Reality Bites
On smoke, scorched plans, and the fake thrills of 4DX. Plus: Let's go back to Ireland!
If you, like me, are anywhere in the northeastern quadrant of the country right now, you are probably choking on smoke from the wildfires burning in northern Minnesota and southern Ontario. The air in Waukegan is thick with it, and smells like the world’s largest, least fun cookout. It clings to hair, eyes, and throat, stinging and burning. I wear a mask to water the squash.
I am not alone in the struggle, but I’m taking it personally because next week I was supposed to be putting into the Boundary Waters at Ely for a long-planned, extended family canoe trip. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is a pristine million-acre wilderness in the Superior National Forest of northeastern Minnesota. It is full of glacial lakes, rivers, towering white pines, deer, wolves, beaver, bears, grouse, eagles and … you get the picture. An estimated 55,000 acres of it are also currently on fire, and entry to the BWCA is closed. Since Tuesday, pairs of rangers have been paddling the BWCA urging paddlers to bug out. Thousands of campers have been evacuated, in at times harrowing escapes.
The fires are, for once, not believed to have been started by human error or malice. They’re the result of a severe storm and flurry of lightning strikes July 6 that, coupled with unusually hot, dry, and windy conditions have smouldered and sparked and spread.
There’s not much to do about them. Firefighting planes are dumping water in areas close to human population, but they are too hot — believed to be burning deep underground — and too vast to be contained. And as fire is a natural and beneficial part of the forest ecosystem, they are to large degree being allowed to burn. One widely repeated account hazards that they will likely burn until the first snow falls.
I am not a climatologist and I am leery of spreading my own half-baked understanding of the science at play here. But the effects of climate change on northern wilderness are well known at this point: warmer weather allows pests — like the Spruce Budworm, as noted in this convincingly authoritative Facebook post — to flourish longer and further north, leading to higher than normal levels of dead trees. Record levels of hot, dry weather turns those trees into a tinderbox.
As the author of that Facebook post notes, the least important thing in this equation is my ruined vacation. I feel that. I’m far more upset about the animals, the trees, and the economic security of all the small businesses that make the BWCA such a beautiful place.
As Stephanie Pearson writes, in an aching account of her retreat from the fires at Outside:
There’s a name for this grief. It’s called solastalgia, the emotional or existential distress caused by negatively perceived environmental change. In other words, it’s “the homesickness you have when you are still at home,” per Glen Albrecht, the philosopher who coined the term in 2007.
It’s raining in Ely today, which hopefully will bring some relief to the area and — eventually — to those of us downwind here in northern Illinois. In the meantime you can support the BWCA community by buying gift cards to local outfitters, donating to the local fire department, and — long term — donate to advocacy organizations like Friends of the Boundary Waters, who have been and continue to do the work to safeguard this special place for generations to come.
In the meantime, last night Paul and I gave up, masked up, and went to see The Odyssey at the local multiplex. The closest IMAX showing was an hour away and sold out anyway, so we opted for the showing in “multisensory” 4DX. Have you ever done this? I had not, and it was fucking insane. For three hours our movie theater loungers jerked and bucked and vibrated and rolled in motion synced to every ocean voyage and battle — of which there are no shortages in the damn Odyssey. Fans mounted high on the walls of the theater blew incessant “winds” that were fierce during seafaring scenes and gentle during outdoor screen moments deemed conducive to a pleasant breeze. At one point there was “lightning.” The marketing promised “scents” as well, but of those there was thankfully no sign, either because Bronze Age Greece didn’t smell so good or because the janky theater was malfunctioning.
The movie was fine — exactly what I wanted — and I was grateful that, thanks to my ninth grade Language Arts unit on Homer, I could understand everyone’s name. I’m not sure what 21st-century audiences might make of “Telemachus” or “Menelaus,” though I confess there was a time when I did think “Penelope” was pronounced like “cantaloupe.”
Anyway! Epic, sweeping, star studded, three hours long. All the things I wanted out of an air-quality-emergency retreat to the cinema — or it would have been if I hadn’t been so distracted worried that I was going to slip a disc thanks to the overactive chair. Rather than immersing us further into the moviegoing experience, this hokey, over-the-top simulacra of the natural world took us out over and over as we clutched the armrests and fell into fits of uncontrollable laughing, underscoring the impossibility of the unmediated experience. All the robotic technology of the world is no substitute for the actual feel of wind on the cheek or waves under your canoe.
This time last year I was in Ireland for the launch of Nothing Compares to You: What Sinead O’Connor Means to Us. This trip was such a balm. I loved meeting our contributors Allyson McCabe, Mieke Eerkens, and Sinead Gleeson, along with genius journalist Una Mullaley, who hosted our event in Dublin, and everyone at the glorious West Cork Literary Festival in Bantry — a reminder that while writing and editing is often so solitary, I am actually part of a global community of smart, fierce, hilarious writers and thinkers. Join me in revisiting this more international, less smokey time below!
Hello from Ireland
Go to Ireland to talk about Sinéad O’Connor and you may well find yourself surrounded by folks who met her once, who worked for the studio where she recorded an album, whose boyfriend’s cousin once played in her band. Barely two years after her death she is still very present here — which makes sense,…
On to West Cork
The day after our Dublin book talk we — myself, my sister (along for the ride), and Mieke — hopped on a train to Cork, where we were collected at the train station by a driver for the festival, and transported, along with famed Irish novelist Eimear McBride, to Bantry, almost two hours to the southwest.
I’ll post some more memories of this trip next week. In the meantime, don’t forget! The paperback of Nothing Compares drops August 25. Preorder it today from your local brick and mortar or online retailer! And, seriously, if you have read the book and enjoyed it, I beg you to please leave a review on Amzn, Goodreads, or the platform of your choice. On A*m*z*n in particular, a critical mass of reader reviews (I believe the bar is 25) will juice the algorithm to more readily surface the book in searches. We need you to help share the power of Sinead.
Hey, I just met Una Mullaly last weekend here in Evanston! She was chosen for the latest group of George R.R. Martin fellows for fiction writing at the Medill School.
“the homesickness you have when you are still at home" indeed. I keep telling M, "this didn't happen when I was little."