Monday, November 12, 2018

The Fire This Time


Fire in California, like drought, is a failure of memory and a longage of people.

In East of Eden, Nobel-prize winning author John Steinbeck's (1902-1968) put it well:
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.

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4 comments:

Jennifer said...

Lovely quote, but plays into the tune of denying climate change. The Dust Bowl wasn't accompanied by an increasingly ice free Arctic. Jerry Brown is correct in describing this as "the new normal".

Jo Mercer said...

MOre recent writers have remembered and acknowledged the way fires control California life:

“It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles's deepest image of itself; Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

- Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

PBurns said...

Drought cycles in California have nothing to do with global warming and neither does the Dust Bowl. A surprising amount of things in this world don't. :)

I guess I know a bit about global warming; my father wrote the first piece in the NYT on this subject and I edited some of his stuff. For what does drive global warming, and a bit of data and history, see >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2006/08/inconvenient-truth.html

For a history of the Dust Bowl, see >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/03/killing-bison-to-kill-of-native.html and the links on the bottom which tell the rest of the story. The Dust Bowl was created by the Russian Revolution and the collapse of their wheat export which fueled massive Great Plains expansion followed by drought. What stopped it (see all the links) was wind breaks, contour plowing, fossil water, and price supports, along with grassland reserves and CRP set asides. Modern slit plowing has helped a lot more. >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/03/enter-immigrants-cattlewheat-and-dust.html

https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2012/03/when-death-squads-for-cattle-saved.html

PBurns said...

I posted on the man and the legislative event that ended the Dust Bowl back in April of this year. Hugh Bennett deserves a statue; he and FDR saved us all.

https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2018/04/dust-bowl-on-hill.html