the Nevada Test Site, the wind from a bomb test that he felt passing overhead as he crouched in a trench. It engulfs me, blasting heat across my skin, between my fingers, behind my ears. It dries my eyes and my nostrils.
Over the mountains, thunderclouds form. I face into the wind and watch them approach. My shadow leans out across the salt. I smell ozone. I hear thunder. The clouds move quickly. A rainbow appears above Death Valley. I can see the rain, but it does not reach the ground. It disappears as it falls. But then I feel a drop, and another, and another. For twenty seconds, fine beads of water hit the ground, evaporating instantly on the hot salt. And then the rain is gone.
Chapter 2
Unmanaged Fire
I drive to Santa Barbara to visit a photographer. After his neighborhood burned, the photographer and his wife, wearing gloves and dust masks, sifted through the ashes. They invited friends. In what had once been their home, they found charred and broken dishes, globs of metal that had once been spoons and forks and clocks and lamps, burned books with pages turned to fragile ash. They found a copy of Br’er Rabbit burned around the edges, and they saw it as an object of novel beauty, an object of fire art. A magazine page, burned but for the image of a man’s face, emerged from the ashes. A mosaic made by the photographer’s mother surfaced, charred and in places melted, but worth salvaging. Half of a coil of green garden hose survived, its other half blackened and melted.
Four days after the fire, a friend found a wineglass in the ashes, picked it up, and was burned through her gloves.
The photographer, wearing his dust mask, in jeans and a white T-shirt, posed for a picture next to a metal file cabinet. The cabinet stood charred and warped, slumped under its own weight, a file cabinet that Salvador Dalí might have painted. The file cabinet once held the photographer’s best work: striking portraits of plantation workers in Sierra Leone, asbestos miners in Russia, a tribal woman smoking a pipe in Burma, Afghani men crouched in conversation. Before the fire, it had been a file cabinet full of images. After, it was a slumping metal hulk full of ashes.
The photographer talks quietly, forming thoughtful sentences that often end with an upward inflection. I ask how the loss of his house and his possessions and his photographs affected him.
“It was a sense of relief,” he tells me, “a feeling that we could make a new start.”
He and his wife and their friends gathered bits and pieces of fire-ruined goods. He talked to neighbors and borrowed artifacts from homes that had burned to ashes. In his studio, he put the artifacts in a light box. With soft light shining from below, the fire artifacts were framed in angelic white. With more light from above, the objects themselves were brilliantly lit. They are cataloged by the street addresses of now gone homes. Many are abstract shapes.
One picture shows what look like the metal remains of an antique revolver from 1325 West Mountain Drive, the wooden parts gone, the iron rusted. From 45 West Mountain Drive: a lightbulb that has lost its shape, its glass heat-softened on one side, allowing it to lean over with a dent in its heat-softened head. From the same house and the same fire: a ceiling fan with its blades and wires burned away, and a heart-shaped Christmas tree ornament now lopsided, a sheet metal angel of the sort meant to sit on top of a Christmas tree but now tragically drooping. From 350 East Mountain Drive: a pile of coins, copper faces green and twisted and unrecognizable. And from 245 East Mountain Drive: what looks like it could once have been a doll or a figurine, seated, with stubby feet and hands and thick limbs, hairless, its skin melted into globs and whatever face it had almost gone, its mouth now a gaping round hole that could be moaning or screaming, its eyes and nose burned flat.
The earth has been around for four and a half billion
Over the mountains, thunderclouds form. I face into the wind and watch them approach. My shadow leans out across the salt. I smell ozone. I hear thunder. The clouds move quickly. A rainbow appears above Death Valley. I can see the rain, but it does not reach the ground. It disappears as it falls. But then I feel a drop, and another, and another. For twenty seconds, fine beads of water hit the ground, evaporating instantly on the hot salt. And then the rain is gone.
Chapter 2
Unmanaged Fire
I drive to Santa Barbara to visit a photographer. After his neighborhood burned, the photographer and his wife, wearing gloves and dust masks, sifted through the ashes. They invited friends. In what had once been their home, they found charred and broken dishes, globs of metal that had once been spoons and forks and clocks and lamps, burned books with pages turned to fragile ash. They found a copy of Br’er Rabbit burned around the edges, and they saw it as an object of novel beauty, an object of fire art. A magazine page, burned but for the image of a man’s face, emerged from the ashes. A mosaic made by the photographer’s mother surfaced, charred and in places melted, but worth salvaging. Half of a coil of green garden hose survived, its other half blackened and melted.
Four days after the fire, a friend found a wineglass in the ashes, picked it up, and was burned through her gloves.
The photographer, wearing his dust mask, in jeans and a white T-shirt, posed for a picture next to a metal file cabinet. The cabinet stood charred and warped, slumped under its own weight, a file cabinet that Salvador Dalí might have painted. The file cabinet once held the photographer’s best work: striking portraits of plantation workers in Sierra Leone, asbestos miners in Russia, a tribal woman smoking a pipe in Burma, Afghani men crouched in conversation. Before the fire, it had been a file cabinet full of images. After, it was a slumping metal hulk full of ashes.
The photographer talks quietly, forming thoughtful sentences that often end with an upward inflection. I ask how the loss of his house and his possessions and his photographs affected him.
“It was a sense of relief,” he tells me, “a feeling that we could make a new start.”
He and his wife and their friends gathered bits and pieces of fire-ruined goods. He talked to neighbors and borrowed artifacts from homes that had burned to ashes. In his studio, he put the artifacts in a light box. With soft light shining from below, the fire artifacts were framed in angelic white. With more light from above, the objects themselves were brilliantly lit. They are cataloged by the street addresses of now gone homes. Many are abstract shapes.
One picture shows what look like the metal remains of an antique revolver from 1325 West Mountain Drive, the wooden parts gone, the iron rusted. From 45 West Mountain Drive: a lightbulb that has lost its shape, its glass heat-softened on one side, allowing it to lean over with a dent in its heat-softened head. From the same house and the same fire: a ceiling fan with its blades and wires burned away, and a heart-shaped Christmas tree ornament now lopsided, a sheet metal angel of the sort meant to sit on top of a Christmas tree but now tragically drooping. From 350 East Mountain Drive: a pile of coins, copper faces green and twisted and unrecognizable. And from 245 East Mountain Drive: what looks like it could once have been a doll or a figurine, seated, with stubby feet and hands and thick limbs, hairless, its skin melted into globs and whatever face it had almost gone, its mouth now a gaping round hole that could be moaning or screaming, its eyes and nose burned flat.
The earth has been around for four and a half billion
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