Smoke, Fire and Time

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. That’s the title of a popular book by author (and mortician) Caitlin Doughty about the history and business of funerals, cremations and other death rites in America. It comes to mind as I stare across San Francisco towards the Golden Gate strait, a natural icon that is usually squarely visible from the lookout near my office at the UCSF Medical Center, but is now shrouded in wildfire smoke. At first, I think only of the sudden cremation of innumerable trees- some of them already dead before they burned, part of the nearly 129-million dried-out ghosts whose trunks are fueling our unprecedented and seemingly continuous fire season. Some tiny part of them becomes me, as I breathe in the smoke with a defeated sigh.

Then I remember the fifty or more people who died inside Paradise, CA, the town engulfed by the Camp Fire blaze with a tsunami’s velocity. The literary allusion that struck me as my itchy eyes looked across my fog-protected city becomes too real: bodies becoming smoke; no written will, family or mortician to come to the decision around burial or cremation; no ceremonial preparation of the body before it was irrevocable altered by fire, nor any preparation of the person for whom it was the home for a soul, a story. Some tiny part of them becomes me, as I breathe in the smoke with a painful, mortal gulp.

My lookout is alongside the UCSF Institute of Regeneration Medicine. Inside, long-toiling researchers are at their lab benches on a Saturday, using stem cells and petri-dish environments to try to bring back the microscopic but mind-blowing health processes that diseases rob from us. I try to imagine the human-scale equivalent of stem cell and petri dish, the regenerative miracles that can bring back these lives and communities and forests. It escapes me. Sure, grieving hearts mend, towns rebuild and forests regenerate, but the secret ingredient in all these is time, a certain kind of slow, winding time that seems to be at the brink of extinction in our society and news cycle.

I’ve never smelt the panicked, metallic reek of lethal gunfire, but there are now the stories of several country-music fans who survived both the 2017 Las Vegas gun slaughter and the recent Thousand Oaks Borderline Bar mass shooting, only to be evacuated by wildfires shortly after. Their stories hang in the air. The billowing black-grey pyrocumulus clouds rising over Malibu, like some kind of enormous deep-sea vents that have risen up from ocean depths, are emblems of our infernal reality: our nation is consumed by fire, whether it’s shouted, shot or ignited.

Finally, my mind rests on Telemachus Orfanos. His family in Thousand Oaks must contend with organizing his funeral — preparing his body, removing the bullets that are the tumors of our country’s cancerous proliferation of guns — as wildfires rage in their backyard and evacuations are called. Tel survived Las Vegas, even helped to identify and heroically shepherd victims to hospitals, but was shot down in his hometown.

These perverted American death rites- dying in gunfire and wildfire- are not right. They are becoming commonplace in America, and they are being justified and rationalized, whether by my resigned, smoke-filled sighs, or the hoots of militaristic recommitment to guns and gas-guzzling, coal-spewing American ways. We can say wildfires, even terrible human atrocities, are natural, with evidence of their existence stretching back millennia. But casting their modern catalysts as fundamental, unquestionable rights — to consume and to carry unconditionally — is a match dropped in the tinderbox that our corporate government has walled us all into. The smoke is heavy and gets in your eyes. Some tiny part of the fire becomes a part of me, as I gather my breath and want to scream, but steady my vision on something, indistinct but bright, rising in this rare moment of slow, winding time.