Jack and I Are Evacuees of the Monument Fire. I Can’t Imagine Parenting in this Chaos.

The Monument Fire began on July 30th, the result of dry lightning striking dense, desiccated, well-seasoned timber. We watched the fire grow in acreage, consuming Del Loma, Big Bar, Big Flat, Helena, Junction City as it moved east along the 299 corridor. But the Monument Fire has been growing in a circular fashion, expanding on all sides as the winds shift and circle around. Burnt Ranch is threatened. Hayfork has already evacuated. Weaverville, where Jack and I enjoyed our first home for a little over one month, and Douglas City are under evacuation warning. We got the text on Tuesday August 17th and were relocated to Whiskeytown National Recreation Area that same day.

We knew damn well before we bought our house that fire country was an extremely dangerous place to live. But the stars aligned and we found a cute home within our price range, we were able to acquire wildfire insurance, and we closed the deal. Trinity County is heaven on Earth for 8 months of the year. For the other 4, it is literal hell.

The relocation was fairly smooth, but during my first full day in Whiskeytown NRA, I came down with a splitting migraine that had me violently vomiting for hours. I know mothers reading this will think, “You just make it work, push through it, put your child first.” But honestly, I’m just trying to keep myself fed and maintained. I’m back to functioning at a low level, surviving, trying to make the best out of a fluent, destructive natural disaster with an uncertain timeline. I can’t even fathom having a wee babe wholly dependent upon me for their every need. I can barely keep my head on straight.

And then I remember what year it is. 2021. If I were to have a child right this moment, what kind of hellscape will he or she be navigating in 2041 at the tender age of 20, a mere child in my eyes even though at the time of this writing, I am 29 years old and still a child to many of my elders. I wonder if Jack and I will succumb to respiratory illness or heart disease from chronic smoke inhalation before we reach age 60. I wonder if we’ll run out of food and freshwater, starving and dehydrating, baking in the sun, cooking until the very proteins in our cells unravel.

I try my best to be realistic rather than macabre. But the reality is, we humans have fragile bodies that were only evolved to survive within a narrow range of temperatures, just as we only perceive a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We have air conditioning now to cool ourselves during these scary heatwaves, but if our energy grid fails, we will be thrown to the mercy of Mother Nature. And she is, rightfully, FURIOUS. Absolutely livid. We humans grew and prospered and procreated, extracting and mining, polluting and spoiling the landscape in proportion to our population.

All I can say with certainty is that safety will become ever more scarce. The entire planet is affected by multiple positive feedback loops that are unraveling the climate we knew and loved and replacing it with a hotter, more energetic climate and a beefed-up hydrological cycle on steroids. Dry places will get drier. Wet places, wetter in such a manner as to be destructive and deadly. It’s physics. It’s chemistry. It is the reality we are faced with.

I want a family. I want my world to revolve around the bright new souls that Jack and I bring into being. But I think often of the guilt my friend spoke of, guilt for creating humans that will have to endure hellacious firestorms, water and food shortages, constant migration and relocation . . . all because I, having known better, having known how fast we’ve killed the planet, wanted to be a mother. It’s possible that such chronic guilt would be even worse than the acute stress of surviving continual apocalypses.

Having taken zero steps to become pregnant, all I can do is wonder. All I can do is strive to convince as many people as possible that we need to decarbonize NOW while we still have the time, technology, and cohesive institutions and social structures to pull it off. If not for the sake of the children Jack and I may never have, then for the sake of the children who have already been born and are yet to be born. They deserve a habitable planet conducive to human life. We need to make drastic changes to pass down such a planet. We need to put life ahead of our own selfish, short-lived comfort.

But my intuition knows the message will fall on deaf ears and paralyzed hearts. We should have addressed this 50 years ago in 1970. We still aren’t addressing it. My hope for the future grows thinner, even as I fight harder and more viciously to maintain it.