Lifestyle
'The Last Fire Season' describes what it was like to live through Calif.'s wildfires
Manjula Martin woke before dawn one morning in mid-Aug. 2020 in her home in West Sonoma County, Calif., to a dry lightning storm.
“Above the redwoods fathomless clouds lingered like silence,” she writes. “From inside them the furious sky hurled its energy at millions of acres of dry, deep wood.” The forest surrounding her was all-too ready to burn.
Martin (no relation to this reviewer) had lived through many prior Northern California fire seasons — she grew up in Santa Cruz, had lived in the San Francisco Bay area on and off throughout her adulthood, and had settled in her current home with her partner in 2017. But she knew immediately that this lightning storm represented an unprecedented danger, because its strikes hit “a landscape that was overgrown, dry from drought, and experiencing record-breaking heat and high winds.” She and Max began to pack, preparing to evacuate.
Thus begins The Last Fire Season, a melding of memoir, natural history, and reportage that traces four months in 2020 when wildfires in California broke records, burning more than 4 million acres. Those lightning strikes — more than 10,000 of them — were responsible for 650 wildfires large enough to be named; one such fire, the August Complex, became the first recorded “gigafire” in the state’s modern history, spanning more than a million acres. Martin lived a few miles south of the Walbridge Fire, part of the LNU Lightning Complex, in a former logging camp and vacation resort that was a “fire trap” filled with wooden houses.
A former managing editor of the literary magazine Zoetrope, Martin records what it was like to live through and alongside these conflagrations with a lyrical attention to detail and through a deeply personal lens. The Last Fire Season unfolds in four major sections, one for each month of August through November 2020, tracing the movement of wildfires, placing them in ecological and human history, and grappling with their repercussions. As she recounts months spent dodging and being followed by wildfires, months when the siren on her local firehouse blared almost daily and when smoke overwhelmed her senses, Martin reflects on what it means to make one’s home in a place that is destined to burn, and to live “inside a damaged body on a damaged planet.”
Indeed, The Last Fire Season is just as much about learning to live with chronic pain as with fire. Martin settled in the house in the forest when she was amid a cascading series of “atypical” medical crises — during the removal of her IUD, one of the device’s small plastic arms became lodged in the wall of her uterus, leading to infection and eventually necessitating a hysterectomy. As her scars healed but her pain did not, she tended a flower and fruit tree garden in her yard, casting it as her “companion in damage and renewal.”
Martin had learned from her father, an organic horticulturalist, that while we typically think of gardening as creation, it is in fact an act of human intervention — pruning a tree, for instance, allows a gardener to manipulate how it grows. In intervening on the land while living in a body that had itself been intervened on, she developed an understanding of the physical world “in terms beyond well or unwell, fertile or sterile, whole or broken.”
This perspective melds with Martin’s nuanced way of seeing fire as both something to fear and as a necessary element in the evolution of the Earth’s ecosystems. As she acknowledges, the Native peoples who first inhabited the land we now know as California had long appreciated the essential power of fire, using it as both a land management tool and an aspect of spiritual practice. When colonists displaced California’s Indigenous peoples and sought to eliminate their ways of life, they also “erased or pushed underground millennia of traditional ecological knowledge,” including how to wield fire for land protection and renewal. Using prescribed burns — or “good fire” — to clear hazardous fuel like dry underbrush is in fact key to preventing and limiting out-of-control wildfires like the ones that had Martin in a state of anxiety throughout the late summer and fall of 2020.
While The Last Fire Season is organized around those tense months when bad fire threatened the garden and forest that Martin had grown so attached to, some of the most effective passages come when she pulls back from the stream of her daily life to weave in research or reporting. Flash-forwards bring the reader along to observe a cross-cultural exchange of ecological knowledge between a group of Lake County Pomo Indians and Indigenous Mexican people, to encounter the aftermath of the 2020 fires in the Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and to witness a prescribed burn on an oak woodland near Martin’s home. These chapters both deepen the engagement with the question of how to live with fire and offer needed texture to a narrative that at times gets tedious in its granular observance of the present and the personal.
Zooming out also helps Martin come to terms with staying in Northern California amid climate change and the megafire era, and with her injuries and pain. For much of the book, these threads of inquiry proceed in parallel; when they synthesize, they truly sing. “Both manners of living with uncontrollable events required me to let go of any sense of an ending,” Martin writes. The Last Fire Season eschews a redemptive arc in favor of witnessing and sitting with the discomfort of reality, with understanding that, as Martin puts it, “what happened to the land would happen to me.”
Kristen Martin is working on a book on American orphanhood for Bold Type Books. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent.
Jane Austen ready to party for her 250th birthday at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting in Baltimore.
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In her six completed novels, Jane Austen excelled at love stories: Elinor and Edward, Lizzie and Darcy, Fanny and Edmund, Emma and Knightley, Anne and Wentworth, heck even Catherine and Tilney. As her fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of her birth, they’d like you to know it’s a mistake to simply dismiss her work as light, frothy romances. It’s full of intricate plots, class satire and biting wit, along with all the timeless drama of human foibles, frailties and resolve.
Tessa Harings (left) learns English country dance at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2025 Annual General Meeting
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“The basic reason why Austen is still popular today is because all of her characters are people we know in the world,” says Tessa Harings. She’s a high school teacher from Phoenix and one of the more than 900 attendees at the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Annual General Meeting, held in Baltimore this year. “We all know of someone who’s shy and aloof and needs to be brought into the crowd. We all know someone who’s quite witty, naturally. We all know someone who is a bit silly and always looking for attention.”
Colin Firth, properly memed from the 1995 BBC miniseries. His Darcy is a big favorite with the JASNA crowd.
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Shy and aloof? That could be Darcy. Naturally witty? Lizzie Bennet. Silly and looking for attention? Take your pick: baby sister Lydia or maybe the haughty Caroline Bingley or the unctuous Mr. Collins, all creations from what might be Austen’s most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice.
Her characters have permeated modern pop culture, even among people who’ve never opened her books. Harings says that’s one reason her students want to read these Regency-era novels. They want to understand the jokes in all those short videos and memes, like Mr. Collins making awkward dinner conversation.
He wants a wife, he compliments the potatoes. In Mr. Collin’s head, it makes sense.
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Her students enjoy the tension between Darcy and Lizzie: he’s very rich, so besotted by her against his will that he can hardly dance, glower and talk at the same time. Lizzie initially cannot stand him and refuses his first proposal, as shown in this soggy scene from the 2005 movie adaptation.
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Harings says Lizzie is her favorite Austen character. “She has such sharp, sarcastic wit and she’s so self-confident, despite the fact that she’s constantly being put down by the people around her for her supposedly lower position in life as the slightly less pretty of the mother’s two oldest daughters.”
Milliner Dannielle Perry (right) and her assistant Mia Berg of Timely Tresses in their Regency-era togs.
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“When I was a teenager, I loved Lizzie and I wanted to be Lizzie,” says milliner Dannielle Perry of Oxford, N.C. She’s read and reread all of Jane Austen’s books and she loves how they change for her as she’s gotten older. She’s now more sympathetic toward Mrs. Bennet, Lizzie’s mom: a woman desperate to get her five daughters married, least they be penniless since they can’t inherit their father’s estate. “I feel sorry for her in a way I never did before,” Perry says. “She is sort of silly, but she’s lived with a man for 20 years who largely dismisses her and thinks she’s frivolous.”
Doctoral student Katie Yu, of Dallas, has this analysis of Mrs. Bennett and her husband, who seems mentally checked-out at best: “He’s not a great father. He’s always putting his wife down in front of his daughters, he’s putting his daughters down in front of his daughters.” Yu says Mr. Bennet married Mrs. Bennet because she was pretty, treats her as an inferior, and often ignores her. This is why Mrs. Bennet goes on about her nerves and “has the vapors” whenever she’s stressed: she’s trying to get his attention.
“But,” says Tessa Harings, “she still has a level of street smarts that she has to get her daughters married. And yes, she’s sincerely concerned about their future … she actually, of the two of them, is the more concerned and involved parent.”
Tom Tumbusch explains 19th century dance moves to JASNA members.
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Dance instructor Tom Tumbusch, of Cincinnati, says men can learn a lot from Austen. “Modern men struggle to find good role models,” he says. “Reading Austen’s works can help them see the places where men can go wrong.” Mr. Bennet, for example. Or the libertine George Wickham who lies and runs off with the flighty Bennet sister, Lydia. Or maybe Willoughby from Sense and Sensibility, who leads Marianne Dashwood on, ghosts her and is later revealed to have abandoned an unmarried woman who gave birth to his child.
Oh, Marianne, he’s so not worth it!
On the other hand, Tumbusch says Jane Austen’s heroes can show men “how to be masculine in a constructive way,” like owning mistakes, taking responsibility and treating women with respect. It’s not just Darcy, who works behind the scenes getting Wickham to marry Lydia, it’s also Captain Wentworth from Persuasion. Tombusch says Wentworth does what men of his station should: he uses his own resources to help someone less fortunate, the poor, partially disabled widow Mrs. Smith. And in Sense and Sensibility, there’s the steadfast Col. Brandon. Hoping to make Willoughby’s rejection of Marianne less devastating to her, he exposes the libertine’s behavior. He rides hours to retrieve her mother when Marianne is near death. He patiently, oh-so-patiently, waits for her young, broken heart to mend.
All this while wearing a flannel waistcoat because he’s on the “wrong side of five and thirty” and needs to keep those ancient bones warm.
Before he rocked worlds as Snape, Alan Rickman made the earth move for viewers of the 1995 movie adaptation of Sense and Sensibility.
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JASNA president Mary Mintz, of McLean, Va., says though Jane Austen is largely known for her marriage plots, it’s really the human need for connection that grounds her stories. “She writes about the relationships between parents and children, between siblings or among siblings, she writes about relationships with friends. And she is really insightful. When you combine that with her knowledge of human psychology, it’s a great formula for success.”
Mintz is fascinated by Emma’s pivotal character, Miss Bates. She’s a spinster and member of the gentry class who lives with her elderly mother on an extremely limited income. She’s also a nervous chatterbox, “someone who can’t stop talking,” says Mintz. “I’ve known a lot of Misses Bates in my lifetime… people who seem insecure and feel as though they have to fill up silence, but are really good-hearted people.”
When Emma is rude to Miss Bates, she’s firmly chastised by her neighbor, Mr. Knightley. It becomes a turn-around moment in the story. Humbled, Emma apologizes. She also sees how she’s been wrong to meddle in the love life of Harriet Smith, a pretty teenager whose parents are unknown.
Mintz says there’s an interesting link between Bates and Harriet, if you put two and two together.
“In Jane Austen’s actual life, mothers and daughters often share the same name,” she explains. That pattern can be seen in many of her novels. “We don’t know who Harriet Smith’s natural mother is, but at one point Miss Bates is referred to as ‘Hetty,’ which could be a diminutive for ‘Harriet.’ “
That’s the first clue. The second clue occurs during that scene where Knightley sets Emma right. He says of Miss Bates, “she has sunk from the comforts she was born to.” He then draws a contrast between the spinster’s current station and her former one: “You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour…”
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Emma’s father is quite wealthy, so why would Miss Bates’ notice have once been so esteemed? Mary Mintz asks, “Is because she had a child out of wedlock?”
And could that child be… Harriet Smith?
The mind: it boggles! A Jane Austen Easter egg! It’s just one example of how multi-dimensional her novels are and why so many people will continue loving, analyzing and discussing her work well into the next 250 years.
Jacob Fenston and Danny Hensel edited and produced this report.
Rob Reiner And Wife Michele
Throats Slit By Family Member
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Updated
Rob Reiner and his wife Michele had their throats slit by a family member, possibly after an argument inside their Los Angeles home, leading to their tragic deaths … TMZ has learned
It’s unclear what exactly triggered the violence, which went down Sunday afternoon in Brentwood … but we’re told one of Rob’s daughters found her parents dead and told police a family member had killed them. PEOPLE reports the couple’s son, Nick, is being questioned in connection with the murders.
Our sources also say the daughter told police the family member “should be a suspect” because they’re “dangerous.”
TMZ broke the story … Rob and Michele suffered lacerations consistent with knife wounds and LAPD’s Robbery Homicide Division is investigating the case.
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Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM … though it doesn’t provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
Sunday Puzzle
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On-air challenge
I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence conceals the name of a major U.S. city in consecutive letters. As a hint, the answer’s state also appears in the sentence. Every answer has at least six letters. (Ex. The Kentucky bodybuilders will be flexing tonight. –> LEXINGTON)
1. Space enthusiasts in Oregon support landing on Mars.
2. Contact your insurance branch or agent in Alaska.
3. The Ohio company has a sale from today to next Sunday.
4. The Colorado trial ended in a sudden verdict.
5. Fans voted the Virginia tennis matches a peak experience.
6. I bought a shamrock for decorating my house in Illinois.
7. All the Connecticut things they knew have now changed.
8. Can you help a software developer in Texas?
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Mike Reiss, who’s a showrunner, writer, and producer for “The Simpsons.” Think of a famous living singer. The last two letters of his first name and the first two letters of his last name spell a bird. Change the first letter of the singer’s first name. Then the first three letters of that first name and the last five letters of his last name together spell another bird. What singer is this?
Challenge answer
Placido Domingo
Winner
Brock Hammill of Corvallis, Montana.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Robert Flood, of Allen, Texas. Name a famous female singer of the past (five letters in the first name, seven letters in the last name). Remove the last letter of her first name and you can rearrange all the remaining letters to name the capital of a country (six letters) and a food product that its nation is famous for (five letters).
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, December 18 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
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