38. And now the fires…

For months that seem like years we’ve watched the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests, listened to Dr. Fauci explain and the President deny the rage of the coronavirus, counted the miles from New York City, then Portland, then Hermiston and La Grande as the disease crept closer. And now the fires.

I’ve been reading about 1918 and its influenza, its war (that would “end all wars”) and how writers now are finding that time again and wondering why it has been so little written about. The influenza I mean. It was gobbled up in the War and the Armistice they say, but now they write that President Wilson had it, and that the Peace that was worked out in Versailles suffered from his disease. That maybe the settling of that War—the huge reparations charged Germany and the carving up of the Middle East by the Europeans with their own national selfishness and little of the interests of the people in mind—would have been different without the Influenza. 

The Influenza was maybe carried initially by a duck to a soldier in Kansas and then to camps and ships to Europe and then tangled up with the War. More soldiers died of the flu than of the fighting, and in all over 600,000 Americans died. Germans too, and some say that the flu helped our side; some say it infected all.

The flu jumped like fire, like our coronavirus jumps now, and “compounded” its effects when it touched war. I think the fire is doing that now, while we watch it rage across California, Oregon, and Washington. It’s chasing evacuees into tight spaces, moving with them and firefighters across the West. And if this flu is like 1918, it will, like fire, go out or underground to emerge again in second and third waves. 

We won’t be able to sum the losses of this season’s fires until the snow flies and they are all out. But we’ll know when they are out and start planning for next year. The virus is trickier. Spot outbreaks here and there. Does it travel with heat or with cold? Will it mutate? Will there be a vaccine, and if so when, and will people take?

Today there is smoke hovering over our valley, reminding us that all of it is close by, just a sudden wind or a few small breaths away.

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