The Great Four Fires
A Transition In a Solarpunk World
1
My kin, I write to you now a memoir of the Great Four Fires and a transition in the spring after.
I remember where I was when the fires became tragedy. I was at home with my father in the greenhouse. He was feeding the fish and checking over our plants. We spent so much time there. Together as a family and I alone too. I loved to play there, to watch the fish, to see how every day it changed. The tomatoes vined higher, the kale sprouting larger or the seedlings poking out of their soil. It was a place of wonder for me. A place of life and joy. We loved the garden and I always felt as if it loved me too.
The smoke had begun to affect the air quality for the past few days and I could sense my parents were getting worried. There were hushed talks by teachers in the school and us kids were taught of fire safety, how necessary controlled burnings were decided and how sometimes nature must destroy to grow anew.
That day, my mother was off at a council meeting and no one was available to take care of me so my dad stayed home to tend to the garden and me. I was trying to get him to laugh. My dad was always a jovial person but today I knew he was nervous. I made voices and I asked questions. He always loved to teach and that brought him some peace of mind. But he kept our phone near by that day and as he was explaining the differences between our little garden and the big community farm, it rang. I still fear that sound, a heavy and ominous ringtone. You hear and know, something bad is happening.
We were already packed. The community was aware that this was a possibility, that the fires could keep growing. It was a very dry summer. In a post-greenhouse gas spewing world, it was still very difficult to predict how any year would go. The equilibrium would take a while to settle, so we would have to stay nimble and we did. But knowing the pain is coming, doesn't stop the trauma.
My dad put me on the cargo bike and raced to the community center, where we would all group up to evacuate by bus. I remember seeing my best friend from far away crying in his dad's arms. I remembering hearing from someone "I think a tragedy is taking place right now" and I remember crying then too. I couldn't stop thinking of the bunnies and foxes and birds and trees and all the other beings losing their homes and their lives.
It was a lot of traveling after that. Our three buses moving from town to town gathering more. We were a big convoy after a few days. That was the first fire and the other three came shortly after. We all became refugees and though we did have a place anywhere. There were too many of us to fit into the support systems of any one community. So the next few weeks of the convoy was us slowly shrinking. Families were kept in the same place and communities were attempted to be placed near one another.
My mom was a great organizer, she was one of the elected leaders of the convoy. And that's why we stayed for so long traveling. I'll never forget those first few nights, there were so many of us and after the shock of the first night with its terribly loud silence. We all began to organize merriment and fun for the evenings. There were meetings everyday and inevitably when the kids got bored, we would go and play in the forest, fields and towns. Wherever we were for that evening and night, we would find a way to entertain ourselves. There was plenty of food those first few days, luckily the harvest was plentiful that year and the buses were filled with unperishables in preparation for the worst.
There was a lot of frustration and pain in the adults. Us kids would talk together and some would cry. We all wanted to be strong for them too. I look back now and think that's when it started. That's when I started to bury my pain and laugh it off instead of cry it through. And later on act stoic instead of letting myself be vulnerable.
2
The first time I felt dysphoria was with my beard. I was happy at first when the little hairs came out longer but when it finally formed fully, I stopped recognizing myself. When I would sleep and it rubbed against the pillow, it was a torment to me. Touching my face was like a shock and I didn't understand why. Shaving was difficult then, like with a lot of things, there were massive shortages of everything after the fires.
The years in its aftermath there was mass crop failure and with so much land lost and people migrating, it became hard for everyone. About 10% of the west coast of North America was taken by the Great Fires. Many industries were lost with the flames and precious technologies. The flames went out and reignited for months, it was a marathon. Once the flames died down for the winter, a great recycling project had to be established across the federation. Expeditions of varying specialists and laborers went back to the burnt industries and towns and got all the salvageable computers, automatons, solar panels, machines, etc. The rare minerals they were made of were nearly impossible to newly acquire now since the dismantling of carbon-based mining practices. But we became very good recyclers quickly.
And that was my first communal job. I was fourteen and wanted to help out. On some afternoons after school, I split apart the pieces of burnt machines and sorted them, so that they could be melted down to their base metals. It was fun. We sang songs to pass the time and people brought their music and told jokes. We made the best of monotonous work and we didn't work for very long at one time.
After that summer I fell into a depression, I started to react to my parents and became rebellious to the little I was asked to do. I stayed out for long times alone, hiding in the beautiful farms with my sketchbooks. Drawing little but staring blankly at the beauty for hours at a time. I stopped feeling positive emotion. I started to forget it. I thought, maybe, I was a sociopath. I was just disassociating, I now know. The land changing from a vibrant love to a monotone hum. I slept a lot at that time and grew distant from my friends and peers. I watched a lot of films and played whatever games I could find. The fires gave me a shell and I climbed cozily in.
My parents gave me space but after these few years and me becoming more distant, in quiet moments as we tended the garden, they would ask me small probing questions. "How is Amy?" *the girl I crushed on.* "Where do you feel that weight in your body?" *I don't know, everywhere.* "Is work okay? You know you don't have to do it, honey." *Work gets me out of my head* "Why do you want to be busy all the time?" I never had an answer to that one. I didn't talk much about myself with my family anymore and they just thought I was going through a tough puberty. How could they know?
My teachers reached out to my parents that same year, they recommended I get therapy. They said maybe a stranger could get me to open up a bit more. They noticed potentially troubling patterns in my work. They didn't know me when I was younger, so they had no reference to how much more outgoing I was before the fires aside from the family introduction when we first arrived. We ended up in a new community after the convoy separated from our previous one. My mom was asked to come stay and help with the rebuilding efforts. My dad was a writer and also loved to fix things. The rebuilding efforts asked for a lot so he would help sometimes and mom mostly stopped helping out with the garden as much. They were stretched tight but they put in a lot of effort to help me find a place in the new community.
It took a while for me to start opening up to my therapist. She said I probably had PTSD from the fires and taught me about many different things. Words like disassociation and trauma were frequent for us. She taught me how to separate myself from my thoughts and look at them. It improved my relationships with others over that year. I felt a hope with the progress and my family and friends were happy to see me improving. But interacting with people was still so draining. I started to think I was just like this, but one spring evening while planting with my dad he asked me a question "Have you ever considered, maybe, you don't like being a boy?". I didn't answer but I wept that night.
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