My plan for the spring was drawn out in digital lines. These blocky cells linked to create dated blocks superimposed over the most recent satellite imagery of the field, which happened to be taken the spring that we burned it. The field hissed and rushed with grass fire that destroyed the dense invasive grasses but caused the blue wild rye to swoon gracefully, perfectly depositing its ripe seed heads into the soft pillow of clean ash in a circle around the heart of the plant. The memory of heat and adrenaline and fascination with how the fire crawled over the landscape, undulating over the topography like a rattlesnake, buzzing its flicking tail, lived in my body as I dreamed about the season of soft green grass, plum colored clouds low with rain, and blue eyes of lupins winking up in their multitudes.
The foothills have many faces, and only some of them are brutal, which is hard to believe in fall and hard to forget in spring.
Our flock scattered on the green grass, a mix of native perennials and invasive annuals, and weeded as they moved across the landscape. The oat grass, a vigorous early sprouting annual, was most prized, and the sheep would shoulder and mostly together in gangs traveling from bunch to bunch until all that was left was the nodding heads of purple needle grass and the yet to flower clumps of blue wild rye.
Leaving the flock to their work watched by the leonine and infinitely patient guardian dog Chego, I hiked up a draw one afternoon into the area burned by wildfire in the previous season, the fire that had stopped at the prescribed burn below, where the sheep were now rioting over oat grass.
In contrast to the cooler planned fire, the wildfire had burned hot and had not been completely covered by grasses as a result. Stark charcoal branches jutted above recovering meadows, and the Kaiya, an edible round-leafed mounding plant, crowded around the disturbed rich soil left by the burnt out roots of oak trees.
Headed up into the steep walls of a draw, I saw my first native Venus thistle beginning to open its red heart. Around it grew a thick crowd of maiden thistles, not yet bloomed, drawn to the loose soil created by tree falls as the sheep in the flat were drawn to the lush bunches of annual grasses. I hope the thistle makes it long enough into fire season to seed. I hope someone is able to collect them and bring them closer to hiking trails so more people can see them.
Cucumber vines swarmed over burnt charcoal trees. Up at the apex of the draw, overlooking the seep of a spring probably enjoyed by deer, were broad shallow lion scrapes, luxurious daybeds curved to fit a languid lion spine. I paused to lay where they lay, and feel how angular and awkward my body was, the marks I left in the soft pebbly soil more line than curve, and so much smaller. I set my soft human fingers into the lines left by lion claws on the deep red flesh of a truly massive manzanita, a giant that had survived the fire, it’s trunk rippling and smooth as a dancers torso, its wood so hard and fine grained that even lion claws barely bit into its surface. Around the ancient manzanita, smaller trees, probably its own kin, were standing as charcoal skeletons. The soft pink shells of flowers were just beginning to open on the ancient tree.
There where lions and a young human had lain in the soil and measured their claws on the manzanita, lay a smooth stone brought there by the last ice age. It’s blue grey surface was covered with soft distinct black blooming spots of pigments, like a negative image of the sky. Looking at it, I realized they were the carbon remains of lichens burnt into the surface. Next to them, starting on the North side, were the bright teal of new clouds of lichen stealing up the stone’s horizon.
My plan had been to spend two months in this sanctuary, doing our part with the flock to increase the percentage of native grasses to set seed, make the landscape a bit more fire resilient, and hike in wildflowers every day. I imagined the kind of loose limbed timeless freedom of childhood summers, when my whole responsibility was to engage my body and mind with the landscape. I was hoping to watch the meticulous curation of the meadow and do my own inner discerning and cropping alongside them.
When you get a call that a landscape that you love is being torn through by a wildfire, a part of your mind, the part that narrates and abstracts feelings, folds itself up like a map, no longer able to be used to navigate. What remains is cold and clear and surreal, relevant objects float above the background of your vision like the faint shadows of pictures cut and pasted into a collage. The important things to grab, the needs of people and animals and proofs of legal ownership almost hover.
It turns out that the same thing happens when your spring idyll is interrupted by another kind of call, of an emergency in a more intimate landscape. While lupin dew wet my socks and last year’s star thistle pricked my fingers as I threaded it loose from my flock’s wool, my mother was dying. While my sheep cleared the obstruction of standing dead thatch and allowed light to reach the meadow soil, and I hiked into the burnt draw, the overgrowth of brush radically removed by fire and the bones of the land opened for lions and thistle seeds, my mother’s veins were obstructed.
In the sharply antiseptic scented ICU hallway, under frenetic fluorescent lights, words like “bilateral pulmonary embolism” buffeted against my ears like a down canyon breeze, less real than the rough tracks of lion claws on the cold and silky tree. My fingers flexed into that claws shape over and over reflexively.
My mother’s internal draw, the spring at the core of her chest, was impacted. They showed me a diagram of the filter they inserted into her vein to catch the blood clot still floating freely in that stream, after they were unable to remove the one in her lungs. My partner glanced at it, and identified it immediately as a fish weir.
The tiny filter keeping my mother from an aneurysm looks identical to baskets woven thousands of years ago to catch fish. In effect it still is, although these are strange and minute creatures lurking in her bloodstream.
In the mind of the brilliant surgeons who developed this technology and placed this tiny trap in her femoral artery are ancestors who knew the pattern of this basket and this hunting strategy, who laid this pattern in their brains to follow.
Due to excessive blood loss, they were not able to operate on the blood clot causing bilateral pulmonary embolism, and therefore heart failure. I cannot visualize that. I can visualize a brush choked dry grey canyon draw, I can visualize a fire burning too hot as a result. I can visualize a basket, wide at one end and narrow at the other, placed with the utmost care, because our loved ones very survival depends on its catch.
The time after a fire is liminal, uncertain. It’s a time when invasive plants can take over, it’s a time when a sudden deluge can wash away vulnerable soil, erode whole hillsides. It is also a time when the dark, hard red core of an ancient tree survives to be marked with a lion’s claws, when the thin twigs around it do not.
Standing in that cold hallway, I prayed that lion into the terrain of my mother’s chest, to watch over her delicate regrowth, the opening springs, the fragile round leaves of redbud grown out of it’s own blackened bones, the curling tendrils of cucumber on the fire darkened stone. Like everyone in my generation who has seen the unprecedented become seasonal and the familiar and unchanging go up in flames, I know this is a time when there is nothing that cannot be lost. Like the seeds falling into the ash, the lion moving into the open draw, the vital heart of the Venus thistle opening out of a burn scar, we still have the potential to tend our inner watersheds and meadows, to burn those cool fires that prevent the catastrophic ones, to nibble around the edges of the invasive annuals taking up all our internal spaces. The land and its fate lives inside each of the cells of our bodies, as we are a cell in the body of the land. Whether we choose regeneration or devastation is unclear, but my allegiance is given to the green shoots in the black.
I trust the ancient baskets of modern laparoscopy. I trust the redbud, the manzanita, the lichen, the thistle, and my mom.