Soundtrack For A Climate Disaster: Living In Rural Sonoma County During The Pyrocene
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Whenever the siren ricochets through the forest, my phone lights up with messages from neighbors, just checking in. Most have the app, too, but something about the siren’s nerve-shattering melody inspires a desire for human contact. My neighbor Kelly Gray dreads the sound of the siren. The morning after my firehouse tour, she served me tea on her deck, which looks out on the same forest that borders my yard. It was hot out, again. Baby ravens cawed from a nearby nest, and we gazed up at a cathedral canopy of redwood trees. Gray and I are fire buddies. We text each other every time the siren sounds. Last October, a two-acre vegetation fire started in the woods near the path between her house and mine. It was late at night. The siren woke us both up, and we evacuated together into the nearest town. This was amid the deep months of COVID isolation; we had only recently become friends, and had barely seen each other’s faces. Fire was what turned us from neighbors into kin. During last year’s fire season, Gray struggled with a mental-health crisis, and she believes the siren contributed to her distress. “It sounds like a thousand raging babies, screaming throughout the forest,” she said, as we sat on her deck. “And at that sound, you know, as a human animal, you just jump.”
Soon our conversation turned to signs of climate change in the micro-ecosystem around our homes. Gray, a poet and certified naturalist who grew up in and around the North Bay, said that the forest seems drier than she has ever seen it. This past spring, she’d noted an unusual number of juvenile foxes out and about far earlier than usual. Her theory is that early heat waves made the animals’ dens too hot to stay inside. As we talked, the sun broke through the redwoods above. An acorn woodpecker squawked. “I like bird sirens,” she said.
I walked home, through the woods, past the burn scar from last year. The path, a dirt fire road, was blocked in several places by piles of dead branches and entire fallen trees—dried-out tanoaks that had succumbed to the blight of sudden oak death. A large madrone tree stretched diagonally across my sight line, its cracked red bark creating stark shadows in the midday sun. The sword ferns in the understory were more brown than green. A carpet of crisp, dry duff crunched underfoot: fir, maple, redwood, bay laurel, poison oak, oak. The forest didn’t just feel thirsty; it felt primed to burn.
The next night, I woke to a loud wail. The familiar fear scaled my spine, and I looked to the window for smoke. The moon was full and illuminated my bedroom through a scrim of redwood needles and maple leaves. I reached for my phone, but there was no notification. The noise continued, and I realized that it was the cry of a fox. Another soon responded. Although I knew it was a false alarm, my body stayed activated. I put down my phone and pawed my bedside table for my headlamp; the foxes babbled their foxy song. I counted my breaths and tried to visualize a collective force field of vigilance—my neighbors, the critters, the redwood trees older than all of us—surrounding me, keeping watch. I closed my eyes and listened as the foxes bleated their alarm into the bosky night. Wake up, they seemed to be crying. This is really happening.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/a-soundtrack-for-an-unfolding-climate-disaster
