INFERNO

The mountains of my home state—the same state whose legislators believe protecting straight people from transgender people is more important than raising teachers’ salaries—are on fire. The mountains where I live now certainly could be; we haven’t had any rain to speak of in over a month. I keep picturing the U.S. Drought Monitor website in my head, wondering how long it will be until our part of the state will go from yellow to red. It’s the 18th of November and pulsing swarms of gnats still appear in midafternoon. The maple trees downtown still look like they’re on fire. Forest floors are so brittle that the depiction, in words, of the sound of anything that moves in the woods now would require an exclamation mark. I passed a grove of oak trees today on my bike and the leaves hissed. On a nearby ridge, somebody discharged a shotgun, then discharged it again. A truck from the Sheriff’s office rolled behind two men in orange jumpsuits picking up refuse with trash grabber sticks. I wondered how long my consciousness would continue to unspool if I swerved in front of a school bus, whose chains clanked together ominously as it passed, as if it might be some kind of Dickensian ghost vehicle. I wondered about the signs I passed: a rusted square hanging from a pole in front of a barn that said “PET”; a flag advertising “fast Internet”; a banner protesting the proposed gas line that announced I had entered what might someday be known as “the evacuation zone.” I thought about my students, many of whom would be spending Thanksgiving with family members responsible for electing the new president, for whom they could not bring themselves to vote, for reasons they dared not share with their parents. I wanted to tell the woman who comes to clean our house that I didn’t vote for the President-Elect and that I hope she’s not afraid, but my Spanish is worse than her English, so I left the house before she was scheduled to arrive, and sent her a text message to let her know the front door was open. On The Diane Rehm Show, Diane asked John Grisham whether his extraordinary wealth qualified him as one of the 1% of the 1%; John Grisham said he didn’t know what that meant, and furthermore, could we just not talk about money or politics? Because, John Grisham said, he was so sick of talking about politics. My neighbor texted me to let me know that the pig he’s buying will soon be ready for slaughter, and that my wife and I had been invited to their house for dinner and to watch Survivor, a show we don’t normally watch, but we agreed, under the circumstances, to give it a shot. At the end of my bike ride, I glided into the cemetery I always pass on my way home, but had never actually visited, and was surprised to learn that none of the names—Savage, Mast, Shaver, Hunter—meant anything to me. I called my father to check up on the fires, which were now threatening to burn the historic Trail of Tears, which the Cherokee had walked nearly 180 years before, at the bayonet points of U.S. soldiers. The air, he said, was smoky. The forecast for rain was slim. The fires, according to some, could burn throughout the winter—and beyond.