We’re in Colorado, enjoying some beautiful late-season snow squalls. There was an inch and a half on the ground when we woke up this morning. We headed out to meet Bill’s son John and grandson Charlie at the playground. We used the snow mounded on the slide to make snowballs and walked over to look at the river flowing along the base of the snow-dusted mountains.
On the way to the river, we walked past a memorial to fourteen elite hotshot firefighters who perished when they were trapped fighting the nearby South Canyon fire in 1994. A number of them were women.
Here is a description of one of them, Terri Ann Hagen, of the Onondaga tribe of the Iroquois. Born in 1966, Terri served in the Army as a medic and completed airborne training with the National Guard. She was a senior at Oregon State University at the time of her death, studying entomology and history. According to the information on her memorial plaque, she mountain-biked, rafted, caved, hiked, hunted, played basketball, taught swimming, and was a rodeo team roper. And was also an elite hotshot firefighter. What a woman!
Fire has been on my mind more often in recent years. The 2020 Holiday Farm wildfire along the McKenzie River, about an hour’s drive from our Oregon home, defaced miles of gorgeous riverside views, devastated a community, and left many homeless for an extended period of time. More recently, the horrendous wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, left an indelible impression. My volunteer work in emergency planning for our neighborhood also keeps me uncomfortably aware of possible disaster scenarios.
Catastrophic fires are happening more often, and a book I read recently, Fire Weather by John Vaillant, provides a detailed exploration of why hotter, more explosive infernos are threatening our communities. Documenting the course of a single devastating Canadian wildfire provides the narrative framework for a non-fiction thriller. Along the way, Vaillant presents a serious argument about how the nature of fire has changed. He
Soon we were all back at John and Jaimie and Charlie’s house, cozy and safe, watching from the windows as more snow fell outside. This is one of the most beautiful places I know, with its high contrast views of snowy peaks, red rock, and stand upon stand of green trees. But it’s dry and vulnerable to forest fires in the summer heat.
Bill, his son John, and grandson Charlie are celebrating spring birthdays. If we want Charlie to be able to enjoy green trees and snowy mountains until he is as old as his Grandpa, we need to pitch in to reverse the warming trend of our planet to prevent the wilder and hotter infernos spawned by these fire weather conditions.
