This
morning broke cool and briefly calm, which was nice, because here in Berkeley
we’re bracketed by wind-driven fires and the smoky aroma of incinerated brush
and homes.
I’m typing this from a tiny table Cactus
Taqueria, a few blocks from my house, because our power at home has been out
for two days. For the cost of a delicious burrito, they have power outlets here
and WiFi access from the Noah’s Bagels next door. Every time I look up from the
laptop screen, though, it’s at the wind-agitated red-gold leaves and waving
arms of a scrawny maple. Behind that, there’s the disturbing, almost
apocalyptic sky--washed out, with too harsh sun filtered through too much haze.
This month,
we’re supposed to post about setting. Considering the circumstances, this may
be a bumpy ride. There are some parts of writing I’m good at—dialogue, humor—but
setting isn’t any of them. (Even, apparently, when the world is on fire.)
At its
best, setting is a character, helping to shape a story. It pushes on the
characters, affecting their choices. Even the description of setting is filtered
through the point of view character or narrator, passing along attitude and
emotion.
Like so many
other parts of writing, setting conveyed well is a combination of
familiarization—let me show you this thing, and you’ll recognize it because it’s
close to what you already know—and defamiliarization: Let me show you a new way
to see, to experience this thing. That’s one reason synesthesia works so well
in vivid description—using one sense to describe a completely different sense:
The “dry squeak” of cold snow under boots.
I wish rain
was on the way, bringing snow to our mountains.
Two days
ago here, Saturday, hot winds started swirling from the land side, which always
unsettles me in October, our powder keg month. It’s the tinder dry end of the
fire season in California before the winter rains. The ominous messages piled
up over the weekend—from PG&E that there might be power outages and then
news of the spreading Kincade fire in Sonoma—where 185,000 people have
evacuated—and the Tick fire in Southern California. Followed by the Glen Cove
fire in Vallejo, the Getty fire in L.A., the Grizzly Island fire near Suisun,
the Sky fire in Crockett, and the Highway 24 fires near Lafayette, and nameless
fires, well, everywhere. California’s governor just announced that firefighters
have responded to 330 new fires in the state in the last 24 hours.
In October
when the swirling winds come from the land side, I always remember the hungry
licking of the forty-foot-high wall of flame blazing through the ridge top homes
in the Oakland Hills fire, 28 years ago this month, while I was driving to pick
up my wife and daughter who were stranded in Tilden Park, and trying to eyeball
how far North the fire had spread—if it had gotten to them already. (It had
not. I picked them up safely, after being rear-ended on the way by another driver
who was similarly looking over at the flames—I told him not to worry about the rear-ender.
Perspective.)
Other writers—and their characters—would
no doubt have a different set of associations with these gusts. Here is Raymond
Chandler, in his Philip Marlowe short story “Red Wind”:
There was a desert wind blowing that
night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the
mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin
itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives
feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything
can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
That isn’t
just setting. It’s voice, attitude, and world view carried on that hot wind. Chandler
tells us more about Philip Marlowe and how he thinks than he does about the
wind.
Where I’m typing this, the wall of
windows on the street at Cactus shows that foot traffic is way down from
usual, because of poor air quality, but what traffic there is looks normal—almost
no one with a respirator mask, with pedestrians of all ages and their array of small
dogs.
We’re just a few dozen miles from
the mandatory evacuations and still-growing Kincade fire, but we’re safe. For
now. There are renewed red flag warnings for tomorrow and the next day, though,
with more high winds and low humidity in California.
The world is burning, friends,
and wind makes smoke a wall.
Hug those you love and speak your
truth,
for one day that is all.
The world is on fire. Things are mostly
normal. Both of those statements are true, and in my neighborhood of downed trees
and crazy-quilt power outages, we wait patiently for our turns at the four way
stops that three days ago were functioning traffic lights. For now.
This is the new normal, but it will
soon be worse. Global temperatures have risen steadily since 1880 by a total of
1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, and the rate of change since 1981 has doubled. In the
face of this threat, effective a week from today, the current occupant of the
White House has pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord—the one significant
international agreement to reduce the rate of man-made emissions that contribute
to global warming.
You can imagine I have an attitude
about that.
This morning, I started my day by
driving 13 miles to the shoulder clinic in Lafayette where I do Pilates work for
my back, not sure if it was still standing. I got an error message when I tried
calling them, and I knew there’d been two fires in Lafayette yesterday.
Fortunately, they were still un-incinerated, just suffering through another power
outage, so I did my exercises in the semi dark, with only the dim light from
the windows. We adjust. We persist. We engage in self care. And we respond to
our changing setting. Right now, hundreds of firefighters are trying to get these
fires under control before the winds come again tomorrow, trying to save tens
of thousands of threatened homes—including homes of people I know.
Last night, at a World Series Game,
45,000 fans who had paid $2000 a seat booed the man who is pulling us out of
the Paris Climate Agreement next week. They spontaneously started chanting, “Lock
him up!”
Because of the power outage, I wasn’t
able to watch the game on TV, but I did watch videos of the boos and chants on
Twitter, entranced by them on the tiny screen of my solar-charged phone. It was
glorious.
This wasn’t a political leader leading
a chant calling for retaliation against his rivals. It was a spontaneous act of
resistance by the relatively well off, who'd had more than enough.
The world is on fire. Thing are not
entirely normal.
Our setting is becoming more
extreme.
Perhaps it is time we all became
protagonists and did something about it.
Good luck to us all, especially
those near the fire.
Dean Gloster is a
former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk at the U.S. Supreme Court. He
has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of
Fine Arts. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon
Pulse. School Library Journal called it “a sweet, sorrowful, and simply divine
debut novel that teens will be sinking their teeth into. This wonderful
story…will be a hit with fans of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars and Jesse
Andrews's Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.” His current novel is about two funny
brothers who have to team up with their friend Claire to save the world. It has
all the usual Gloster novel ingredients: Death, humor, the question of whether
it’s possible to save someone, a love interest to root for, dysfunctional
parenting, and a slightly off-kilter sensibility. Also a mergers and
acquisitions lawyer dad who is missing 74 percent of his soul.
When Dean is not writing, studying Aikido, or downhill ski racing, he’s on Twitter: @deangloster
