A Finger of Owls   

by Julia Corbett

I awoke in darkness to the smell of smoke blowing in through open windows. There is no smell as disconcerting and discomposing of sleep when you live in the woods in a wooden structure.  Winter mountain snows were paltry and we pinned our hopes on raucous spring storms that never came.  Now in June, a fire in full fury burns in record heat and rock-bottom humidity about fourteen miles south of my cabin.  In what is typically the lushest month, the meadow grass is browning, holding on, quickly trying to make seed.  The midday sun casts a rosy-orange glow on every surface.  Smoky sunsets smolder across the horizon.  Bits of ash float by the windows, resembling small gray bugs, flitting up, floating down, briefly up, then again down.

Officials tell us to get used to this - a warming, burning West.  My neighbors and I realize that fires are an expected risk - though never a welcome one - for the privilege of living in the woods.  But we never bargained for a drastically and abnormally warming planet.  The warming temperatures, in addition to shrinking snow pack and soil moisture, have created severe stress for the trees and good homes for beetles - pine beetle, spruce beetle, fir beetle.  They burrow through bark and lay eggs that feast when they hatch.  Within a year, the needles start to turn red-brown, and by the next year, the entire tree is clothed in red, like a torch ready to burn.  An added consequence of warming temps is that some beetle species now complete their life cycles in one year rather than two, essentially doubling their population.

Though I have lived here just six seasons, I know the symphony of Wyoming summer - when the aspen leaf out, when I spy the first western tanager, when the spring peepers fall silent, when the sandhill cranes fly south.  It's painful to imagine this music and its choreography changed.  Already, pikas, those sweet-faced rodents who squeak from alpine rock-fields at passing hikers, are on the brink of extinction: There is no cooler, higher elevation for them to seek.