November 2014, Memphis and Chattanooga. We drove there in a 16-foot yellow Ryder truck, filled with two of Bachrun’s art installations. Now we are returning, four weeks later, two solo exhibitions delivered, installed, viewed, taken down. The immense rainfalls of Tennessee and Arkansas gave way via Oklahoma to the incrementally drier Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally, Southern California landscapes. The last leg of the journey brought us home on our very own Highway 245, as if we had just gone to Visalia for groceries.

 

As we came the last tenth of a mile, approaching the Pinehurst Lodge, a century-old centerpiece of this community, an unfamiliar, sickening sight came into view. The Lodge, once a sawmill for shaping lumber from the old-growth forest, had been snugly encircled by the second-growth forest that rose up when logging ended in the 40s. Now that forest was dead. In a month.

 

You could say that this isn’t my first pandemic.

In this moment I’m locked down in Pinehurst with no eager Park tourists to host, our bank accounts empty. Around the world people are suffering from the virus, fear of the virus, or sick of the virus-induced cabin fever. From this perspective, a vista of suddenly dead trees is an insignificant local hiccup. But in 2014 a cascade of effects upon the immense Sierra forest was coming. My worst fear crept closer: wildfire was coming for us.

 

What to do with millions upon millions of dead trees — more than 129 million in the southern Sierra Nevada alone? Snags, standing dead in the air, threaten to fall in a fire, blocking escape routes and killing firefighters. CalFire was clear: get ‘em down. Public agencies from county to federal grappled with the implications. Fire season loomed. The blunt solution: leave them where they were felled. The dead forest would be horizontally stacked along roads, left in ditches and up mountainsides, jackstraw-style, to decay. With the canopy absent, brush and shrubby plants could seek the sun, and in time, they would overgrow the recently dead and newly horizontal logs, creating a new fire hazard.

 

Walking to Cedarbrook the other day, I stepped in and out of rain showers, under cloudy and blue skies. Two inches of rain had fallen overnight, not particularly unusual for an early spring storm. I tiptoed and jumped around accumulated and running water down the road to the stream.

 

Water runs down. There is no other way for it. It pours through and out of the soil — down. It pours into the drainage between hillocks — down. It pours into the culvert and out the other side — down. If the road progresses downward before another drainpipe appears to divert the water, it chooses — down, even if it means crossing the road. At times it felt that even I would be caught in the madness, rushing down, down.

 

Trees intervene and reverse the inevitable down. Water is commanded upward. Roots plant themselves deeply and purposefully into the soil to suck the water out. In the dry late summer days of August, we have noted a decrease in the amount of water our well could pump. Jackie, our well guy across the road, told us that’s because trees take a long, final drink from deep sources to survive the last months of seasonal drought. Continual rising and flowing vertical circulation is its lifeblood, you could say. 

 

Six years of severe drought, glaring hot summers, and bark beetles in the trillions caused tree circulation failure. Hot summers and warm winters stressed and weakened the pines, allowing their mortal enemy, the western bark beetle, to overwhelm defenses. The top of the tree dies first, as beetles attack and the flowing sap inside becomes too feeble to eject them. Browning needles and branches progressing from top down mark the victim. Sap globules ooze from the bark; when it had been overcome by the beetle, the sap flowed red. The trees were bleeding to death.

 

Drained of life, decay set in. Even live trees, and every other scrap of vegetation, dried out as drought persisted. Into this scenario a summer thunderstorm in 2015 shot dry lightning onto a perilously steep back country ridge in Kings Canyon.

 

Bachrun and I, with Bill (visiting from NYC), drove over to the canyon in early August to see the flames lapping the ridge tops on nearly vertical slopes. A helicopter flew over, dropping retardant, producing no visible effect. Already Park fire professionals were concerned; Kathy, the Buck Rock lookout, told us that, in the worst case, the fire could be drawn up Ten Mile Creek and reach Hume Lake, a large summer camp. Thus began the Rough Fire, or as our lookout friends liked to call it then, “baby Rough.”

 

The fire grew up quickly, and for days, nights, weeks, and eventually months, it marched, tore, consumed its way through extreme terrain, dry brush, dead trees. It crossed the Kings River, jumped containment lines, menaced power plants. Thousands of firefighters were called to the fight. Sequoia groves were laid with miles of hose and watered to save them from a potential — and deadly — crown fire. Maps and air quality reports were issued twice daily over the course of three months, which I faithfully forwarded to a large list of neighbors.

 

Smoke was part of our lives, our lungs, our clothes. The Rough Fire was still miles away from us, but menaced the entire forest with a clear message: I am unstoppable. Smaller, unrelated fires burst out closer to Pinehurst. The atmosphere was jittery; locals checked in with each other as never before. We saw the poor state of the forest; we saw the future.

 

It seemed like we should start packing. By late August, books and art and the beautiful antiques from June’s estate were stashed into boxes. After 13 years of living in a flammable forest, we finally prepared our evacuation plan. We found a place to store our stuff if Rough made good on its threats. But a forester we knew assured us that we would never have to evacuate for this fire. It’s miles away, he said. It will never get this far.

 

The early morning of September 11 was fiercely smoky. At 6:30 the phone rang — my sister in the Central Time Zone told us first. Evacuation Order. Then our nephew in Argentina Time. Evacuation Order. About 45 minutes later, two sheriff’s cars pulled into our driveway and delivered the news in person: Evacuation Order. They told us which way to leave, and posted a florescent orange flier on our house, printed from corner to corner with a forbidding black X.

 

We decamped to a friend’s tiny rental apartment just down Highway 245 in Badger. We hung up Tansy’s cage and released Puffnip in Bachrun’s studio nearby. I wasn’t worried for our safety — we were outside of the danger zone. Yet the fire’s advance onto Pinehurst felt theoretical; possible but not probable. That week was wrenching emotionally, as sadness and stomach churned uncontrollably. 

 

By the second week of September, the fire was approaching McKenzie Ridge. If allowed to jump over, its direct path would wipe out the community of Dunlap. Embers from such a vast and powerful fire would seed the dry forest of Pinehurst. So a last stand along the Ridge was mobilized: six huge tanker planes would stage a backfiring event, literally bombing the ridge, fire meeting fire, to starve it of fuel, until there was nothing left to burn.

 

We watched the fire-cloud materialize from our safe space in Badger. Pounding flames into flames, the campaign created smoke as I had never seen. It was in fact creating a weather system, a 40,000-foot-high pyrocumulus smoke cloud, that could be seen for miles. 

 

Hours of restless waiting. Anxious moments. Foreseeing the burnt forest, imagining our destroyed home. Also incredulity. It’s not the end of our life here, is it?

 

Next day, clouds. Not anticipated, unusual for September. Then, rain. The fire was repelled. We could go home. It took me months, after this life convulsion, to sort out causes and effects and realize that it was the fire cloud itself that had produced the storm. It had put itself out.

 

Although it had sustained a decisive blow, the Rough Fire still burned for another two months along its 235-square-mile perimeter, ultimately consuming more than 151,000 acres. At the time, it was the thirteenth-largest wildfire in California history. The official end date — November 5th — coincided with the opening of our art exhibition at the abandoned hangar in Badger, The Hatchery: Fortress, where we festively burned furniture in the oversized fireplace, and partied with a DJ and LED light show. Fortress, indeed.

 

Yet the Rough Fire, for all its insistent forward progress through National Parks, National Forests, National Monuments, towards isolated mountain settlements, requiring thousands of person-hours and interagency cooperation, not to mention millions of dollars, was eventually dwarfed by ever more destructive California fires: Thomas (2017), Tubbs (2017), Mendocino Complex (2018), Carr (2018), Woolsey (2018), Camp (destroyer of the town of Paradise in 2018).

 

Right now the pandemic is swallowing history and suspending us in an endless present. The Rough, the Tubbs, Carr, Camp, all of them, have been displaced by a virus and its attendant calamities. Anxiety, nightmares, disintegrating cultural norms, inexpressible social voids. Have we fallen apart yet? Are we coming to an end?

 

I propose a break from catastrophe, and reference my simpler story: the Rough Fire came for us, but it didn’t get us. It was a close call. And now I’d like to stop talking about it. 

 

If only there weren’t another one on the horizon. 

 

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Climate Change. It’s coming for us.