Living One Spark Away from Apocalypse

A story for uncertain times

I live cupped between two mountain ranges, one named for water, the other for blood. To the east, the Wet Mountains are lumpy, low, dark green with lodgepole pine. In the west, the Sangre de Cristos tilt high against the sky, all sharp edges, no prelude, no preparation. In the valley between, I am gathered up with the person I love, in a home I love. I love standing in the kitchen, chopping onions, shoulder-wiping tears. Sweeping cottonwood leaves off the front porch. Hanging laundry on a line beside the lilac bushes. I am not ambitious towards the world, but that’s not for a lack of ambition. I am ambitious for the things I can only find at home.

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I was made for a quiet life, always quieter than what was available. My kindergarten classroom overwhelmed me to tears. In grammar school I spent recess alone at the edge of the fence. But quietness does not fund adulthood. So I disguised my ambition for slow listening with quick doing. I was good at it for awhile, but increasingly I felt panicked and sick. My ability to focus eroded. Then, after decades of drifting in the noise, I met someone who’d been surviving his own version of the same story. He understood without me having to explain that a slow life mattered, was worth pursuing.

We ended up married. And when we finally got the chance, we broke away from the city and came to this mountain valley. We came to live in the shadow of something beautiful and peaceful: trails rising up through shady trees, creeks descending with snow melt. We came for unencumbered views on every side, to watch mountain weather going and coming like the angels on Jacob’s ladder. We wanted to be quiet and listen in on the passageway between heaven and earth.

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The quiet here is real, but so is the trouble. It hangs in the dry air. Nearly every summer now, wildfire smoke smudges our blue sky. It used to start in July, then in June. One year it took over in April. When I wake up to haze, I check the federal Fire and Smoke Map. Flame icons show what’s burning. Spreading grey bubbles show how much of the country is choking on the soot. Just last month, a nearby ridge of National Forest caught fire. For days it burned, zero percent contained. The nearby town went on alert for evacuation. We stay aware of the winds, the chances for dry lightening. We know we are one spark away from apocalypse.

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My husband is the early riser. At first light, he puts away the clean dishes, lets the dog out in the backyard. While I sleep on, he makes coffee and reads. For years, I have not had to listen to the morning news. He mediates the headlines to me, a gentle messenger telling of votes and game scores, waves of sickness, weather fronts and wars. Beyond our walls, every road in and out of our high valley is dangerous. Tight curves and sheer drop-offs. No shoulders. Mule deer dart across the yellow lines at every hour of day. Rock slides in the canyon. Black ice on the river road. Every time my husband goes “down the hill” to the hardware store, I brace a little for the possibility: What if he doesn’t make it back?

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It is so easy to feel desperate.

We no longer believe the whole forest can be saved; the point now is to create “defensible space.” Cull as much dead wood from around your home as you can. Commit to regular chain-sawing and chipping of the tangled deadfall and undergrowth, and maybe your strip of land can be spared.

Another alternative is plain panic, like one landowner new to mountain living who reacted to a plume of smoke several years ago by bulldozing a strip down to the back side of his square-mile of property, an escape route should the front driveway go up in flames. That plume was a false alarm, so he hasn’t needed his remedy, but it waits, a sudden scar down a steep slope with a pile of dead trees on either side.

Meanwhile, there are metal roofs over every house on our block at the edge of town, a guard against flying sparks. But not long ago, when we watched a thousand suburban homes near Boulder burn down from a grass fire, we all felt as exposed as if we’d done nothing.

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Middle of the night, shrieking in my yard wakes me up. A roaming cat fights off a skunk. An owl screeches from the garage roof, sounding like a terrified infant. If I got out of bed to look, I know the stars would stun me in the dark, the naked spine of the Milky Way curling across the sky. But I rarely get up. It’s not exactly fear that keeps me under covers. Sleep whimpers at me with its sweet numbness while the universe never begs to be glimpsed, and I’ve always been a sucker for whining.

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When the weather is mild, it’s easy to forget all of this. I go on walks with my long-legged husband and our loping dog. We stride up shaded trails beside falling creeks. On Sundays, we saunter to a little stucco church, kneel at an altar, and wait for the bread of heaven to be placed into our palms. We say amen. Maybe I’m not as afraid as I could be. But I am still afraid.

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The dry reality of the American West crouches outside my door: thousands of forest acres are ripe for the kind of consuming fire that changes everything. Our local Forest Service ranger, Jeff, spends his summers fighting fires wherever they flare up. He is matter-of-fact when he tells us that though it’s all drought-smacked now, it was getting unhealthy long before any hole in the ozone. We thought we were doing right for over a century, suppressing every kind of flame as quickly as possible. It turns out we misunderstood. Fire was always as natural to a forest as rain. Without it we only increased the supply of fuel. Jeff shrugs: it is simply overdue for blazes beyond our control. It will be the end of the forest as we know it, but it won’t be the end of the forest.

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One of the reasons we love this town is that it is full of stargazers. They stand by their telescopes at night, focusing their wonder on darkness and consuming fires. By day, they gently warn about light pollution,  protest our glut of forced shine. They walk around in t-shirts that say “You can see more in the dark.”

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I must admit, the light does not always help me see, does not deliver certainty. Some mornings the sun seeps over the Wet Mountains, filters through a few clouds, then saturates the Sangres with light, turning the rock red and purple. This is the reason for their name: Sangre de Cristo is Spanish for blood of Christ. Stone becomes liquid wick, burning but not consumed. The alpenglow pulses and sparks only a few moments. The mornings I’m awake for it, I perch at the edge of fresh sight. Then the sun heaves higher, the clouds swipe away, and the flame inside the rock blinks out. The mountains become inscrutable again.

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“You can see more in the dark.” I understand the wisdom of this; I agree. Life grows in the blind womb. The richest treasures are often the buried kind. My mind concedes completely. It’s the rest of my limbic system that recoils, whimpers for comfort, avoids the naked wait for glory. Left to it, I would make all my encounters with trouble tame, on my terms, in my time. I would invest only in defensible space, stamping out every spark of risk, cutting scars in the name of escape. But have I dared to imagine the damage of dodging every loss I can? Do I have the slightest notion what more there may be to see? Can I consider throwing my weight into watching for some unsearchable wonder on the far side of loss?

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It is easy to feel desperate, but we came to this valley to be quiet, to listen in on the passageway between heaven and earth.  What I am hearing in that exchange crackles like thunder in the middle of the night. In the ascents and descents, I see that nothing is safe: the forest with its soothing trails, the fire-resistant roof over my head, the man who listens beside me. Love and fear share a heartbeat. Everything is always on the verge of apocalypse.

Which is to say, everything may be on the verge of revelation, on the edge of being see-able and seen¹.

And isn’t this what my ambition had been all along? A chance to live with unencumbered views?

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Lately, I wake in the middle of the night to silence. I still don’t go outside into the brilliant dark, but I reach my fingertips toward my husband’s warm ribs. They rise and fall with his sleeping breath, reminding me a passageway is always open. I am afraid. I am afraid. And I stand at the gate of wonder and awe.

NOTE: The soundscape above by Ryan Keenbaugh is titled “But I sense the promise.” He created this original composition in direct response to the essay I’ve written, offering an immersive harmony out of the story, emotions, tensions and images found there.

I have not added my narration to the audio this time. The soundscape stands alone, offers its own experience, communicating that a wholeness can be present, even when, in words, it cannot be named or known all at once.

My first collaboration with Ryan was for my post, Midsummer Vigil. I am so grateful for his willingness and joy in collaboration!

1. The origin of the word “apocalypse” is from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein, meaning ‘uncover, reveal’.