Formative Fires
Raining ash, a now common occurrence, settles on the hood of my vehicle. July 2023.
July 2023
Another summer and another long drive ahead. From BC’s Northern capital to its swarming metropolis via its paved blood vessels. It is a cool Saturday morning and I have the heater going and a light jacket on, despite knowing it will soon be above 30 C. Another hot day in a drought-stricken summer, driving around in a carbon belching sedan that burns prehistoric life. Luckily, I have some tunes to underscore the journey.
My iPod Touch, bought back in mid-2009 and still going strong, is plugged into the vehicle’s sound system. It carries 800 or so songs and has not been updated in a couple of years. An extended time capsule covering my high school days to my late twenties.
I have my coffee and everything is packed in the back. Time to head off. Initially, in silence. The daylight is barely present and the roads are quiet. Not too many giant metal prowlers – comically big pick-ups and SUVs, to the rest of you – out and about. It feels nice just starting off without any noise in a city that is usually bathed in it. I navigate past the bridge construction and make my way onto the main highway. The signs change from 70 to 100 and I am off. Cruise control set; time to hit play.
It is Paul Simon’s reworked “Can’t Run But”. I turn it up and settle in.
I can’t run but I can walk much faster than this,
Can’t run but.
A cooling system burns out in the Ukraine,
Trees and umbrellas protect us from the new rain,
Armies of engineers to analyze the soil,
The food we contemplate, the water that we boil.
July 2017
Over an hour on transit in with a suit and tie on, during a fairly busy morning, to make my way to downtown Vancouver. I am not a morning person, nor a suit person. Some people say suits are comfortable and/or that the formality they impress upon onlookers is worth the rigmarole of putting one on. Comfort is a moot point – my objections go beyond soft fabric on skin. Identity can be expressive or hidden and clothing only its most visible articulation. What one chooses to wear is then just a social dance, a jig of conformity or non-conformity with various in and out-groups. Suits, thus, associated with many things I choose to avoid. As for the onlookers, I wish I could care less.
I enjoy the sunshine though, and that is about it.
I arrive at the address my phone is directing me to and look up. A large, brutalist building home to many corporate offices. I have come here because my unemployment stretch has hit the magic number – three months. It is now time to give up on dreams of finding the right gig with an organization that matches my principles, because none of those gave me an interview. Things were looking good in late 2016 – only a month out of graduate school and already working with a non-profit doing small-time work with big impact. But after that quick foray into a grant-funded, temporary position, no further momentum was manifested.
So here I am, signing up with a temp agency that has promised me work, of any kind, in short order. Time to commit to anything in the hopes of it becoming something. The agency has requested an interview and I have obliged with the suit. Perhaps overkill, in hindsight, but I have never done this before. I go in, sign some papers, and find myself sitting across a recruitment agent. She asks me about my interests, experience, hobbies, skills – all things written in the paper on the desk in front of her. But that’s ok, this is all part of ‘the process’, of how things go in the real world, where we spend most of our time repeating what we have already written down because no one has bothered to read it. And that is ok. I do not expect everyone to care about their jobs and performance when their seat is occupied not out of enthusiasm but necessity.
The agent then asks me about where I would like to work. She seems earnest, so I decide to go off script and tell the truth. I am looking for ‘meaningful’ work, ideally far away from a private outfit – I have a fundamental opposition to those operating with a for-profit motive. Stick me in the irksome corners of civil society home to assured activists and system changers. I know I do not have the experience nor the easily grasped education, so am happy to start at the bottom. She says they will do their best and to not worry – there are plenty of opportunities out there. ‘Opportunity’, by the way, is a desk-and-chair term. It implies you seek it rather than it seeks you.
The agent sits me down at a computer in a long line of desktops, perhaps a dozen. She says that the last part of the interview is a standardized test on basic office systems so they can get a good idea of candidates’ software skills and digital literacy. There are three other, young men already there, working their way through said tests. She says it will take about an hour and leaves the room. I follow the prompts and make my way through the innards of Outlook, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint. I do horribly.
I have no hope of finding anything by the time I get home, suit and tie off and into a hoodie and jeans less than five minutes after returning. The eleventh of July ends. On the twelfth, I receive a call. They have secured a job for me if I will take it, primarily an administrative role. The employer is a non-profit that is hiring ‘scheduling and deployment coordinators’. I ask for an address. If it is too far, I might not go for it. The pay is minimal, but I am not in a place where being picky will do me any favors. They give me an address and I type it into google. Ah, it is too far. At least an hour on transit each way.
But the employer’s name comes up too. It is the Canadian Red Cross. I remember some of my graduate research being focused on the American Red Cross, and more broadly on corporate non-profits. I had promised myself not to go down this road. But we live in a world of brand recognition and surface-level assessments of life experience. I acquiesce and accept the position. Maybe a little experience with the largest non-profit in the country can be the buoy I need to seek out that ‘meaningful’ work I idealize in my head.
This is before I internalize how much is dependent on people and not positions. On striving for better despite the enveloping structures of our lives and limits of our power. On how the ‘meaningful’ is up to the person and not their occupation.
July 2023
The lengthy drive continues as do the intermittent, intruding brainwaves.
It is only from a privileged vantage point that you can truly dive into the philosophical quandaries that our entrenched in our daily labor. Wading into discourses of our increasing climate footprint, connection to those inside and outside our borders, or the latest political and scientific fads.
Are we pencil-pushing our way to oblivion? Living lives that are defined by purposeful distraction; momentary lapses of awareness coiled together in an unending chain? Ignorance cannot absolve us of our responsibilities. This is an inexcusable self-shackling. And yet, I can understand it. Retreating to sports and fiction at the end of a protracted workday the perfect, chronic antidote to the malaise of our times, political economies that cannot function without subdued and tired citizenry.
All of this coming to mind because from my apartment to Williams Lake, or approximately 250km, I have driven through a veil of wildfire smoke. Unceasing and oppressive, at times so heavy that fog lights have been needed. Everyone is still calling these disasters ‘natural’.
The haze is beginning to clear though. The deceptively sunny “Feels Like Summer” from Childish Gambino matches its volume to that of the rays sweeping the sky.
You can feel it in the streets,
On a day like this, the heat,
I feel like summer,
She feel like summer,
This feel like summer,
I feel like summer.
Seven billion souls that move around the sun,
Rolling faster, fast and not a chance to slow down,
Slow down.
July 2017
A provincial state of emergency was declared just a week ago, one that will last for almost 3 months. Wildfires are scorching dry earth and growing fast. The organization has me running through spreadsheets, cold calling rolls of registered volunteers to put together availabilities for deployment. Usually they only accept people who are available to deploy for at least two weeks, stepping away from their lives to assist evacuees at reception centers, hand out aid, conduct case work, provide psychosocial support, etc.
This summer, they are accepting everyone. Two days at your local community hall? Fine. Three days part-time and maybe an extension to four? We’ll take it. Volunteers from other provinces and the US are expected shortly in large numbers. Our temp team prepares orientation packages – overviews of codes of conduct, histories of each region, response terminology, processes and conditions, travel claims – a continual stream of admin that will inform and perplex in equal measure.
There is a television playing close-captioned news in the call center, visible through its surrounding glass windows. A large room filled with rows of computers and landlines, manned by temps who scroll through numbers and blocks of texts as they dial across Canada. In a couple of weeks, the little screen will report that firefighters from Mexico, South Africa, and Australia will be landing in BC. Around the same time, the air across the Interior and North of the province will nearly blacken, the high noon sun a red dot trying to sear its way in like a cigarette butt through paper.
Someone comes to my desk and asks me how to fix an issue with a pivot table in excel. I have no idea what a pivot table is but tell them that I will let them know soon after a couple urgent emails I have to send. As they walk away, I google their question and find a tutorial. About 10 minutes of troubleshooting later, I send them some truncated instructions on our internal messaging software. They say it works and are grateful, saying I must be a wizard at excel. I acknowledge their gratitude but do not admit that I am as lost as everyone else. I think about how we react to problems. How quickly are we inclined to adopt approaches focused on prevention? To learn from rather than repeat mistakes. To manage difficulty.
2017 will go on to become the worst wildfire season in BC’s recorded history, in terms of land burned. 2018 will surpass it. 2023 will surpass 2018. No cookie for guessing whether a worse one is just around the corner.
August 2017
I have been deployed to the Prince George Red Cross office for the past week and a half… in an HR capacity. An individual with almost no direct response experience, I am orienting newly arriving volunteers from across Canada and the US after only two days’ training. When the orientations are done, the volunteers head to reception center feeling assured and nervously excited, eager to support in good faith, having travelled far to be a good Samaritan. My path after each powerpoint is back to my office across the hall, to answer emails, work on spreadsheets, and make calls.
I am not even qualified or trained to wear the Red Cross vest. No First Aid/Responder, trauma-informed, or case work certification. Not that I have been required to do so – it just feels strange to be the first point of contact on the ground.
But things are about to change. We get word that they require several more personnel in 100 Mile House where residents are returning from a recent evacuation. The local curling rink has been outfitted as a reception center for Emergency Management BC and the Canadian Red Cross (supporting those just evacuated and those who have been unable to return for more than 72 hours). I sign up to support and join a deployed American Red Cross volunteer who will drive us down. We talk about many things on the four hour road trip. He is a retired pensioner who has a background in the US military and has travelled thousands of kilometers to answer a global call. I am a paid temp, green to wildfires, emergency responses, the Red Cross, basically everything. Carrying the weight of academic knowledge not yet bolstered by practice. This will the first of many road trips that will come to define much of my labor for the next seven years, though I still think it a surreal break from the norm.
When we arrive, we are greeted by chaos. The curling rink is overrun by those seeking aid or support with registration. Red and blue-vested workers sprinkled among a mass of movement. Vehicles and trailers litter the parking lot and large stacks of containers with recently delivered supplies coat the outside of the rink. Inside, we are greeted by the site supervisor who directs me through lines of families in front of a neat row of desks in front of makeshift walls – black cloths hanging from metal railings – that obscure the back half of the rink (currently a large gym area with hardwood flooring). Behind the translucent walls are printers, cabinets, desks, and various supply repositories. The operations hub of the reception center. The site lead guides me to a sectioned off desk and chair with extension outlet access – my new ‘office’ for the next two weeks. She speaks with a kind and pleasant tone as she introduces me to the other staff and volunteers and shares the duties I can start with – getting some HR to-dos done. She will tell me a month or so later, back in Vancouver, how I struck her as a deer in the headlights. But she will also relay that this is normal, and how proud she was of how myself and the other young staff handled ourselves with those in crisis.
It is another scorcher, the heat and smoky air likely spurring the anxiety of all those present. At this point in time, the research on the effects of polluted air, of its dulling of cognition and heightening of stress, is well known to scientists but has not yet entered the mainstream consciousness.
Everyone is on edge that day in 100 Mile House. There are plenty of reasons why, most apparent and some indistinct.
– – –
A week later, things have calmed down somewhat, not least in part due to the efforts of the responders who have blunted the waves of disorder with reliance on empathy, solidarity, tried and true procedure, and guidance from those who have navigated these seas before.
I am in conversation with an EMBC volunteer at the entrance to the center. A local senior who has recently undergone a hip replacement, still compelled to donate as much of his time as he can to supporting his community in recovery. He is telling me about his family and farm, of the troubles with following evacuation orders and becoming separated from relatives while navigating the complex informal networks that would ensure the survival of the creatures and lands he holds dear. This is as therapeutic for him as it is educational for me; an open-air didacticism through apportioning of story.
The backdrop of our chat is a small hill that domineers above the central townscape, separated from the curling rink by a short road that cuts through a small pond. The sky today is a clear blue as the winds have blown away any lingering haze, at least for the time being. My attention is caught by a large cloud of smoke that rises slowly and menacingly from the South side behind the peak. I gesture towards it and we both gaze as the grey puff lazily mushrooms, like a dawdling atomic blast.
The man yells and takes of his vest as he fumbles for his keys. The smoke is coming from right where his farm is, or at least that is the thought that dominates his mind. He rushes off to ensure the safety of his animals as the smoke unfurls itself across the visible firmament.
I never see the man again nor hear whether his land was affected. The small wildfire is human-made and quickly contained; no need to evacuate the small town again.
All the news, updates, and dispatches received locally come in the form of anecdotes. They no longer find their way to front pages as record-setting fires have sprung up across multiple continents. Canadian networks focus on the quantities in brief updates that kick off broadcasts – the hectares burned, number of people displaced, dollars in damage done – before shifting to other news.
Statistics are relayed first. The narrative accounts will be disclosed later.
July 2023
One of my favorites by k-os, “Born to Run”, hits its stride.
If the sky would fall,
Will it take that to bring us together?
Do we have to start all over again?
That doesn’t mean you were born to run,
Either we’re vain or we’re broken hearted,
We don’t believe in a heaven above,
That’s why we’re back to the place that we started.
October 2017
The four-month crash-course in the unpredictable is coming to an end. It feels like I have been employed in Emergency Management for years despite only living through one response season.
The province has cooled and the state of emergency rescinded, though fires continue to burn outside populated areas. I have applied for a role with the Canadian Red Cross’s 2017 wildfire recovery team and been successful at securing a one-year contract. This will be the start of exactly four years of recovery work and supporting multiple other disasters with the society. It will be the first time I am employed for longer than six months at any organization.
The new role will require me to relocate to Williams Lake. Not an unwelcome move but as I will discover, a regrettably frequent one as I follow my interests across BC, my job descriptions as diverse and rugged as the province’s tumbling geography.
A summer that began with uncertainty over career prospects concludes with a commitment to a different kind of ambiguity – one embedded in the work itself. Not so unsettling a thought when considering the knottiness of social struggles.
As I enter the new role, I hope not to give off a ‘deer in the headlights’ vibe. Not to diminish fear or apprehension; these are acceptable feelings. Our response to them far more important.
July 2023
The song ends but the thoughts continue to swirl. I skip back and play it again. If we have adopted the illusory chain, then it ties us all together. So we drag and get dragged, our comfort within the collective determined by our singular pursuits.
Am I a pencil-pusher? Am I distracted? I check my wrists – they are only lightly scarred. There is a large truck ahead and I slow down to match its speed until it is safe to pass.
…same old thing on the radio, radio…