Fire Walk With Me
OK, More Smoke Than Fire, But C’mon, Let’s Ramble … For Real
Summer 2022 will stand out in my mind for many reasons, most of them good.
Yes, there was plenty of bad Out There. Exhibit A, the SCOTUS decision of June 24, for which I believe (hope?) there will be a swift and truly righteous reckoning on November 7.
But personally, despite a few setbacks that wouldn’t so much as ruffle a self-respecting Stoic’s robe, well, I could complain or gnash my teeth here and there, but what’s the point? The blessings from trifling to monumental abound above and beyond all that.
On the cooking front, in May I got a little wood-fired pizza oven for my birthday. It burns the same pellets I use in our Traeger smoker, gets up to 800 degrees in minutes and tests my mettle every time I break it out and fire it up. The first couple trial-and-error sessions skewed toward disaster (“Hey, turn it into a calzone!”), but four months and a lot of experimentation later, we are getting the hang of dough prep, proper mise-in-place and most efficient pie prep order. For the moment, here’s how it goes: stretch the dough (sometimes sourdough, sometimes Napoli-style with 000 flour) out on the floured counter, sauce it, then slide the aluminum, well-Semolina’d peel underneath before adding the rest of the ingredients. Then get it under the flame ASAP. Two to three minutes and four 90-degree turns later, that 12-inch beauty is ready for its close-up. Though I doubt I’ll ever attain the godlike status of the six pizza savants headlining the latest edition of Netflix’s food porn favorite “Chef’s Table,” there’s no harm in trying. And I just discovered that a lot of people sear steaks and bake bread in these things. Look out.
On the family front, we’ve watched our to younger daughters further forge their way into independent and vibrantly creative lives. One lives in Chicago with their partner, drawing and developing graphic novels. The other just moved to New Hampshire with their partner, who is studying for an MFA in poetry. My son continues to work hard as a DOD contractor and feverishly feed his golfing jones in Colorado Springs, while my oldest daughter — the only of our four kids still in Nevada — thrives as a personal trainer while she and her firefighter-EMT husband raise the two smartest, athletically gifted grandsons in creation (you heard it here first). Plus, one of my nephews and his wife moved to Reno from Southern California in August, joining a niece and her husband, who arrived earlier this year, and a sister who began the trend in 2018. So my family’s long-planned, methodical takeover of Northern Nevada continues apace.
Golf game? Meh on the scorecard (when I bother to keep score), magnificent on the friendship front.
But topping the list is perhaps the simplest joy: My wife and I have finally settled into an almost-every-morning dog walking habit. Sure, we went on walks before, but otherwise challenging economic circumstances brought us a truly unforeseen gift—more time together. So we use a chunk of that time wearing an imaginary groove in the concrete and asphalt outside our door. Arnie the Airedale is ecstatic (just ask him), and along with the physical benefits of knocking out a couple miles or more before breakfast, we’ve gotten reacquainted with what we consider the best neighborhood in Reno, and not just because we’ve graced it with our presence and property taxes for more than a quarter century.
Why the best? Many reasons, but chiefly because two blocks from our house is the Truckee River, one of several that flow from the Sierra eastward and northward into the vast Great Basin, away from the Pacific. Named after a Paiute chief, the Truckee begins its 121-mile journey at Lake Tahoe and is only one of two of these bi-state waterways to terminate in a natural body of water — Pyramid Lake, a spooky and starkly beautiful remnant of Lake Lahontan, a shallow sea that, some 13,000 years ago, covered much of what is now northwestern Nevada. The first human denizens came along about that time, and both the Truckee and Pyramid remain sacred to them — and us. Without the Truckee, Reno-Sparks would not exist, at least not in its long and currently flourishing form. We certainly wouldn’t be here to walk along its banks and respect its seasonal rhythms and coexist with its teeming flora and fauna.
Until a week ago, a close second to walking was doing so under gloriously smoke-free skies. Indeed, it looked as if the summer of 2022 was doing an about-face from 2021, when several huge blazes west, north and south of us shrouded much of the northern half of Nevada in sometimes dense, always noxious smoke for more than two months. Lake Tahoe was ghosted for a huge stretch of its summer high season. The sun hung like a bloodied eye in the corner of the sky, and the moon rarely broke through the muck. Outdoor activity was downright hazardous. Kids couldn’t go to school. We all became experts in Air Quality Index, or AQI. More than 100 is unhealthy, but many days shot past 300.
“New normal,” we heard, and nodded weakly. “Climate change.” Nodding again. “Gonna be this way from now on, and not just in the summer.” Head shake this time, not out of disagreement, but out of abject despair. Smoke got in our eyes, and heads, and hearts. It was the summer of our wheezing discontent.
But somehow, some way, 2022 had turned the forest fire page from putrid to pure, at least in our slice of the West. We dodged the smoke bullet from big blazes in far northwestern California, which only now are on the tail end of a multi-month run. Parts of Oregon, Washington and Idaho were and still are getting hammered as temperatures rose and lightning struck. A nasty one broke out in Southern California’s Inland Empire as August slid into September, but the remnants of a Pacific hurricane helped knock it down (replacing the smoke with mud, as in slides, as in welcome to another case of West Coast weather whiplash). None of those touched us, either.
Then came the Mosquito Fire. As the worst September heat wave in history deepened its grip on the West, a spark quickly became a serious flame in the parched pine, oak and chaparral of the Sierra Nevada’s western flank halfway between Sacramento and Tahoe. Within a day, the Mosquito grew into a dragon of several thousand acres, brewing a heat-fueled Hiroshima-level mushroom cloud in the Troposphere (we’ve become accustomed to such awesome and scary sights). A week later it’s still growing, more than 60,000 acres and counting as I sit here and watch the afternoon wave of airborne filth flow into the Truckee Meadows yet again on the prevailing southwest wind.
This morning’s AQI — sometimes I think that our obsession with AQI, rather than the smoke itself, is knocking points off our collective IQs — was well north of 300, which precluded our morning walk. Arnie wasn’t happy. We probably could have rolled the dice wearing a couple Covid masks, but decided that discretion is the better part of respiratory valor. A couple hours later the Mosquito Fire belched smoke into 500 AQI territory. Barring a volcano eruption somewhere, that’s the worst air quality on the planet at the moment. If it gets any worse we might have to don our masks indoors.
But yesterday was a different story, at least for a little while. We could almost see the surrounding hills and mountains and the air outside our door didn’t smell too much like a campfire, so we went for it, taking one of our regular two-to-three-mile routes around the neighborhood.
It was just a regular, garden variety jaunt, with one slight change in perception beyond the smoke thanks to this guest essay in the New York Times by a guy named Francis Sanzaro, a climber and “mountain athlete.” Sanzaro riffs on an essay called “A Literature of Place” by nature writer Barry Lopez, who died on Christmas Day 2020. He thanks Lopez for setting him on a new path over familiar ground, a path of presence, of zen awareness, of sensing and moving without judgment or too much intellectualizing. Of being one with the landscape for a change. A form of meditation, perhaps — go-ga rather than yoga.
I read Lopez’s essay to get more of the gist. I urge you to read and savor it and nod your head at it, as I did. He contends that what’s become known over the past couple decades in America as “nature writing” is actually a main strand in a thread running through some of this nation’s most well-known, vaunted literature — the essays, novels and poetry of Thoreau, Melville, Cather, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and many others. Later he goes deeper into our geographic past, before written language, when Native Americans, and all indigenous people around the world, laid the groundwork for all of those words to come simply by walking the earth without barriers to nature:
As a rule, indigenous people pay much closer attention to nuance in the physical world. They see more. And from only a handful of evidence, thoroughly observed, they can deduce more. Second, their history in a place, a combination of tribal and personal history, is typically deep. This history creates a temporal dimension in what is otherwise only a spatial landscape. Third, indigenous people tend to occupy the same moral universe as the land they sense. Their bonds with the earth are as much moral and biological.
Are not those bonds what we seek when we head out on a hike in the mountains or desert — those fleeting, delicious, nameless moments that take us above mere exercise into some kind of exalted oneness with the All? And how do we strengthen those bonds without putting too much strain on them, snapping them, which leads to what Lopez calls “truncating” our relationship with the very land, air and water that sustains and defines us, that is us?
By being quiet, posits Lopez. By being truly aware. By dropping all assumptions and just seeing, tasting, listening and soaking in what the earth gives us with every step, the stuff buried but ever breathing beneath the slabs of concrete, the timeless stuff hanging above the roofs that shelter us, and behind the fences we erect with folly and fear to mark off our fleeting territory.
Most days, our summer walks over familiar paths lead into the kind of conversations we humans spend far too much time on. “What’s the place selling for?” “How come that RV hasn’t moved in a year?” “Why don’t they take better care of their yard?” “I like the look of that patio.” And on and on. And there’s no doubt we will continue to have those conversations, because projection and assumption and speculation is the easiest kind of banter there is. It passes the time while my Apple watch racks up the GPS exercise data.
And sometimes we just walk along while Arnie sniffs along in dog bliss, quiet in our own loud and scrambled thoughts, while so much intricate and intimate magic drifts on by.
But yesterday, on the heels of reading the essays, I gave being more “present” my best shot. I was less than successful. We ended up conversing with a couple workers directing traffic on a main thoroughfare that was one-way for the day while the city did some slurry sealing. We talked with each other about things that had happened already and things about to happen, and what we needed to get done before they happened. We strolled by the same squares of lawn and overgrown bushes and sewer grates and faded paint jobs and parked cars that greet us every time we take this route. And we did so as the smoke from the Mosquito Fire crept over the mountains and toward us on the gentle morning breeze yet again, announcing that it wasn’t done with us yet. It wasn’t even close to being done, and there was nothing we could do about it except accept it, just as the indigenous people did for thousands of years when fire came and the rebirth followed, when they moved along to someplace else until that rebirth welcomed them back.
The smoke, and the unseen distant fire that bred it, is telling us its story. So I’m telling mine, rambling as it is, like an aimless summer walk.
Many days I ponder if anything is more arrogant than modern man? When Mother Nature gives us a good head slap, we should stand up and listen. Alas, we continue thinking WE rule the Universe.