I’m human and as a human every day has its own concerns. Relationships, career all take my thoughts and energy as I try to keep my life on track and with adequate successes. It’s hard to deviate from the normal. I could live my life without the interruption of climate change, with a few notable exceptions. This morning when I take a my walk, I am in the mountains. I feel the breeze in the tall fir trees.
The calm and the peace of a mountain place is hard to describe because it’s more than quiet.
It’s a tranquility that meets you at a deep level, close to the foundation of your thoughts and feelings. As I walk I feel that I’ve entered a sacred place, and I feel my concerns and anxieties dropping away. As I walk there though, I cannot forget about the jeopardy of the mountains.
Mountains are this interconnected place of calm. All around the world you can go into the mountains and find beauty. The cool nights bring with them a peacefulness that sits on the land the next morning. Like a soup you can drink from it like dew that sits on the leaves.
Here where I live near the mountains in Eugene, Oregon, climate change is like a circus show that keeps coming to town uninvited. It started with drought. Fifteen years ago this was a place where the moss dripped from the trees and the heaviness of the tree canopy was a curtain. You had to part through it in order to enter and visit my grandparents house. Drought became apparent. I would never have noticed less rain, but I did notice increased sun. More places in the forest were dry like shriveled ferns. Fires covered more of the land. First the east side of the reservoir, then the north. In a period of a few short years fire was taking more and more of the forest. We climbed over fire scorched land on our hikes. I felt tentative and frightened that the soil was unstable and that a tree might fall on me. In 2020, a truly unique windstorm came. My family and I got warnings all day long on our phones that there were outrageous winds coming. The fires were massive and ran miles and miles. By midnight that night the sky was orange. Later we would learn the family home was gone and my grandparents and aunt would spend the next years in between housing.
The stupid thing about climate change, is that its never done with you. However catastrophic, fire seems like a part of the recipe for climate change. Wildfires are a disaster scientists communicated about. Another thing the scientists kept saying is that the snow levels were going to drop. More snow falling as rain. They didn’t mention ice.
In 2024, there was a massive icestorm. This is approximately 40 miles west of the wildfires, in a suburban community called Springfield. Many community members were psychologically wrecked. People went without power for 2 or 3 weeks and the effect on their mindset was heavy. My friends busted out their survival skills maintaining vigils over wood fires.
Seeing Springfield after the ice storm was like seeing a place after a hurricane. The tops of every tree had been mowed off. Huge splinters from massive limbs could be found everywhere. Literally everywhere including the grocery store and the highway median. The town looked so different. The river runs through the town and near the lumber mill the effect on the forest seemed especially damaging. From long ago the trees there had a strange green lichen that I think is from the air pollution from the mill. The forest there that lines the curving river was especially mowed down. Huge trees fell. Massive change. I imagine the trees were more fragile from the years of pollution. In science I learned they trees down from wind and ice forest “disturbance”. It can make room for new things, but this kind of massive change seems to serve a diminishing and a breaking rather than making room for something new.
The mill in particular is a source of angst for me. During the 2020 wildfires the air was so full of smoke it was hard to breath. Our windshields were covered in ash and it was always raining tiny gray filaments. Still the mill went on pushing out its exhausts, making the air dense with smoke and stinky pulp odors.
I can’t speak long about the inadequacy of the government to respond to immediate disasters. I actually work for an environmental agency, and I saw first hand their strange and confusing response.
I don’t like to get into anger, and I don’t like to commiserate with others. The whole subject makes me shake with rage, or slink into a despair. After my family’s experience my compassion is depleted. Let’s not talk about our feelings. I don’t feel there is a place for our grief and it always ends with me feeling misunderstood.
Thinking about Springfield, thinking about the forested towns of Vida and the whole forest-river area, I know what I am seeing is climate change. I know it. Another name could be ecosystem change or environment change. Vast change.
This is climate change. It’s not one change. It’s a series of connected changes. A domino effect of change. Is there another word I can use, or just change? Change to the lower forest, change to the valley and then waiting like a sitting duck for the upper forest to change. The rug is being pulled out from under our feet. I wish all of us sturdy sea legs.
As I make room for this grief, anger saddles up next to me. I’m too tired to be angry though. Anger is a private passion. Now, I know I need connection. I believe it will be the small things that help us really get by. When I look back and think about resilience, it come from the small and tiny friends and neighbors. The things that helped were the neighbor that watered our new trees when we were living in town. The old friends that came for a tour after we rebuilt our new house. People and friends are few, but they are the tiny links that form a community. They are the gems in a necklace I am wearing during this disruption of the natural order. I’ve surveyed my surroundings, and what I really believe in is the power of these gems and yes, ordinary people.
I think a lot about water. Because it is what connects these places. From mountain to valley. That primal source of life. Genuine human connection is like water, and together it can form a little stream. A little stream that keeps running and keeps flowing while the land turns upside down.