La Vieja In These Times
I am writing this from Topanga, where the mountain meets the sea in the Tongva language, a canyon village in Southern California. What inspired this essay was the raging wildfire in New Mexico this spring, caused by historic, weather conditions. The official fire season hadn’t started yet, but there had been several vegetation flare-ups where I live, so here we are. La Vieja, the protagonist of my latest novel, La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, (Hand to Hand, Los Angeles, March 2022) is an Elder alarmed by the Anthropocene, the consequent climate dissolution, our out of control burning planet. In the past, fire season raged from August to November and recently in California has been beginning in June, but the two fires, Hermits Peak, which escaped a controlled burn, and Calf Canyon merged on April 22 and became the largest, most destructive fire in New Mexican history, only to be relieved by an equally record setting monsoon.
Many are speculating that fire season may now be a yearlong condition, especially as the Marshall fire, southeast of Boulder, Colorado, gusting 50-to-100 mph winds, burning more than 6,000 acres and destroying over 500 homes, started on December 30, 2021 and was followed by snow. On June 29th, the McKinney fire started raging in the Mt Shasta area which they are beginning to mop today, August 22, 2022 after burning 60,000+ acres. The Yeti fire is only 15 miles away having been started by lightning on August 5th, as were 11 other fires in the area. While we are told how many structures and sometimes people succumb to the fires we rarely hear the numbers of non-humans who are burned to death though that is who suffer the greatest devastation. The [Fisheries] Department of Natural Resources of the Karuk Tribe of California has indicated that the McKinney Fire caused the deaths of tens of thousands of fish in the Klamath River.
La Vieja retreated to a Fire Lookout in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest from which she could see fifteen miles in all directions. She had chosen a lookout where, because Fire Season is intensifying, she decided to spend the rest of her life, in order to see. To truly see, not only to catch sight of incipient sparks before they blaze, but to see what had brought us to this time in history and whether it is possible to extinguish the fires we are currently setting before they engulf the future.
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/wildfires.html
La Vieja came to me because she needed a writer to chronicle and, accordingly, to confirm her life. I yielded to her because she had so much to teach me. I could not write her unless my life was somewhat in alliance with hers. Writing is ethical: I needed to deserve her. As a character, she was far more developed than I was and so afforded me the opportunity that such immersion could provide. Furthermore, it soon became clear that if the planet is to survive, her goals needed to become common goals.
In response, the Writer became a character and found a lookout on this land in Topanga and spent several summers listening to La Vieja, writing the text, also watching for fires and learning how to live in such times. But the Writer was not the only one to follow the old woman. I, the author, the one who is writing this essay, also needed to be trustworthy.
Didn’t she [La Vieja] indicate that to write about La Vieja, I had to know La Vieja myself from my own being? There are scores of ways to be a Vieja. It may not mean that I, we, each find a cabin on a summit and keep a lookout in that manner. But it may mean that I am required to fulfill her calling to see into all the dimensions and not look away. Bear witness, relentlessly, to our own culpabilities.
I must have auditioned for the role without realizing it, not only by my concern with fire and climate dissolution, but my passion for the natural world and respect for all the non-humans. It seems she knew that I had an unprecedented but indisputable relationship with Elephants in the wild over more than twenty years, which indicated that I would understand the direction her life was taking and the reasons for it.
I had had the experience of communicating across species and great distances, Topanga, USA to Kasane, Botswana, then in later years from Topanga to other areas in Southern Africa. The Elephants and I and my colleagues had met without fail and communicated with narrative precision on the last hour of each last day that I would be in their territory. Accordingly, La Vieja could trust that I would be able to convey the necessity and reality of the steps she would take, literal and symbolic, to form articulate alliances with the natural world.
The Elephant Ambassador – photo by Michele Daniel. The first meeting with the Ambassador, the final hour of the final day in Chobe, Botswana, 1999.
Over time, I came to know the Elephant people’s music. Over time, I could hear it through my feet as they did, rumbling silently to each other across vast distances. Even now, I am hearing their anguished cries, the death songs of more than three hundred and fifty elephants around water holes in Northern Botswana succumbing to what might be a neurological affliction whose cause remains unknown on Saturday, July 4, 2020. The dying Elephants have been communicating their plight to other Elephants in Chobe, where I pray the Ambassador I first met in 1999 is still alive, and those we met later, the Matriarchs in Mashatu, Namibia and Thula Thula and even the Master Teacher in the desert of Namibia and beyond to all the Elephants we know, and further still, until all the members of the species know and are mourning while contemplating their next moves for survival, seeking and preparing to yield to another strategy to keep them alive.
Damaraland, Namibia, 2017 Photo by Deena Metzger. The Master Teacher catching the light on the last hour of the last day.
With timing that could not have been planned and could not have been casual, The Master Teacher emerged out of the shadow of a shale ridge and was illuminated by the last light of the setting sun. We were undone by awe. He continued his parallel way across the desert, his footsteps illuminated by a light from an invisible source.[1]
Damaraland, Namibia, 2017. The Master Teacher walks toward the far hills, the very final hour of the final day. Note the light gleaming under his feet and trunk from no possible source.
While disconnection from the natural world and its violent consequences is at the core of contemporary life, such connections as I had with the Elephant people were what La Vieja sought when she sequestered, recognizing these as essential for healing the time. She knew that all life is threatened, and we are entirely responsible, each one of us. Yes. La Vieja knew this in her bones and secluding herself in an isolated mountain cabin was her way to returning to a more ancient consciousness and profound way of knowing. She was not living this way because she needed healing, she was living in this manner because the world needs healing desperately.
She was going to the forest, to the woods, to land, and in that moment, without saying more, emphasized that our natural abodes, our biologic locations are as critical as any social construction. Whatever story was going to emerge could only happen there. This story happened there and could not have happened elsewhere. … By that bend in the river, by that Sycamore, no, Juniper, at that time of day, when the midsummer light streaming toward sunset slanted just so through the Pinion branches, when the cones were ready to give up their seeds and the Bears were approaching in the center of a storm. Place is alive and specific and communicates outside of language. The imagination yearns for substantiality. Indeed, I didn’t always know this about place and time, I assumed human culture formed us; I didn’t know it was Earth.
La Vieja’s goals are clear, if not the way to realize them. She wants extinction to be reversed. She wants the natural world to thrive again. She wants creation to be saved. She is agonized that that the planet is in dire jeopardy. That drought and floods, tornados and glacier melt are rampant. That everything is on fire. All of this by our hands.
Over time, a path opens. She descends from the deck that surrounds the living area, entering the forest below, step by step. Once enfolded in the darkness the leaves and needles were gathering into themselves, La Vieja would not stay long. These were not her woods. This was called the Shasta-Trinity National Forest as if it belonged to the nation, but it truly belonged to the Bears and all the other peoples who lived here long before the settlers came and took everything for themselves. La Vieja had seen a great Black Bear striding along the bank of the river, his river. This was the Bear’s land and river. His ancestors had lived here for somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-thousand years, long enough to homestead by any standards.
On September 25, 2021, La Vieja retreated into silence. The Writer, similarly, cut off connections with us, the author, the readers, everyone. Whatever their lives will become, will be out of our view. But, the author, the woman who is writing this, is still responsible to live by her words and questions as best as she can. She still holds the questions: What is the role of an old woman at the end of her life? What is the role of the elder?
By Sunday afternoon, on May 8, 2022, the fires in New Mexico had burned over 270,000 acres. I went to the outlook on my land from which I can see into Topanga State Park where several fires burned during the time La Vieja was being written. I found myself bearing witness again as I had for so long, as if the land itself, and fire, itself, were, once again, demanding the intimacy of awareness.
This year, I am not only looking for fires but following the horrific violence being inflicted by the war against Ukraine which is simultaneously a war against the Earth. It is important not to distinguish them. A single war with different faces is being waged violently with many victims: humans, animals, birds, Earth. All those injured and terrorized call us to experience their on-going agony as if it is our own, as if we are suffering it, which we are.
https://cdnph.upi.com/pv/upi/6364ea397a7d78397f971ad08647d8c7/RUSSIA-UKRAINE-WAR.jpg
I wonder what La Vieja would say if she would return to speak to us. She might say, “This is our war. We started it. We imagined it, or wars like it, and so it has come to be. We are a bellicose species and we have developed the art of imagining war, whether it is in the form of the weapons we invent, the homicidal entertainments we pursue, or the combative language we use. We are always creating wars and they are always coming to life.”
Without La Vieja, we have to rely on ourselves to bear witness to these horrific times and to resolve this violence and brutality. She was a guide and could be again as we review how she lived those last years she allowed me, us, to observe her life and transformations.
What does an old woman do at the end of her life?” …. “The job of the elder is to remember how it was once before we destroyed it. To remember and to restore. To remember and to restore.
These are concluding words by Laura Simms, Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Story Telling, in her Afterword to La Vieja.
I take them to heart. Do I remember? Recently when alongside the Elephants and other animals in Africa, scenes I saw what resembled paradise—the lion lying down with the giraffe in a territory set aside for such relationships.
Mashatu, Botswana, 2016. Photo by Deena Metzger
Here is the moment: lion, giraffe, co-existing, elephant in the background, a lush flowering landscape; it reveals what is possible—and if for the beings of the natural world, then also for us. The medicine for ending war and the medicine for ceasing ecocide, the methods, the strategies, the actions, are the same—interrelationship, interconnection, interdependence.
We can choose between the ongoing brutal assaults on the Earth, from war to extraction industries that support our life styles, the forests burning, the devastating heat waves and floods, for which we are all responsible—all of us, you, the reader and I, myself, absolutely—and the peace and beauty that emerges from the vitality that is intrinsic to the network of connections between all beings of the natural world. Even or because We are responsible for the devastation, We can choose the alternatives; We can—and I pray will—find the beautiful ways toward peaceful co-existence and restoration of the natural world.
Again, the animals show us the ways; they evolve out of deep relationship between all beings.
Mashatu, Botswana, 2016, Photo by Deena Metzger (One of a series of Elephants seemingly in prayer)
[1] Deena Metzger’s Opening Convocation at International Free the Elephants Conference & Film Festival April 27-29, 2018, Portland, Oregon.
For more information about Deena Metzger’s 2022-2023 writing classes, 19 Ways workshops, and other events, please visit her website.
I, too, am an old woman, passionate and torn as you are. Cut off from other human contact
by lung conditions, susceptible to Death by Covid, I can only communicate with other humans
by phone or computer.
In my garden it is different. I respect and thank all living there, and they all thrive. we
converse. I care for them. I envision a better future for them.
I write letters begging for mercy for the earth. The churches, the spiritual traditions, and
they are everywhere, easily recognizeable or not, MUST recall, study, reframe the
teachings, and get them out there. Maybe we need to admit to the existence of evil.
Now there's a war worth fighting.
Gratitude to you and yours, Deena; I and many others depend upon your efforts and
leadership.
Karen