Memento Mori
Remember you must die. These words have trailed my attention as I’ve wandered through this seasonal transition. Death is all around in early November. It’s the focus of cultural observances – Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, Samhain. It’s also in the mushrooms that bloom and rot back into the humus again, in the golden maple leaves that pirouette from upper limbs – the act for which the season is named, in the drooping flower heads followed by the fading seed heads.
These words come up for me each year this time, a throwback to a survey course in my early days as an art history student. The memento mori trope gained popularity in European art of the 17th century. These still life paintings contained any number of symbols – nearly burned out candle stubs, rotting fruit, hour glasses, skulls, wilted flowers. There was nothing subtle in the imagery. The successful memento mori refocused the gaze of the beholder from the fleeting pleasures of earthly life to the eternal rewards of the afterlife.
The origins of memento mori go back even further though, to the time of the Roman triumph, a civil ceremony commemorating a successful military endeavor. According to the second century writer Tertullian, a victorious Roman general was shadowed throughout the celebratory procession in his honor by a slave whose job it was to hold a crown over the general’s head while whispering in his ear, “Look after you and remember you’re a man.” In other words, “Don’t forget you’re going to die.”
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The Holiday Farm Fire | McKenzie River, Oregon
The still life masters of the 17th century have nothing on Oregon’s 2020 wildfire scars. Driving up the McKenzie River Valley is an experiential memento mori.
Past Springfield driving east, highway 126 begins its gentle climb into the Cascade Mountains. Wide flatlands slowly give way to a forested river canyon. The western boundary of the 173,393 acre Holiday Farm Fire intersects with the highway just miles beyond the historical covered Goodpasture Bridge in Vida. The 2020 blaze burned downriver from an RV park in Rainbow, erasing the town of Blue River, wide swaths of mature forest land, and most of the scattered development along the river corridor for thirty miles from the outskirts of McKenzie Bridge to Leaburg.
Most of the trees are standing dead. We drove through them in heavy rain, peering as far as low hanging clouds allowed. Most of the development is brand new. The houses that have been rebuilt in the last four years share a number of design features, lending them a uniformity at odds with the burned landscape: brightly colored hardiebacker siding, metal roofs, the absence of all landscaping and plant material from their surroundings, much of which is paved or graveled. Gone is the character, the sense of time’s depth in this place.
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The 10 a.m. Policy
On August 20th in the summer of 1910, a year after the US Forest Service was established, drought, wind, and lightning conspired to burn 3 million acres across 1,736 fires in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. The catastrophe was dubbed The Big Blowup and incinerated 7.5 billion board feet of timber. All told, 5 million acres burned across the US that summer. In the following year, the federal government passed the Weeks Act, outlawing all cultural burning on Native lands and setting a precedent of total wildfire suppression across the country.
In 1935, the Forest Service issued the 10 a.m. Policy, another fire suppression directive that ordered all wildfires, regardless of origin, be extinguished by 10 a.m. the morning following their report. Lives and livelihoods were at stake. The war waged on fire by the US Forest Service over the next century had behind it all the zealotry of a Crusade. As if fire were an emissary of hell itself.
Fire terrified colonial settlers, perhaps rightly so. But in fear we flattened a cycle by oversimplifying the equation: fire = death = bad. In our hubris we took control of nature, imagining an end to wildfire entirely. Imagining, wrongly, that our places would be better off without this element in play.
One-hundred years of these fire suppression policies later, fuel loads in western forests with historically low burn rates have accumulated dangerously. This kindling pile up is now colliding with shifting climatic conditions – warmer winters with less snowpack, hotter springs that melt what snowpack there is, longer periods of drought in the summer, hotter temperatures for longer stretches of time. Ultimately, the once in 100 years wildfire season that burned 5 million acres in 1910, sparked policies that resulted in a 10.2 million acre fire season in 2020.
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Prescribed Fire, Do Not Report
A highway sign alerted me to activity on the McKenzie River Trail: Prescribed Fire, Do Not Report. Small bundles of thick smoke announced about a dozen brush fires along the riverside path. A hard, cold rain fell, more or less containing the fires to their intended parameters on the forest floor. They burned directly under massive trees, some of which bore scorch marks on their trunks but were otherwise unharmed by the flames.
This section of the popular recreational corridor, just miles east of the Holiday Farm Fire’s boundary, passes through mature stands of fir and cedar draped in thick moss. Water stood inches deep in the trough of the trail. Every part of me untarped by Goretex was soaked through within a mile. I walked around the smoking remnants of the fires thinking about memento mori. The solemnity of the trope appeals to me, the elegiac quality, something of the preciousness of life. But something else in the moralizing, in the conclusions drawn, feels off.
Memento mori’s finitude is the part of the construct that doesn’t sit well with me. Death in this imagining is an ending, conceived of as a final point on a linear journey. But death is part of life’s cycle, and a cycle by definition is circular and dynamic. What kind of solace might that fact provide while I move through the rites of autumn? What happens when death is recognized as a necessary threshold within the life cycle, over which life passes, rather than an obstacle it must confront, the end of the road?
I wondered at what scale the application of prescribed fire measures was effective. Would the dozen ladder fuel fires along this mile of river trail be enough to keep the next wildfire from reaching these trees’ crowns? Probably not, but this was the first time I’d encountered intentional fire applied to the land for its benefit, and I grabbed hold of it, a hope I can carry with me into the dark.
