Catching Fire

Catching Fire

By J. A. IRVING

I’ve known George and Marisa for a long time. We fell in love with SF and the 1960s and ’70s together, as teens, and spent a lot of time reading and analyzing magazines from the ’50s and ’60s, watching Roddenberry-era Star Trek. We listened to The Beatles, Hendrix, Moog, Pink Floyd. We read Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke. Andre Norton. Poul Anderson. Space Opera. Robbie the Robot. From the planets to the stars. And of course, pulp-paper magazines with lurid covers.

Complicating matters for me, at least, they became partners: a couple, cohabiting. Counter to stereotypical expectation, George was the psychedelic humanist, Marisa the technocrat with rivets. He had shoulders-long hair, ten-inch beard, birchwood sandals, versus her pixie-crop, space-fabric jumpsuit, and sleek trainers. Maybe it all came together in bed, or maybe they each thought they could eventually win the other over to their version of enlightenment. In it for the challenge? I remained the extra wheel, I hope stabilizing their wild career.

Fortunately for their children, they never had any. George would probably imagine a holistic, gentle guidance under which children would follow their interests and passions and simply flow into whatever skills and training they needed, while Marisa would dream of putting young minds and bodies under rigorous scientific development as they evolved between each cognitive and affective stage.

So, the two of them had this weird, counter-intuitive love scene happening, and I was the partnerless nerd-foil. This wasn’t fun in itself, but I liked them both, and I always had faint hope that someday I’d find my own someone to bring our trois to quatre. Maybe someone from their circles. I did like having friends who dug the same stuff I did, and we could always talk over Childhood’s End or the Foundation trilogy into the wee hours and drive off the (from our perspective) uncool.

Professionally speaking, George was a painter, Marisa a coder and philosopher (she even had a doctor of philosophy diploma on her wall). Me – I ended up editing the local weekly paper, chasing ad sales and dozing through County Council meetings. It helps that I can take good enough photos with my old 12-megapixel DSLR on Automatic. The Whigby Warrior does still appear in print – almost a retro marketing gimmick – but who knows for how long? Especially since the fire.

One day – seems ages ago, now – I wrapped up the latest edition. I posted it to our website and emailed it to the printer with a relieved sense of accomplishment. I strapped on my latest-model crash helmet (safety before style) and hopped on my vintage 1969 Norton Commando Fastback (style before function). The electric starter even worked, this time, and Red and I burbled out to George and Marisa’s place on the rustic edge of town. A hint of wildfire was in the air, fortunately from far enough away.

Marisa and George’s place was too small to be a hobby farm, too much on-grid to be a homestead, but George intensively gardened a good deal of fruit and vegetables from the big yard, including enough wine grapes to let him practise his vintner skills. The house was super-insulated, dressed in weathered grey board-and-batten barn siding, with a built-in solar greenhouse and solar water-heating panels. They had tried a wind generator, but now they had a photovoltaic array to provide some of their electric power. Vines and espalier fruit trees surrounded the place, trained along wires.

I pulled off my helmet, hung it over my handlebar-end and let myself straight into the kitchen like one of the family. Marisa hunched over her laptop at the heavy, wooden table. She had traded her jumpsuit today for a snug white polo and stretch jeans. A nibbled mini-baguette and a chunk of yellow cheese sat beside her, with a couple of fresh plums. Lunch was late. She sipped a demitasse of espresso from a Moka pot on the stove.

George staggered into the kitchen, straining today after an hour in the garden with a huge Indigenous-made basket of fresh grapes, just as Marisa paused her work to greet me absently. George’s sweaty mop of greying hair and whiskers had caught a few leaves and twigs, even some cobwebs. “Great crop this year!” he exulted, as if the grapes were his personal creation. “I just hope the wine turns out as good as the fruit is plenty!”

“I’m sure it’ll be great!” I said, hopeful of a jug or so for myself. George had improved his product over the years.

Marisa revived an age-old debate between them. “Doesn’t juicing and fermenting waste a lot of valuable food?” she questioned, sincere yet repetitive.

“We have plenty of fruit, making our own wine saves money, and we compost any leftover pulp and stuff,” George responded. “Even the Bible called wine God’s gift for celebration!”

“The Bible-Bible, or the ‘Orange Catholic?’” Another SF allusion, of course. Her eyes twinkled.

“The Bible-Bible – probably the other one, too, but I haven’t read that series in a while, and I don’t remember that the wine question even comes up.”

“OK,” Marisa acquiesced. “But maybe, should we share our grapes with those who don’t have a garden?” We all believed in equality and social justice, of course – and we actually tried to practise some, when we remembered.

“I invite people to glean, but they usually make a mess of our vines – and not that many show up to work.” George sounded frustrated: principle often makes an uneasy marriage with practice.

“Maybe they’ve learned by now that you don’t leave much over!” Marisa smiled with a teasing light in her dark eyes. “Anyway, I’d better go back to my project planning and let you get on with yours. I still think fresh grapes are worth more than pulp and liquor!” She picked up her tablet computer and bustled out of the kitchen, snatching a trio of ripe grapes as she passed George’s basket.

“At least you could say, ‘Yum!’” he called after her, but she had already shifted focus to whatever she was working on. “The other thing is,” George told me conversationally, as he went back to washing his grapes and filling up the rest of a plastic tote with them, “grapevines just like to make grapes. We have far more than we can simply eat or cook with, or dry for raisins.”

“And you planted them years ago, so all they really cost is the time and labor for care and harvest.”

“Definitely.”

George and Marisa did agree on hope. They differed over what they felt they truly ought to hope for, and how the world should get there, but both believed that a golden era still lay almost within human reach. A little patience and the right effort could bring it to reality. George’s garden and his paintings always promised eventual success – sooner, he hoped, than those painters whose works make millionaires of others after they themselves have died. Or those vintages that become as treasured as “Old Winyards,” if they survive the bibulous appetites of their first owners. Marisa’s app-writing and philosophy lived just on the verge of viral celebrity. She and George would remake the world – soon. If only they could come to a consensus on the new world’s dimensions.

They wept and worried as shifting climates and the ambitions of rulers brought war, pestilence, and wildfire to so many areas. They donated to the food bank, reused, recycled and composted, backed community action groups. They dressed from the thrift stores, reusing and re-purposing. They created all the beauty and utility that they could in every kind of work they touched. Unlike George’s vines, the real crop of hope never quite came in.

I left them to their arguments and rode back to town for another thrilling night at the library. I poke fun at myself, but the Whigby library actually could be exciting at times. The town librarian brought in some good fantasy and science fiction titles while they were still new and exciting, so you often found a favorite-to-be on her shelves.

“So it goes,” as Vonnegut said.

And then the Bastion Ridge Wildfire launched.

The more than summer-dry woods and parkland in our hills took to fire as to their natural condition: they generated a brisk wind that drove the flames forward. Sparks and clumps of flaming material leapfrogged ahead of the front line of the fire’s progress. The same thing was happening in enough places across the region that firefighting resources got pretty stretched. I went out and took photos and video, thinking all the while, “Didn’t scientists describe this decades ago?” For that matter, Wilhelm, Ballard, and lots more wrote foresighted novels decades ago – but I was never a big fan of dystopias.

The County warned about evacuation, then ordered residents out. We headed for the Coast like the fire-spooked deer wading into the lakes.

George and Marisa obeyed the evacuation order while the BR fire remained a wall of smoke somewhere beyond the hills nearest their property. I rode over and helped them pack.

“We can only hope the wind will shift, or some miraculous local shower will drench and save our place,” George said as they loaded some favorite things into their rented electric car.

“Is that realistic?” I had to say.

“No,” Marisa answered as she shoved some beloved books, and her framed Ph.D., into the last free corner of the vehicle. “But realism can’t lift us from despair.”

“Imagination, on the other hand, can sometimes lead to creative responses,” George said optimistically, strapping in behind the steering wheel.

“Hope so,” I grunted and waved them off. My bike wouldn’t carry much in the way of keepsakes – just a few clothes and cans, boxes, or bags of food. I pulled on my helmet, jacket, and gloves, and hit the road myself.

#

It took more than a week for the worst to pass, and downed or broken utilities still made some parts of the fire zone risky. Officials refused to allow people back, for fear looters would respond to reopening before owners could. When conditions did allow us to return, I rode back just ahead of my friends. The asphalt was scorched.

Obviously, we couldn’t expect much, but I still took pictures: a charred “Welcome” sign, burned-out buildings.. The black, skeletal remains of a playground in a park. The pictures told the story, but I interviewed a few County officials, and other Bastion Ridge refugees, and wrote an update roundup later that night in the emergency shelter. Even posting online wasn’t possible yet, here.

We rode and drove through scenes of shattering destruction: George and Marisa wouldn’t have known we’d reached their home if we hadn’t counted the miles carefully from the remains of the last crossroads sign.

Marisa crumpled in tears – far from her usual techie competence – while George busied himself examining the charred remnants of their house, gardens, and the nearby forests. I couldn’t believe the scale and completeness of the disaster.

“We can rebuild!” George said with unusual steel in his voice. He stood, pouring himself some coffee from a vacuum bottle. “Replant. My great-grandfather back East grew potatoes and oats on land that had been logged and then burned over; the ash and leaf-mould made rich soil.” He seemed to know or guess how much work he was asking of himself. “There are technologies that will help, now.”

Technology probably got us into this, I thought. Can we trust it to get us out? I kept my mouth shut. Maybe this was their story, not mine.

Marisa copied his firmness, pulling herself together. She dried her tears on her shirt tail and combed her hair with her long fingers.“‘Can’ and ‘should’ aren’t always the same, George,” she cautioned, however. She gave him a probing, serious look. “Do we really want to try again, or is this one more sign that our plans for this space were never meant to be?”

“The land will try again, whatever we do!” George gestured around him, then clenched a determined fist. “Roots and seeds already here in place, or arriving on the wind, will sprout and push aside the ashes and ruins. Vining plants will creep over the remains of walls; certain pine cones need fire to release their seeds!” He sounded like an orator, calling his people to fight on in a war. Would anyone respond?

“We can help, and we can try to shape the replacements for what we lost, or we can stand by in despair and watch a ragged, ramshackle recovery that will take much longer to grope back to any meaningful beauty or order.” He seemed almost angry that the land, on its own, would do such a sloppy job.

“What about ‘letting nature have its way’?” Marisa chided. “You were always trying to grow things with as little interference from us as possible!”

“Don’t ask for rigorous consistency, that ‘hobgoblin of small minds’!” George waved both hands. “Join me, Marisa! I’ll do it myself, even if your name is on the deed. But it will go much better if you work beside me!” He looked into her eyes, hoping for some spark.

“I do have Cloud backups for my research,” Marisa admitted, the shadow on her eyes lifting a little. “The County will want Web infrastructure up and running ASAP. There’s some insurance. The Institute will recognize I need time to get back into regular hours. I can even see some possible uses for some of the work I’ve done lately, in guiding our rebuilding!” She had begun to sound excited again; even I felt more optimistic. “But, oh, George, it will take such dedication!”

“Keep pointing my eyes to the vision ahead,” George said firmly, thrusting his beard toward the mountain of labour to do. “Not to sound all airy-fairy, but, seriously: don’t let me get lost in looking back at what didn’t work!” He planted his fists on his hips. “We need to look forward, even as we learn from what we’ve seen.”

Marisa nodded, hair tossing. “I’ll try, for sure! But don’t you ever let me forget what we first set out to do together. Humans will flourish in unforeseen ways, reaching out across the planet to the Solar System, even the stars. We need to re-examine our old ideas, scrap some, let other people take charge of their own parts of the vision . . .”

“Your science and technology can help,” George declared. “But we will also have to remember that the Life of the Universe wants to make things better – look at all the living and growing that goes on, so many and different species, the rationally irrelevant beauty around us!”

We all three turned then, ruefully, to take in the charred ruins of “rationally irrelevant beauty” that in fact surrounded us. Well. Nobody said life was easy, did they?

George took Marisa’s hand – she smiled and reached for mine, surprisingly. Gave it an encouraging squeeze – was that pity?

“I think you’re both right,” I put in. “I want to keep walking along beside or behind you, telling stories, wielding a hammer or a spade when I can. We will all slip so many times, make so many mistakes because we can’t see past our own needs, but we can climb farther than where we started, at least. Things can improve.”

“We’ll need a communications person,” George said.

A County pickup truck pulled into the ruined yard just then. A young woman jumped out, wearing the tan uniform of the Environment and Works Department, and dusty hiking boots. “You people OK?” she asked.

“Depends on how you mean ‘OK,’” I jumped in. “Physically, we’re safe; we had bacon and eggs and toast and a quart of strong coffee this morning before we drove over here. Our vehicles are running; we still have half a tank of fuel or more.” I paused.

“Emotionally, I imagine my friends are pretty shattered: this was their place, they’d worked on it for over a decade, at least. See for yourself what’s left!”

The smiling girl from the County shook her head. “Looks like a rough go to me – I’m Ellie Bains, by the way. The County wants to help, but you folks may have to help figure out how.”

Just then, an official helicopter came whup-whupping over. Ellie’s radio erupted in talk and questions from the pilot.

“Roger, ’Uardo! Three returnees here, trying to see what to do first.”

The radio crackled noisily, but the young worker seemed to understand it. “Yeah, they probably should come back to the shelter tonight, until they get a camp of their own going,” she said. “I know they’ll need water and shelter.”

“There still should be a spring,” George said. “We should be able to make a fire of charcoal. Tarps and things are somewhere in the car here. If you have some poles, we could use them.”

“Got a pair of aluminum ones here.” Ellie rummaged in the back of her truck. I reached out to accept them from her. She smiled as she handed them over; I felt honoured to accept two hollow aluminum poles.

“This County will come back!” Ellie said, with the voice of her political supervisors. “We’ll build and plant and get our people back up on their feet before anybody can believe it, if they’re willing.”

“We can’t do it alone,” Marisa and George chorused, “but we can join the program.” They fell into each other’s arms for a weary yet hopeful kiss. I was still the spare wheel.

But then, Ellie leaned over and laid a lip on me, too. Maybe there really could be a future for all of us.

END