Drive up through the burned canyon, above the river designated “wild and scenic” from its headwaters to the hydroelectric dam. A river that now fills with wild black logs after every windstorm, rainstorm, landslide.
The canyon’s steep slopes bear a tangled coat of tree skeletons, like spilled black toothpicks, still holding on somehow.
Your dithering about whether “burned forest” is an oxymoron will dissipate like fog under the climbing sun as you discover that six years is time enough for forest to assert identity. Not the same identity as before; it will never be the same. Nothing will ever be the same: not the creek you wade in twice on the same day. Nor yourself after, say, serious illness, divorce, lottery win, a drive into the mountains.
To circle the sun is to accumulate memories of times, places, people that will never be the same.
Mourn, yet choose not to dwell in nostalgia. Cowboy up and get used to it. It might help to keep driving through the burn, mile after mile after mile after a shocking twenty-two miles of road until you’ve left the burn behind you, beyond the last visible ridge.
Once you’ve driven beyond the scar of conflagration—so much more, orders of magnitude more, than “wildfire”—sit among moss, salal, Oregon grape. Hemlock and fir and cedar and maple. Huckleberry if you’re lucky. Fern after fern. Their varied multitudes.
When rain starts to fall, pause. Accept that it was good to have cancelled that camping trip and slept under a solid roof. Kept dry while you boiled water for tea and oatmeal.
Return to the burn. Witness the profusion of alder, bigleaf and vine maples, underbrush you’ve never learned the name of. Chipmunks. Abundant birds threading wingflash through black pillars. On the ground, find the moss, branched like miniscule fern, raising its little flags.
How many generations until stout trees with their bounty of cones and leaves rise from these roots? Is it more or fewer than the number of generations since colonizers began suppressing the usual fires in these places?
More. Many more. We are powerful, for ill and for good. Remember these two faces of strength when the charred toothpick crowd gets to be too much.
Listen: a creek murmurs. Listen: wren and chickadee warble; crow calls. Listen: the breeze finds something to wiggle back and forth until you hear its song.
Watch the very large ant. Watch colors change through the day, the sun slide down its flume. Know that at your back, it will return.
Breathe. Look closely at each place you set your foot.
Dark clouds hasten over and into this canyon. You cannot know their extent, what they wield.
Take good care.
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One of the 2020 Labor Day megafires in Oregon was the Riverside Fire, which ignited on Sept. 8 and swept through the Clackamas River canyon. I highly recommend this story map from the Mt. Hood National Forest for a compelling sense of the size, power, and immediate impact of the fire.
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