Found this at the Tricycle site, an online exclusive.
Waiting on Fire
by Rick Bass
First bellflower bloom, first twinflower, first monk's hood, a brighter purple than any king's robe. First wild strawberries, too, red as fire, and the first hawkweed, colonies and colonies of it spreading through the forests and meadows, displacing native plants, eaten by nothing, its blossoms brilliant orange, like glowing sparks. Butterflies congregate in huge swarms near any cliffside seep or spring, as water dwindles, with the swarms, the butterfly colonies, becoming larger as the heat expands. To our northwoods shade-loving selves, it feels as it does when you stoke a stove too full of dry wood, too much too fast—as if someone is throwing such wood on the sun itself—and though doubtless one of the reasons the butterflies gather in such immense numbers around the drying-out damp patches is to feed upon the saturated mineral residue left behind as the puddles and ponds evaporate, they are after the pure water too, I think, and to happen upon such a colony, while on a walk through the heated woods (trying to stay in the shade of the trees), the impression one receives at first—just before they all spring into the vortex of flight, random-chaos-swirl, disrupting all those thousands of fruit vendors' stands over in India, Morocco, and Hong Kong—is that the butterflies have been gathered at those seeps and springs, hunched over them with fluttering wings in an attempt to fan some faint coolness onto those waters, or even to provide, with the stained-glass church-windows of their wings, some glimmering protection: as if even trying, with the filter of their wings, to disguise or camouflage that water, from the consuming stare, consuming gaze, of the sun.
Almost every year, it is this way, in August—hot and dry, with the guessing game that really began back in the heart of winter, as we watched the snow fall, or not fall, coming right down to the whittled point of now. Will the fires come today, tonight, tomorrow? Later this week, or the middle of next week?
As the woods become evermore still and hot, as the last ghosts of moisture oven-bake dry from the last twig, and the last pine needles—as the green and living trees themselves begin to dry out, with some of them dying even while still standing up, browning their needles as if the fire has already passed through—the question that back in January or February might have been an if seems inescapably now a when.
Weather reports shift by the hour, and take on the immediacy of war briefings: wind directions and velocities, temperature, humidity, and storm forecasts. As the heated rock shell of the mountains grows hotter each day, like so many bricks baking in the oven, the convective updraft from those violent heatings take on the force of coal-fired bellows, or even the exhalations of a lung-heated, living thing, sending invisible towering plumes of heat straight up, pistons of unlit fire, where—thirty and forty thousand feet later—they finally cool, condensing and spreading into apocalyptic-looking mushroom clouds.
They are not yet done, in their cooling. The fire is still in them. It seeks to return to the rocks from which it was birthed—or if not yet birthed, conceived, in that August heat.
The weather reports tell us who is getting what and where, all around the state: lightning with rain, or lightning without rain. Worst of all—or rather, most frightening of all—if one is frightened of these things—lightning with no wind, accompanied by, driven by, high winds.
It comes slowly, in August—the awareness that the lush bounty of spring and green summer, the rampant growth, has now become like a sort of trap or prison, if one allows one's self to be frightened by such things—the cell walls of every living plant, every grass and forb, twig and branch and limb, leaching paper dry, kindling dry, gunpowder dry—all this botanical exuberance, all that life, surrounding you now, surrounding everything, with its husks, husks everywhere—and even if you love fire, and love the pulse of life it brings back to a landscape in its aftermath, you cannot help but be a little frightened, standing before the immensity of such a power, and waiting.
Rick Bass is an award-winning author and an environmental activist.
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