I shall build me a house where the larkspur blooms
In a narrow glade in an alder wood,
Where the sunset shadows make violet glooms,
And a whip-poor-will calls in eerie mood.
I shall lie on a bed of river sedge,
And listen to the glassy dark,
With a guttered light on my window ledge,
While an owl stares in at me white and stark.
I shall burn my house with the rising dawn,
And leave but the ashes and smoke behind,
And again give the glade to the owl and the fawn,
When the grey wood smoke drifts away with the wind.
Robert Penn Warren, Vision
“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”
Dylan Thomas
Mankind has long been fascinated by the smell of wood smoke, most likely because it indicates to us that human habitation is near at hand. Once upon a time, in the vast forests that used to cover America, that must have been true. I can easily imagine Hawkeye and Chingachgook wandering through that wilderness and becoming aware of wood smoke by sight or smell, instantly knowing that some form of humanity was nearby – maybe a family at rest in a tent or a snug log cabin, or perhaps another group of wanderers enjoying an evening meal around a blazing campfire.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” has long been a favorite maxim, one suggesting that something nefarious is going on whenever there is too much talk and rumor about someone or something. This maxim could easily be amended to read: “Where’s there’s smoke, there’s humanity,” rumor and talk being peculiarly human endeavors. Such an amendment would also serve to reflect the fact that the smell of wood smoke occupies a place in the most primal levels of the human psyche, associated, as it is, with homeliness, sanctuary, and food.
This morning – this Sunday morning – all of Humptulips County is suffused with the smell of wood smoke, but it is not the sort of smoke that speaks of home, of safety from the dark or the storm. This smoke smells of rapine, plunder, destruction, and despair. The entire state of Washington is infused with this smell on this Sunday morning, as if the devil, worshipping at his altars, has had much more effect than mankind has, worshipping at his.
The smell of this wood smoke is so pervasive that eastern and western Washington have been bound together in a show of rare unanimity crossing political, geographical and cultural boundaries. All of Washington is aghast at the scope of the destruction which has hit our state; we are all amazed at the effort and human cost required to bring it under control.
Despite this sense of common purpose in the face of shared disaster, I strongly suspect our unanimity will not last long; when the current fires are under control and we come to a consideration of their causes, differing opinions will shatter our current unanimity. Given this inevitability, I might as well jump the gun and say what I believe to be true.
Not all wood smoke is the product of human activity. Nature is capable of starting its own fires, as the facts of lightning and volcanos attest. But if there is any truth to my revised aphorism, where there’s an abundance of smoke it’s certain that humanity is nearby. We have given nature a helping hand in its efforts to spread fires, made it much easier whether the fires began by dint of lightning, lava, or human hand. Drought leads inevitably to an exponentially increased risk of fire, and drought is a by-product of global warming; if humanity has contributed significantly to the circumstances creating global warming as our most talented, bias-free scientists suggest, then surely each of us shares in the culpability that the current drought exists – and for the ubiquitous smell of wood smoke on this Sunday morning, a smell more suggestive of fires born of sulfur than of wood.
Vincent van Gogh once wrote: “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.” Perhaps the time has arrived when we can now warm ourselves at Vincent’s fires; perhaps those fires have become so hot, so ubiquitous, so damned that they have manifested themselves in the reality of our existence and are burning out of control. Perhaps we’ll heed the warning.
Or, perhaps not. For as Don MacLean once sang to the essence of Vincent’s shadow:
Now, I think I know what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
Is it possible that we have let things go on for so long that all the hope we have left is embodied in Robert Penn Warren’s vision of a land given back to nature when the fires have exhausted their fuel? Or have we taken things so far as to leave nothing for nature – nature, as we have known it anyway – to enjoy when our lingering traces finally fade away? That these questions can be asked with even the merest hint of verisimilitude says volumes about humanity and the narrow extent of its sense-limited horizons.
Chingachgook and Hawkeye would have been wary of any wood smoke they saw or smelled in that wilderness until they determined the nature of the fire at its heart. We should be equally and especially wary of the sort of wood smoke we smell on this Sunday morning – for there is no joy and no beauty to be found in the burning of these bridges.
