The Athenian School’s first required meeting for faculty is next Thursday. The long sweep of my sabbatical and summer break is about to be broken. Now I am in a redwood forest at Bullfrog Pond campground, 90 miles north of San Francisco. A one-lane road heads from the 2,000-year-old trees on the valley floor up to the ridge and campground. As I drove here yesterday, I wondered how I would escape should a fire hit. I imagined myself in the middle of the pond, breathing through a straw, the surrounding woods aflame.
I feel at home here. My daughter and I went on a week-long camping trip to Bullfrog Pond every year when she was young. We first came here when she was 15-months old. We stayed in the campsite next to where I’m currently perched. I picked that site because it’s relatively flat and my daughter was still learning to walk. Each night I would put a bottle of milk in a bowl of ice outside the tent. When she woke up hungry in the middle of the night, I could get her bottle without leaving my sleeping bag.
We came back every year until she was 13–at that age she took control of her summer holidays and began heading to a camp in New Hampshire–but we had many adventures here. Kaia as a mud-monster emerging from the primordial pond. Kaia as Grania, the swashbuckling Irish pirate queen. Walking around the pond picking warm blackberries or sitting in a field of mint savoring the luscious smell.
The camping trips were partly an opportunity for Kaia to take on challenges. The first years, the challenges were physical. She would scamper up downed redwood trees and walk along the spine of these fallen giants. Then the challenges became social, as she wanted to make friends with other children staying at the campground.
If I see my daughter struggling in an area, the first question I ask myself was whether I struggle there. With one exception, the answer has always been yes. My approach to helping her was not to try and get her to do anything different, but to move myself. Because I was doing it for her, I was willing to take on things where I would have settled if it had just been for me. So, nearly 20 years ago, I found myself striding into the campsites of other families, feeling very uncomfortable, my daughter following shyly behind me, a big smile on my face as I introduced ourselves and tried to make friends. It worked. Quickly she was off making friends on her own and doing it much better me.
One of the joys of Bullfrog Pond is watching the sun set. Once during our first stay here, Kaia and I spent two hours sitting high on the ridge watching as the day went from complete sunlight to full darkness. Last night there were several groups of people watching the sun drop over the hills to the west. The sky above and to the west was completely clear. Turning to the north, however, we could see the smoke from one of the fires that is currently ravaging northern California. At sunset, the smoke was a beautiful pink, but also an eerie and foreboding red. The comparison that came to my mind was seeing the burning of Atlanta in 1864.
There is no threat of rain, so I didn’t put the fly on my tent. The entire top of the tent is mesh and I can lie on my sleeping pad and look at the trees and sky. When I woke this morning, the sky was not blue. The winds have shifted and the grey smoke from the fires is now overhead. A faint sun strains to reach the earth. It is a bit like the light of a solar eclipse, but with a grey sky and an acrid smell.
It is 7:45 in the morning, but the campground is so silent that it is spooky. I can see tents, but no one is astir. Perhaps there was a call to evacuate that I missed. There is no breeze, and so the trees stand still. Except for the sound of an occasional bird or bug, the silence is complete.
Sitting here in the smoke-filtered light, I wonder if this forest will have burned before I next return. Should I be saying good-bye to this home? Will the squawking blue jays be here when I next return? Will the redwood trees, designed to withstand fire, survive the inferno to come?
After the sun set last night, I walked down to the pond. There is no water in its basin. In our many years of visiting, there was always a pond. Tonight, there were 12 deer on the exposed pond floor, munching on grass. There is a new online reservation system for the campground at Bullfrog Pond and I read some of the reviews last week. Visitors said to bring ear plugs because the bullfrogs were so loud. They are silent now too.
For the ancient Greeks, death was the thing. Their gods are just like us, but they are immortal. The only way humans could achieve immortality was by being remembered for heroic deeds. The Greek plays and literature usually were about life and death. Patroclus, Hector and Achilles. Agamemnon, Hecuba and Medea. Our species has made a mess of this beautiful planet. Would outsiders call the drama of humanity a tragedy?
The book I am currently reading is James McBride’s Kill ‘Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul. It is, in many ways, a sad tale, a story of how racism and greed damaged a man and his legacy. But it is also a saga of beauty and virtue and hard work and caring. It is on values like these that I proceed. There is a Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco next month and a march the Saturday before. I am working with a group of students to organize a delegation to the march. I hope this will make a difference, even if, to borrow from Brecht, ‘it will not shorten the age of exploitation.’
No Foreign Lands 