Fire(works)
The Aspens are ready to rise and so are we
A quick note: I may or may not publish here again until September. We’ll see how the spirit moves me. We’re aiming for a screen-free summer for our kids and I am trying to embody that too. So…that’s that.
You can listen to me read this post here:
In her first Wednesday art club at her new school, Clara used chalk pastels to draw a just-lit match.
It’s hanging in her room amongst many pieces of artwork. She’s quite prolific. So is Nora.
(My mom used to have my brother and I choose just one picture to hang at a time. I’m not as tidy, so we have more of a kid-art-masking-tape-wallpaper approach, and every now and again the girls and I stand in their room and in our office—which is also the kid-art overflow zone—to do a tortured recycle-and-replace session).
The match has been hanging up since January, so I have looked at it a bunch. Each time, I notice that the flame defies physics. Close to the match head, the fire is yellow. Then orangish-red. And then, blue. Blue hot.
To be accurate, her match should look like a reverse partial rainbow, with blue at the core closest to the source fading to yellow, then orange, and red.
But art doesn’t have to be correct to be right and I wonder if Clara used her own artistic license or if Mr. C. modeled it this way.
My friend who used to be on a hotshot crew says that smoke, too, burns different colors depending on its fuel. White for grasses. Tan for trees. Gray (grey for my British and Kenyan readers!) when other human-made items enter the fuel mix. Black when the source is pure dinosaur sludge. An exploded oil refinery. A ship on the Strait of Hormuz. For example.
He and I were biking the Colorado Trail once when a fire started. We saw the plume of white smoke bubble up miles to our north and he said,
“That’s a high-alpine grass fire. It’ll burn out fast.”
And sure enough. The local tourist train threw a spark near the height of its journey in Birdseye Gulch. It burned red-orange quick. And then it was over.
On a phone call two days ago, that same friend said, “The mountains look like they usually do in September.”
Tomorrow morning my family and I will embark on our annual migration from Kenya (where we live ten months a year) to America. We will board a plane at 3:10am East African Time on the 4th of July, 2026. America’s 250th birthday will get to Kenya a full 9 hours before it reaches Colorado. If our flights go according to schedule, we will land in Denver at 6:25pm, also on the 4th, living this complex day for an extra 3ish hours even though it’s only 24 hours long.
We will arrive just in time for fireworks.
If Colorado weren’t on fire.
Three days ago, just hours after observing Elephants ambling across the savannah, twisting their trunks around grass to meet their daily 60,000 calorie goal (imagine needing to each nearly 600 heads of Iceberg lettuce a day), after watching Giraffes float across the horizon, after seeing two juvenile Impalas lock horns in what appeared to be “playful” fighting (I am grateful my daughters do not have horns)—when we had exited the Maasai Mara wildlife conservation area, I turned my phone back on and received a text from the woman who rents our home in Leadville, Colorado.
“There is a fire west of Leadville and currently at 7:20 this evening, I am under pre-evacuation orders.”
Five days later, the fire is 0% contained and is now 2011 acres. It’s smoldering in a pocket of land I know well. Near the Highline Trail I’ve hiked dozens of times and nested next to Bald Eagle – a small rise where I’ve camped a few nights. It’s hemmed in (praying it stays this way) by Mount Massive—Colorado’s second highest mountain.
Authorities have evacuated the Leadville National Fish Hatchery, a place I have visited more than 100 times, especially after becoming a mom. I used to ride there with Clara and Nora in the bike chariot. The “fish hatchery loop” also known as the “mom-sanity loop.” When we arrived, they’d feed the fish and play in the little creek that’s actually an irrigation ditch. Sometimes we would hike up to the swings and sand box.
Also evacuated is The High Mountain Institute, the boarding school where “nature and minds meet,” where I worked for a half-dozen formative years. And the Ass Ranch across the street.
My friend just moved her horses to a ranch an hour to the south in case the fire gallops eastward toward town.
There will be no official fireworks show in Leadville this year. Anywhere in Colorado, I think. I hope. Fires burn around the state.
The story is the same: drought, heat, a winter that never came, reservoirs that never filled and won’t. Weather anomalies that feel less anomalous and less anonymous with each passing year and tragedy.
Still, people who call themselves patriots will still set off fireworks. And fires.
In the match drawing in my mind’s eye, someone is (many ones are) holding a match. The flames burn blue-hot, with flecks of red and white-stary sparks. Black smoke rises.
Around the edges of the frame though, fierce patriotic hands—yours, mine, many—are working on containment. We’re marching. We’re writing. We’re voting. Turning off the sink when we’re not using it. And picking up trash. We’re making art. We’re checking in on our neighbors. We’re calling a friend.
We’re going for runs in the forest (if it’s not on fire). We’re having tea with a friend.
We’re gathering for action potlucks. And potluck-potlucks.
Submitting comments about the proposed Federal Grant Rule (here’s mine — wordy, go figure!; here’s some great guidance from Elizabeth Ginexi due July 13th by midnight EST; here’s where you can submit your own). We’re submitting comments about the abolishment of the Peace Corps (due date TBD). We’re submitting comments about threats to Mail-in Ballots (due yesterday). So many comments!
We’re writing letters about our love for the Boundary Waters.
We’re laughing out loud when we read a New York Times article about a type of fish who partakes in “cloacal diving” in the body of a manta ray. Not because we don’t care about the manta ray (“It does not look like the manta ray likes it.”), but because we needed some lightness sandwiched among the articles about war and genocide and political horrors. We’re paying attention to those too, though.
We’re snuggling our kids longer, smelling their hair and breathing them in, proclaiming our boundless love using words (however limited) and a-little-too-tight hugs.
Like Anne Lamott says, “(We) do what (we) can, what good people have always done: …bring thirsty people water; (we) share (our) food, (we) try to help the homeless find shelter, (we) stand up for the underdog.”
We’re taking our own dog for a walk.
We know the fires are not contained. We’re building literal firebreaks to protect our town. And metaphorical firebreaks to protect ourselves and each other.
We’re tending and befriending. Taking care. And, we’re warding off numbness in a million and three one-foot-in-front-of-the-other ways.
And, we’re remembering that where the fire burns, Aspen shoots are waiting to sprout. They are already and always connected in an intricate underground network. Like us. They will rise through the scorched, bare mineral soil one after another. From the Earth. Like us.
After a few laps around the sun, they will burn green in the spring and gold in the fall. And they will be a strong wall of defense in the face of future fires. Like us.
-B