The hills where I grew up are on fire.
It’s not such an unusual story in the West, certainly not now; some hills somewhere are always on fire. Chances are good they meant something to someone.
But these are my hills, the ones I hiked with my parents, with my friends, by myself. I haven’t spent much time in them in a while. I moved states, moved back, live across town. They’re still my hills in the way your parents are still your parents even after they pass.
They were filled with sagebrush, and grasses, and arrowleaf balsamroot. The smell is magic, the warmth of earth and dry grass. The smell of sage, not sage the bay leaf but the hearty silver brush that to me makes the West, sweet herbal smell intoxicating at the slightest touch. I laid on the ground and peered in at their gnarled trunks when I was a kid, imagined what it was to live beneath their fragrant boughs.
The sagebrush where I grew up is on fire.
It took me a long time to see this high desert as a beloved thing, thinking though all my younger years that I would rather live in the rainforest, on the coast. I tried it, and no. The sagebrush is for me.
Sagebrush is a tough plant, prepared for rain or blistering heat. At a young age, though, like most living things, it has a harder time. No gnarled trunks and deep roots to fasten it in place. It gets crowded out by that hated Eurasian invader cheatgrass. It gets trampled by a hundred thousand hooves, by cattle grazing. A mature sagebrush is a tough old thing because it survived its tender age. There’s no way around it.
The hills are black, and they loom over the city as a terrible reminder of what we’ve done. Hills we protected, we cherished, we took for granted. Now they look like the hood of the Grim Reaper, peering over the horizon.
I murdered my lawn and replaced it with native plants, with drought tolerant species, with weeds. I got surplus sagebrush plugs from a conservation program, and now I have four stalwart sagebrush of my own. I like to run my hands in their leaves, to make myself smell like home.
The hills are on fire, and this time next year they’ll be full of the invasive grass that burns like a bed of matches. They’ll crowd out any new sagebrush starts, push everything but their own kind into nonexistence. It makes my own sagebrush feel like precious things. These are my captives, like a rare species in a zoo. It feels like they’re safer here than in the hills.
It’s nauseating to consider, not just my own nostalgic loss but the loss as a whole. I heard about the loss of Boise goldenweed, a kind of plant only just recently recognized as genetically distinct, its footprint in the world mapping similarly with the outline of the burn. To think, how many times did I walk past such a special thing and not notice?
We all notice things in their absence. I think about the wildlife, the birds and trees and insects, the things that persisted in this place the way I persist. A human makes a bad choice, lights a bottle rocket or drives a car over dry grass, and there is no explaining the aftermath of fire to the fox that lost its den, the quail their nests. We do this a thousand times, again and again and again. We are the gods of destruction to everything around us.
In the long arc of existence, though, all of nature is a god of destruction. This is not the first time fire has roared through these hills. It won’t be the last.
The West is resilient, in its nature and its people. There are already conversations about how to restore the burning hills. It won’t bring back all that was lost, but somewhere down the road, there could be another girl wandering the trails, laying beneath the sagebrush.
I hope so, anyway.