, hardening like concrete, cracking like a dry lake bed. As for wildfire in Vermont, I could find no history, no list or statistics about wildfires that have occurred here. The Department of Forestry reports only that "most wildfires in Vermont are caused by outdoor burning, campfires and logging operations" in the dry periods. Not surprisingly, these dry times usually occur in the fall but they can also arise in spring, never mind that the land looks green and damp, in the forest ground fuels and litter could be dry enough to keep a fire going once it was lit. There is no sure thing.

Not a bush, but my overgrown brush pile. I may have to wait until the ground is snow-covered to burn it.

 We need to ask our town fire warden for permission to do any burn “over three feet in diameter.”  Almost everyone who owns an acre or more of land has a brush pile. I have a brush pile and I can't seem to keep from enlarging it. The possibility of having a burn that spreads beyond the “three feet in diameter” limit doesn't sound sufficiently remote. A few years ago a farmer lit his field across the road in a planned and undoubtedly permitted burn. The burn was extensive though, covering several acres. After a while the wind picked up a little bit, just a little bit, and it began to look just a little bit scary. There was a tremendous plume of smoke, enough that the town fire department was alerted. Thankfully the fire didn't exceed its  planned perimeter and the flames eventually subsided on their own.  

I also remember all too well one day in the fall some years ago while I was out doing errands Ken tossed a pail he thought was meant to be discarded on top of a pile of leaves and brush in the woods right next to the shed. I don't know what he thought was in it.  But in the bottom of that pail were smoldering ashes.  As I pulled in the driveway I found a cloud of smoke and the beginnings of a fire frighteningly close to the shed in a pile of dry leaves and branches. I was so shocked I almost didn’t know what to do first.  What’s quickest? Turn on the water!  Find Ken!  Grab the hose!  Is it long enough? Panic.  It happens so quickly.  We managed to put the fire out. It was caught just in time. Luck, just luck. 

Site of the near thing

 

 FIRE/FLOOD?

 

I have no complaints about the wet. Easy to say, I know, I know, I’ve been fortunate not to have suffered because of the summer’s flooding. But I’ll take the wet over the dry anytime.  How do you weigh such choices, anyway?  For one thing, water is not going to surprise you in the same way as fire.  It won’t arrive in the middle of a beautiful day, will it?