No plan survives contact with the fire gods

Welp.

The last couple evenings we've had the winds blow up, super gusty with occasional 60-90km/h, and a lot of lightning. I think there have been something like 40 new fire starts in the district in the last 48 hours that are known, and our district is really large so several won't be known for awhile: there is enough ambient smoke that new smoke plumes won't be seen easily. The district to the east of us had probably another 30 or so starts in that timeframe, and the majority of the towns within 100km of me each have "their fire".

https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map if you're curious, I'm in the Prince George fire center southwest-ish corner, but remember that the size of the icons doesn't change so the fact that they cover the whole province when you're zoomed way out doesn't mean we're all on fire. The gut-read on that map is much more accurate to the on-ground situation if you zoom way in.

Anyhow, the air at work is suddenly electric. I've felt this before here during big fire seasons. Because fires are a huge personnel draw but only sometimes, the provincial government has a program set up where people from within it can go help with fires, everything from warehouse and logistics to actual ground crew, when they're needed. The firefolks borrow our trucks (lots of them are from mexico, australia, etc) and priorities get revamped even more on the fly than normal. The office mostly empties out and is left with a skeleton crew of people rotating through their off-deployment times and juggling a situation that changes minute-to-minute.

My sampling program is supposed to go in order down a random list of 100 locations throughout the district. When the summer students come back from running trucks down to the fire center, I'll have them comparing the map of 100 potential locations to the map of fires: I'd been planning to do the first 8 on the list but I'll be lucky to find 8 that aren't either on fire or with access blocked by fire by this point.

If an evacuation alert (which is basically: you may be evacuated at any moment) comes down, we'll have to stay within the alert area since once it's transformed to an actual evacuation there's no re-entry. And obviously I can't take all my animals into the field with me, so I wouldn't be able to re-enter to get them.

Exciting times, and my summer has definitely gone from the next month of scheduled work to very on-the-fly. I think I like this better, once I settle into it? But here we are.

Tonight is supposed to be another big wind-and-lightning evening, and then I think we get a break for a couple days.

Likely two more months before any fires will fully extinguish.

Jury is currently out on whether this is better than somewhere with hurricanes or tornadoes? But all my walks outside with the dogs, sitting in the back field in my baby orchard, watching my tomatoes and corn grow: I still love it here. I'd still rather be here than anywhere else.

Which is lucky, because I think my planned visits down south this summer are coming off the books pretty quickly, to be replaced (hopefully not) with an unplanned evac in a truck full of animals.

Perfectly normal

I'm never quite sure how much "normal" people keep tabs on the world around them. As a land manager there's a lot of input I'm used to about the landscape. So the other night I had open:

https://firesmoke.ca/

https://wildfiresituation.nrs.gov.bc.ca/map

https://www.lightningmaps.org/

windy.com

zoom.earth (less helpful with smoke)

Government weather page

Pages for each of a couple nearby fires as per the wildfire situation map

google maps

Hahahahaha

I must be feeling better. I'm shit-disturbing at work. Much easier to do it in support of admin staff than in support of myself of course.

(no subject)

They say it will pass so quickly
And somehow it does
There you are,
Forty, with each summer hotter than any in memory
So quickly you didn't notice
You still feel like sixteen inside
A little bewildered
And still believing in rain.

(no subject)

Writing poetry is a tide. It sweeps me up in my own lens onto the world, slightly blue tinted and distorted by the thick curvature of my experience. When I write I have the voice that human communication denies me: shade, nuance, tilt, perspective. My whole life I've lived in the minds of those around me. Every moment is, how are they thinking about this, what motivates them, what do they want, how do they see this? That's how I'm allowed to approach.

Sometimes people have approached me, but rarely. Poetry is where I take my own hands, my own voice, and exist outside of what people want to hear from me. My double vision, always looking at this thing and that thing or rather the relationship between-- always arcing, like a wire that's worn through but not quite enough to go dark.

That is to say I'm sitting here listening to lightning, with fires all around. The lightning isn't showing up on the website in front of me even though sometimes it flashes through the window: its truth is unanchored in the human-made world. It's real and I'm real, but perhaps no one else in the world is. Wind that used to be cool against the heat is a precursor to smoke now, carrying the scent of campfires and evacuation as it fans these literal flames around me.

How am I supposed to put that nuance into human language? It used to be relief. Before that, before my fat protected my core, it was frustrating and made me shiver. Even two weeks ago I was saying how grateful I was there was wind. I'm in metaphor again because how do you talk about that relationship without it? So many things in life are like that, beauty and lightness tinted and then obliterated by new context. Which way the wind is blowing matters now: towards the highway, to shut it down? Towards my house? Or back onto the already-burnt area of the fire so that it may starve and dwindle and lose its power? How do I know which it's doing, to know whether to relax and enjoy the wind?

I felt more like myself the month I wrote poems everyday than at any other time. It faded as I stopped. I enjoy things now: walking the dog in the back field and learning her love language of snuggles and holding, baby ducklings diving into the water as I pour it into their bowl, the weight of my body against the acupuncture mat that lets me relax into it. I wouldn't say I enjoyed poetry. But I thrived on it nonetheless.

Today it's started coming to me again, especially at times when I can't write it down. My mind is waving near-invisible tendrils through my experiences, grasping them and connecting them insistently. Watching firefighters out the back window. The feeling of being rooted so deeply in this land and the way roots tear when you pull them out of the ground and the whole plant is got and it dies, or conversely when the top pops off and the roots are left to grow. Which am I? Offers of help that-- you know, sometimes it's just stage-managing an experience for other people so they feel like they helped, so they won't feel bad and they'll go away. Actual help, well, when the anesthesiologist was putting me under he was gentle, he was taking care of both my body and through his kind explanations of my mind, and I cried and felt like crying was ok in front of someone. I don't cry about the offers of help I've got lately, except maybe one.

Writing this the wind comes up sharply and blows the tin off a roof. It can only be fanning the fire and I don't know what direction it's coming from, I'm inside and it can only spill in through the window. Is it pushing the fire away or bringing it towards me? How can I not write in this? Everything that happens is a sign, is a portent, is an explanation of my own life's map.

Writing. Just writing. To myself?

Of course. There's no one else here.