Notes from the burn scar
The map of the Caldor fire looked like an angry earwig, its red pincers closing around the exact location of my summer cabin on Strawberry Creek near Lake Tahoe. I gave my retirement dream no more than a 10 percent chance of surviving the next 48 hours.
Two days prior, I had woken to a beautiful Sierra summer day, a cracking blue sky, a light breeze. I knew the fire was burning farther down the canyon, but the firefighters would surely have it contained before it made it this far, wouldn’t they? By mid-afternoon, the wind was up, the sky an ominous orange, ashes floating down like leaflets from an enemy bomber. The air quality index was a gasping 850. “Evacuate immediately,” we were told.
When I bought the cabin two years earlier, my hope was that the older me might reintroduce himself to the mountains and meadows I roamed as a boy.
But after a few hikes through tinder-dry forests in record high temperatures, past cabin-sized brush piles the Forest Service hadn’t been able to safely control-burn, I realized I might actually be coming home to say goodbye.
Did my cabin make it?
Two summers later, I’m writing this from my deck overlooking Strawberry Creek. On the far bank, tall pines bristling with new growth shade a manzanitacovered hillside. My cabin and 60 or so others in this small tract were spared thanks to the heroic efforts of firefighters along with fortuitous topography and a favorable wind the day the fire was upon us. A thousand other structures did not fare as well.
I am living in an oasis in a burn scar. Panning out and scanning the larger landscape of my own long life, I see other days that started off sky blue but that by nightfall I had given myself no more than a 10 percent chance of surviving: a death, a divorce, a disaster. And yet survive I did.
I live on in the burn scar of my own life.
My favorite hikes now take me through scorched earth, but that earth shows signs of new life: ferns thriving in the ash-laden soil, Indian paintbrush, blue lupine, snowflowers flaunting their colors in delicate defiance of the infernos of 2021. Walking on, I might round a bend and find myself in an unmolested glade, lush vegetation sweetening the air with chlorophyll, a blue-green stream gurgling past.
Why was this acre spared? Why was I spared?
Yes, I ache for all that was lost, but I remind (and reprimand) my smallminded, selfish self that these mountains have stood sentinel for millennia while numberless forests have thrived before succumbing to ice ages, volcanic eruptions, and, yes, fires. And I have stood for seven decades, my exterior scorched, sloughed off, and renewed again, my core intact.
Tomorrow I will wake up early and stretch my protesting frame, and then lace up my hiking boots and set off, my new mantra keeping the pace: Focus on what’s left. Focus on what’s left. Focus on what’s left.