My mother used to remind me of the saying “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” I had shoes. Today my internalized mother voice might admonish me by saying, “That’s a First World problem.”
We rank suffering. Being killed by a wildfire is worse than losing one’s animals or home, which is worse than breathing the hazardous levels of smoke now enveloping places where I used to live, which is worse than breathing the “unhealthy” levels of smoke on only one weekend where I live now. You get the idea. Still, even when others suffer more, there is sadness for your own loss.
I have shoes. I am not in danger from the August wildfires. But I look daily for updates on fires in places familiar to me from the almost 40 years I’ve lived in the Northwest, most of those years in Idaho. The novelist Kim Barnes reminds us that even when artifacts burn, the stories remain. But those stories are grounded in place, and I wonder what happens when the place where a story is grounded burns, turns to ashes, how that changes the story.
On Labor Day weekend, 1980, my husband and I drove east from Riggins, Idaho along the Salmon River, to the end of the road where we camped and hiked and harvested yellow plums that we took home and made into jam. We knew our daughter would arrive from Korea in two weeks, that our lives would be forever changed, that it would be a long time before we could spontaneously go camping again, just the two of us. Neither of us sees a yellow plum without thinking about that otherwise unremarkable camping trip. That area, those plum trees--burning, part of the Teepee Fire.
Further north, the Selway River drainage is burning, places where we backpacked with the our two children and eventually where my husband and I camped before moving out of Idaho, our children grown—the camping trip we couldn’t imagine that weekend on the Salmon.
We first took our children camping at Wilderness Gateway campground on the Clearwater River, a trip that we remember for too many Oreo cookies. My girlfriends and I stayed there, too, used it as our base camp for hikes to Stanley Hot Springs and Jerry Johnson Hot Springs on a weekend with the kind of rain that area badly needs now.
“Waiter, I want some water.”
There is a story about that song that is tied to those hot springs and that weekend.
I can’t tell you all the stories. They are grounded in a sand bar in a river, a surprise of huckleberry bushes, a night spent lying outside, miles from any lights, watching the Perseid meteor shower. One belongs in the snow of the the Methow Valley, also evacuated and burning. I know mothers whose sons are fighting those fires, people whose computers and photo albums are in boxes by the front door. My concerns pale in comparison to theirs. But I still look at the news to see if the Syringa Café has survived, because when you hike out of the Selway, all you can think about is a slice of their huckleberry pie.