Tag: non-desert dispatches

Smoke and haze

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A few days ago I woke to a muted orange sun, shining sluggishly through layers of haze. This wasn’t the orange of sunrise—the subdued light lasted well into the day—and it wasn’t caused by the clouds of a late-season desert thunderstorm, either.

It was wildfire smoke. Again.

It’s been more than a month since Tucson’s Catalina Mountains burned. That fire, too, filled the daytime sky with smoke. It made my eyes itch and left ash on our backyard trampoline.

[Orange smoke over Catalina Mountains at sunset]
Those look like rain clouds over the Catalinas, but they’re not.

My eyes have been gritty this past week, too, but it’s no longer Arizona’s mountains and grasslands that are burning. Now California, and Oregon, and Washington burn instead.

The fact that these wildfires are hundreds of miles away doesn’t matter. Air moves, after all. Wind blows. Ash and smoke travel. The entire planet is in motion, and what happens in one place affects all places, in small ways and in large ones. Smoke in California becomes smoke in Arizona, and New York, and Europe.

If your air is polluted, my air is polluted, too.

[Sun through wildfire haze]
California smoke or Arizona smoke? They look the same.

This is, of course, the lesson of the current pandemic, as well. I breathe air out. You breathe the same air in. I cough, and where that cough lands determines whether someone I’ll never meet lives or dies.

It’s not enough to keep ourselves safe and ignore everyone else. It’s not enough for you to wear your mask if I don’t wear mine. It’s not enough to only douse the fire we can see, not if we ignore everything else that’s still burning.

Judaism has taught me that, “If you save a life, you save the world.” As I move toward Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, I’ve been thinking about that teaching a lot.

Thinking about the ways it is may be literally, and not just figuratively, true.

“This is not the last snowfall … But if I were that kind of grateful, what would I try to say?”

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After a stop in Phoenix for YAllapalooza, I’m on my way to climes eastern and cold. Lnhammer and the tuxedo kitty gang are holding down the fort for the duration.

The northeast is rather cold this week, isn’t it?

One thing about traveling (and even not-traveling) is, you stumble upon fragments of other people’s stories. So here’s today’s:

A mom and teen on the rental car shuttle beside me, daughter holding a slim instrument case.

Mom asks quietly, “You ready for this?”

Daughter answers, more quietly, “Yeah.”

Writing for the Long Haul will be on hold until my return. Why not catch up on earlier posts in the series while I’m gone?

– Elena Acoba on touching reader lives
– Steve Miller on building a writing life
– Sharon Lee on remembering we’re not alone
– Betty G. Birney on always challenging ourselves
– Nora Raleigh Baskin on making deals with the writing gods
– Sean Williams on unpredictability and luck
– Deborah J. Ross on writing through crisis
– Sharon Shinn on managing time
– Marge Pellegrino on feeding the restless yearning to write
– Sarah Zettel on embracing ignorance and writing your passions
– Uma Krishnaswami on honoring unreasonable exuberance
– Jennifer J. Stewart on finding community and support
– Sherwood Smith on keeping inspiration alive
– Mette Ivie Harrison on defining success
– Jeffrey J. Mariotte on why we write
– Judith Tarr on reinventing ourselves
– Kathi Appelt on the power of story
– Cynthia Leitich Smith on balancing business and creativity

This is me being brave

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I’m phobic about heights. Specifically, heights with steep surfaces and/or drops to both sides. (One could argue what I’m really scared of is not heights, but falling.)

So walking out under this arch, with drops to both sides and nothing remotely resembling a safe direction in which to fall, took a bit of courage for me.

Arches National Park

In other news that may or may not be related, I sent the raven book, with the shiny new working title Nevermore, off to my agent this week.

Onwards!

Post-apocalyptic writers take note

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On The Civilizing Power of Disaster:

“Researchers in disaster science have again and again debunked the idea that catastrophe causes social breakdown and releases the ugliest parts of human nature. Research from the past several decades demonstrates, as one report put it, “that panic is not a problem in disasters; that rather than helplessly awaiting outside aid, members of the public behave proactively and prosocially to assist one another; that community residents themselves perform many critical disaster tasks, such as searching for and rescuing victims; and that both social cohesiveness and informal mechanisms of social control increase during disasters, resulting in a lower incidence of deviant behavior.” People become their best selves when crisis strikes.

“The history of modern disasters entails a parallel history of people suddenly exhibiting communal, altruistic impulses … A growing body of research suggests that large-scale emergencies loosen social mores just enough to open up new spaces for human resilience, imagination, and compassion.”

My new geographic crush and other things

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So Oregon, which I’d never visited before, was lovely, and the Oregon coast especially so. Forest and ocean and sand dunes! All together, and not separated into the three distinct landscapes I’d previously thought of them as. In the Central Coast we twice hiked through the pines and sand of Oregon Sand Dunes Recreation Area to find ourselves utterly alone on a stretch of wild gray beach. Scared off a bald eagle, managed not to scare off some seals or sea lions, watched snowy plovers run along the shore, the sea erasing their prints behind them. Two nights we found lodgings overlooking the water, once from several hundred feet above it, once from a balcony near sea level. Further north, the beach was more populated, but it was only us humans who cared about that; the water crashes to shore regardless.

Standing atop cliffs looking down at the water, I was reminded how like the edge of the world an ocean is.

Standing right beside the crashing waves, letting them wash over my feet as they dug into the sand, I thought, if I could learn how something so loud could be so peaceful, I’d understand something I need to know.

lnhammer has a haiku summary of said vacation. I want to return with a tent and backpack someday.

Before said trip up the coast, we spent a day in Portland’s downtown Powells (they ship!), and had lunch and dinner with friends, and generally discovered there’s no such thing as bad food in Portland (two words: kimchee quesadillas). After we headed in to the Columbia Gorge and the Sirens conference, where we sated ourselves on book talk and general good conversation amid more towering pines, along a river instead of an ocean.

After that, I signed alongside Cindy Pon, Mettie Ivie Harrison, Malinda Lo, and Sarah Rees Brennan at the Beaverton Powells (which also ships). Malinda Lo has a picture here … and there are now signed copies of all our books at there, so if you’re ordering from Powells, be sure to ask for them!

Got home late Monday night. Tuesday, my psyche demanded that I do some bookbinding for the first time in almost a year, so I did, and last night, one of our trademarked bright pink-cloud sunsets welcomed me back to the desert.

Now onward to catching up on email, maybe some more bookbinding, and pondering a rather thinky editorial letter.

Spring snow

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Had a lovely time just outside of Omaha, in Mahoney State Park, talking about sense of place and writing processes and the many different paths we follow to tell stories and to sell them with Nebraska’s SCBWI chapter — and akamarykate (who is as terrific to talk to in person as online), and twitter guru Jenn Bailey (who talks about social media in sensible, grounded ways).

As I began talking about place Saturday morning, more snow began to fall, smaller, still-soft flakes that drifted to the ground and turned the bare trees to shadow. That snow was still falling, against a white sky, as we all did the writing exercise that went with the talk. I stepped outside before doing some writing of my own, letting the flakes fall into my hair and melt against my sleeves, smelling the cold and the wet in the air.

It was a snow that held an edge of spring though. Or maybe that was just me, remembering walking through the zoo with akamarykate the day before, as the wet snow fell in spring-thawing chunks from the trees. (And, among other things, onto the black fur of some rather unconcerned bears.)

I’m told usually there’s wind to go with that snow. Clearly, I’ll need to rely on locals if I ever write scenes set the area. Or else, you know, go back. 🙂

The conference chatter continued through dinner in the park with those who could stay, and then went on in the cabin we were staying in that night, late enough that I crashed remarkably early when I got home Sunday.

So much fun to watch conversations happening, to see writers getting inspired, to get inspired myself. Thanks for inviting me, SCBWI Nebraska! (Or, as we realized during the hash tag portion of Jenn Bailey‘s presentation, SCB Wine Braska. :-))

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Two days ago, walking through Tucson, I got my first whiff of citrus blossoms–that heady, over-perfumed scent so strong it almost seems artificial. Spring!

Yesterday, driving through Omaha with akamarykate, the brown hillsides had their first green, though the deciduous trees are still bare.

Last night, just before bed, I looked out my hotel window and saw the biggest, softest, white fluffy flakes coming down. This morning, the evergreens are heavy with that wet snow.

A last taste of winter, or a first taste of spring, it’s hard to tell. 🙂

(If you’re near Omaha–I’ll be at The Bookworm today at 4:30. Come by!)

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Am home, wondering who used up all the desert’s blue sky and warm air while I was gone. (Seriously! We have a high in the 40s expected tomorrow, and lows below freezing lined up for most of the week.)

New York and Vermont were lovely … from the bare-tree snowscape of upstate New York, which got coated with ice before we left (and the almost-five-year old who reminded me that ice storms are for playing in); to the steampunk tunnels of New York City, and the city above them, turned to a snow globe (as a stranger on the phone in Penn Station observed) by big fluffy flakes just as I was leaving; to more bare-tree snowscapes in Vermont, where snow, not ice, fell intermittently from the gray sky.

With many lovely meetings and conversations along the way.

(Also, there were rainbow cookies. Which seem to be a New York–or northeast?–thing, and which make me irrationally happy.)

Train magic

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Been behind on blog updates as I travel (snowscapes and bare trees, ice coating snow, steampunk trains racing through tunnels, a city turned to a snow globe), but here’s something lovely: asakiyume and I waved to each other as my train from NYC to Vermont passed by.

It was about halfway through the journey. I was on the train, cell phone in hand. And first we were talking, and I was saying that I saw buildings, and trees, and we were wondering how close those trees were to the trees where she stood. Then she began hearing the train’s mournful whistle (I love that sound) as I heard it from on board, and a little while later I heard the train crossing bells through her phone. And then we put the phone down a moment to focus on looking for each other. And first there was only more snow and trees, and then there was a figure in a dark hooded coat waving, and I was waving back through the window, though it turned out I was impossible to see.

She was gone in a train-flash instant, and then we were both on the phone again, a little bit breathless.

A lovely, lovely bit of magic in the middle of my journey north.

And the fact that asakiyume and I both knew it was magic, and that it was worth doing, makes me want to meet her in person for more than an instant all the more.

I didn’t get any pictures, because the train really did flash by too quickly, but asakiyume did take a picture of the sunset winter forest once the train was gone.

And on into the Colorado Rockies

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After leaving the Gila Wilderness, we made a stop in Santa Fe and then headed on into Colorado toward Vail and Sirens.

Vail itself is in a part of the rockies that’s all about the sharp, tall mountains, the scattered gold aspens on their brown slopes already past peak. Everywhere there was a feeling of largeness, not in an entirely comfortable way. Those steep slopes felt so near, and with winter being so near as well–I found myself imagining a character who might live here, near one of the utterly scenic and rather cold rivers running through the mountains, feeling … well, small. And cold. And out of place.

The mountains here were stunning. Yet I had the sense that it wasn’t a home place for me, or one that spoke to me–or at least not in a comforting way. There’s challenge in those mountains, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Certainly it makes for a lovely place to visit. (And a lovely place for a conference, too.)

As a place to live … it would depend whether one were in a place to want to be challenged by the land on a regular basis. Whether one wanted to be always just a little bit on edge.

Or simply, perhaps, on whether those mountains were yours, as they somehow weren’t mine. The mountains around Vail have a very different feel than my own home-place mountains, and also a different feel than any of the New Mexico ranges we drove through.

And yet …

To get to those mountains, we drove through some high Colorado plains, sage and scrub and flat flat land stretching out to mountains no less steep than the Vail mountains, but seen lining the horizon–creating a boundary for the world–rather than being right up close with their steepness.

And something about those plains spoke to me in a more comfortable way, which completely surprised me. Because if shown pictures, I would have described the land as kind of flat and empty, but when I was driving through it, I just felt … grounded and happy. Like the straight road through the flat plain could just go on and on forever, and that would be just fine with me.

There are voices to be heard in that land, if one has the time and the patience to do more than drive through, and I find myself wondering just what they would have to say.