yesterday

Yesterday for the first time since June 5th we put the dogs in the car and drove up to the top of Mount Lemmon. The last time we drove up Mount Lemmon was the day before we watched lightning strike the western slopes of Pusch Ridge. That was the beginning of the Bighorn Fire, which burned 120,000 acres before the first big monsoon rain finally put it completely out. As the fire began to ebb into embers and ashes, and the many crews of firefighters, weather service, deputy sheriffs, and game and fish officers, could pack up, the conversation began around how to recover, or what is next. The forest service has something in place: a Burned Area Emergency Response plan. 

What we saw yesterday was much the same, for awhile, until we got up to where we had picknicked two months before and saw from the edge of the road the whole mountainside to the north down to the next valley scorched and covered with ashes. As we descended from the ski area above Summerhaven we could see how close the fires had come to the mountaintop telescopes and the edge of the road. And we could see the first small green sprouts as new growth began on the ashen slopes of the mountain faces.

And so this local disaster, which occupied our minds and feelings for over a month, as the smoke, the helicopters and airplanes, and on many days the flames, occupied our senses, began to release its hold on us. In the middle of the fire month of June I had listed our common anxieties in order of longevity - and perhaps in reverse order of attention. 

1. The Bighorn Fire

2. The Coronavirus Pandemic

3. The Presidency

4. Climate Change

The Bighorn Fire began June 5th in the Catalina Mountains and ended a little over a month later. (Fire season is far from over in the Southwest, but see below under #4.) 

The Coronavirus Pandemic began sometime last December in southern China and has far from peaked, though there is hope that with proper precautions at the individual, social, national, and global levels, and the efforts to develop and distribute a vaccine, it can become another endemic disease, like the flu or the common cold, rather than the fourth scourge alongside tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV/AIDS. 

I'm skipping one. 

Climate Change began 250 years ago and will have its effects for the next millenia. It causes things like our wretched summer of excessive heat as well as the more extreme weather events and the more frequent droughts, fires, rainstorms, floods, and mudslides that are piling on top of each other.

The Presidency will, according to The Economist, nine chances out of ten be handed over to the opposite party in January. 

After the Bighorn Fire the Burn Area Emergency Response plan goes into effect. Shall we re-seed as we did after the Aspen Fire? After the fire in the Big Bear area some years ago, Giant Sequoia were planted. Will we see planting of indigenous species? After the Oakland Hills fire of 1989 people built back, better one hopes. After the second Great Earthquake and Fire of San Francisco, the one in 1909, the City came back, different but greater.

We talk about the new normal. We talk about before, during, and after. We talk about building back better. 

But I can tell you, since the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November four years ago, an obsession has gripped many minds. And so we when we begin to talk about what is next what we talk about is the disaster continuing. But nine chances out of ten less than ninety days from now there will be an election that begins to overturn the current situation, political but not climate or health, and people have NO IDEA what that will look like. I hope the prospective next president has some people on board who do see a future with hope. Too many are too obsessed with the present to look ahead.

And yet the future is where we will live. At least the next generation, and many of us, will live in it.

We will not see again what we had before. But we can begin to build what we can become, indeed what we are called to become, as individuals, as citizens of this nation, and as creatures on this planet. 

We have to. For we will survive, and it is our duty.

Getting Rid of Stuff

Bighorn Fire, Catalina Mountains.

My brother used to talk a lot about getting rid of stuff. After his death, we went through his apartment. We found his clothes and his excess vitamin supplements, his training equipment and his furniture, and eventually opened the top drawer of his dresser. The Lord of the Rings DVDs were in the drawer under the TV. We found a double rack of six storage bins with his personal papers. In the closet were his hiking hat, green pullover pile sweater, and fancy walking stick. On the wall hung our grandfather's campaign hat from the forest service or the first world war. 

Up front as we entered the apartment had been an organizer bin propped on a dining room chair, full of photographs. In the trunk of his car were a bunch of road flares. All we took was a box of things that seemed practical at the time. A Pendleton blanket. I don't know what else. What happened to his lifetime of photographs -- he was a pretty good amateur photographer -- or anything else, and it doesn't matter. What really mattered was gone.

In the early days of the Bighorn Fire, from the evening we watched the lightning strike the Catalinas, and the next morning's first smoke, I remembered the smoke rising over the Oakland Hills on the Sunday morning when hot dry winds fanned slumbering embers into flame that consumed a neighborhood. Among the parishioners were a man named Bob who lost everything and another man who already had, in a divorce. The second man shrugged and said he'd sleep at the hospital where he worked for awhile. Bob was devastated. I hope he's okay. 

And I'd remember longer ago, the family memory of 1906 in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. Aunt Carol said, "When I was eighteen years old there was an earthquake. My father said, 'Carol, stand in the doorway, and I did!" The Japanese art student living with the family asked, "Do you have these here often?" And, we learned, the family evacuated to Golden Gate Park, or perhaps the closer Presidio, where "Mama cooked in a big black pot over an open fire" and they slept in a tent until the all-clear.

Early in the past month I recalled the picture of Gandhi's personal effects assembled after his death: two pairs of spectacles, sandals, a dhoti, and a rice bowl. And what was found in the coffin of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, when they opened his tomb in Durham Cathedral five hundred years ago: his episcopal ring and pectoral cross (the latter often copied), his comb, and his portable altar with its mica top (for a stone surface) and inner drawer for the bread, the wine, the oil, the sacraments.

I thought of aunt Em's last possessions, as she waited death in a convalescent home in Millbrae. Just a wall bulletin board pinned with family photographs, and the latest copy of TV Guide, which I sent her. What she remembered were the visits of aunt Diane. Her own sister Virginia had predeceased her by years.

And I thought about the stuff in my house after the Loma Prieta earthquake, how I'd gotten home from San Francisco late that evening (at 5:04 in the office hallway I'd remembered Carol's words and stood in a doorway) to a house full of light and the cats with their eyes wide. And I could step outside and shut the door behind me and walk around that house and everything I had was in it. But nothing mattered, not so much as friends and family and life itself. But sometimes we lose even those.

What then shall we save? What will be preserved? Left behind? What will matter then? To us, to those who remain?

Habit, William James would tell us. Habits of behavior - ‘how you wind your watch, how you pack your pipe’ - and habits of mind, that ‘set like plaster’ by the time you’re thirty. 

Ben Weir told me that what he remembered during the months and years in captivity, held as a hostage in the dark by militants in Lebanon, were the words of Presbyterian hymns. And since then I’ve made a practice of daily devotions, taking in words and phrases, prayers and psalms, from the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. So those are the habits of mind and heart I build in myself. 

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)

When Herb O’Driscoll came to visit my anxious congregation, he had me move the baptismal font front and center. He reminded us that as long as we have the story, and the water and the oil, the bread and the wine, each other - and the Spirit - we’ll be alright. What we have in these anxious days may not be the daily or weekly gatherings we cherish but we do have the story, each other, and the prayers. Those remain.