A Meditation on August
As Drought Comes to the Pacific Northwest
What is resilience?
This is the question I ask myself hourly in the summer the West is on fire.
It is August. Poppies and cosmos intermingle, their ungainly stalks eye-high and lassooed with string. The distance shimmers in incense. The air is thick, and sound travels and bends slowly around corners. Even airplanes seem different, with the lazy small propeller sounds of a slower century.
August defies the laws of breathing.
You can exhale and stay there, moving neither forward nor back. Look at the dogs, and the lawn, indistinguishably golden and bleached, panting, lolling, wordless. Be like them. Walk barefoot into the garden at dawn in a long white dress and feel the stubble against your toes.
There will be only one cool moment before evening and it is now.
I stand for hours with the garden hose, saving what trees I can before rationing begins. The ground dampens quickly but after months of heat I am no longer fooled. I can sink my fingers into the dirt and know it will be bone dry. When dirt changes character and no longer knows how to receive, the scientists call it hydrophobic.
The garden hose and watering can, these symbols of all things fecund and generous and regenerative, have met their match.
The loudest sound in the garden is magnolia leaves. When they fall they clatter against the stacks gathered at the trunk. But as the lower leaves drop and the center becomes bare the crowns explode in feverish new growth and blossoms. I ask the nursery, and they say what nursery people always do: It’s too much water.
Or not enough water.
Or too much fertilizer or . . . not enough fertilizer.
My favorite answer is “They are getting rid of the leaves because they don’t need them.”
If I were a magnolia I would want to keep all my leaves whether I needed them or not. I would want to be as beautiful as a grove in a Persian miniature. I scrape leaves into sacks already filled with what I have ripped out, what no amount of water will save from the heat: day lilies, creeping jenny, crocosmia lucifer, fragile fern, pale green hosta, the hellebore that laid down and never got up.
What remains has deep roots, few needs.
Not like me. I could blow away like a thistle. I need everything, all the time.
My sister calls. My sister doesn’t cry. She comes from horses and forests and barns and tough people. She comes from ancestors who’s starched white collars hung above the TV set and dared you to complain.
She says, I’m actually depressed. We went on a picnic to the mountains and I cried. I think it was because of the Mountain. The glacier is broken. Have you noticed? I’ve been looking at that glacier on Mt. Rainier my whole life and it is almost gone. It’s just a gray scar.
I tell her it’s my job as the oldest to do the crying and she should let me do it for her. I’ve got this, I say. What about your boyfriend?
My mood didn’t go over so well. The Christianity. God’s will, you know. We try not to talk about it. He says he sees God’s beauty everywhere and that’s why he takes pictures. He says he’s doing his part.
While we talk I ask my computer how many people are on Instagram at any one time: 300 million, give or take.
I can’t find the selfie–to–sunset ratio. Who knows which has more beauty? But I don’t think this will save Mt. Rainier.
So do I want to punish my sister’s boyfriend for taking pictures instead of signing petitions? Do I want him to forget about God’s will and cry too? Should we stand on the mountain with a fan and blow cold air?
I take as many pictures as he does I’m sure, I’m just not so sure I’m doing my part. In fact I seem to be more unsure all the time. Because: dirt. How can there be resilience when the dirt fails? It frightens me.
Later that night I go out for a walk. The sunsets have been eerily, transcendently spectacular. Abalone iridescence, pearlized cloud, blues of a depth and complexity I have never seen before. From the ridge I can see the Olympics, snowless but clear.
To the east, the horizon is murky with smoke and the mountains have disappeared. I think of friends with blackened cabins and ranches along Lake Chelan, and of the horse with its burnt muzzle, the one that survived the Antoine Creek fire. Ahead I see an acquaintance and we walk together for a few blocks.
I’m going back to California, she says.
Aren’t you worried? The water ––?
Oh, when you’re there it’s not like the news, people are still watering their lawns.
My cousin in Sacramento has been showering at the gym and peeing outside to avoid using scarce water for the toilet. You can walk out into the reservoir and scratch the dry bottom of it with your shoe. But I don’t bring this up.
Then we talk about Life and Things, and my acquaintance says, Whatever happens to me next, it will be a better thing. It will be what’s meant. I wouldn’t get up in the morning if I didn’t think there was a Soul Plan, and its goal is always to move us to higher ground.
I say to her, A Soul Plan. That has honestly never occurred to me. I just figured we signed up without thinking about what would happen and then we’re screwed.
I tell her I’ll reconsider.
I walk on, alternately comforted and perplexed, as the sky gets more and more intense. On the hill a lawn is newly paved with brick. Two red plastic chairs sit side by side, kept company by the only flower, a double pinwheel planted on a stick. The large wheel has stars, and the small one has stripes, and they rotate in opposite directions. The landscape has undergone color-rationing, reduced to red, white and blue, and the overall scheme appears to be 100% drought resistant. I stare at the pinwheels, wondering how they can go simultaneously both ways.
When I get home I check the news and in the feed comes up an image of unusual and subtle beauty. Muted grays and ochres and blacks, with a background of pink and a flare of gold like the kintsugi poured into the cracks of ancient tea bowls. The headline says “The West’s Most Beautiful Forest Fires.” Look | Don’t look. The craven impulse towards beauty, the lust for unusual colors, the eternal adoration of clouds, be they filled with blessings or horror. I think of the man on the front page of the news paper jet skiing into smoke. Everything in the picture was gray except his suit, which was orange. I am going to enjoy myself goddammit.
Yesterday the water lady came to read the meter and console me and to traumatize me further with numbers.
Yes, she said, you are on track for a payment plan, and your garden doesn’t even look that good. What’s wrong with that maple, it’s dying, huh? And she pointed up into the great shade tree who’s rustle I love so much.
I laughed. That’s not dead leaves up there, it’s money. That’s babies.
When she left I went upstairs and studied the tree up close to be sure. I have never seen so many seeds. Usually they are green and blend in with the leaves, but this year the wings are bronze, and if you don’t know better they do look like something dead. As I watched a gust of wind came up and shook the pods with a sound like rattles. A few came loose and spiraled to the ground.
Acer macrophyllum. Such blazing fecundity in the face of change. Drought tolerance: medium to high. Me. Drought tolerance: uncertain.
Resilience. Around me change is happening at a pace I cannot comprehend. Last year the Northwest was still heaven’s corner, and now the worst El Niño on record is predicted into 2016. No one knows what happens then, or which forests, will be standing. I am grateful that my garden doesn’t read. It doesn’t argue global warming, or study satellite photos, it doesn’t worry. It doesn’t think about the difference between surviving and thriving. It can continue to practice its own dumb brilliance, its strategies honed over centuries long before I was born.
By September I will be raking maple seeds. They are called helicopters, and their shape is oddly comic, made for twirling through the air. In the hand the seed is burred and homely, and it leaves a little splinter. It plans to stick to everything, and then to dissolve its wings. And then it plans to burrow into darkness and to grow.
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Two books I’ve been reading this summer: Antifragile, by Nassim Taleb, and Dancing with Life, by Phillip Moffitt.
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For more art and essays on politics, art and contemplation, visit Iskra Fine Art and follow my blog.
Banner-image: August, photo collage © Iskra Fine Art
