Remains of Big Horn Fire 2022
Extreme heat, high wind, years of drought. From California coast to the southwest, the country is on fire. In the past ten years, hundreds of thousands of acres have burnt and are burning. In June 2020, I spent a month in Tucson, Arizona during the Bighorn fire, which devoured 120,000 acres of Santa Catalina Mountains. Ready to evacuate at a moment’s notice, we watched the mountain glowing red at night, nervously waiting for the monsoon season to start. It’s one thing to read about a catastrophic wildfire in Apple’s newsfeed. It’s another thing to witness one in close proximity. Two years later, I visited one of the burn sites. Life continues even where the fire had blazed through not too long ago. You can see new growth, shrubs and wild flowers blooming in stark contrast to charred and blackened mesquite and pine trees. In many cases, the heat of the blaze produced a gallery of grotesque forms: twisted trunks and warped branches and detached outer barks. Charred, naked, hollowed, the trees remain standing, as if they are there to tell us what they witnessed, hanging onto the memory.
I gathered some of the remains, brought them to the house, and began cleaning off the soot and ashes. To me this act of tending was more like a conversation I had with the trees that may not have survived the fire but still had a story to tell. As I cleaned and added hand-coiled paper, I felt connected to the beauty, horror, and resilience of nature. The aftereffects of wildfires are rarely part of their story, which ordinarily focuses on the spectacular blazes that ravage large tracks of parched wilderness. Windblown flames, record heat, Hotshot crews—these are the storylines. What is there to say about burn scars themselves? Whether forests will be resilient to things like wildfires and climate change is a huge question. A lot depends on the recovery time of areas damaged by severe burns, which can be long. A piece of forest with moderate harm might show robust signs of recovery a decade from now. A really bad burn area might not recover for 100 years. As I conceive it here, the process of healing begins now with a conversation with the remains of fire.