Por Jeffrey St. Clair
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Columbia Gorge shrouded in smoke. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair. |
Hōfuku, pointing at the mountains: “Is this not reality?”
Chōkei: “It is. But it’s a pity to say so.”
On August fifth, Lola and I went for our morning walk. It didn’t feel like morning. It was too hot for morning. It didn’t smell like morning. The winds had shifted overnight. Instead of blowing off the Pacific, they were now coming from the northeast. From central Washington. From Spokane, when Spokane was burning. We were looking at a sky scrimmed with smoke from the fires of Spokane, three hundred and fifty miles away. We were inhaling the ashes of the Lilac City, the smell of lilacs in the dooryards burned, Walt Whitman’s song of the “bleeding throat” come to call.
That morning Portland would register the worst air quality of any major city in the world. Most of the smoke was from Spokane and the fires near Lake Chelan. But Oregon was burning, too. Burning big time. More than two million acres had gone up in flames during the last three weeks. That’s a record for an entire year and there are three months left in the fire season, assuming fires restrict themselves to our seasonal calendars anymore. The fires were growing by the hour. They defied any attempts at human control. By the end of the week, a fire on Mt. Hood had threatened one of the world’s greatest hotels, Timberline, where Stanley Kubrick shot the exteriors for The Shining. Timberline is, as its name suggests, situated at timberline. These fires don’t restrict themselves to our tidy geographical boundaries. The fires go where they want to go and only the fall rains and snows will stop them, if there are fall rains in this year of the Super El Niño.
One way or another, most of these fires are ignited by humans, either arsonist freaks or their transnational doppelgängers, the fossil fuel and timber companies. A few years ago, a kid burned down the Oregon side of the Columbia Gorge by shooting off fireworks into the parched forest. A week ago, a recidivist firestarter lit the fuse that burned down Spokane. The man had previously killed his father. Oepidus the Pyro, our new national pathological complex.
A man in California started a fire with sparks from his chainsaw this week. He’d done this multiple times before. He’d been warned. He’d been fined. But he did it again. The fire quickly grew to more than 15 square miles and killed a woman who refused to evacuate her cabin and leave her dogs behind. How many other animals did the chainsaw man take out? How many birds, how many bears, how many salamanders, how many snakes? In the Pacific Northwest, many people consider their right to bare chainsaws as being protected by the Second Amendment.
Under natural conditions, the forest would come back. Under natural conditions, the forests crave a little fire. Under natural conditions, the forests wouldn’t burn to the ground, but in patches, leaving stands of big trees to reseed the scorched landscape. Under natural conditions, the ground wouldn’t be fried. Under natural conditions, the burnt forest wouldn’t be scalped to the bone for salvage by timber companies, looking for a cheap federally subsidized profit
But there’s nothing natural about these conditions. The forests aren’t meant to be this hot. The forests aren’t meant to be this dry. The days aren’t meant to be this clear. The sun isn’t meant to be this bright, this unrelenting. Not here in Western Oregon. Not anywhere.
The days start earlier and end later. It’s hot when you wake up. It’s hot when you go to sleep. It’s hot at 2 am when you take the dog for a piss. The days are hot. The mornings are hot. The evenings are hot. The nights are hot. It’s the hot nights that kill. The earth needs a chance to exhale. It needs a chance to cool itself and moisten up. But even at 5 am there’s no morning dew.
Willamette Falls in December 2025. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Willamette Falls on August 3, 2026, Oregon City, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
We’re walking the river trail through fields along the Willamette this morning.
The ground is hard. The earth is sun-bleached to the color of bone. It’s so dry the ground is cracked. We’re walking on fissured earth. The creeks are dry. The grass is withered. The blackberries shriveled, brittle and tasteless.
The river is low. So low there are mere threads of water spilling over the fifty-foot drop of Willamette Falls. (At a flow of 32,000 cubic feet per second, Willamette Falls is normally the second largest cascade by volume in the US, behind only Niagara.) The falls, which usually roar steadily, are silent. The silence speaks. Do you hear it?
Above the falls, the water is tepid. It barely seems to move, as if dazed by the sun. The water is green. Not the emerald green of pools in the Cascades, but a sickly green. The green of Trump’s Reflecting Pool. The river, one of the biggest and brawniest in the West, is filmy with algae, as if it were a riverine corpse turning green, rotting in its banks. Lola wants to go in. She wants to cool off. She wants to drink out of a river. I restrain her. Rivers call to us. Rivers pull us toward them. We all, human and canine, have that same instinctual desire. To be taken to the river, to be dipped in the water, to let it wash you down, to let it heal you.
But what happens when the rivers are sick? When the rivers are suffering from heat death and there’s no resuscitation. When the waters turn to poison? What happens when the rivers need care, but the societies they sustain don’t care. When the pallid color or death stench of the river doesn’t matter, as long as its water can be sucked into the cooling towers of data centers so the chips don’t melt. Our rivers are overheating so the data centers won’t, the very machines that are creating fanciful simulacrums of the world they are rapidly destroying.
Who was consulted on that fateful trade-off?
Lola and I find shade under an arching cottonwood. The big tree blocks most of the sun, but none of the smoke. The sky is shrouded in smoke. But it’s not the sky that’s enwrapped in smoke. It’s us. We have a corpse’s view of the dismal gray sky.
There’s no escaping the smoke. It walks with you. It seeps into your clothes. It clings to your skin. It invades your eyes, embeds itself in your lungs. It follows you inside.
The air has a texture, a grit. You can feel each breath. The air has an odor. The air smells. It smells of burnt flesh, the flesh of trees, the flesh of grass, the flesh of living beings. You’re inhaling a cremation.
Buddhist monks have burned themselves alive, forcing others to smell the odor of their incinerating bodies, as a protest against war and mass death. But this burning is no protest. This is the mass death of our time; steady, relentless, apparently unabating. Breathing the curdling air, I was reminded of a line of graffiti written on the walls of Paris in May 68: “Meanwhile, everyone wants to breathe and nobody can breathe and many say, ‘We will breathe later.’ And most of them don’t die because they are already dead.” (Et cependant tout le monde veut respirer et personne ne peut respirer et beaucoup disent ‘nous respirerons plus tard.’ Et la plupart ne meurent pas car ils sont déjà morts.)
Next year will be hotter. Next year more forests will burn. Next year the creeks will run dry sooner. The rivers will run lower. The skies will be starker. The air more clotted with the ashes of the dead. Are we living in a rational world, run by rational beings? Is there still a place for us in it? Any refuge from the fires of our own making? Should there be?
Jeffrey St. Clair is co-editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3.
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