We were grateful when the long drought finally ended. The San Jacinto mountains turned neon green; the hillsides up north grew covered in wildflowers. It looks pretty, a seasoned Californian told me, but when it dries up this summer, it’ll be kindling for the wildfires. The inevitability stung—a sign of seasonal return, like fat tomatoes or fireflies, turned sinister. This week, as much of the country scorched in an early heatwave, two fires began to spread in California. That now familiar summer ritual begins: checking updates on the acres burned, what percentage has been contained, who has been evacuated. Hungry flames devouring a swath of poppies, orange eating orange.
What does it mean to make peace with violent changes in our environment? How do we prepare ourselves to live alongside flood or fire in an increasingly extreme future? As usual, there are instructions in the past: in California, there is a long history of indigenous tribes enacting annual controlled burns, cultivating the landscape and encouraging new growth. Tribes like the Coast Miwok used burns to regenerate sourberry bush, their straight sticks necessary for basketry, and in the process cleared out vulnerable brush1. Cultural burns are a way of living with the natural cycles of fire and rebirth, a relationship less like taming and more like compromise.
There is an evergreen shrub called snowbrush whose hard seeds require fire to grow2. The heat promotes germination, cracking them to life and covering the burn site with the cream-white flowering brush. Where and when the snowbrush grows can have long-lasting impact on the land around it, even improving the air for surrounding firs and pines to mature taller and healthier. This is not a metaphor to suggest that destructive fires are somehow beautiful, but rather a reminder that we are all desperately connected. From flame to seed to breath to tree, we do grow on together.
The History of Fire3
by Linda Hogan
My mother is a fire beneath stone. My father, lava. My grandmother is a match, my sister straw. Grandfather is kindling like trees of the world. My brothers are gunpowder, and I am smoke with gray hair, ash with black fingers and palms. I am wind for the fire. My dear one is a jar of burned bones I have saved. This is where our living goes and still we breathe, and even the dry grass with sun and lightning above it has no choice but to grow and then lie down with no other end in sight. Air is between these words, fanning the flame.
Copyright © 2020 Originally published in When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry, edited by Joy Harjo.
I love how this poem assigns familial lineage to fire, blurring personal history with the creation myth of burning itself. In just three short couplets, Hogan conjures a family tree of many generations, as ancient as lava and as recent as gunpowder; grandmother, father, brothers. After the speaker takes her place—and I am smoke with gray hair—we get our first standalone line: I am wind for the fire. This powerful declaration blows across the page like a gust, an assertion I read first as agency but think is really more like a relationship. The speaker is wind for the fire, part of its propagation. Like a daughter at the end of her family tree, she is discovering her place in an ongoing tradition. By the end of the poem, the very air we breathe is implicated; we all have a place in the history of fire. We don’t yet know its future, but if we can see ourselves in its lineage, perhaps it can help us imagine. An abundance of snowbrush.