Greenstorm's Journal

"2,286,972 hectares – 22,869.7 square kilometers – have burned in the Prince George Fire Centre so far this year.

The highest number of hectares burned on record before this year in the entire province was 1,354,284 in 2018 [...]

We also have to consider our fire centre is 33.6 million hectares in size.”

I'm in the PG fire center.

The ground is frozen and we didn't get substantial rain, so we'll be going into year 3 of drought in spring. Things will be dry under the snow, so like this year we should start pretty quickly unless we get a very rainy spring.

You can walk across the confluence of the Nechako and Fraser rivers right now.

So fifteen years ago I sat in on a presentation for some fire predictions for the boreal and sub-boreal. They were using the term "mega-fires" and speaking to the fact that no matter what forest management we did there was no model that didn't involve really large fires in the future, say 20 years.

Today we got a technical update around mega-fires, which pretty much started in 2017 up here, around "we knew they were coming and they're now here to stay" and we kinda know they'll be getting bigger. We're also not able to expect the June lull regularly. Lots of talk in land management around controlled/introduced burns, including post-harvest burning and seasonal burning. I think it's realistic how they're skipping over seasonal burning, almost, in favour of full-on anchor burning, because the fire behaviour doesn't really reduce as much in some of the seasonally-burned landscapes anymore. The 2-4C we're expecting in climate increase in the next 25 years here will make a difference, as has the past increase.

1.52 million ha burned so far in BC, that's coming up on 1% of our land area I think? we're expecting 2 more months of fire season. So far it's had impact on fewer people because it's been in unpopulated areas, because Donnie Creek is a pretty intense fire, but it may well start moving down south.

The rain we've had hasn't been enough to increase streamflow, so they're saying it probably won't do much except give us some days of safer firefighting.

I'm still of the personal belief that we'll get a very significant shift from forest, especially conifer forest, to grassland and savannah, especially aspen savannah with trees that can resprout from roots. Though my understanding is that aspen doesn't have good seed survival in hot/dry situations, so it may drop out if it's not able to recombine/evolve quickly enough. Hopefully the little black spruce bogs dotting the landscape will remain to some degree. Super hopefully we have grasses that can sequester carbon in the soil, and that make some soil since we don't have much. I kind of wonder if we should be working on climate migration for grasses? I know so little about prairie ecosystems though.

At work, as of two weeks ago, my own office had given 28 person-weeks and 8 trucks (plus trucks taken by the individuals on those person-weeks) to firefighting over 2 months. So work was half-staffed previous to the fires, now we're at maybe 1/4 staff. Then, once the fires are over, we start on habitat restoration.
In addition to provincial full-time staff and loaner staff, here were 3 international incident teams (2 australian, 1 from mexico) just in my little corner of the district, I think we now have 1 aussie team and possibly the first brazilian team ever?

It's interesting to see how fast it's all normalized. I knew water was going to be big on the radar, I think I didn't realize how much fire would shift my actual work?

Anyhow, just thoughts after a briefing. The brainstem is much happier with clearer air and a little rain.

We've had several days with lightning and thunder in the afternoons, accompanied by high winds and-- by rain! Enough to bump the fire danger down from extreme to high, and in some places in the district even moderate or low. It's not enough to totally skip watering the garden, but it's enough to reduce the urgency. It's also enough to bring down the smoke level in the air, and it's cooled down here to perfect skin temperature.

Now, it was pretty extreme wind, and it's likely more of the lightning strikes will flare up when things dry out and warm up again -- the last round left three spot fires around the highway -- but for now, a reprieve.

Tucker came up for a week. At one point I'd asked the question, if a lot of what had been going on before was burnout, then what? Well, the "then what" is that he was able to engage emotionally and intellectually with what I was asking, to share his stuff and to be vulnerable and to make long-term plans and be realistic about the likelihood of those plans, to listen to me and be empathetic and loving, and to give me space to make my own missteps so I could overreact, catch myself, and apologise instead of it leading to a spiral. These are new skills for us and we need to be careful not to tear the new skills by overworking them but it was so nice. When my counselor said what I wanted from him might be mystery, it didn't land quite right. He is capable of surprising me, and that's fundamental to longevity of this stuff, but I think what I wanted from him was hope. Hope for visits like we just had: not perfect, but generative and close and loving.

Added bonus I can send some pork down to Josh with him.

In farm news the muscovies are coming out of every corner with babies. First a chocolate mama showed up with 9, then a lavender one with 7 the next day, and the black mama who's mysteriously nesting in the pile of feed bags had one. I've consolidated them all with the chocolate mama in the quail house along with the geese and anconas. I'm pretty sure there's a humidity component involved: when things are dry and the nests are dry I don't get so much of a hatch. Then when it rains or if I soak the bedding around the nests (not in the nests) things move better.

Hopefully I got all the babies off the ground quickly enough that they'll do ok. I think there's a disease in my soil that catches them if they're not taken off it in time, and I've lost a lot to it over the years. I'm considering building more enclosed space up off the ground for that reason. Having the aspen chips is really nice in that regard: it's going to be a brutal season to get straw.

In light of the pottery studio dissolving I'm keeping an eye on kilns. They've hired a studio manager and have mentioned that no personal work will be done in the studio -- I haven't talked to the studio manager yet, this had come through the program director. It's such a shame to have a lovely studio, two brand new kilns, all those wheels and equipment, and only use them for classes and not allow anyone who's taken a class to do follow-up work. And maybe they'll get to that point. But I have re-learned the lesson that, for things important to me, people and organizations are not necessarily reliable.

Mostly looking at kilns is a hobby right now: they can be got pretty cheap because they're super heavy and hard to move, but that money is not in the plan right now. Good to keep an eye on what stuff looks like. At this rate I might be able to go down south for pagan stuff and maybe...

...a very soft and purring cat just came and sat across both my arms. I guess that's it for this update.

Yesterday was cool with almost no smoke. I was able to open the windows and little breezes played through the house. It was lovely, especially since I was cleaning house for Tucker's arrival. I even washed all the squished mosquitoes off the bedroom and bathroom walls! It's been long enough since I was a housecleaner that I begin to forget how much difference those little things make to the feel of a place: cupboard fronts (which I did not wash), walls, light switch plates, baseboards. It makes a house look newer and lighter.

I'd got these tiny tiny pouches from the grocery store trash run that said "add to 1L of water, let dissolve, and spray" and they were a bathroom cleaner. They worked surprisingly well, and even more surprisingly the scent didn't bother me. I guess the format is meant to reduce the number of spray bottles and weight of water that gets shipped around. I have a couple more to drop into cleaning buckets of hot water (not how it's meant to be used, I know) for big wall-cleaning days. I continue to be grateful for my vacmop.

Today the smoke is creeping back. I'm in the office to figure out what's going on with this summer: my fieldwork is a no-go, since more than half the road-accessible area of the district is under evac alerts or orders for fires and at least a couple of the blocks I was going to sample are probably on fire. Between the smoke and the alerts fieldwork is probably counterindicated.

This morning I put on my "neurodiversity is beautiful" shirt and wore it to work. Previously I've worn autism-coded symbols but not anything with the word. I figure I may be dizzy, tired, and disoriented but that's the best time to pull off representation - when I'm too occupied by living to overthink it.

Wish me luck on scooping some good work out of the pile today. Contracts all summer will destroy me. I can't even put correct names on itineraries lately.

but this is apocalypse itself:
the air the colour of creamsicles
thick as porridge
obscuring the mountains
and even nearby cars.

this is apocalypse itself:
ash sifting down
whitening my truck in the mornings
and snowing on my hair
as I water my garden.

this is apocalypse itself:
eyes stinging over the dubious
air sucking through my mask
and the hammer of annihilated trees
hitting my lungs with every door opened.

this is apocalypse itself
as it is in story
as it is in song
as it is in paintings:
sun orange through an orange sky at noon
fire everywhere
and only dust underfoot.

***

Thoughts on looking at an evacuation alert near my home

So many years we didn't even realize we weren't winning
Secure in our delusion as a dominant species.
We thought we could control the trees because we could cut them down
Thought we could control the water because we could put up dams
Thought we had dominion over animals because we could kill them.
On our maps everything was known, and was ours.

We make new maps now.
Where once we had roads, boundaries, ownership by this or that person
Now we have lands we have surrendered.
Orange and red crawl across the roads, across forests, obscuring them
From our ways of controlling. They seize back control
With each lick of flame, each curl of smoke, pushing and pushing
Until our maps give way.

There be monsters, the maps say,
As they did before, this land is no man's. Fire, drought, flood:
Now who controls the trees by killing? Who holds back the water from falling? Who devours the animals?
We surrender to the supremacy of the monsters
As we once did
So we do again
And again
And again
With our new maps washed in red.

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.

There's a fire 5-6km just west of the highway between here and Everywhere Else. Even if it doesn't threaten my property or the town, they tend to call evacuation in when access to a town will be cut off, for perhaps obvious reasons. There is a rough backroad out of town but I think parts of it are currently washed out, and there's a longer road that leads into Mackenzie but I think that goes through several fires, and if not it is at least a very slow logging road with lots of loose gravel and dust. So.

Good: it's getting cooler because it's evening, there's a lake right there for the firefighters to use, they'll prioritize it because it's right close to us.

Bad: it seems to have grown roughly 30 hectares in a couple hours, everything is so so dry, there are so many fires right now.

I can hear the planes heading back and forth, I'm not far from the little local airport they use to refuel.

I do not currently have a way to transport my animals properly: I could take the dogs, the cats, and some geese or ducks or chickens. It's way too hot to put them in the utility trailer and I don't have a proper livestock trailer.

My coworker takes guesses at breakup every year. It's been as early as April 6 and as late as I think May 16 in the last twenty years. He has a neighbour identify a particular strip across the lake that has to be ice-free. This has been a long cold spring; I guessed May 12th. The prize is bragging rights, which is why my PDA self can participate. I have serious issues with competition.

The long cold spring hasn't stopped it being a dry spring. The ground was dead dry last fall and we got a normal amount of snow or just barely above normal. There are spots on the mountain where we did controlled fires last fall and it seems like with snow off them they're still smouldering this spring. Uncomfortable.

Seems like it's easier to write daily during the week, and when I'm at work. Makes sense. I'm lucky to have that spaciousness at work. It does mean I'm not going to the field, but my excuse is that a little fire showed up on the wildfire map across the road I was going to take into the bush today. We've had some rain, but fires have been moving very quickly and being out of contact along or past a road with a fire on it makes me twitchy. If it did blow up there'd be no way to let me know.

We have a safety system when we're in the field but it's missing the crucial component of being able to be contacted while I'm out there-- I can always call out but there's no agreement on, for instance, always running on a certain radio channel so they can get me.

The province lost another little community last night. It lost Lytton awhile back now, a train wheel against the track sparked a fire fight near the town, and it seems like within half an hour after the spark the town was gone. That was the day after Lytton had hit the "hottest spot in Canada ever" record two days in a row. Last night was Monte Creek, a little outlier town west of Kamloops. A big fire had been building in the mountain for days but a big wind drove it downhill, across the highway, and through the town.

A lot of the province is on fire.

Meanwhile I see damp grey clouds and patches of blue sky outside and it sprinkled rain twice yesterday. The apples are swelling and swelling; I keep the duck pools under them so they get several dozen gallons of water each per day, plus some fertilizer.

Tomatoes are starting to roll in.

The tomato trial has basically two parts: one is to gather information, and the other is to choose and collect seed from the ones that will continue on into next year.

Gathering information about plants and earliness is lovely. I walk along the rows, I count clusters of green tomatoes, I observe the plant growth form, I poke around looking for buried ripe fruit.

Continuation is more complicated. I'm still saving seed from everything that ripens, but. The panamorous row is a truly random collection of mixed wild and domestic genetics and it is producing a lot. What it produces is... fascinating. There are a couple cherry sized tomatoes, lots of saladette-ish size, and I just got my first beefsteak of the whole garden from that row (though Maya & Sion is coming right along behind, and maybe Taiga too).

Before I put seeds in to ferment, especially from the panamorous row, I taste the fruit. The panamorous tomatoes get sorted into A (tastes quite good), B (insipid, mealy, or has a weird acrid aftertaste that I associate with certain wild genes), and I have a tiny pile of Wow! Unfortunately the best panamorous tomato so far was densely fleshy with only 2 seeds. That might indicate an obligate outcrosser -- some of these have genes which prevent them from self-pollinating, so it's possible that ones with fewer seeds are obligate outcrossers which didn't get well-pollinated because our weird weather is hard on bees this year. It's possible that something else is going on. There certainly seem to be more seeds in the less tasty ones, sadly.

I'm keeping the B pile because any of these plants may themselves be hybrids so the offspring will be different than the parent, and/or they may have crossed with the garden tomatoes I planted in a ring around them. Any single one of those seeds may hold something amazing. And by increasing my seed supply in this way, and to this extent -- I'll have tens of thousands of seeds by the end of the year at minimum -- I can start hard selection for direct seeding and eventually self-seeding into an animal disturbance soil seedbank.

Basically-- I can plant lots and lots of seed and not too many plants will survive. The ones that survive will be the ones I want, and once I have enough survivors in that situation I can start tasting the first fruit of each and pull out the unpleasant ones so they don't contribute. Eventually, after a couple or a dozen years, I should have enough early tomatoes that I can pick some and others can drop to the ground and self-seed that way. As long as I keep removing the unpleasant ones there will be seed accumulated in the soil that will express itself over several years and the fruit should get tastier and tastier.

It's a multi-year project! There are a series of goals -- first, plants that ripen from transplants. Then, plants that ripen from seed. Then, plants that taste good. Then, plants that can seed themselves.

In the end the idea is to seedbank like this for many species. Bare land sprouts plants, it just does. If I can shift the seeds in the soil, it will mostly sprout plants that I want. Everything will sprout earlier than if I'd planted it after the soil warmed. There should be selection only for what doesn't sprout early enough that the cold kills it; I don't need to do anything for that to happen. This should allow me to get a really good early crop to work return out of the garden.

Gardening in this environment requires some knowledge; I need to have a good visual grasp of what all my desired plants look like when young. Then if I want an area to be only tomatoes, or only brassicae, I'll leave those sprouts there and weed everything else out. For warm crops, weeding everything else out might look like harvesting well-developed chard or lettuce or broccoli raab or lamb's quarters that started much earlier, leaving a patch somewhere to go to seed and replenish the soil seedbank.

Precisely what seed replenishing rotation looks like depends on how long a sufficiency of seed remains viable in the soil. We've mostly bred multi-year dormancy out of domestic crops without even trying; our seed is basically always saved from what we planted this year so it's a strong selection for most of the history of domestication. But. I bet you that with the quantities of seed that can be pumped into the soil when I let several lettuce plants go to seed (hundreds of thousands at least) or even tomatoes and tens of thousands, that it'll come along on its own.

So, yeah. I'm basically tasting a widening trickle of tomatoes and making decisions and occasionally wrinkling my nose or grinning. I'm walking a path that leads far into the future and may never arrive there. I'm using my sense of discernment and consequence. And I'm having a lot of fun.

There was smoke high overhead in thin ribbons today. Was going to drive up to Sakeniche with work but my bush partner got called to work on the fires along with a bunch of my office; part of how government maintains fire capacity when fire seasons are so unpredictable is that it expects to draw trained firefighters at will (foresters all have some fire training and lots of them worked fires as summer jobs; currently they're only calling up folks with past experience).

Guess I didn't have to work till 7 yesterday wrapping things up for the weekend.