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.
President Trump speaks at the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery on May 25 in Arlington, Va.
Alex Brandon/AP
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Alex Brandon/AP
President Trump has suggested that an event celebrating America’s 250 birthday should instead be a Make America Great Again rally after many of the artists who were announced to perform dropped out.
The Great American State Fair, which is set to begin on June 25 on the National Mall, had featured artists such as Martina McBride, Morris Day and the Time, The Commodores and Poison’s Bret Michaels — who have all since withdrawn from the lineup.
McBride explained why she decided to not to be part of the fair, writing in a social media post she was presented with an opportunity to perform at “a nonpartisan event but that turned out to be misleading.”
“In my mind I thought this was a great way to celebrate the states and also bring people together in the way that only music can. I saw it as just a bigger version of so many state fairs I have performed at over the years, celebrating community and what makes each state special,” McBride wrote in the post on Thursday night. “Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening.”
Some artists plan to still perform at the fair. Vanilla Ice said he would not drop out of the event, writing on social media, “This is not a political platform. This is celebrating America’s birthday.”
In a social media post on Saturday, Trump called the performers who backed away from the event “Third Rate” and said he will give a speech that will rally the U.S. “forward like I have done ever since being President!” Later on Saturday, Trump wrote in another social media post that the event should be canceled and replaced with a rally.
“We should have a giant MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN RALLY, for 250, instead of having overpriced singers, who nobody wants to hear, whose music is boring, and yet who do nothing but complain,” Trump wrote.
The fair is being organized by Freedom 250, a public-private group working with the White House to organize the celebration of America’s 250 birthday. The Trump-backed celebrations have drawn criticism and concern that it is centered around himself instead of the country.
Democratic lawmakers and watchdog organizations, such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, have also questioned where private donations for the 250th celebrations are coming from.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is involved with planning the celebration, on Sunday said the events are “nonpartisan.”
“It’s not about the transparency of the donors,” Burgum said on CNN’s State of the Union when asked if the donations should become public. “This is about Americans celebrating the 250th anniversary.”
On-air challenge
Every answer is a word, name, or a familiar phrase in which the first syllable is pronounced “fair” — in any spelling. (Ex. Locale for an exhibition –> FAIRGROUND)
1. Long stretch on a golf course
2. Alternative to Celsius in temperatures
3. Alaska city just south of the Arctic Circle
4. Boat that transports passengers across a river or body of water
5. Monarch in ancient Egypt
6. Medical term for the throat
7. Revolving ride at an amusement park
8. “Cinderella” or “Hansel and Gretel”
9. Small, domesticated animal related to the European polecat
10. Historical Jewish sect in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles
11. County of northern Virginia that’s adjacent to Washington, D.C.
12. Actress Morgan
13. Louis who leads the Nation of Islam
14. Chemical secreted by the body that’s a stumulant to others
15. Fond goodbye
Last week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Jim Francis, of Kirkland, Wash. Think of a famous female singer (8,4). The first syllable of her first name, the second syllable of her first name backward, and last name forward again are all verbs associated with human desire. Who is this singer?
Challenge answer
Courtney Love
Winner
Larry Birkenmeyer of Glenview, Illinois
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge comes from Mike Reiss, a longtime writer and showrunner for “The Simpsons.” Name a classic song with a two-word title. Drop the first letter. Add an R after the new first letter. The result will be the names of two countries one after the other. What song is this?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it below by Thursday, June 4 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle.
Jean Smart.
HBO Max
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HBO Max
This review of the Hacks series finale includes spoilers for the episode.
It also discusses suicide.
The truth — my truth — about the fifth and final season of HBO Max’s Hacks is that I would have left it at the end of the penultimate episode last week. Deborah’s show in Central Park, improvised after she was thwarted in her efforts to play Madison Square Garden, was a triumph. The story has always been, after all, about Deborah and Ava together, outdoing the expectations other people have for them and outfoxing the people who try to thwart them. So being embraced by a huge outdoor crowd, surrounded by people who love them, was just the right ending. Not too heavy for a comedy, not too idealized and neat.
In this week’s series finale, you get a much more melodramatic story. The earlier hints about Deborah’s health problems mature into the news that she has cancer, but she has decided to forgo treatment and travel to Switzerland to undergo an assisted suicide. She also wants Ava to go with her. Ava is furious and panicked, wanting Deborah to choose differently, but Deborah’s mind is made up. In the end, encouraged by Jimmy to respect Deborah’s decision, Ava appears at the airport, and the two go to Paris for a final vacation before they travel on to Zurich. They laugh and walk, and Deborah gives Ava her first taste of Parisian bread. They shop for skin care, they go to the Louvre (which Deborah buys out just for them), and they debate Van Gogh. They even go dancing.
Perhaps I was naive to never believe the show was going to end with Deborah’s suicide. Perhaps it might have ended that way. But it doesn’t. (Here, I am tempted to say, “Of course it doesn’t.”) After Ava fights Deborah, concedes, fights her again, and concedes again, Deborah suddenly (very suddenly) realizes she still likes writing jokes, and she decides to write a new hour with Ava and begin cancer treatment instead of going to Zurich and ending her life. “Happy Days Are Here Again” plays as they walk together in Paris, and then later in Vegas. The end.
I’ve always been of two minds about Hacks: the scene-level writing is impeccable, the jokes have a high hit rate, and the performances are utterly singular, but I’ve always found the plot choices frustrating. By Season 4, the basic story was repeating over and over (they feud; they make up; they feud; they make up). But even then, the jokes were still working, and the performances were exceptional.
Similarly, in this finale, the scenes in Paris are not only great to look at; they are very funny and wildly charming. Even in a short, slapstick bit where Deborah cracks herself up by making Ava try to learn stick shift driving a boxy little rental car through a roundabout, the kicker line from Ava, “Why am I in the rough draft of a car?” is just a straight-up great line. These are gorgeous scenes between the actresses (who are co-leads and always have been; do not let the Emmys deceive you), and they are a great gift to the many people who have loved Hacks over its very successful run. These characters are soul mates, and it is delightful seeing them, once and for all, on the same side.
But the flip side is this: When you incorporate a story about illness and death, especially very late in a show’s run, and especially if it resolves abruptly, it can seem maudlin or manipulative. Death is just a big bat to swing in a comedy series, and there’s a good argument that Hacks just didn’t need it. There is plenty of emotional heft in the history of Deborah and Ava, and in the stories of their careers, without a death scare. And because it was a death scare, some things got awkward, like … Why did D.J., Deborah’s daughter, play no role in any of this? Certainly, Deborah might not want to tell her, but when begging Deborah not to die and pulling out all the stops, would Ava not have talked about her family? Might “please don’t leave me,” touching as it was, have been accompanied by “or your daughter”?
It’s not that the Hacks finale was bad, not by a longshot. (Though the Jimmy/Kayla triumph where they re-enter Latitude to literal applause was perhaps a bit pat.) It’s the capper to a very successful and very good show, which has been richly rewarded with awards and seems highly likely to rack up a few more this fall. But it did, in the end, feel a bit like a hat on a hat, like they didn’t quite trust what’s been built between those two characters enough to pack a wallop without the Grim Reaper stalking the episode. But perhaps it would not have been a Deborah Vance production if it weren’t just a bit over the top.
If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9 8 8 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
This piece also appears in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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