Orange Signals
South Addison, Maine, Sept. 15
Orange Signals
South Addison, Maine
It is 5:40 am. Clad in orange the sun is crawling over the horizon. The tide is high in the bay and both the sky and the water are suffused in orange, the color named after sweet fruit, the lonely color that has no word that rhymes with it. Orange sleeps between red and yellow and this morning her wide beams pierce the bedroom window, stain the walls, the quilt, my hands. I wake to orange. I get out of bed. I am orange. The world of the room is orange.
Orange the color of pumpkins and autumn. And fire. Here, no smoke reflects orange. No ash drifts slowly down, like snow from sky.
But on the other side of this country, in the place where the sun sets instead of rises over the ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge ascends into orange at noon. In California, 2,000 years old redwoods and leviathan oaks, lithesome willows, ancient families of aspen, burn. And the farmers’ fields and tumbledown mountain villages. And too, in Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, the forests burn, smoke rises, skies are orange all day. The streets of the cities are stained orange, the glass windows of the posh high rises blush orange. Faces absorb orange like dry forests absorb rain, if there were rain.
When did it happen that we dried up the lakes, that we dried up the rivers, that we desiccated millions of trees, warmed the world without noticing? When did it happen that we began to believe we didn’t have to pay attention to the messages of the trees, the songs of the rivers? Finally, and much too late, this year news reports stop equivocating, lay the cause of the fires at the feet of human induced climate change, at the feet of what we have called progress.
In the place where the sun sets over the ocean, there is the firetruck still in the fire station, burned and black. And there is the man running and there is the chimney rising among the smoking cinders of the blackened body of the house. And there is the woman on her knees, crying.
Here, in the East, bear hunting season has begun. “Are you wearing orange?” the sign at the trail head scolds. Orange, the color of caution. Orange the color meant to save you from danger. Yesterday, I heard a story, a real story. A neighbor out walking on the shore at low tide saw something large and black washed up on the verge of the ocean. He was smoking a cigar when he reached down to pull the thing out of the water. You can see the cigar in the foreground of the picture he took when he bent over — a large animal, perhaps a large seal you think at first, but the fur, still luxurious, is too long for a seal. Then you see its paws, twice the size of my neighbor’s hands. Then you see what isn’t there — its head is severed from its body. A headless bear washed up on the shore on a brilliant September morning. If only the bear had read the sign.
There are signs all around us. The newspapers are using the word apocalyptic. A friend of Colin’s tweeted that by 2030 if we don’t do something immediately to limit the burning of fossil fuels, these 2020 fire days will, by comparison, be seen as good days. On a hike later today, we will notice how dry the forest is here, how the streams are not streams but pebble beds devoid of water, how the peat floor is loose and dusty, how the ferns are browned, the mosses not quite as green. Fire. It could happen here.
I want to run from orange, from fire, from the future. I imagine my grandchildren’s future, burned and turned to ashes. Last year while working so furiously on the book about the climate crisis, I held hope that the poems and essays and art between its pages would awaken us to the immediate reality of global warming and, by awakening, turn us towards action.
Today, let me lay hope in the color orange. Hope in fire. Fires are ancient forms of signals. My Celtic ancestors laid fires during the harvest festival of Samhain to ward off the evil spirits of the underworld. The fires in the West are signaling us. The evil spirits of the underworld are here. And too, in fire there is renewal and rebirth. Some seeds only open in fire. My hope is that in the immediacy of orange, enough of us will waken, and then, as fast as we can, rearrange ourselves as humble, interdependent creatures living in harmony with the forests, with fire, with rain, with sun.