Greenstorm's Journal

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.

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.

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

Well, I'm super exhausted and can't breathe, which makes sense because recovery from the last week) plus my downstairs is completely covered in concrete dust including all my clothing that had been freshly washed and laid out on the bed and in the closet. And I'm back at work doing a leadership program that is extremely anti-autistic.

But: goodness are there a lot of animals around this year. A bear on the neighbour's lawn, two separate elk sightings, a deer making her way through my neighbour's garden while I was watering mine, five bears on the forestry road in one day, swallows that took the place of the bats eating my mosquitoes, looks like maybe a high in the rabbit cycle, etc,

First wild rose opened June 2nd, spruce buds are opening very quickly, arnica cordifolia and viola canadensis are all over and open, tons of them. Dandelions are going to seed.

It may be ok.

Outside is calling me really hard right now. There's a perfect wind, the lake right outside my office window is full of little wavelets, the sky is true sky blue with just enough fluffy white clouds to add interest, every leaf is just out with that new-leaf bright green and no silvering from pest damage or yellowing from drought yet. Half the dandelions are in seed and half are still invitingly yellow, just asking to be made into fritters.

I need to sleep out there, I think. You'd think 7 acres would be a lot but my forested parts are right up against the highway and everything else is visible to a neighbour. I'm working on planting myself barriers but I need to clear, then plant, then everything needs to grow.

Last weekend, to celebrate new ducklings and to celebrate having someone to share food with, I brought out a duck. Normally that's 5 days of food: a seared breast two days in a row, then legs and picked-off bits and gorgeous crackling skin two days in a row, then soup one day. Because I shared it's 4 days: I get to go home to duck cracklins and stinging nettles creamed in duck fat, then figure out which direction I want to take the soup tomorrow (pho flavourings, maybe? With starch noodles?). It makes such a difference to me having someone appreciative to share with, not an anonymous person to sell to but just a place where bounty can flow over and be enjoyed.

It's turning into summer. The seeds are in the ground. We need rain, and I should run irrigation. Things will grow without me for a bit. The time for heavy work turns into the time to relax, observe, and enjoy; the time for giving labour to the soil turns into the time to receive my body back bite by bite.

I've been wearing my ring, scythe and wheat, ebb and flow. It's been so hard to ride everything that's been happening with any sort of grace. Today I remember that the wheel will turn anyhow, it will turn and turn and turn and there will always be change. When I lose my grace, when I get thrown off and need to climb back on, there's always another turn ahead to handle more smoothly. Acceptance is not an end state; it's a practice.

One month till solstice. The cool overcast with daily twenty minutes of hail and cool wet breezes drifting into slight warmth of sunshine has given way to the big sun. The big sun lives everywhere, all the time, and except in stone-walled basements lined with blackout cloth it is inescapable. Up in the morning, out into the garden at seven, and the big sun is high already and working to warm the day into real heat. I come in by ten-thirty with a sunburn on my cheeks despite long sleeves and hat and sunglasses. Up late the sun is wildly energetic; at dinnertime Tucker calls from the dark of Virginia and says, "the sun's still up there, isn't it?" and indeed it is, it's only starting to consider leaving its flamboyant afternoon party to even glance at the horizon. At ten it is dark, mostly, with lingering blue along the horizon, but that won't last long. There have been summers I've not seen dark for months. Staying up on solstice the sun does go below the horizon but the horizon nver surrenders its light; deep twilight is as far as it gets.

One month till solstice and my favas, soaked, are in the ground late. One tiller on the way from the factory and the other in the shop, both unexpected delays, and my favas were soaked so there was no putting them back for next year. I took the mattock and fork to the upper field and put them in, roughly 12 x 14, packed much tighter than I was expecting because I was trying to minimize the labour. No barley went in the mix, though I will definitely put in alyssum and calendula or borage up there. This was half what I grew last year, the mix of Lofthouse and Russian Black, and half new genes: Ianto's return, Aprovecho select, sweet Loraine, sunshine coast, Montana Rainbow, Frog Island, Can Dou, perhaps some others I'm not bringing to mind. My saved seeds germinated well. The soil was unexpectedly sandy up there, probably from the old riding ring, with random rocks of all sizes. We will see how they do.

One month till solstice and I have a weekend to myself, staying up till midnight making meatloaf and then out at seven to plant seeds and back in before noon. Now I'm sorting my corns in preparation for planting, like any autistic person with their collection, and thinking about both how happy that makes me and how much I really do hide these behaviours. The distinction between things no one else talks about because no one else does them, and things no one else talks about because we all do them but they're private, that's the space where neurodivergence hides.

One month till solstice and I am hiding from the sun in my also-sunny livingroom like a bowlfull of light and writing until the still aggressively sunny evening.

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.

On the one hand, the conventional pagan calendar was formed in a very different place and agricultural system.

On the other hand, I picked roughly a gallon of sakatoons, 2L of raspberries, a jar of pickling cucumbers, and a bunch of other stuff on the weekend.

I'll probably be picking that many raspberries every 2 days or so for a bit.

Every day I miss eating a cucumber I need to make up for it the next day by eating two. The pickling cukes are poised for a bit of an avalanche.

The tomatoes are trickling in slowly, lots of orange ones from the polyamorous row comparatively. My seed collection is swelling.

Apples are swelling. Everything is building and building, the trickle before the flood of harvest.

For my garden it's a good year.

Things are rough in other directions right now. Engaging with relationships as they are, not as I want them to be: that's taking a lot of constant presence and effort. When my expectations get too tangled up in something I often can stop appreciating what it actually is, and I also generally stop looking for what I need in places I can actually find it. Maybe PDA makes me extra aware that carrying the weight of other people's expectations is a heavy burden. It's not one I prefer to inflict on those I love without consent.

But every day I come back to the garden and for awhile things are alright.

Yesterday was another appointment with the trauma therapist provided through work. The previous time I'd spoken with her it was pretty useful but this time was, if I'm honest, a bit of a shit-show.

I used the term partner. She talked about my "husband".

She lectured extensively about how women "like us" think about many eventualities at once, whereas men like my husband usually only take one thing into consideration when they're making a decision. Oh, and men are always more worried about financial things.

It honestly was too much energy to deal with it all so I agreed along but it was not comfortable even a little.

By the time she was shocked and worried that if I was thinking about buying property with someone I might want to discuss the exit plan before we signed anything it barely even registered.

The gist of what she's saying is, concentrate on actionable things and take actions, and basically don't think about things where actions can't be taken. Additionally maybe be creative about what actions can be taken because there's usually something.

We also got our "post-covid" flex info from work, we've known for awhile they'd be calling us back to the office Sept 7th but that something was in the works for some kind of remote flexibility.

Turns out their plan is-- I get it, but I don't think it's super well thought out. Basically there's room to work remotely 1-2 days per week for normal folks, then for folks who want to work 3-5 days remote there's a more rigorous process with approval from higher-ups (not that we have any higher ups right now, different story) and you are likely to lose your permanent office/desk.

On the surface that makes sense, right? Not using the desk much, might as well not pay for the space to keep it, and as I've noticed this year it's not really feasible to ride the middle line of a couple days from work and a couple days from home per week without paying for a second set of equipment out of pocket. But it super disincentivizes folks from coming in for a day a week to keep in touch with the rest of the folks in the office and I'm a little concerned about that. Forestry is 10000000% politics and relationships and maybe 2% science.

On the other hand it's probably not as bad for me: my town is in the bust part of the boom-bust cycle so our office is empty on the best of days. I don't think anyone's going to remove my name from my cubicle. And I suppose that in the summer folks are taking a lot of vacation (lifers can have 8 weeks or so of vacation, or sometimes more) and also a bunch of us are in the field pretty often. For relationship-building it might make sense to try to go to the field once a year with almost everyone rather than keep abreast of them in the office. But still.

Speaking of in-person, the parade of summer students is occurring. I took one out two weeks ago (I think?), another one last week, the same one this week, and each in succession next week. I think the following week or two I also will take out the third summer student. The first two haven't been in the bush before and-- I'm glad I checked before we left the office because the second one didn't have any water with him. He also didn't bring the water to the block, so we walked a kilometer and a half back for lunch and to the block again, but I think he's getting sorted out. They are both enthusiastic, polite, and friendly kids.

My ex-previous-job friends were talking about how much energy summer students bring into the office, especially back in the days when there would be 40 of them (I think our whole office is 30 people nowadays, and in the office they were speaking of there were 12 by the end?). I think it's true. Supervising or managing folks who have never had a professional job before, or who have never been to the bush, is sure different than handling someone who has some idea of what they're doing.

These daily writings were supposed to be exploring my emotional landscape but they're coming out pretty much like news bulletins. Well, like news from before the shock and disaster era of news. I guess I haven't felt spacious and energetic enough to really dive back into there. I've been working my way through a pretty great video (youtube https://youtu.be/diE7f6CKj6c ) by Sarah HendrickX called Hiding in plain sight: shining light on women with autism profiles. It's... there's a lot to unpack in it, and I'll no doubt write more about it in the future. It's an odd feeling to be seen in some ways so clearly, but to still have to accept such ill-fitting labels as "woman" to get that info. It's like cutting my arm off to escape a trap, but at the same time once I'm out of the trap I can't drive home without the arm. It's damage.

There are good things in the world too. I got my shipment of Ugandan vanilla beans, which smell truly amazing even compared to other vanilla beans. The tomato trial with seven or eight ripe varieties so far feels like a completion and proper fit of self into the world, more than I can describe it makes me happy. Being happy in that way I wish I had someone to talk about it with, but here we are. It's been cold and raining, below 10C at night and below 20C during the day, so my trial is going to be fairly representative of my conditions and I'm less likely to need to evacuate for a wildfire. The green cherry tomato I got from the grocery store, that I saved seed from, has ripened some fruits so it's early, and they taste amazing even though they're the first fruits off the plant. I am impressed.

I'm just putting off going out into the cold in fuzzy socks to do chores, though, so I'll go get the pigs their bounty of spoiled dairy and their grain and watch the baby geese and maybe harvest some more cucumbers for sunomono. It's definitely sunomono season.

It's good, out there, but it's not enough time to grow back after everything else.