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| Smoke from the Horse Creek/North Unit Fire, Easter 2021, as seen above the Killdeer Mountains from Lake Ilo National Wildlife Refuge (by Lillian Crook) |
I have vivid memories of past droughts including the Drought of 1988. I also spend time each day with my
mother who was born and raised on a Slope County ranch during the Dirty
Thirties. She tells me of the tumbleweeds, of the grasshoppers scratching on the
window screens in the night, and of the cattle that had to be shot. Mother also tells how my Grandma would instruct her that if they were separated due to a prairie fire, they should meet at the Yellowstone Trail sign west of our place. Last summer,
when we were locked out of her nursing home, I would relish the mornings when I
could call her and say, “Mother, it rained last night” and hear the relief in
her voice. Sadly, those mornings were few and far between.
My husband, Jim,
loves to tell the story about Gov. Art Link and the Drought of 1976. There was a
big fire in Slope County that autumn, near Davis Dam, north of our Slope County ranch. I remember being on the school bus driving home from a basketball game,
turning the corner east of Amidon, and seeing the smoke. We boisterous teenagers
packing the bus went silent. Back at home, it was all hands on deck, and, in our
farmhouse kitchen, we prepared hundreds of sandwiches which I delivered to the
Davis Ranch, the fire operation headquarters (a teenager, I was thrilled to get
any chance to drive on my own – to not mention the opportunity to be in the
center of the action). During a tight campaign for his re-election, Link was
forced to announce that the hunting season would be closed that year because of
the extreme fire conditions and the Slope County fire. Then, just a few days
before the election, the sky opened up and it rained! The downpour put out the
Davis Dam fire, Link announced that the deer season would open on schedule – and
he was re-elected.
Now we will forever remember the 2021 Good Friday and April
Fool’s Day fire that burned thousands of acres of parched grasslands southwest
of Medora, forced the evacuation of the village, threatened the national park,
and scorched right up to the concrete portions of the Burning Hills
Amphitheater, giving new meaning to “burning hills.” We bore witness to the fire
as we drove through the TRNP South Unit, viewing the still-burning junipers (explosive torches in these conditions) from the park’s vistas. From our Easter weekend’s
lodging near the Elkhorn Ranch, we stayed up late for star-gazing and followed
updates on the fire closely.
We awoke Saturday morning to meadowlark song and
found joy in the knowledge that the migrants had arrived in the night. Fording
the low Little Missouri River, we hiked to TR’s Elkhorn Ranch site, where the
buffalo-grass crunched underfoot. Our eyes were eager to spot any hint of green
and we searched in vain for crocuses. A pop of cobalt revealed the arrival of mountain bluebirds.
The interpretive sign at the trailhead
best captures something so true to my life.
"While my interest in natural
history has added very little to the sum of my achievement, it has added
immeasurably to the sum of my enjoyment in life." Theodore Roosevelt
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| Lillian, Jim, Christine Hogan and Larry Dopson, Elkhorn Ranch hike, Easter 2021 (by Lillian Crook) |
By Saturday
evening, the Medora fire was mostly contained, but a new one had sprung up in
the Little Missouri National Grassland’s area north of TRNP’s North Unit known
as Horse Pasture, threatening the park’s Visitor Center and housing. On our trip
home, we visited Lake Ilo National Wildlife Refuge, near Dunn Center and from
there we could see the smoke to the west billowing above the Killdeer Mountains.
This is rugged country and the responders must be very weary, faced with a long
fire season to come.
This past winter, the driest in North Dakota in recorded
history, I’ve been pondering the word solastalgia, a neologism that describes a
form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change, the
lived experience of negatively perceived environmental change. The word is
formed by the combination of the Latin word sōlācium for comfort and the Greek
root -algia for pain.
The writer Robert Macfarlane first brought my attention to solastalgia. He writes, in his book Underland, it is a “term coined by Glenn Albrecht in 2003 to mean a
‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’.
Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining
activity on communities in New South Wales when he realized that no word
existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being
transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term
to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia
arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where
the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends
to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the Anthropocene—we
might consider John Clare a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native
Northamptonshire countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810S—but it has
certainly flourished recently. ‘Worldwide, there is an increase in ecosystem
distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht in an early paper on the subject, ‘matched
by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes.’ Solastalgia speaks of
a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by
climate change or corporate action: the home become unhomely around its inhabitants.”
Robert Macfarlane, Underland, pg. 317
Drought triggers solastalgia – may this epic drought end
soon.
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