San Juan Basin Public Health advises that you remain indoors if smoke is thick or becomes thick in your neighborhood… If visibility is less than 5 miles in smoke in your neighborhood, smoke has reached levels that are unhealthy…
— From a San Juan Basin Public Health advisory, June 11, 2018
The wide mountain valley that stretches between Durango, Colorado and the Southern Ute Indian Reservation was blanketed with a light haze of wood smoke on Sunday morning, June 10, as I drove to the Durango La Plata Airport to begin my flight to Seattle, WA. Further up the Animas River valley, the 416 Fire continued to rage, threatening homes and helping to instigate a complete closure of the San Juan National Forest. The size of the fire was estimated at about 22,000 acres on June 11, ten days after it was first reported.
The InciWeb website states that about 917 men and women will be fighting the fire today, doing their level best to protect homes and other human-built structures from permanent damage.
The smoke, meanwhile… well, there’s not much we can do about that. The fire is generating a lot of smoke, which is, in turn, generating daily air quality warnings from San Juan Basin Public Health.
Our culture is not in complete agreement about wildfire. Some of us see occasional wildfire as an essential element in a healthy forest — and would argue that the “zero tolerance for wildfire” policy maintained by the U.S. Forest Service, for the past 100 years, is one of the main reasons we’ve seen such large fires during the past decade… in Colorado and New Mexico and California and Montana… and all across the American West.
Other folks still support a “total fire suppression” philosophy, although this approach no longer appears scientifically or financially viable. Even Forest Service personnel have lately expressed doubts about the USDA’s past fire suppression policies, and about the drain caused on their limited federal budget allocations by their attempts to control wildfires.
Fighting fires is not for the weak of heart.
Neither is fighting about beliefs and philosophies.
As I said, I’d driven through the smoky haze on Sunday morning to catch a plane flight to Seattle. My immediate family — my sister Cecilie and myself, plus our numerous children and grandchildren — were gathering there for a “Celebration of Life” in honor of my mother, who passed away last fall. The celebration was to involve certain things my mother had loved doing — cooking and eating, a round of golf, singing around a campfire, doing arts and crafts with the children, sharing stories.
Being a family.
I’d flown to Seattle a month earlier to help my sister plan the event, and during that visit, I’d come across a yellowed sheet of lined paper among Mom’s keepsakes, decorated with her elegant handwriting and titled, “The Right Way to Argue.”
My mother spent 68 years married to a man who loved to argue, and we cannot doubt that Mom learned a thing or two about verbal combat during those years. Her one-page summary includes this straightforward advice:
The Right Way to Argue
1. First, know what you want.
2. Express your feelings as clearly as possible.
3. Speak only for yourself; never presume to know the needs and desires of your partner prior to his or her stating them.
4. When you are speaking, never attack or belittle your partner.
5. When listening, give your full attention to your partner — don’t interrupt to make a point, and don’t cheat him or her by using the time to formulate a response.
6. If necessary, use written expressions of your feelings to get negotiations started. If you begin each sentence with “I feel” — as in, “I feel hurt when I think you’re not listening” — this will help you avoid the more explosive, “You never listen to me!”
7. Remember: the object here is to bring the two of you closer, step by step, until you reach a point of agreement.
8. And a well-timed hug never hurts.
To make things a bit more interesting, this one-page essay was stapled to a letter I’d written and mailed to Mom in 1993 — a few weeks before I moved to Pagosa Springs, when I was still living in Alaska. Mom had saved every letter she received from her children, and every photograph, and it’s easy to assume that her brief essay about ‘The Right Way to Argue’ was connected, in some way, to my 1993 letter — since the two were found stapled together.
And, in fact, my (somewhat painful) letter also addressed the concept of fighting, within a partnership.
When I wrote my letter in 1993, Clarissa and the two girls had already arrived in Pagosa Springs and were settling into a tiny, rented cabin on San Juan Street, on the banks of the San Juan River. My son, Kahlil and I were still in Alaska, working at our jobs for a few additional weeks — hoping to start off our new lives in Colorado with a bit of a nest egg. Clarissa and I had been mainly self-employed in Alaska, and we expected to be mainly self-employed in Pagosa Springs, but starting a new business in a new, unfamiliar town poses certain financial and logistical challenges. We knew we might be living on Food Stamps for a while.
My letter to my mom, however, hardly mentioned the challenging financial situation into which I was headed. Mostly, my letter talked about fighting.
1993 was one of the more difficult years in my marriage to Clarissa. And as happens with any typical marriage, the conflicts were affecting the people around us. Our children. Our friends. Our parents. We did our best to keep the turmoil from causing collateral damage, but maybe our best wasn’t good enough. The smoke, after all, effects everyone.
From that 1993 letter:
“Well, Dear Mother, I thought I would have my ‘essay’ done by now, but alas, other things have come first lately. The questions you asked in your last letter would have been thoughtfully answered if I had [written my essay,] but now I can’t keep you waiting and I will answer as best I can…”
I don’t have access to Mom’s original letter, but I can guess from my response that her first question was something like, “How are the kids doing?” Mom’s next question concerned my relationship with my wife, known to everyone (back in 1993) by her nickname: Seya.
“What value do I give to my relationship with Seya? I consider her my best friend, and also my ‘best enemy.’ In many areas, we are helpful and consoling of one another. In many areas we have been, and still are, adversaries.”
As I consider this written note from 25 years ago, I find myself wondering: Did Clarissa and I stay together for 36 years, mainly so that we could learn the finer points of combat?