For most of last week, pyrocumulus clouds stretched across the head of our valley. The Ross Fork fire, a small, let-it-burn lightning strike in rocky terrain had, in a day, destroyed square miles of thick forests in Beaver Creek and Smiley Creek. It had torched the slopes of Abe’s Chair and the entire south shore of Alturas Lake. It came close to burning down the town of Smiley Creek, but a wind change at the last moment allowed a backfire to be lit. Only two houses burned.

Now the fire has moved through Frenchman’s Creek and into the headwaters of the Salmon River. Galena Lodge, over the summit in the Wood River drainage, is ready to evacuate. A cold front has moved into the area, making the fire less active, but our current low humidity and afternoon winds make it hard to know how long the fire will last and where it will end up. Yesterday the fire was active, judging from the smoke. By Thursday—if we can breathe this air that long—we should have rain, enough of it to stop the fire’s active growth if we’re lucky.

For the moment, the town of Smiley Creek is out of danger. As for us, we’re fifteen miles from the flames, upwind, but are all too aware that we’re still surrounded by dry forests and sagebrush. Our fire-anxiety season won’t be over until we get snow on the ground.

The Forest Service, which has the power to ban campfires in undeveloped campsites in the valley, waited until yesterday to do so. Given how traumatized the residents of Smiley Creek are and given how worried the rest of us in the valley are, such inaction can best be described as low-grade passive-aggressive reptile-brained bureaucratic sadism. Or maybe just the plain old human reluctance to get out of the office and do something. It’s hard to tell one from the other.

Two big hunting camps are a half-mile downriver from us. Our home, our possessions, and possibly our lives depend on those campers obeying the Forest Service order. We hope they spend their time here hunting rather than sitting around, drinking beer, and dragging logs into an illegal fire at two in the morning.

 

Once there were forests on the Sahara. It’s useful to remember that from time to time, as the American West alternates between drought and flood.

It’s hard to imagine that anything as complicated as a global climate could respond so simply to a 1.5C increase in temperature by getting dryer when it’s dry and wetter when it’s wet. But that’s apparently what’s happening. It means increases in both rainfall and desertification, and a decrease in the complexity of the biosphere, as living things fail to adapt to their new extreme environments.

Death Valley got more rain than Boise did this summer, most of it coming in a single downpour that caused flash floods. Cars were up to their fenders in gravel bars deposited by flood waters onto the asphalt of parking lots.

Boise had twenty-seven days that exceeded a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, but it will probably wait for an atmospheric river this winter for its own flash floods.

Death Valley has recovered from its rainy weather. Last week it hit a hundred and twenty-seven Fahrenheit, a new record for September.

 

Also last week, an article in The Guardian listed five climatic tipping points that the planet has probably already reached: the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, the transformation of the Amazon from rain forest to savannah, tropical coral die-offs, the thawing of Arctic permafrost, and the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. Describing these as tipping points means they have become positive feedback loops, which in turn means that no matter what humans do, they can’t stop the cascade of change. Also, each feedback loop will add to the effects of the others, so every change we can imagine—and some that we can’t—will come faster than expected.

The research that inspired the article also indicates that another nine tipping points will be reached before the planet reaches a 2C increase. So get ready for the rerouting of ocean currents and subsequent changes in weather patterns, the end of Himalayan glaciers, an open-water Arctic, refugee camps on Ellesmere Island and in the Antarctic. Beyond 2C, the nature of the tipping points, their speed, and lethality are anybody’s guess.

But humans are in the middle of a C02-spewing frenzy, and barring the end of civilization, we will go beyond a 2C increase in the next decade or so.

The good news is we will get to see what happens. We won’t need to guess, we’ll just look out the window. The bad news is that what’s out the window will be a world where food is difficult or impossible to grow and the living things that cannot move are either dying of thirst or drowning. Civilization will end, but too late to save the climate.

The long Holocene—eleven thousand years of weather stability—is over. In its place is the Anthropocene, a time when humanity has quickly jacked up the temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans.

Weather records, from now on, will only indicate that the past has no discernable relationship to the future. Not good news, as civilization depends on agriculture, and agriculture depends on a stable climate.

 

I’m not trying to alarm anybody. People are alarmed enough. People in the still intact houses in Smiley Creek will look out on a blackened world in all directions from their picture windows, and believe me, they’re alarmed. The forests that they used to see will not threaten to burn again any time soon, because trees won’t come rushing back in a climate regime that includes heat, drought, and flood. But it will be a long while before the miles of blackened trunks fall down and the grasses and sagebrush and fireweed soften the stark outlines of a much-reduced world. Smoke will continue to clog the air—I’m assuming the Forest Service will never go back to its relatively sane policy of getting fires out by ten o’clock the morning after a fire report—and a persisting landscape of trauma will remind us all that houses and possessions and life itself are the result of luck and not the inevitable order of things.

It always was a bit presumptuous to assume the inevitable order of things included human happiness, agency, continuity, or purpose.

 

I’m a Baby Boomer, part of that generation that has spent every moment of its existence living with the knowledge that civilization could be going strong one day and be radioactive ashes the next. We’ve done pretty well at suppressing that knowledge, constructing normal lives in the face of annihilation, giving ourselves real life goals, behaving as though we have agency, and, astonishingly, achieving a modicum of happiness. (I’m aware that such happiness has come at the expense of other, later generations, whose sufferings we also avoid thinking about. As in, “When the climate gets really bad, I’ll be dead.”)

Our world might rest on a foundation of batshit crazy magical thinking, but it’s only when catastrophe strikes close that we see that what we call life-as-usual is happening in an old and poorly-maintained firetrap of a theater, and the exits are blocked so people won’t sneak in without paying, and the scenery is made of lacquered canvas and dry pine, and the playwright has specified that the last act be performed with real fireworks.

We would stop going to the theater if we could, but we’re already in our good seats—middle row, center—and it would be rude to climb over all those people during a performance. We’ve made it this far. It’s far less disruptive to sit back and try to enjoy the show.

 

Sigmund Freud had his blind spots, but one thing he and his disciples saw clearly was that civilization itself was a deep and deadly rebellion against the natural order of things. It’s unnatural to have cities, hydroelectric dams, cars, steel mills, container ships, hospitals, and factories. It’s perverse to have laws, courts, schools, police, tax collectors, markets, religions, and nations. At any given time, a demagogue can inspire half a citizenry against the civilization that maintains their lives, simply by promising to restore them to a state of nature. No more taxes, no more school, no more work (you’ll “live off the land”), no more cheap Chinese tools, no more catechism, no more obeying the elders of the tribe. It’s a vision of paradise, at least until dinnertime.

Carl Jung, Freud’s most influential and least obedient disciple, went further than his mentor and said that the conscious self was an opus contra naturam, a “work against nature,” a move opposite the downriver flow of life and the entropic way of the world. It takes enormous effort to have a conscious self, and many people give up on the project, becoming instead cogs in a bureaucratic or legal machine, or compulsive-obsessives, or ideologues, or preachers of the one true truth. Anorexics, addicts, and suicides do their best to destroy the heavy burden of consciousness.

So it’s not too hard to understand that a civilization can blissfully prepare and plant the seeds of its own destruction. It’s not hard to understand why old men send young men off to war, or that citizens can vote to destroy tax laws and the educations taxes pay for. We Baby Boomers may have wrecked the future, but we’re secretly relieved that we won’t miss out on anything fun. And we’re tired, anyway. It will be a relief to lay down the cares and burdens of everyday living, and—I don’t know—sit around on clouds and sing hosannahs all day. There’s not a lot of consciousness in heaven. There’s a lot more of it in hell.

 

For two afternoons last week, Julie and I took our lawn chairs to the dog beach at Redfish. We took Juno, who is curious about other dogs even though she’s accepted the burden of being a human, and some reading material, and thermoses of gin-and-tonics, and cheese and salami. (This is not consciousness, but it’s not hell, either.) Then we watched as four Canadair CL-415s came in low over the hill behind us, over our heads, and hovered a few inches above the water, lowering scoops to take on 1400 gallons of water in twelve seconds and then flying off again, toward the Ross Fork fire. Twenty minutes later they came back and did it again.

The tankers probably saved the Smiley Creek structures. God knows where the boundaries of the fire would be without them.

A CL-415 costs thirty million dollars. The four we saw are worth the hundred and twenty million, once fires get as large as the Ross Fork. It would have undoubtedly been cheaper to attack the fire with smoke jumpers and helicopters a couple of weeks before, but fire policy in the West is torn between, on the one hand, putting fires out and letting forest debris build up to uncontrollable levels, and on the other, letting them burn until the wind comes up and those little fires grow to destroy homes and lives. Add climate change to this dilemma and you have a situation where every policy is certain to be the wrong one.

But sitting there on the beach, I began thinking that those CL-415s showed what engineers could do. They could design a machine that can suck up five tons of water at speed, carry it twenty miles, dump it on an out-of-control forest fire and then return for another load. Properly maintained, it could keep up that routine for days, weeks, or seasons.

With a nod toward self-interest, we’ve been watching the economy, civilization-induced climate change, the war in Ukraine, the destruction of civility in American life, and even the Forest Service as it struggles not to end up administering forests of sand and rock. We’ve concluded that our cultural consciousness is more or less inadequate to our existential problems.

But engineering? Sitting on the beach, watching the CL-415s scoop up water and disappear, and then reappear and scoop up more water, I decided that engineering was better than consciousness. A CL-415 was the ultimate opus contra naturam. Humanity’s unnatural peak did not lie in the brains of Newton, Einstein, the Dali Lama, Picasso, Helen Keller, or Freud. It was there at Redfish Lake, expressed in the purpose-built lines of the CL-415s. Two million years of big-brained hominid evolution had resulted in the biggest, baddest, fastest water-bucket in the universe. It’s as close to perfection as humanity is going to get.