Monday's postcard, and the other fires that keep me awake at night
August 5, 2024
The Emmons glacier on Mt. Tahoma
A long hot day, and a really bad dream
As some of my Facebook friends know, there was a fire at my apartment building last Wednesday—late afternoon during rush hour. I wasn’t there at the time, but I was en route on my bicycle, coming back from a swim in the river. The sky was blue; the temperature was 90 degrees.
When I got to my block I could hear the demanding scream of the fire alarm and see smoke billowing out of a second floor window, about forty feet away from my apartment. A minute or so later a plume of smoke was venting out the main entrance, just a few feet from Monroe Street, a major thoroughfare, which would soon become blocked by a handful of fire trucks. For a while, I reflexively held the front door open for the firefighters in their helmets, fire-proof overcoats, and oxygen tanks. I’d kept my bicycle helmet on.
I’ve covered fires before, as a young reporter, including one that destroyed a large apartment building in downtown Ellensburg on a bitter cold day in January, 1980. The water from the hoses froze in mid air, coming back down as artificial snow. I was wearing sneakers. My newspaper-issued camera literally froze after just a few images. The fire left dozens of people homeless and terrified.
It’s different to cover a fire, or a bad car accident, than it is to be part of the story, so to speak. For the most part, reporters get to punch out and go home at some point. Which is not to say we’re indifferent. It’s just to say that we know the difference between doing our jobs and being chosen, by fate, to be injured or experience a personal loss. I got a taste of the latter in November 2022 when my apartment building in Browne’s Addition burned in the dead of the night, killing a woman in the apartment above me. I remember how frightening that was, not just the fear of being injured or killed but of being displaced, which I was for several weeks. I was blessed that my good friend Sharokh Nikfar took me in until I could move here.
I wasn’t thinking about that last Wednesday. At least not directly. I was grateful nobody was hurt here, on Monroe Street, but already thinking about what I needed to do Thursday. The door to my apartment had been shattered by firemen making sure someone wasn’t inside, but the lights worked, and the refrigerator was on. My son called and we spoke until my voice started to fray, mostly from the physical exertion of the long bike ride following my long swim.
My brain had other plans. Shortly before dawn I had a painfully realistic dream. I was driving my son (he was ten years younger in the dream than he is now) to a lesson or school event, and we were late. So I tried to drive faster. As I did my vision became impaired in high speed traffic on a busy, twisting highway. I was partially blind and terrified of a high speed collision and nearly had one as I looked for a way to get off the busy highway. I got us out of the car and started walking on a median, and when I looked up I saw my ex-wife walking toward me, badly burned and with a bandage on her face.
I woke up with a gasp, and in a moment or two realized it was the suppressed trauma of the earlier fire, the one two years ago. I sat in a chair on the foot of my bed, planted my forehead on the foot of the mattress, and just held myself there for a couple minutes, wrenched.
It’s not a wonder that our minds would work this way—actively thinking about the tangible hopes and frustrations we face in our mornings as we put our game faces on. And then without the gates and arrows of cognition, our night dreams venture into our fantasies and worst fears—in this case being present to the fear of hurting, or seeing hurt, my son and ex-wife, both of whom I dearly love.
I don’t know how much that has to do with getting older—of arriving at 67 with a brain that still thinks I’m forty, or maybe even 39. That said, I can at least appreciate having acquired a deeper understanding of what we’re living through, even though I was more sure of myself, and more optimistic, when I was forty.
In my waking hours the big fire I actually do think about—the one that does keep me up at night—is global warming. We’ve long needed a better label for it—one as dangerously rude as a spitting cobra—rather than a term as innocuous as a puppy in a wicker basket. I will keep writing about it, because that’s the purpose of being here, in this space, to try to write well about important things.
The Clark Fork River, east of Missoula, Montana
When NASA’s James Hansen gave his now famous warning to Congress 36 years ago this summer, global warming was almost entirely an abstraction. The predictive science (about what would happen if we failed to dramatically reduce human-caused carbon emissions) was sound. But the effects were incipient, such that they were difficult to discern above the noise of probability. This was less true in 2007, when writer/activist Bill McKibben and others launched Project 350, to try to build a global movement committed to keeping carbon dioxide levels in the Earth’s atmosphere at 350 parts per million. We are now at ~427 parts per million.
It’s no longer an abstraction. Where I live, you wouldn’t miss the consequences even if you were sightless. You’d feel it. The Pacific Northwest has long been a beat-the-heat tourist destination in the summer months. When I first moved to Spokane 43 years ago we didn’t need air conditioning on summer nights to sleep comfortably. We just opened a window. Many of us kept our sweaters within reach, even in July.
In the time I’ve lived here, Spokane has averaged about a day a year where the temperature has reached 100 degrees. In 2021 and 2022 we had six days where the temperature reached 100 degrees or more. Thus far, this summer, we’ve had seven days of 100 degrees or higher. We’ve gone from occasional summer wildfires to common summer wildfires like the one that burned hundreds of homes and killed two people just west of Spokane last summer. On the ostensibly cooler side of the Cascade mountains, in Portland, about 80 people have died from summer heat exhaustion in the past three years. It was one thing for James Hansen to warn us this could be our future. It’s quite another to feel it and break out in a sweat.
The Bumping River, southeast of Mt. Rainier National Park
The Clock of our Times
Tomorrow is Hiroshima Day, the 79th anniversary of the first time an atomic bomb was used against people. It matters some that I was born at Camp Hanford, not far from where the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb (August 9, 1945) was created in reactors alongside the Columbia River. I wrote my first magazine story about the threat of nuclear weapons when I was 25, and not long afterwards found myself leafleting at a gate to a naval base where dozens of plutonium-tipped Trident missiles were deployed on submarines.
One of the journals I’ve written for, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is known for its so-called Doomsday clock. Founded in 1945 by Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists who’d worked on the atomic bomb, the Bulletin’s purpose is primarily to alert the world to global catastrophe. Its focus has been on the nuclear arms race and military conflict, and the purpose of the Doomsday clock is to remind us how precarious a world with conflict and thousands of nuclear weapons is. The Doomsday clock is now at 90 seconds to midnight, a signal of “historic danger,” not just because of the weapons of mass destruction and the conflicts, but the observed inability of world leaders to meaningfully address underlying problems like “climate related disasters [affecting] millions of people around the world.”
Over the past forty years, we’ve actually reduced the number of nuclear weapons in the world from near 70,000 to just over 12,000 which, to borrow a phrase from the late Carl Sagan, is a large step in the direction of “planetary hygiene.” We have much more to do, for sure, but it is a sign we can actually make the world safer, if we work at it.
Lamentably, the dynamics and trends in carbon emissions feeding climate change are different and discouraging. Although we can (and do) destroy nuclear weapons by the thousands when we choose to, the build up of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere can’t easily be reversed. CO2 accumulates and threatens negative feedback loops (i.e. warming that melts arctic permafrost, thus releasing large volumes of methane—an even more potent greenhouse gas—that only amps up the “greenhouse” effect globally.
Time is of the essence. And because it is you’d think these existential challenges—both nuclear arms reduction and rapidly reducing global carbon emissions—would be at the top of the list in this year’s Presidential election campaigns.
But they’re not. The main reason they’re not is we are absorbed (and not without good reason) in an American culture war stoked by a convicted fraudster who has taken control of one of our two major parties and, more recently, the Supreme Court as well. Just read Trump v. United States and you’ll get it. His ambition—if he’s elected a second time—is to more aggressively change the very nature of our government, from one that ostensibly serves and protects the public, to one that serves him, protects his interests and prosecutes those who have and would oppose him.
Approximately half of voting age Americans are in his camp. Which is why we’re not talking so much about nuclear weapons and climate change, but ridiculous bombast like Trump mocking the sound of Kamala Harris’s laughter and pushing the bogus charge that she has suppressed her black identity in favor of her Indian heritage. He’s also accusing her of wanting to '“stop the words Merry Christmas.”
Of course, this is catnip for his followers who are not only entertained and enthused by him denigrating anyone who disagrees with them or him, but apparently just okie-doke with him meeting with the nation’s top oil companies and promising them regulatory relief in return for a billion dollars in financial support to his election campaign.
I don’t know how this became okay: how easy it was for Trump to dupe tens of millions of Americans into believing “he alone” can fix problems when the hallmark of his life and career is creating problems and sowing division. What I do know is that it’s an acrid wildfire of populist gibberish and unabashed corruption, and the sort of thing that should keep us all awake and committed to having our voices heard.
—-tjc
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