This book is like fire. Polyphonic. Painful. Cleansing. Healing. Beautiful.
Polyphonic. In the multiple voices of the narrators—ranging from animals, to a little girl, to feuding neighbors, to the mountain—this book is composed of many sounds. Fires crackle, snap, and pop, soothing and mesmerizing on a hearth or firepit. Fires roar through wilderness, rumbling and thundering as they devour what lays in their path. Fires whisper as their flames burn low, turning to soft embers that still carry heat enough to burn us.
Moose
that creature standing there so forlorn-lorn-lorn these last years, but only because that creature has forgotten how to be, how to stand in meadow and tilt head to grass and wildflower and now she sinks and we both feel cut, slice, fear and I do not want to go dark, either, because all creatures = sharp desire to live.
The desire to breathe.
The desire to put hoof to earth or wing to air.
my great knees buckle at the same time the creature falls, too.
out of air we both go down.
I have ancient feeling of standing in rain, nose in flowers.
Painful. In the experiences of the different narrators, we feel the pain of loss, disconnection, and fear. Fire burns us, burns our possessions, burns the land. Wildfire can drive us to desperation and bring on physical illness that lasts long after ashes are all that’s left. Massive smoke clouds filled with toxins from paint and building materials fill the air, clogging our lungs and making the air we breathe dangerous.
Raven
besides air all i need is water which i find under the sprinkling water. Hunker, pant, rest, cat darts by, bear gimps by, one paw burned. moose goes down. woman goes down. trees go down. tree bits float up. woman ash floats up. moose ash floats up. I raise up. Wings, up, up, push, push toward red poppies and brown cabin and blue bowl of water.
Cleansing. Fire burns and hurts and it can also cleanse. Amidst the various stories of loss and disconnect and suffering, Pritchett writes about land management policy, including prescribed burns that would minimize the risk of fire. Characters discuss the difference between good and bad fires. Through the stories within the pages, the haze of smoke is cleared away and we gain a greater understanding of the impact of wildfires.
“But still, there’s this one wild component: Do you know what it’s like to drop1,500 feet from an airplane? And five seconds later, your parachute explodes alive? So orchestrated. And yet, so fucking not. Orchestrated and yet wild. Like love.”
Healing. Relationships are formed and healed, throughout this story, as people come together to help each other in times of hardship and fear. This healing is not faux-inspirational, and there’s no saccharine Hallmark presentation of easy mending of rifts. Yet, people realize in this time of crisis (COVID isolation and wildfire evacuations) that they need each other, whether they want to or not. They realize that they need to help each other, that they need to let their walls down, and that, going forward, things need to be different.
“Yes. It burned. We saw it there, burned. We should name the winds. In other countries, they name winds. And winds have personalities, god-like powers. And if the Earth is to be saved—and it won’t be, it’s too late—but if it were to be saved—it will be through the imagination. It would be because we made up stories about wind. You know?”
Beautiful. Pritchett populates the pages of this book with vivid characters, some likeable, some not, but all human and unique and quirky. In one of my favorite chapters, a woman who has long lived in the area and is soon selling her land digs up a body in the private cemetery on her property, because she wants to say goodbye to this person she researched and whose land she has lived on. She talks with this long-dead man, revealing her loneliness and grief, but also showing the ways we are always connected.
“My husband and I used to walk this land together, too, looking for arrowheads. Bottles and tools. Perhaps you were the person who touched them last, before me. That makes us not so distant after all, doesn’t it? It’s funny in how certain ways, time can be collapsed.”
“I wish White Owl and Jean Baptiste could see this blackened sky, the ash falling down, not because I want to make them sad, but because I want to commune with the past and future people of this place. I want to collapse time.”
The future of the community, and the world, really, is uncertain in the final pages of the book, but Pritchett leaves us with a bit of optimism.
The mountain watched the bear wander in search of a new den, watched the woman in her den bundled in a blanket. How shivering beautiful that we all watch one another in this blink of time, the mountain mumbled. How simple and true: that we witness fires rage and die, that we look up and notice the moon crossing our viewshed in its various forms, full and half and fingernail. That we sleep to wake, that we rest so we can heal, and that we scramble for survival until our blink is done. What a good blink I’m having! Yessssireeee, I do appreciate boinking out of the crust of this blue spinning ball at this particular blink in tie, whoo-eee, it’s a miracle, indeed.
The Indie Press Book Club will be discussing this book on March 5th, 2025 at 6pm, and we're pleased and excited that Laura Pritchett will join us on Zoom for the first half hour of discussion!
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