They Vote For The Fire
The day after the election, shortly before I made my way home from work, I texted my mom. I didn’t know what to say, not knowing how she felt, or how my dad felt. So I told her how quiet New York City was. And how it had felt like the longest day I could remember. She replied an hour or so later. She said hello, then explained how the quiet must be because the whole country is in a state of shock. And then she said, “even folks who voted for Trump did not expect him to win.” In the same text, she asked about Thanksgiving plans and reported on some family healthy concerns, closing with how it’s been so dry there, brushfires and forest fires are flaring up. She could smell smoke, she said.
So much to process in a single text. Helena called it apocalyptic. It ended in fire, after all.
There were no sudden brushfires when I was growing up in North Georgia, and it was never dry in November. And yet, my home state is on fire. Some 23,759 acres of Georgia have burned in the last three weeks, mostly in a national forest called the Cohutta Wilderness. It’s still burning. Firefighters are coming in from across the country to contain it, to make the attempt. Geography works against them. The forest is surrounded by hundred-foot cliffs, so how are you going to send a fire truck into a literal bowl of fire? My home state is burning like California can sometimes burn, in a way it never did when I was a kid. It’s burning in November, and not just Georgia, but parts of Tennessee and both Carolinas.
It must be understood. Fall in The South is wet. The rain is insistent, wakes you in the morning, and makes it hard to get out of bed. The fallen leaves are damp against the ground, sticking to the soles of your shoes so much you find them in your foyer, in your hallway. Pin oak leaves are the worst culprits, like little narrow stowaways. But they and their leafy brethren are burning in the brush because there’s just not enough of that historically-inevitable rain this year. The weather in my home state is broken and so the state burns.
The Cohutta Wilderness covers three counties in North Georgia and part of one county over the Tennessee state line. Fannin, Murray, and Gilmer Counties are models of rurality, if that’s even a word. People flock to Gilmer County to pick apples by the bushel. It’s beautiful this time of year. This is the foot of Blue Ridge territory, just a couple counties east of where I grew up, but it feels like another country. The hills roll and make back roads feel like roller coasters. When I was growing up, every autumn my parents would take us a long Sunday drive to Ellijay, the county seat of Gilmer. I insisted on a basket each of my favorite apples, the Rome Delicious and the winesaps. As an adult, I’ve been there far less often. I’ve not been to Ellijay proper in five years or more, but I’ll never need Google Maps to get there. I know North Georgia. Directions to anywhere around there are never all that complicated.
Even before I checked the results, I knew how Election Day went for North Georgia. There are no surprises here. Rural Georgia has voted conservative for years and years, going back to when Democrats in the South were hard-line conservative Dixiecrats. By a factor of nine-to-one give-or-take, voters in Fannin, Murray, and Gilmer voted in favor of the GOP’s candidate, Donald Trump. While the dry leaves burned around them and smoke choked the air such the scent carried as far South as Atlanta, residents across the Cohutta Wilderness cast ballots for a man who believes climate change is a myth invented by the Chinese.
Is this where I talk about how I grew up with these voters, how I know them and how I’ve seen them on better days? Ask you to forgive them, for they know not why they do? I’ve written already about the normalization of Confederate nostalgia, so perhaps this is another symptom?
I grew up in a part of the South, in a part of Georgia in particular, where racism is often viewed as an indulgence, like drinking on the sly or bumming a cigarette when you said you quit weeks ago. It’s when your aunt’s second husband makes a crack at the holiday dinner about how “that’s just the way blacks are” or when you overhear your grandmother talking to friends on the telephone about how well she was treated by the “sand-n____” who did her chemotherapy. You can imagine it like pulling a swig from a bottle and passing it along. These people would never admit to hating anyone outright, but they do love that bottle. Until a few years ago, I had regular contact with a man who wielded his recreational racism like a fencing foil, reading the room for just the right moment to let slip a comment so unexpected and unnecessary, it would take your breath away. Once said, he would smile, knowing he’d set the rest of the evening at a tilt. It’s a game.
Racism is not the only story here, not even recreational racism. This is about insulation. These voters are insulated against a changing world by assurances their way of life has been and will always be the way it was before now, enshrined in the idea that Real America looks like Rural America, and Real America never has to change. That idea is the 100-foot tall cliff that surrounds them. So they voted for the man who promised to protect their values with an even bigger wall. He will reverse the obsolescence that shuttered factories. He will never ask they consider other points of view. He will protect them from the arc of history, time itself.
Surrounded by fire, they vote for the fire.
My mom texted again Tuesday, a week after the election. She asked how I was and I told her the truth. The week has been rough and difficult to reconcile. It feels like a man has been elected who has no respect for the office, who cannot conceive of the responsibility he has inherited, who is surrounding himself with incredibly ugly-minded people, and who does not even want to live in the White House at all. She responded by telling me to try to accept the situation, to not let it upset my life, and that now was a time for prayer and hope.
But my life is upset and I’ve been praying already. Just days ago, when my own comforts were no longer working, I cast my mind back to a remembered sanctuary. I imagined wood polish on pews, organ music reverberating off breezeblock walls. I found myself muttering The Lord’s Prayer under my breath. “Our Father, who art in Heaven …” I got only as far as forgiving those who trespass against us, then I shook my head, dismissing the quiet. Prayer helps, and hope is necessary, but the Apostle Paul might have the best approach to these coming days: “What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works?” Pray by what you do in the light, not just what you say in the dark.
I was sad, and now I’m angry, and I don’t see the fog of it lifting soon. To take the highest prize in the land, promises were made to Real America, promises that threaten the wellbeing of Actual People I hold dear. Those promises cast shadows and darken days long before they’re made manifest and become enforceable, if they ever do. I’m sick with this. I don’t sleep well. Even if the incoming administration is as incompetent as reported, I’m uneasy.
If you were told a fire would appear in your living room, warned exactly when it would start and where, what comfort would you take from an “ill-prepared” inferno?
