Raindrops falling on late summer dust make a particular sound. I woke up this morning thinking I heard it, but it was only of Dad’s sprinkler as he tried to get a little moisture into the ground around the house. I worked on my own defensible space last night, trimming overgrown branches away from the roof of my cabin, filling tubs and buckets full of water on the porch. Dry lightning is predicted for the next two days.
It’s been a terrible year for our corner of the county, where when I was a child it would rain for weeks on end every winter. This year the rain came late and didn’t last long. The last few weeks have been hot, steal your breath hot, but this morning the sky had a scrim of clouds over it, their bellies dark with promise, disaster or both.
We have friends and cousins on the ranch now for rifle season and they, too, are girding for disaster. They are all mostly older, in their 60s and 70s, but they have gathered tools and one has turned his old hunting truck into a water tender. We stood together a while and watched the old water tank fill from a garden hose.
“Like watching paint dry,” his wife said, and I laughed an agreement, flickering my face to the sky. The morning had turned to afternoon and the clouds had turned to gauze, but the air still sat on top of us, pushing down with its heavy ominous heat.
Last night Dad and I drove out to where he’d parked the grader so we could move it closer to the house, ready to scrape the ground if the hills caught fire. Like most of his tools, it’s a vintage machine, the tread of its massive tires worn to nubs. We pulled the tarp aside and he tinkered with the controls. It took two of us, pushing together on the back tires, to force the machine into a lurch down the small incline, then he got behind the controls again and, with a belch of blue smoke, the grader ambled down the road towards home.
I followed in his wake in the side-by-side, a welcome breeze blowing up the ridge to ruffle my hair. The grader goes just slow enough for me to think and worry, the things I’m best at. I live in Eureka now. A few months ago, I left my fulltime job so I could do things like this — follow my dad around, think, worry and write.
There’s a lot happening on the ranch this week. A two year-long project that brought together CAL Fire, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, The Save the Redwoods League, the Mattole Restoration Council and the Mattole Salmon Group is entering its final phase. If all goes well and nothing catches on fire, Wednesday will see helicopters rise into the sky above the ranch, toting bundles of logs. The logs were cut as part of a fuel break intended to protect wildlife habitat from fire; they’ll be dropped into some local creeks to create more habitat for salmon.
We’re all excited about the helicopters, but I’m thinking about all the people showing up, the biologists and project managers and choker setters, people who love my dad and might get close enough to breathe on him. I consider following him around with a cattle prod and a spray bottle of disinfectant, but I doubt he’ll put up with that.
So, I watch the sky and wait, and ponder the kind of world where the people I respect most – tough-as-nails ranchers and veterans who can skin a buck faster than I can paint my toes – face existential threat from an errant sneeze. I think about the word impossible and what it means. I grew up in the 90s, a logger’s daughter in the time of the Timber Wars, when the watchword was clean streams, clear creeks for salmon. The science has evolved. The people have evolved. Now we’re doing impossible things together. Somewhere else in the world, someone else is doing the impossible thing that needs to get done to get us through COVID-19. They’re inventing a vaccine, drafting a policy, teaching their kids, scrubbing their hands and showing up to work at a hospital.
I’ve always been struck by my dad’s approach to the impossible. You wouldn’t think, for example, that a 75-year-old man and his middle-aged daughter would be able to push start a 20-ton machine. You wouldn’t ask them to or expect them to or —if you were writing the best laid plan for fire prevention —depend on them to. But this is what being on the land is much of the time: A series of tasks that often feel hard or impossible but must be done anyway. And so, you do your best with what you have for as long as you can. And sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes it rains.
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This column originally appeared in the Ferndale Enterprise.