The Mountain of my youth, my first and most significant home, went up in flames, as the Bridge Fire raged across the Angeles National Forest this week.
I have feelings about this I’m not yet ready to talk about.
I wouldn’t have written Forager if my mother hadn’t been dying. I couldn’t have looked out that window if I hadn’t known it was about to close.
When I began writing Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult in 2020, I slept on the empty Mountain. The fallen log my mother sat on as a child near the upper camp, which she introduced me to when I was 10, was still there. During the pandemic, I sat on that log and looked across the mountain and wrote a story of my mother’s family, from my tiny vantage point.
In 2022, I planted some of my mother’s ashes with a sapling near that log. This week, the log and the tree went up in smoke. Or at least, that’s what it looks like from this vantage point.
The mountain on which I’m building my tiny, tiny, tiny cottage is not on fire. Not yet.
Cradling life’s fragility, knowing I too will be ash one day, I’m continuing to take steps forward on this project, embracing whatever windows open.
How solid is the ground any of us build our lives on?
One of the first steps in the micro-cottage building process is ordering windows.
Since windows aren’t something I can manufacture myself, I will order what I need from someone else, a request that requires determining measurements, and which windows will be fixed, which will open, and whether the ones that open will do so with a slide or be double hung and lift or lower, and whether I’ll need screens, and if I have enough sheer wall in my design to support the expanse of glass I crave to look out into the natural world.
And since I’m more a poet than a carpenter, this feels like an invitation to determine what I want to open myself to, what I want to let in and what I want to keep out, and the risks I’m willing to take.
I think about structures and how long they last or don’t last, and the temporal containers of buildings and bodies. Opening windows expands interior space. More space feels expansive, as if time too can expand.
Is home a building, the land it sits on, the safety of a structure, or the right to be there?Who is safe outdoors? Who has the right to live on wild lands? Who has the right to call a place home?
As I’m choose a window, I determine its purpose, what I'm inviting in and what I'm keeping out. (Do we really get to decide? Or is control always an illusion?)
As a human who feels at home in the wild, but doesn’t want to subject herself to all the elements of the wild, where is the balance?
When I was a child, we sang a song in church about the foolish man who built his house on the sand and when the rains came down and the floods came up, the house on the sand fell flat. And how the wise man, who built his house upon a rock, when the rains came down and the floods came up, the house on the rock stood firm.
We all have different definitions of wildness and stability, such vastly different experiences of sand and rock. What anyone wants to let in or keep out is deeply personal, and achingly human.
When I think about earth and fire and water, I think about my writer friend Cait West and her experience of wildness and water. Every time I listen to someone speak of wildness, I recognize our interbeing.
Interbeing: My being partakes of your being, and that of all beings. We are fundamentally unseperate from each other, and from all beings in the universe; what we do to another, we do to ourselves.
From Cait West:
End of August, an hour until sunset. Lake Michigan, low tide.
It’s a green-flag day, which means the water is safe for humans, or at least as safe as any large body of water with currents can be. Wrinkles of waves gently wash over my thighs as I walk slowly into the water.
The lake is the warmest it’s been all summer, but not warm like the Gulf of Mexico or a heated pool. Warm as in: my toes aren’t going numb like they usually do. Warm as in: still cold.
Sunlight breaks through clouds and scatters through my eyelashes as I sink all the way in–maybe for the last time this year–and the cold reaches my heart, my vagus nerve.
My mind, which spends all day parsing out black-and-white text, dissolves into lake blue, sky blue, cloud blue. A thousand sapphire shades.
My blood slows, my heart trying to match the rhythm of the surf. It is not green-flag safety I feel. Is this what belonging feels like? Like a risk worth taking?
My hands float. I watch bits of algae and downy white feathers float by as the cold water embraces me, effortlessly making room for my body.
I am, after all, also mostly water. So perhaps this moment of thoughts and skin dissolving into sky-reflected waves–maybe this is my wild. Maybe this is me, returning to my nature, my body reaching back to the water where I belong but where I can never settle. But then I return to shore and feel the wildness sink below the surface and the words rush back in.
He says Grandpa is right about the end of the world being nigh, and he has a lot of charts and graphs of constellations and astronomical alignments and prophecies to prove this. He thinks reading the night sky is a logical map that will lead him straight to God.
But I think this logic is a wall, not a window.
~Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult
I’d love to hear about your experience with wildlife, with fire, with interbeing, how you use windows, or how you immerse yourself in the wild from the inside out.
Share in the comments below!
How do you feel safe in the wild?
If you’d like me to showcase a photo of one of your experiences, respond to this email with the photo and a caption (including your your name and location of the shot).
My mother taught us to use the first letters of “Survive fear, survive with faith” to remember what to prioritize, should we find ourselves lost in the wild.
• Shelter - Location, location, location. Decide where you will build your nest. Choose a flat space on high ground (a large rock or a mound of dirt, where you can remove roots and debris), away from well-used animal trails, leaning trees, and snow or rockfall areas. A good shelter in a bad location is a bad shelter.
• Fire - A fire can prevent you from freezing or keep you warm enough to do the other tasks you’ll need to ensure your protection. Cooking can increase the range of food you can consume, keep away bugs and wild animals, and improve your overall sense of security. Consider site selection and site preparation away from your shelter. Without matches, your setup will be crucial. Before you attempt to start your fire, collect ample tinder, kindling, fuel.
• Signaling - Ask yourself: Who knows I am missing? Is anyone looking for me? When is the earliest possible moment a search could begin? Do I want to be found? If you want to be found, signal early and often. If the landscape on which you are stranded is dark, collect light rocks. If it’s light, collect dark rocks. Find a clearing and spell out SOS. Make three small fire pits, designed for maximum smoke. If you hear a plane, you will rush to light them. If there is no clearing, use the brightest color fabric you have (tear it from your clothing, if that’s your only option), and tie three flags to the highest tree you can climb.
• Water - Dehydration will directly affect your ability to make logical decisions. Once you have built your shelter, home in on your water system. Water is the earth’s blood, giving life to all the world’s beings. Honor it. The blood in our veins, the sap in the trees, and the water of rivers and streams are united in shared sisterhood. If there is no running water, use a jacket or anything you may have that resembles plastic to build an evaporation net. Find a sunny spot near vegetation to dig a hole as wide as your plastic. Place a cup or anything you can improvise as a container inside the hole, and then cover your hole with the flat plastic, securing it around the perimeter with rocks. You will also need to place a rock on the center of the plastic, directly over the container. Condensation will collect in your container overnight, yielding up to a quart of water a day.
• Food - If it could take more than a couple of weeks for someone to find you, or if you are running from something and want to remain hidden, you will need to sustain your energy with food. Depending on the sea- son during which you are stranded, this may be simple or it may be difficult.
~Forager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult
Thank you for reading Forager Fridays — your support allows me to keep doing this work. All paid subscribers will receive a Zoom link to our co-writing workshops which take place on the last Saturday of each month at 1:00 PT/4:00 ET. If you’re not in a position to pay, the referral option gives you the same benefits as paid subscribers. Use the referral link below, or the “Share” button on any post to earn credit for new subscribers. Send the link in a text, email, or share it on social media with friends.
Thank you for being on this journey with me. I am grateful for the gift of your presence. Walking this path, knowing so many of you are walking it too, gives me hope. May we recognize our interbeing, with one another and the anima mundi, supporting each other in growth and recovery, like a mycelial network. If you’d like to continue this conversation in person, consider enrolling in my small group writing workshop at the Maloof this October. There are two spots left.
I feel you. I've lost so many playgrounds and places of solace to wildfire. It seems to chase me wherever I go in the West.
This is such a beautiful and poignant post. Thank you!
—
I think control is an illusion, a very comfortable illusion, but an illusion nevertheless. Mother Nature is immensely more powerful than fragile humans and the structures that we build. Whether it is fire, earthquakes (had one on Saturday), or Hurricanes (New Orleans), the untamed wildness of the world reminds us of its strength. Sort of like Cait’s comment “as safe as any large body of water…can be” on green flag days.
——
And maybe if we let go of that illusion, we have to open that window. But as you said “What anyone wants to let in or keep out is deeply personal, and achingly human”
Thank you