It wasn’t the fires that forced us to go, we had this trip planned to visit the Salton Sea for some time. We were going to listen to the land. It wasn’t without a tinge of guilt that we were leaving behind a landscape that was screaming for care and concern to visit another that was in living decay. Transient beauty caught between memory and entropy. The tension between natural cycles and human interference, where the deceptive "calm" becomes stagnation rather than renewal. Cyanobacteria, Eutrophication, Anaerobic decomposition, Biodiversity, Evapotranspiration, Desertification. The land speaks of both science and spirit. Wanda Orme, with whom this project is a collaboration, our roles in this ecosystem differed. Wanda gently embraced the land, unafraid of the sedimentation, the hydrogen sulfide, the arsenic, the “black goo”. She accepted the land in all of it’s truths, the death of life did not turn her away as she held it in her hand, cuddling the mud pots, and rejecting the toxic reputation this place had acquired. I on the other hand was more apprehensive in my approach, maybe it was intuitive. Things that are not toxic can still cause harm, I needed to understand before getting my hands dirty. I’m still learning. The land is a being, we are getting to know. We deepen our relationship as we listen more intently, we dig deep both literally and metaphorically, uncovering the layers of identity. Salt crust, algae, black goo, dirt, mud, clay, and far beyond, magma. A paradox of surface beauty and deep, volatile truth.
Poem for a Fire
A crackle in the sky sparks the Earth. Could be the big bang, but it’s 13.8 billion years later.
The Earth is dehydrated, fertile ground for a fire.
A flamelet is born in the hills, but is quickly spotted by humans and extinguished.
All is well, on the surface.
But deep within, the embers remain.
Smoldering in the soil, slowly traveling through living roots and organic material from decomposed plant matter.
Life and death nourish it’s six day journey.
Far from home, a crack of light carries the call of the wind.
The embers are listening as the calls increase.
A hundred miles per hour.
Ignition.
Vegetation becomes its next source of sustenance, fuel for high combustion.
Form, process, dispersal, GO, or the other way around.
Either way, the embers have arrived.
A fire isn’t born, it is the realized iteration of a spark, all grown up.
Increasing.
Mistakenly unpredictable, it does what it’s told, a loyalist to the call.
Where very little can escape.
Love is a fire, suffocate it put it out, give it space to breathe.
But this breath is destructive when combined forces are at play.
The wind and fire innocently fall in love, and the land is covered in red.
The cars are laced with ash, invisible chemicals penetrate the air.
Collision, a memory, this happened before, remember Maui?
Remember before.
They don’t want us to remember.
But we refuse to forget.
A cultural burning, we alchemize, a controlled burning.
A prescription for the future.
Fire as medicine.