To Outlast the Flames / Melissa Fu
Image by Melissa Fu
La Mesa Fire, 1977
Duration: 9 days, June 16–June 22. Extent: 15,000 acres.
I have no memory of the Jemez Mountains without the scars of forest fire.
The La Mesa Fire marks a point in my life when the evening news begins to be more than background noise.
'That’s Bandelier!’ one of my older brothers says, looking at the TV. The newscaster is saying something about ‘Bandelier National Monument’ as pictures of a fire appear on the screen. I am four-and-a-half.
‘Can we go see it?’
‘No. Why would we want to go see it? Too dangerous, little girl,’ my dad says, dealing himself another game of solitaire.
I stare at the screen. Is that the same Bandelier where we play in the stream and have picnics?
‘Will it burn our house down?’
‘No, no. They’ll put it out. It’s at least fifteen miles away.’
Still, I am worried. And I can tell that he is, too.
My mom calls us to dinner. The TV is turned off, the cards put away. The fire forgotten for the moment.
Later, family friends talk about seeing the fire from their homes, smoke and flames visible across the canyons. Some visit the scene afterwards. One tells me the fire was so fierce it actually jumped across New Mexico State Road 4, a two-lane highway.
Imagine that: a jumping fire.
Out of Town Visitors
When out-of-town visitors come, we go to Bandelier. We drive along the highway that the flames jumped over. They ask about the blackened, barren land. To show them where the flames stopped, we point out firelines—cleared strips of land where firefighters bulldozed away the trees and bushes so the fire would have no fuel, could travel no farther.
We drive down Frijoles Canyon and visit the small museum. At the displays, I rub the cool stone mano along the bowl-shaped metate and pretend that I am grinding corn into meal. I like the scraping sound. My brothers say these stones are fake, they are not the real ones made from volcanic rock the Anasazi used. It doesn’t matter what they say. I imagine living in this canyon without them and their know-it-all-ness.
My brothers and the visitors go on a longer hike to Ceremonial Cave. I have to stay behind with the moms at the picnic grounds. They talk and talk over the remains of egg sandwiches, empty coke cans and potato chips.
I take off my shoes and socks to wade in the creek. The water is snowmelt from the Jemez, travelling down the mountains on its way to the Rio Grande. It is cool and clear and makes a rushing sound as it hurries along. I test the water with my bare feet. Soon, I’m in up to my ankles. Soft mud squeezes between my toes and clouds the water. When it settles, I walk gingerly across sharp stones and start collecting pebbles. Black, orange-yellow, rusty red. They are smooth and rivertumbled. I find rough granite ones, glittering with bits of mica. Flat sandstones with rough surfaces. I display them on a large boulder. I invite the moms to visit my rock museum. They say yes, okay, but they don’t stop talking. As the pebbles dry in the sun, their brilliance fades.
Going back home along the burnt highway, my brothers tell their version of the fire story. It involves a cigarette butt tossed from a car window. Years later, my mom will clarify that the fire was started by a spark from a faulty catalytic converter, but my memory clings to the image of an unknowing culprit, carelessly speeding away, unaware of disaster rising.
Controlled Burn
In 7th grade, our class goes on a field trip to Bandelier. Most of us have been there several times before. We have climbed the wooden ladders up into the cavates with the ceilings blackened by smoke and imagined living there. We have stretched out on the floors of those caves, propped up by our elbows, dust rising to our noses, looking out at the circular ruins of Tyuonyi. We are already well-acquainted with the Long House and can quickly spot our favourite petroglyphs of turkeys, snakes, and thunderbirds. Many of us have ventured into the kiva at Ceremonial Cave, stepping out of the sunlight into the sacred hush.
That day, we set out from Juniper Campground on the Pajarito Plateau and follow the Frey Trail down into Frijoles Canyon. As we walk the switchbacks and cross several streams, the ranger shows us how the land is healing from the fire seven years before. She points out the opportunities for new growth the fire has provided.
This is what we learn: the ponderosa pine is a fire-adapted species. Over time it has adjusted to fire. The natural occurrence of fires from periodic lightning strikes keeps the forest floor clear of debris and provides room for mature trees to grow. In the years before the La Mesa Fire, it had been a mistake to stop all fires. The forests grew too dense with fuel and kindling. Crucial to managing the forest are targeted burns in the cooler seasons to clear out the undergrowth.
Controlled burn becomes a part of our vocabulary.
Dome Fire, 1996
Duration: 9 days, 24 April–2 May. Extent: 16,500 Acres
Through my adolescence, we see wisps of smoke rising from the Jemez from time to time. Oh no! Another fire! But no, it’s okay. It’s just a controlled burn.
Perhaps a certain degree of complacence creeps into our consciousness: yes, fires are imminent in the hot, dry summers, when night skies flash with heat lightning and offer no relief of rain. Yes, we understand the danger of matches and fireworks. Perhaps the practice of thinning the forest and monitoring the undergrowth grows lax. And twenty years after the La Mesa fire, a natural interval between cleansing fires, an improperly extinguished campfire ignites a wildfire through the Santa Fe National Forest.
I am unaware of this fire. I don’t know if it is because my parents are moving away from Los Alamos that summer, or if it is because I am busy putting out fires of my own: ending and beginning relationships, starting and stopping graduate school. Although it burns about as much land as the La Mesa Fire, I never see the scars, can’t point to where the forest fell.
When the flames die down, it is clear that a new strategy for forest management is needed. A neglected infrastructure and conflicting missions from different agencies have resulted in disastrous miscommunication. From the ashes rises the Interagency Wildfire Management Team.
The team develops maps and methods to prevent wildfires and keep the forests healthy. They find funding for resources, training, public awareness. Their burns are prescribed, pin-pointed, strategic. They have schedules and targets; they understand fire’s role in the forest.
But even the best of models can’t always say which way the wind is going to blow.
Cerro Grande Fire, 2000
Duration: 47 days, 4 May–20 June. Extent: 47,000 acres.
In May of 2000, a controlled burn slips its leash, and the Cerro Grande fire roars away, into and over the Jemez mountains, towards my hometown.
Initially, there is optimism that crews can keep the fire away from the town and the national laboratory. But by May 10, it reaches the far side of Los Alamos Canyon, the last natural barrier. Never mind jumping roads; this fire jumps the canyon.
The town of 12,000 is evacuated in four hours.
What do people take as they pack their cars and flee our mountain-top town turned tinderbox? How do they choose between wedding albums and houseplants? Pueblo pottery and violins? There is no time to take it all.
The fire is hungry. It singes away the undergrowth. Whoever dreamt how much disaster lay sleeping under those thick carpets of pine needles? Crossing the wildland-urban interface, the fire seeps through holes where the Interagency Team’s plans have no jurisdiction. Accelerating through overgrown shrubs in backyards, climbing up older, less fire-resistant buildings, its rapacious fingers sift through the abandoned homes and buildings. When it seems the flames can rise no higher, ruthless winds rile the fire into a reckless symphony, roaring, billowing through the night.
I am not there.
I am in New York and it is pouring. My car splashes through spring thunderburst puddles and I wish I could send this surfeit west.
Through the night of May 10, I can’t sleep. What will go up flames when I close my eyes? My childhood home? Parks where we played?
The next morning I watch from 2000 miles away as television cameras pan by house after house reduced to charred, smoking heaps of wood and rubble, the remains of someone’s home. Firefighters hose down hot cinders and ash, wary of hotspots reigniting. I can’t recognise the streets I thought I knew so well.
The firefighters’ heroism prevents complete devastation. Still, over 400 hundred families lose homes and 112 laboratory structures are destroyed.
Homecoming
Later that summer, I return for a friend’s wedding. In the weeks before, walking along the beaches of Long Island, I try to brace myself for the sights of home. I dream those mountain roads, sending my soul ahead to scope out the territory where my body will soon follow.
I know the way home: first we pass Balancing Cow, the traffic sign someone stuck on a tent rock, then up the hairpin curve, past the water tower where a family friend was killed in a bike accident. Then we are at the foot of Monkey Mountain, the end of a plateau that looks like the profile of an ape. This is the way home: We pass the ‘Y’, where we’d leave cars between Los Alamos and White Rock if we were carpooling to Santa Fe. Now up Main Hill Road, winding, climbing, I know each curve, each bend. On the biggest curve, the blind one, where my dad always says to go slow, in case a crazy person is in the wrong lane, we pass the scenic lookout where everyone from my town has pictures of themselves standing with out of town guests. I know my way home. It is past the turn-off where on summer nights we’d walk to the end of the mesa, look out at the twinkling lights below and discuss the Big Questions. Past the military checkpoint, from when this was a secret city. Past the small airport, where I snuck onto the runway with Joe and Chung and we watched Cessnas land. I know my way home, past East Park Pool, where I had my first job as a basketroom and snackbar girl. We are close to my street, I know these houses, these yards. I am only a gesture away from my front door. I know how to get there—in dreams, in sleep, in everyday footsteps.
The sky is clear the day I drive up to Los Alamos. As I get closer, the Jemez looks bare. Coming up Main Hill Road, it seems starker than I expect. And as I drive along East Road, I can finally see that what had once been a thickly forested canopy of ponderosa has become black sticks on a dusty hill.
Oh my mountains. Oh my mountains.
Las Conchas Fire, 2011
Duration: 38 days, June 26–August 3. Extent: 150,000 acres
We have been living in the UK for almost 5 years, and I’ve been wondering when I can next manage a trip back to New Mexico. On Monday, June 27, I arrive home late. My husband says there is another big fire in New Mexico. I rush to the computer and start typing in websites, opening multiple tabs, trying to find out what has happened.
The fire started on June 26. In the first 13 hours, it burned through 44,000 acres, almost an acre a second. Again, my town is threatened. Again the forests are burning. The recovery of the past eleven years, so carefully tended, so fiercely won, threatens to blaze away in days. Again, I am miles away. Again, it is raining where I sit. Bucketing. From my kitchen table in England, I watch the evacuation live-streamed online. The police sergeant comments on how calm and organised the procession is. Of course it is, they know the drill, they’ve done this before.
For the rest of the week, I’m jumping between live feeds, checking for email updates, making telephone calls to friends and family still in the area. I play and replay riveting time-lapse videos. I scan strangers’ Flickr streams for familiar horizons, landmarks of memory.
I follow a Twitter feed where a parade of humanity marches down the screen. There are announcements of shelter spaces, questions on how to volunteer, tasteless jokes, angry remarks, requests for updates, links to images, misguided finger-pointing, furious responses, offers of pet food, misinformation, corrections, people remembering other fires.
Pushing the laptop away and sitting back, I close my eyes to recall the last time I was in Los Alamos: my mind returns to August, 2005.
I am meeting a beloved teacher at Fuller Lodge after a lunchtime concert. My son is 18 months. He toddles on the lawn. He contemplates the pansies outside the historical museum. A muddy puddle captivates him and he gets his shoes and trousers soaked. He swings on the railings of the wheelchair ramp. I can remember doing all of these things myself.
My reverie is interrupted with an update that this fire has surpassed the size of the Cerro Grande fire. I realise that my four-year-old daughter has never been to Los Alamos. She has never chased ducks at Ashley Pond, has never gotten her fingers and knees sticky with sap from climbing the low branches of piñons. Will my children have the chance to watch meteors streak across the summer sky? To climb the ladders at Bandelier? To while away entire summer days playing in Jemez mountain streams?
To Outlast the Flames
Looking for background more substantial than social media updates, I find the Los Alamos County Community Wildfire Plan. Since the Cerro Grande fire, much work has gone into understanding this land, its needs, its unique geology. I see maps of neighbourhoods and canyons, analysed for risk, scheduled for controlled burns. A small flame of hope begins to glow. I see why there is serious concern, but also a certain calm in the Fire Chief’s tone. The town is in less danger this time.
After 5 days, with dry skies and cruel winds, the fire has grown to 92,000 acres. Yet the efforts and expertise of the firefighters have protected the town and laboratory. My relief is unsettled, though, by news of changing winds. The fire now spills into the sacred lands of the Santa Clara Pueblo. By the time it is put out, at least 16,000 acres of the watershed will have been consumed, destroying cultural sites, medicinal plants, wildlife habitat. Much of the pueblo’s land and livelihood is devastated.
On July 3, the evacuation order ends. The official cause of the fire: an aspen tree falling on a power line in high winds. The underlying causes? Drought? Devilish winds and scorching heat? A planet struggling to maintain its internal checks and balances?
The Las Conchas fire burned an area roughly ten times the size of Manhattan Island. Ten times. I cannot picture this. The immensity of the landscape’s wounds bewilders me.
From 4,914 miles away, what can I do? Whisper a lullaby to calm the wind? Pray for rain without floods?
What can possibly outlast these flames?
The Pace of Wonder
I bring my children to New Mexico. Not only to see their grandparents, but also to meet the mountains. I want them to walk the trails, play in the foothills, feel granite on their palms, and inhale the scent of juniper berries crushed between their fingers.
We are in the foothills of the Sandias. We move at the pace of wonder. A hairpin bend can take us 15 minutes if it makes an interesting turn. They stop to clamber up slabs of sandstone, claiming to be lizards and lions at the same time. At the top they stand tall and hold their arms out wide. ‘I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal!’ They leap from boulder to boulder and every other sentence begins with the command pretend.
‘Pretend I’m the baby lion and you’re the daddy lion and you’re teaching me how to hunt.’
‘Pretend we were enemies and then we decided to become friends and we shake hands.’
‘Pretend you’re sleeping and I come up and bite you to wake you up.’ Pretend.
The light is fading and I call out, asking if they want a jacket or a drink of water.
My voice startles Carl. He stares a me for a few moments, recognition gradually spreading across his face. I must be a hazy silhouette, backlit by the low sun. He has completely forgotten that I am there, that he is a boy and I am his mom. ‘Nah, I’m not cold.’ He hops down to the dusty trail and vanishes behind a rockface.
‘Oh, a crystal!’ Lucy says, picking up a piece of quartz. ‘I’m going to call it the crystal of love… no, I’ll call it the crystal of magic… no, I’ll call it the crystal of life.’
Soon they are both searching for crystals. They are filling their pockets, delighted by discovery, chattering like chipmunks. I pick up a piece that has two points like mountain peaks and slip it into my own pocket. I watch them until the shadows fade and they come back to me—fingers chapped by the rough surfaces they have been pulling themselves onto and over— ready to walk back down the hill to my parents’ home.
The Grass Isn’t Greener
Each morning, my heart soars to wake in the presence of these mountains, and then breaks, knowing that soon, I must leave again. The grass isn’t greener here, though. It’s brown and brittle. Its moisture and greenness have been sucked out by a thirsty, ravaging sun. The dry months—no, the dry years—have made the mountain creek beds narrow and barren. The drought is cruel: bushes wither, leaves are small, branches spindly.
‘There is water!’ Lucy cries when she finds a trickle flowing over a pool whose depths have gone dark with leaf rot, whose pebbles have not been washed and polished to gleaming by snowmelt for too many years.
‘Refreshing!’ she says as she kneels and dips her hands into the cold, clear waters. ‘So many colours!’ pointing at the shades of murky brown and black reflecting and bouncing off this small pool that was, in my childhood, buried deep under rushing waters with white foam and glittering spray.
I say nothing. There is nothing I can say. I am splintered between joy and despair. I am here, I am home. This is the air I want to breathe so deeply that my breaths exhaust me. These are the vistas I want to gather with my eyes. That gecko, that crow—hello friends, I have missed you. The smell of dust dampened by rain, the scuff of boots on gravel, the shape of boulders under my feet, the sweet taste of water during a long, hot hike. All of these were once unalloyed joys.
Now I find myself unable to trust what I once took for granted: that there will be trees to play under and streams to cross. That there will be wildflowers for honey bees, a chilli harvest, and apples to take us through the winter.
My rose-coloured sunglasses cannot make the scrub oaks grow bigger, or erase the scars of wildfires. Walking these trails is a sucker punch to the stomach. I scan the horizon, hoping for thunderheads, unable to delight in the blue blue sky because I know it offers no rain, no relief for these beloved hills.
Perspectives
Eight summers have passed since a wildfire has raged in the Jemez.
Every late spring and early summer, my stomach tightens and I hold my breath as the calendar turns to Fire Season. Every autumn, I sigh in relief when the only flames in the sky are from changing leaves. Every winter, I hope for deep deep snow, not just for skiing and snow angels, but to replenish the water table, to cool the ground, to stay these fires for another season, another year, please.
It’s not that the threat is gone, only that it has moved. It could come back.
The frequency and the list of catastrophic wildfires grows. Each fire is larger, hotter, fiercer, harder to contain. In the summer of 2016, Alberta, Canada suffered the Fort McMurray fire which burned 1,500,000 acres and destroyed over 2,400 homes and buildings. Fires in California singed almost 2,000,000 acres in 2018, adding to and exceeding the 1,400,000 acres lost in 2017. In Europe, 2017 was marked by France, Italy, and Croatia suffering devastating fires. 2018 followed with flames in Spain, Greece, Britain, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Wildfires even spread into the Arctic Circle. During 2019, massive fires in Australia, New Zealand, the Amazon rainforest, and California have flared like signals of more loss, more suffering, more imbalance of fragile ecosystems and habitats. Satellite photos from NASA show smears of fire on every continent except Antarctica.
Do wildfires now jump over oceans and across continents?
Gazing down from so many miles above, my mind spins with helplessness. This is too much to hold in my head, my hands. I cannot wrap my arms around the world.
I must, instead, begin from where I stand, from what I can reach, what I can touch. I must gather my love for this land in great armfuls and deep breaths. I must learn to tell stories that outlast the flames.
Storyteller
To hold a piece of Pueblo pottery in your hands is to hold something simultaneously solid and fragile, born from the union of earth and fire. Most pieces have no more than three colors: the unglazed dusty white of the clay itself, echoing sandstone and volcanic ash; a slip of brown, suggesting piñon kernel shells or the muddy Rio Grande; and black—like obsidian or ravens. The hand-painted designs are geometric, intricate, and likely to show broken symmetry. Tucked among the patterns are emblems of the land: antelope, bear, snake. Double rainbows, corn plants, eagle feathers.
I love the pots, plates, and wedding-vases from all the different Pueblos. Each has been made with a care passed down through generations, and each Pueblo has a distinctive style. My favourites are the Cochiti Storytellers—clay figurines of people with generous laps and open arms. Seated on each knee are at least two or three smaller figurines of children. Another half dozen children might be nestled in the crooks of the Storyteller’s arms. More perch on the shoulders, within easy reach of the ears. Sometimes, a few even cling to the Storyteller’s back, determined not to miss a single word of a story. The more children gathered around the Storyteller, the more valued the piece.
A Cochiti Storyteller has eyes closed and a mouth open to a singing ‘O’ because story is melody as much as it is words. The Storyteller sings of the land, the people, and the land and people together. The Storyteller not only sings the stories, but keeps them safe.
The children listen. With their ears and their hearts and every pinch of clay they are made from, they listen. Because they listen, the stories are not lost to flames or forgetfulness, but become seeds. Because they listen, they learn the sounds of rushing streams, gathering clouds, greening leaves.
Because they listen, they themselves will one day become storytellers.