The grimmest book I have ever read was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It was grim because there had been an apocalyptic event but it is never named or revealed.
Civilization collapsed and was in ruins and a boy and his ailing father were wandering the wastelands in search of a better place. The mother had committed suicide in the first chapter because she couldn’t bear living in the wasted world.
It was grim because it seemed plausible.
No zombies. Though people who preyed on other people were part of the burned over, decimated landscape.
No invading armies or talked about radioactive fallout.
Just a countryside mostly devoid of people and destroyed by some terrific event or events.
A few years back I was on a river in north central Oregon in August where it is hot and dry in the best of years. That year British Columbia reportedly had hundreds of fires or blazes and the pall of smoke from those fires reached down into the American Pacific Northwest. Remarkably, the fire season for Washington and Oregon had been light.
As I sat beside the river I’ve traveled for four decades, the heat and the suffocating smoke, even for someone without asthma or lung issues, was stifling. I thought about McCarthy’s novel. I thought - this is a glimpse of what a post-apocalyptic world might look and feel and smell like.
I could imagine fires out-of-control destroying power lines, cell towers and pipelines faster than we could resurrect them or protect them. I could imagine firestorms blazing not just across the West but across the entire country. Year after year. Drought followed by drought. Soils, once considered fertile, now sterile from being scorched by fire.
Aquifers finally drained dry. Water storage systems depleted. A mountain range’s snowpack no longer reliable. Glacial fed rivers and streams a trickle due to the diminishing and vanishing glaciers.
I have a poor imagination. It’s the reason I can’t write fiction.
But I do have a writer’s knack for observing and I think I do well at describing what I see and I like telling stories that are as close to the truth as I remember it.
It was so oppressively hot and smoky during that river trip that not even the swift moving river known for its bountiful steelhead could free my mind from end of civilization ruminations. I only have a forty year snapshot which, in the scope of all of the time humankind has walked the earth, is hardly a flutter of an eyelash. Flatulence in a hurricane. But, I can say, the number of fires and the overall amount of smoke each “fire” season brings has grown worse, or become more consistent.
In the last decade fire and smoke have played a large role in my business.
In the previous thirty plus river seasons, I had never had to reassure guests about the air quality or refunded trips due to poor air quality or fielded dozens and dozens of queries about air quality. There have been fires - some exceptionally devastating like the Rat Creek Fire that surrounded Leavenworth in 1994 - but they seem to come in clusters now and explosively consume acreage with impunity.
The factors contributing to the fire maelstroms are many but the entire Pacific Northwest region going without significant rain for months on end has to be one of the largest contributors. Our rain forest on the Olympic Peninsula has suffered fire damage in the last few years and this season several fires have popped up threatening communities in western Washington. We might be hitting our average annual rainfall, but it is not stretched out over 300 of the 365 days like it used to be.
When I first moved to Washington in the mid 70s the joke was that summer consisted of the first week in July.
Everything is drying out. Dehydrating as if on a rack in a dehydrator. And that makes for a considerable amount of tinder.
As I said in the beginning, my experience on that river trip was apocalyptically surreal. I could envision society’s endgame as I recalled McCarthy’s grim read. I can only imagine the loss, terror, anguish and horror going on in communities all over the West coast as I type. The reports were half a million people under evacuation notice in Oregon. The town of Malden, Washington, obliterated. The destruction in California incalculable.
On the other hand, and to conclude on a lighter note, the book I’m currently nose-deep in, Humankind - A Hopeful History, suggests that - even if our nightmares become reality - our inclination, as a society, will be to come to one another’s assistance when the shit hits the fan, or the firestorms take down the power grid and other infrastructure. Mr. Rogers mother’s helpers will come forth out of the woodwork to help make things right.
I hope the author is right.
It’s hard to see it through all the smoke being blown up our asses. And otherwise.