Forest Fire
By Finlee LeBouef
*comparing the effects of climate change on the writer’s home state, Colorado, to those of Maine
It’s October again
the whole world sighing into itself, breathing out sunset
orange red and yellow swaying aspens, dancing in clouds brought down to earth.
Fall doesn’t look like where I grew up.
It looks like long rolling plains fading from green to brown,
like a grass blanket skyline,
like snowmelt rivers changing
from white water rough to sleepy winter winding.
We don’t get glowing trees or rolling morning fog,
or we didn’t used to.
We didn’t when I was growing up.
I went to my old home this summer and couldn’t see anything but green,
shining unnatural emerald trees and grass and flowers, like a cursed stolen treasure.
The rain fell so heavy and constant every June day,
for two months after my dad’s front yard was jumping with grasshoppers.
My dad grew up back home too, deep in the mountains
where the rolling grass hills fade to rock and ice
where kids grow up with one leg short from living on a frozen rockslide.
He said when he was a kid that it wasn’t really summer until mid-May,
when the toads and lightning bugs would reappear from winter
and every night would bring a light show and a symphony.
That there used to be winding ice melts and flaming autumn leaves
leading down from the hilltops dragging away the summer,
that the flood season spring and fire season fall I grew up with
wasn’t even meant to be there anyway.
I’m half a world away now,
only some handprints in powdery snow
left to show of me
in that old home away from home.
And when my dad calls me,
every other week, consistency like a church bell,
just to make sure I’m okay,
asking if I need anything before the next hurricane hits,
I want to ask him
if the leaves are changing on the mountain slopes,
if the buffalo grass is turning brown,
if the white water rivers are starting to freeze.
And I guess I don’t have anything of my childhood anymore
cause he says there hasn’t been a dry spell in two years,
and it hasn’t got cold enough for the rivers to freeze in even longer,
and well, shouldn’t I know that?
But all I can really think about is the first time I saw a real flash flood,
my sister’s hand on my back,
pushing me forward down the sloping hills,
running from a gathering storm.
I should have known those rolling clouds were gonna wash away more,
more than just the dust and leaves,
that something of the toad and lightning bug summer
was going too.
Or maybe had been gone,
and whatever time I thought I had to look back
was disappearing behind me
like steam rising above a forest fire.