Literate Matters: Home is a paradise and a paradox in 'The Last Fire Season'

If they haven’t been announced already, there will likely soon be local warnings highlighting wildfire danger. Dry ground and strong winds can create combustible conditions this time of year.

Typically, however, this danger is far greater in the western U.S. where the 2020 fire season, amplified by the pandemic, serves as the foundation for Manjula Martin’s memoir “The Last Fire Season,” where she underscores the dangers, both collective and personal, of living in wildfire country.

She reminds readers early how “any origin story is at heart a romance, a love story about oneself,” as she digs into her upbringing in Santa Cruz, after her parents first lived in the forest in a dome where “they practiced yoga and followed the teachings of Baba Hari Dass,” their 1960s counterculture mentality rubbing off on Martin.

But there are more current threads here too, as the author grapples with the personal details of medical struggles that leave her at least temporarily adrift in an atmosphere of debilitating uncertainty.

A writer/editor, Martin moved many times into and out of California before landing in rural Sonoma County with her partner Max, where they moved into a small house, part of a long ago “summer-cabin enclave” that became a neighborhood of “white, working–and middle-class” folks that was also “by all accounts, a fire trap.”

Tinder or not, before the pandemic her new neighborhood had largely escaped the cataclysm of previous fire seasons, from luck or proximity to Pacific fog maybe. But as was almost universally true, the pandemic brought “rumors of increased crimes,” as “People were out of work. People were bored.”

Martin was soon wracked by her own physical worries in the form of abnormal abdominal cramps, necessitating several surgeries. Her recovery, painful enough on its own, was exacerbated by the need to evacuate her home when lightning ignited the first of many nearby fires. Her ability to scaffold these struggles together is compelling because she doesn’t so much point fingers as ask for calm. “The tending of a natural body,” whether her own or the ground she cultivated in her gardens, she writes, “required constant attention, the giving and receiving of nurture and discipline.” At the root, “It mattered how the relationship was structured, not just that there was one.”

Martin wonders whether she shouldn’t have been more prepared for the disaster, though, because on the night of a housewarming party, not long after she “moved to the woods and started wearing clogs instead of combat boots … a firestorm driven by ninety-mile-an-hour winds burned down several neighborhoods in Santa Rosa, the city ten miles to the east.” The world was burning.

Throughout, Martin’s interiority is ballast against this burning. In the process of evacuating she didn’t fixate on the couple’s possessions, but recounts how instead she had landed on “that good warm light, the relationship I had built with this half acre of land, the feeling I had that was almost inexpressible but might be approximated by saying that this place, those trees, that garden, had helped to heal me to whatever extent I could be considered healed.”

Martin’s story is held together by a steady dose of solastalgia, or “the grief that a person felt when her home environment was irrevocably altered,” what Glenn Albrecht, the Australian professor who coined the term, calls “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.” Through several temporary moves built upon steadfast hopes, this emotional and existential distress anchors her to the memories of home even as the landscape shifts under her feet.

Martin’s insistence on the science of climate change combined with her critical interpretation of westward expansion will put off some readers. But for those open to how calamity and beauty often share the same story, “The Last Fire Season” illustrates how we can contemplate home personally as well as collectively.

Good reading.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: Home is a paradise and a paradox in 'The Last Fire Season'