Field Notes #2
(Alberta Wildfires)

It’s happening just the way we thought it would: wildfire smoke in the middle of May, ash coating the new leaves and the premature lilacs, pavement too hot to walk the dogs during the day so we wait for the evening, the streetlights radiating smoke, the occasional, solitary, exhausted moth circling listlessly. The neighbours mow their lawns with zombie focus. I can feel them eyeing my dandelions, my back yard full of last year’s unpulled thistles, and yes, I know, I have to, I have to keep up appearances, I am a renter and my security demands it. I’m waiting though, because even if it’s thirty degrees and the crows are labouring in the trees, there’s still something hatching, something burrowing its way up from underground to greet its new life, to see the dull orange sun for the very first time. Surely we don’t need to cut it all down just yet.

It’s hard to sleep, the dogs are restless, the smell of smoke prods us into vigilance, my dreams are vivid and frightening and I wake up to an orange strip of light that cuts across my face at five in the morning because I never manage to close the curtains all the way. I roll over and realize I’m dreaming before the dream takes me, I know I’m sleeping before I’m all the way asleep.

I dreamed I was a riverbank and I knew and was known by everything that had ever grown on me, by all of the water that had flowed past me and by every salmon that had burrowed into me. I had cradled every larval stonefly and every sprouting tree, I had witnessed every death, every fallen nest had fallen into me and I had buried every blade of grass and every muskrat’s child inside my own unending body. I remembered all of it, I celebrated all of it, I mourned and longed for all of it. In the hour of my dream all of time swept through me, every fire and every flood and every baptism and every funeral. I knew, in my dream and since my dream, that all of life is this way, that the stillness and the movement are one thing, the coming and going, the sorrow and joy. And I don’t know why that dream chose me, but I felt chosen by it, that it was in the world and it came to me. The night before, I had a dream about buying bubble wrap, and before that a dream that my teeth had fallen out, and then with no warning I was a riverbank, and now I will never not know what it is to be a riverbank.

Ash is lying greasy on the Nechako and it is much too hot for the sturgeon and the salmon. Last night I stood in my yard and watched ash drifting down and the little woolly aphids spinning up from the grass, looking just like the ash but hopeful, living. I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing now, I don’t know why we have to mow the lawn and have jobs. Maybe if we stopped, the grief would overtake us, and maybe we should be overtaken. I think about how that would be, to be overrun in that way, and I have decided that maybe it should overflow me, sweep away my fear of losing, immerse me. Maybe it should swallow me whole, and when it does, maybe the riverbank dream will find me again, and with it the courage and the patience to grieve the whole world, to honour all of it, grow more loving and more courageous through all of it, to let it break my heart over and over again and come back and back and back, to loving what’s left more than before, better than before, until nothing remains.

Nursery,
36”x48”
oil on linen,
2022.