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The Burning Houses of Our Lives

January 27, 2019 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

I was mindlessly mowing on the John Deere a couple summers ago, listening to subpar country music on the headphones, when a song came on that instantly caught my attention. It was haunting and beautiful, so unlike everything I had been listening to. The song was ‘Burning House,’ and the singer was Camaron Ochs, known simply as Cam. The song was written based on a dream she had had about a former boyfriend and how guilty she felt by the way she had treated him.

“I had a dream about a burning house/ you were stuck inside/ I couldn’t get you out/ I lay beside you and pulled you close/ And the two of us went up in smoke”

During our December trip to Texas, we hiked through Bastrop State Park which had gone up in smoke on September 4, 2011, after months of drought and excessive heat. It was the most destructive wildfire in state history, burning 32,400 acres, killing two people, and destroying 1,696 homes and businesses. Ninety-six percent of Bastrop State Park was affected by the wildfire with thirty percent being intensely burned.

The Bastrop area is part of the Lost Pines ecosystem, the western most area of the United States where Loblolly Pines have grown for over 18,000 years. Seven years after the fire, the destruction was still so evident—the missing trees, the standing ‘ghost’ trees, the charred wood, and the fallen logs.

Fire kills trees in two ways: by destroying the cambium or living tissue layer that is under the protective bark or by consuming or damaging the needles, leaves, or buds. Ponderosa Pines and Western Larch are the most hardy trees when it comes to surviving a wildfire, which is dependent on the speed and intensity of the fire.

The 2011 Bastrop Complex Wildfire burned for 55 days.

This photo shows the various levels of damage, and the ridge gives us a visual of what the area previously looked like before the fire.

Another fire swept through the area in the fall of 2015—the Hidden Pines Fire. We drove through that smoke-filled air when we went to Austin for our daughter’s wedding that October. Eyeliner-black tree trunks define the destruction.

“I’ve been sleep walking/ Been wondering all night/ Trying to take what’s lost and broke/ And make it right”

To add insult to injury, on Memorial Day, 2015, after excessive rains, a dam on a 10-acre lake in the park failed and flooded this low-lying area.

We saw burnt trees that had acted like a snow fence, causing the roaring flood waters to dump the rocks on the downside of the tree. (Erosion is an ongoing problem in the park as it tries to reestablish the lost forest.)

“Wish that we could go back in time/ I’d be the one you thought you’d find”

The Bastrop Fire of 2011 and the preceding drought was devastating for the park and surrounding community. Trees that had taken multiple decades to grow were gone in a flash of fire. Homes and businesses—gone. Like the wildfires in California and other places around the world. Hiking through the park on that warm December day was a bit haunting—the evidence of what once was stood stark against the blue sky, and the loss was a reality hard to grasp. Even after seven years. Just like the burning houses of our lives. We find ourselves, or put ourselves, in a place that is going up in flames—guilt licks at our ankles, confusion fuels the fire, indifference smothers the air from our lungs. “I’ve been sleepwalking/ Too close to the fire” Our protective bark is breached, and the fire gets to our living tissue and causes us pain and death of what once was. We wish we could go back in time, but everything has changed.

On Friday, sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland about Climate Change. She said, “But I don’t want your hope….I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.”

We’ve been sleepwalking—in the living emotional areas of our lives, in the political and financial arenas of the world, and in the very real existential crisis that we face with climate change. How do we take what’s lost and broke and make it right?

‘Burning House’ lyrics written by Jeff Bhasker, Tyler Johnson, and Camaron Ochs

Fair Warnings and Feeding Frenzies

December 2, 2018 by Denise Brake 6 Comments

One semester before returning to graduate school, I worked as a teacher’s aide at our neighborhood elementary school. It was a traditional, old-style, brick schoolhouse with two stories, wide stairways, and big windows. I stayed with one student who needed some extra help with staying on task and controlling his behavior. I was prepared for my work with him and with a whole school of exuberant young children, except for one thing—I wasn’t warned about lunch time! Lunch was held in a big gym that was built to one side of the school—lunch tables were lined up under basketball hoops, and a long line formed around the walls of the gym as we waited to get our lunches. In the winter, heavy coats, hats, and mittens were thrown down in haste along the wall in anticipation of recess. Excited anticipation in young children is not conducive to savoring a nutritious, delicious lunch, and on that first day and every day thereafter, I could not believe how fast the food was gotten, gulped, and trashed as a necessary precursor to what they really wanted—recess!

Mother Nature gives fair warnings. Sometimes she does so in colorful and dramatic ways: sunrises like this mean that some kind of weather event is literally ‘on the horizon.’ The beauty of the colors are not just visual art to be noticed and appreciated; it means something. When I looked at the western horizon, the sky was dark with heavy, snow-filled clouds.

I wasn’t the only one to notice—the birds knew, too. Every morning usually has a ‘feeding time’ for the birds, but before the snow came, there was a feeding frenzy! More birds, more movement, more excitement. Purple Finches flocked to the feeders and to the ground beneath them, gulping down black oil sunflower seeds.

Gray-cloaked Juncos hopped around on the grass and snow, gathering seeds and gathering friends.

At the back feeder, the beautiful, brassy Blue Jays shoveled through discarded shells in search of intact seeds as the snow began to fall. An old tin tub holds acorns and corn cobs—another cafeteria for the birds and squirrels.

Fair warning in a vibrant sunrise and fair warning in a Black Friday National Climate Assessment that was released and refuted by the White House. Climate scientists anticipate what is going to happen based on science, data, and expertise. The latest report confirmed what climate scientists have been seeing and reporting for decades—the rise in greenhouse gases is hurting the economy, the environment, and public health. Get ready, be prepared, make changes—yet another fair warning—this one intense and wide-reaching. The questions of whether the right models were used, whether scientists were profiting from this, and if this was for political reasons are moot points. All we need to do is look at what Mother Nature is saying—the warnings are consistent and persistent—record rains, flooding, wildfires, droughts, high temperatures, extreme fluctuations, and ice melts. The evidence is right before our eyes. The real question is why aren’t some of us noticing it, seeing it, believing it, anticipating it? Just like any other form of denial: the ‘cost’ of seeing the truth is more painful than the ‘cost’ of believing our own story. How do we not throw away what truly sustains us just to quickly get what we want?

Denial in the Cold Night

January 14, 2018 by Denise Brake Leave a Comment

“Denying the truth doesn’t change the facts.”

It began with some serious banging of the pipes—enough to wake me up in the middle of the night. So I run downstairs to the boiler furnace and see that the water pressure is low. I open the valve to let more water into the system, hoping that will displace the air that is causing the commotion. The next morning I check the boiler again—it needs more water. Not a good sign, but I add more water and scour the floor and ceiling for any evidence of leaking. It’s probably just evaporation with all the usage in this cold weather, I reason. It is Thursday before the long Christmas weekend, Emily is home, more company is coming, and temperatures are cold and headed to below zero readings for the weekend. So…the furnace can’t be broken, right? My denial lasts through most of the day, but the hourly checks of decreasing water pressure and noisy pipes finally force my hand to call the repairman. The evidence is right before my eyes—a water pressure gauge—and ears—clanging, air-filled pipes. Not the way I expected to head into Christmas and not what I wanted to deal with when family was here for the holidays.

Our temperatures have been on a roller-coaster ride—a very unusual winter so far. After a frigid Christmas and New Year’s, our daytime temperatures soared above freezing for four days this past week. The little snow we had started to melt—an early January thaw in the normally coldest time of year.

This is our third winter of a snow drought—we’ve only had inches of snow when usually the grass, plants, and garden rocks are completely covered.

New Year’s Day the high and low temperature was 1°|-18°; on January 9th, it was 41°|28°.

The next day the temperature dropped from a high of 40° to a low of -10°—fifty degrees from high to low in a little over 24 hours! The temperature pendulum is swinging wide and erratic. The melting snow water on the birch branches flash froze into ice droplets.

A half an inch of snow floated down, when days earlier the forecast had been for 8-12 inches.

Record low and high temperatures have been set in every decade of the last 120 years of record keeping, so there’s really nothing to be concerned about, right?

The furnace repairman assessed the situation and did not deliver good news. We may have a leak somewhere in the basement in-floor tubing. We could change out parts for hundreds of dollars that could “force” the leak to show up—maybe. Not something one would want to do in the middle of the holidays, it seems, or in the middle of winter. So we changed the game plan a bit and tried to mitigate the basement heating. Not a big problem in the whole scheme of things. We didn’t lose our home in a wildfire or mudslide like thousands of people did in California and other western states. Our home was not extensively damaged or destroyed in a hurricane or flood like what happened to tens of thousands of people in Texas, Florida, and the Caribbean islands. We didn’t start our new year having to deal with a Bomb Cyclone like the northeast did. The evidence of extreme and erratic weather due to climate change is right before our eyes, in the news every day, and in the extensive, credible research of career climate scientists.

Denial is a very human response, even as we are presented with evidence that is hard to refute. I did not expect furnace problems, and even more telling, it was not what I wanted to deal with at that time. William Shakespeare wrote, “The eye sees all, but the mind shows us what we want to see.” Our creative, sometimes desperate minds easily explain away the evidence that our eyes are seeing. Sometimes, as in life-altering situations like accidents or death, denial can be a blessing. Grief expert Elisabeth Kübler-Ross explains that denial “is nature’s way of letting in only as much as we can handle.” It “helps us to pace our feelings of grief.” But often denial is a mechanism of willful doubt because we do not want our beliefs challenged in any way. What if we would allow ourselves to become data collectors? Most of us do allow this when trying to figure out what washing machine to buy or what’s the best computer for our needs—we rarely buy appliances according to party line. The same due diligence should be used on all issues—research, evidence, data, personal experiences and reviews from thousands of people who intimately know the issue. We need to ask the tough questions and be willing to see and hear the answers. Sometimes it takes some serious banging of the pipes to wake us up and take action.

Not Your Normal November

November 20, 2016 by Denise Brake 3 Comments

It’s not normal to photograph blooming flowers on November 17th in Central Minnesota. The weather has been abnormally warm the last three weeks with daily high temperatures all above normal with most of them ten to twenty degrees higher than normal. On November 5th the high was 72—27 degrees above normal. No wonder the flowers are still blooming! We had cleaned up the garden, pulled and put away the pots of annuals, and done the other fall clean-up in our usual yearly routine. But a small raised bed of spring-seeded annuals and perennials on the southwest side of the house continued to bloom in spite of a few frosts. Cosmos, coreopsis, and hollyhocks of different colors shone on in summer fashion, while most of the fall colors around them had faded to brown.

The only potted plant that was left out in the November warmth was a tropical Mandevilla vine that had produced an abundance of pink trumpet-shaped flowers all summer long. I was sure any hint of frost would have killed it, but the warmth of being beside the house must have protected it from the light frosts.

The next day—Friday morning—rain hit the windows with a strong NNE wind. Soon the rain turned to freezing rain and sleet, and the ice pellets piled up in the grass. By mid-morning, the precipitation was a heavy, wet snow.

We were in a blizzard warning, and schools, events, and college classes were cancelled.

It snowed all day, the temperature fell, and the wind blew strong and relentlessly.

The heavy, wet snow was plastered onto the north side of the tree trunks and burdened the evergreen branches. My ‘color’ pictures showed a black and white world.

Saturday dawned clear and chilly—a normal late November day in Central Minnesota.

The brilliant blue sky ushered in the clear, Canadian air. It felt good to breathe it in.

The flowers from two days ago were folded over with ice and covered with snow. A few Autumn leaves stood boldly in the winter wonderland…

and shone like amber in the morning sun.

Fall, in the guise of Summer, has passed the torch to Winter. Temperatures will stay cooler now with a blanket of snow on the ground.

The birds will come to pick the crabapples like they normally do once snow inhibits their food gathering.

And we trek on.

Flowers blooming in 60-degree temperatures is not normal November weather here in Minnesota. Not at all. This wasn’t some rogue outlier warm-couple-of-days in the pendulum swing. This was a steady, long run of much warmer than normal temperatures that stretched the growing season of Minneapolis-St. Paul to a staggering, record-smashing 220 days. The normal growing season (consecutive days without freezing or sub-freezing temperatures) is 157 days. It’s easy to overlook the facts, because who doesn’t love blooming flowers, snow-free driving, and going outside without a coat? Climate change. Extreme weather events that are becoming commonplace—floods, drought, wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes. Pollution. Water scarcity. It affects all of us negatively in one way or another—some much more personally than others. It’s just very hard to see on a daily basis and easy to dismiss, deny, and gloss over. I’ve worn my own blinders on various occasions—I know that denial can be a loving bedfellow that gives us what we need and want. But soon the promises of the golden eggs are unrealized, and we discover that the excited, noisy chatter coming from the coop isn’t because of golden eggs, but because there’s a weasel in the henhouse.

‘Burning House’ lyrics written by Jeff Bhasker, Tyler Johnson, and Camaron Ochs

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