“The facts do not tell the story of how our hearts are breaking”
-Terry Tempest Williams

Amidst minty juniper shrubs and the canary yellow palo verde trees of New Mexico’s painted desert lie the bodies of thousands of migratory birds. Blue feathered bodies of migrating bluebirds nestled in the porcelain sands of White Sands National Monument. Scientists believe that there is no explanation other than they have all died of exhaustion. Warblers, swallows, swifts, and bluebirds have been fleeing the smoke of wildfires, forcing them to migrate early or change their cloud cluttered routes thousands of feet above the smoldering land.

For months now, when I walk down to my car in the early mornings, it is coated in a thin blanket of ash; ash made of the smoldering land my father loved, the feathers and bones of migrating warblers, and sprigs of young aspen not yet able to paint themselves flaxen and marigold. I drag a finger across the bottom of my window and the grains and sediment of thousands of years of life is hard between my fingers before it falls to the ground again. Smoke and flame are casting a light upon the landscape of the American west and what we have allowed to happen to it.

The American West is a landscape of erosion, endurance, and resilience. Horseshoe Bend in the Red Rock Desert of Arizona took nearly 5 million years to form. The Colorado River patiently, meticulously, meandered its way through the spiced Navajo sandstone, seeking the path of least resistance for centuries and centuries. Slowly it formed a nearly complete circle before taking a sharp turn towards what would later become the Grand Canyon. These weathered places have endured so much and remain resilient. But we as humans are asking too much of them. They cannot, should not, be required to hold our mistakes in their valleys and river beds.

This time of year, the valley of the Never Summer Mountains in Colorado would be bright with changing foliage of the high country. Rocky Mountain National Park is home to many pine and aspen laden valleys, but this year is different. The headwaters of the Colorado River bubble up from a seemingly inconsequential ditch that cuts through willows and tall swaying grasses. This same season, several years ago, I made the hike to this spot, wanting to see where the Mighty Colorado begins. To feel the cool babbling water that empty itself into the Gulf of Mexico 53 years after making its pilgrimage through the varying landscapes of the American West. The Cameron Peak fire has been lapping at the heels of the Never Summer Mountains and this valley since August and continues to grow, uncontained, in this remote and rugged wilderness. It is the ash from this fire, the bones of birds who drink from the headwaters of the mighty Colorado, the sprigs of aspen inching toward Mount Cirrus and Lake of the Clouds that blanket my car in the early mornings. The wilderness that we inhabit is burning, and so too are we, for the landscapes that have shaped us by wind and rain and are part of our own erosion, are part of who we are.

In just this year, 130,000 acres (and counting) of wilderness in Colorado have burned leaving behind the smoldering trunks of Lodgepole Pine and Douglas Fir as a monument to what we have allowed. There is a resounding refrain this year. We cannot breathe. We cannot breathe. We cannot breathe. We have allowed for choices that knocked the air out of us. We cannot breathe because thick smoke and ash gatherers in a cloud above the American west as hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness become ash. Climate change is happening right in front of us, at the foot of the Book Cliffs in Grand Junction burning acres and acres of high desert leaving behind charred sandstone. Climate change is happening all over the state of Washington where people and animals are fleeing one fire zone for another. Climate change continues to ravage the state of California with fires from Crescent City to San Diego. The flames of a warming planet are lapping at our heels as people try to flee the woods that should have been left undomesticated.

It is time to take some cues from people who have lived in these woods and deserts and know these landscapes. We’ve mismanaged our public wilderness for years, keeping fires at bay while hot summers dry out years and years of grasses, spruce needles, and foliage turning the forest into a tinderbox. Indigenous people lived with forest fires for years, understanding that when controlled, they can lead to change, regeneration, and rebirth. They have a reverence for the land that allows them to understand it in the way that it deserves. Instead of showing the American West this same respect and reverence we have pushed it to it’s limit and sacrificed native lands to the oil and gas industry.

Indigenous people respect the American West and understand the care that it requires. They will often burn a riverbank’s brush to improve the river’s water. The smell of burning earth rises above swift river teeming with life. A cultural burn, or a cool burning will often be lit near a river, sending smoke plumes into the atmosphere to cool the water temperature down. These cultural burns are largely outlawed in the United States, leaving our forests dense with materials that make it easy for wildfires to spread quickly.

Months into the summer of burning, I went into the Pike National forest to summit Mt. Wilcox, a 13,000 foot peak towering above three pristine alpine lakes. I started early before the sun was up, and still the smell of burning pine bark and willow leaves filled the air, leaving it thick and heavy. Our forests are not okay. Our land is not okay. We are not okay. I am not okay. A ghostly sun, glowing scarlet, slowly rose above Mt. Bierstadt and Mt. Evans that rise nearly 1,000 feet higher across the pass. For many summers, my father was the caretaker at Naylor Lake, the sub-alpine lake that sits below the summit of Otter mountain, just next to Mt. Wilcox. He would walk these trails and fish for trout in these waters. I can’t help but think about how much we are jeopardizing the landscapes he loved. That morning it was nearly impossible to see more than five miles in the distance from the summit, the 14,000 foot peaks were shrouded in dark smoke.

Terry Tempest Willams wrote about the smoke and fires in her essay A Burning Testament. She could see the smoke from her home in the desert of Utah where bears have come down from the La Salle mountains to escape the unbreathable air. “Grief is love” she says. “How can we hold this grief without holding each other? To bear witness to this moment of undoing is to find the strength and spiritual will to meet the dark and smoldering landscapes where we live.” Now is the time to take back our breath, to take back our voices. To rise, and to care, and to let our tears for the landscape drench the fires and wipe the ashes from the possibility of what can come.

Swifts, a common migratory bird in many parts of the world, rise in multitudes, quickly in dim evenings, into the atmosphere in what is considered a vesper flight. Vesper in latin means evening, but vespers are also devotional prayers said in the most solemn part of the day, evening. Their evening vesper flights take them high in the atmosphere past the convective boundary layer where the landscape changes no longer affect the wind and air currents. Here, the swifts are high enough that they are able to see approaching cloud systems and weather fronts. Now is the time for the human race to look to the teachings of indigenous people, to the teaching of swifts. Now is the time for prayers, and action, and vesper flights. To rise in multitudes, looking towards that ghostly horizon that we have bought upon the landscape and work towards reversing it.

These landscapes that are burning are dense with crisp leaves, swallow nests, and towering Lodgepole pines. The pinecones that Lodgepoles produce are sealed tight with a woody tissue and resin that hold the scales together like a clenched fist. Inside, the serotinous seeds look like tiny sepia feathers. They are safe, locked inside, and will sometimes stay on tree branches for years before opening. The pinecones will only release their scales in extreme heat, dropping their seed feathers to the ground before forest fires consume the resin and wood and bark that once held them inside. We cannot keep holding our breath. It is time to unfurl our clenched fists and open them up to the ways and teachings of indigenous peoples and the creatures that have inhabited these lands for thousands of years. It is time to let our tears for what we have already lost extinguish the fires so that soon, we can breathe again.

**Note: The title, Obituary for the Land, is borrowed from The Daily Podcast that featured an essay by Terry Tempest Williams called “A Burning Testament.”

Kateri Kramer is a writer, illustrator, and book designer from Colorado. She has an MFA in CNF from the Mile High MFA at Regis University. Her work has been published in Axon Creative Explorations, 5×5, Barren Magazine, among others. In her time away from the studio, she enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains and American West, fly fishing, pottery, and lots of baking.