Burning Questions columns

Published 6/17/23 in Sierra Sun 

Burning Questions: Who wants to talk about orange skies? (Opinion) | SierraSun.com 

It’s early evening in the Green Mountains of Vermont. The faded wooden rocking chair creaks softly as my sneakers push against the floorboards of the porch overlooking a lush sloping meadow; I can hear conversation and laughter floating from the barn beyond, where writers from all over the country have gathered to share their work and learn from each other. As one of the more introverted ones at this conference, I’m keeping my distance from all those lively, gregarious people. I’d rather write to you. 

So here I sit, writing on a sheet of paper tucked into a clipboard, pausing every so often in my rocking to sip the glass of beer teetering on the warped floorboards. Dusk is setting in, rosier than it should be thanks to the raging wildfires in Canada. 

In my mind I’m picturing you, the reader I haven’t met but feel kinship with anyway, seeing the smoke out your window, or reading about it on your newsfeed, and feeling that same rippling unease in your stomach that I feel. Wildfire smoke in the northeast in June? Aren’t wildfires supposed to be in the west, in August and September (and October and November)? For me, as a west coast resident visiting the east coast for the first time, seeing that eerie orange cast to the light has the feel of a victim who has fled their abuser, only to turn a corner and find him standing there, waiting.

A recent National Geographic article ( Orange skies are the future. Prepare yourself. | National Geographic ) about the proliferation in recent years of wildfires around the globe heightens the sense of pervasive threat. Our everyday experience is bearing these stark headlines out as we grapple with one disaster after another, year after year. 

And yet we don’t talk about it much. We read headlines and turn away. Who can blame us? Who wants to marinate in doom and gloom? We want to live our lives, enjoy our friends, watch our kids grow. We want to binge-watch our favorite shows and eat things that taste delightful and may not be terribly good for us. 

But I want to talk with you. I want to ask questions, and hear yours. We just might be able to solve a problem or two, and help each other feel that we’re not alone, as we look out at that strange orange sky and call our kids in from their play.

So who am I, asking you to come with me on this journey?

I am a forty-seven year old mother of two who grew up in northern California, in a lovely small town called Sebastopol, where all the dreams of 1980s suburban America took root in my psyche. I expected a life of continuous progress and wonder—both for me individually, and for America, the greatest nation on Earth. There was no doubt in my young mind that those were unassailable truths.

I started writing at a young age, created handmade newspapers for my family in elementary school, wrote for my high school and college newspapers, wrote bad novels every few years from my twenties onward. At the same time I was second-guessing my own inclinations and talents, going into a career in teaching which went nowhere, and administrative assistant jobs which also went nowhere. I am a person who, in darker moments, bewails the decades of wasted time and effort… who thinks it’s too late to pursue the path I should have charged down two decades ago.

I am also a person for whom a life-changing convergence happened in the summer of 2020, when the world was emerging from lockdown against a mysterious new virus, the western US was choking under the haze of one of the largest wildfires to date, and I had a five-month old baby, whose life was in danger from the very air he breathed. 

Does this sound anything like your experience? Maybe not the specifics exactly—but your version of it? The disorientation of the pandemic’s arrival, the unsettling rise in dangerous weather, the worry about your family, your friends? Even though the details vary, we are experiencing these seismic shifts together.

As for me, those seismic shifts have made me a person who wants to help make the world better, but who doesn’t know quite how. They’ve made me a person who composts because my ten-year old learned about it in school and educated me in turn… A person who wants to walk up to the executive offices of Exxon Mobil in Texas and ask them, “Are you worried for your kids’ future?” And see what they say. (Maybe I will!)

So back to those questions on the porch in my creaky rocking chair: Every time wildfire smoke casts the sun in that eerie orange tint, and the air starts to feel grimy in my mouth, I feel that rippling unease in my stomach, like hunger pangs, or maybe a touch of the runs. Do you feel something like that? What do you do with it? Do you talk about it? 

Among all the questions swirling around us, here’s one I do know the answer to. We are in this together, and it is together, talking and being vulnerable with each other, that we’ll make it through.