In this strange future we listen for the ghostly traces of organisms now gone, of stories long erased, and ancestors from across the earth to see if we can understand where we are now. We listen to the winds as they race down the Sierra from far away in the Great Basin, making our old wooden homes into creaking ships—ghosts of the ancient forest, timber dragged out of the Sierra after the gold was gone. The wind whips up the fires to the north and east and south of San Francisco, violent gusts that shake the street trees in the city also send embers into the dry grass at the edge of the raging fires, growing the haze of smoke that filters the autumn light. Fire season has become uncanny, the repetition a creepy dejavu, we are just far enough removed here in the city as the light becomes cinematic, the lengthening dark growing all through the week of Samhain, Halloween, and the Day of the Dead. Ghouls stride and lurk in the streets, parties spill out of cobwebbed doorways and jack o’lanterns light up the stoops, all the while the countryside burns. Our families, neighbors, and friends must evacuate their homes while we celebrate the in-between time, the time where the spirit world comes close. 

We listen to the Diablo winds and we think of  the eighty-five souls departed from the ridges and canyons of Butte county a year ago in the Camp Fire. We ask if they can haunt us a little longer in this time of spectacular crisis and twenty four hour news. We wonder if we can let the deaths by wildfire link to the histories of genocide and slavery here in California. We want to be haunted. How many types of apocalypse must we account for? On how many different scales before we get a picture of how long, how wide, how deep and plentiful the dying will be? How long and wide and deep the dying has been? 

In Butte County, the apocalypse came in 1863 for the Koncow Maidu people.  Across the ridge from the town of Paradise is Helltown where the hanging of five Maidu men started the vigilante killings that led to the forced march of the Konkow Maidu from Butte County to Mendocino County- a death march under the guns of the US Cavalry, from Chico to Round Valley. The Koncow had already been under immense pressure- many of them having fled the Nome Cult reservation in Round Valley in an attempt to return to their ancestral lands and not be starved in the isolated valley. This march is known as the Koncow Trail of Tears. 

Beginning in 1996, descendants of those forced to march across the Sacramento Valley and the coastal mountains retraced the steps for more than 120 miles and paid homage to their ancestors in what is now a yearly memorial walk. 

Hauntings of all kinds are occurring here in the foothills of the Sierras. The population of California’s Indigenous sunk from approximately 150,000 to 30,000 between 1846 and 1873. The names of the places we pass through while visiting Butte County—the places where we swim, work, play and go get a beer—they become the names for the sites of massacres, they become thick with ghosts, sticky with blood. Oroville, Yankee Hill, Pence’s Ranch. Jarbo Gap, where we go get tacos and beer at a biker bar named Scooters, is named for Walter S. Jarbo, a stockman who gathered together a group of vigilantes and made for himself a mandate to clear the land of the Indigenous people, like rats, like fleas. All through this burn scar, the names of Indian killers, rapists and thieves are uttered, woven through, remembered. Even the winds that fanned the spark in the grass on November 8, 2018—the winds are named the “Jarbos”, blowing from high up on the ridges in Butte county. They are katabatic winds, high pressure air moving from the Great Basin down through the Sierra to low pressure zones along the coast. The Jarbo winds, like the Santa Ana that blow across LA,  and the Diablo in the Bay Area, pick up in the fall and race across the parched California landscape, fanning sparks into cataclysmic flame. 

The campaign to erase the histories of California began in order to extract resources with impunity and was successful because the early pioneers really could not see. Interdependence was not visible to the pioneer, prospector, homesteaders—just dominance, destiny, and dollars.They became erasers in part because they could not see or comprehend the relationships they were witnessing. They saw only the products of those histories, forests with massive trees, park-like, and rich with flora and fauna, wild rivers and clean clear waters, birds darkening the sky, fish thick in every stream. To the pioneers these were commodities to be exploited or God’s work and God’s offering to his chosen people. The rich land was not seen as the result of thousands of years of care by indigenous people who lived in deep relation to the myriad species, elements, and energies that they were dependent upon. This type of care-taking was not visible to the farmer, the rancher, the miner, it was happening on a scale and a time frame that was invisible to those looking for quick profits.

These erasures were almost perfectly attained, and now we watch the land burn with incredulity, crying apocalypse. The stolen land is named for the thieves and murderers and they wrote the history, they popularized the myths and they sold the story of the opportunity called California. 

There will be no rapture here. The end is not in sight. That is the horror of this, how slow we seem to be putting the puzzle together. How slow the end will be. Are we are still buying the story of California with the power out and the dry autumn air filled with smoke again?

The layers of truth are old, seeded in places dark and distant, and often cool to the touch, like the mycorrhizae of an ancient fungus. To begin to understand what is happening on our planet at this moment—to really understand, to sit with the horror and the tragedy—requires a fortitude, a steely patience. It requires a capaciousness, an ability to look into the eye of not just one kind of apocalypse — that of industrial capitalism and the civilization it has cultivated and protected, founded upon an ethos of exploitation — but also other apocalypses, the ones which occurred hundreds of years ago and whose scars still live deep in the land. We know that this is not easy work. It is easier to look away, to willfully forget. 

As the smoke from the Kincade fire disperses and re-settles into an uncannily persistent shroud of fog blanketing the Bay Area, we remind ourselves to stay vigilant, to remember what asks to not be forgotten. The forests, the fields, the clouds, the sinuous curves of the water have never been quite the static diorama cutouts, the natural history exhibits that our local leaders and propagandists claimed they were. The fires that have torn through Sonoma County, Butte County, and Los Angeles these past three years also ruptured this fragile veneer, allowing for the re-emergence of the ghosts under the veil. The twenty-four hour image factories of our media empires relentlessly create and re-create the conditions for us to close up, forget, move forward, stay too shriveled and small to hold multiplicities. But we can do better. If we want to call these woods, these grasses, these rivers of California our home, we must do better. Like shoots of bamboo sprouting from a root system threaded hungrily and hardily into the earth, the past returns persistently to the present, and ghosts long for an audience. The skin of the earth is a troubled mesh of ghosts, dreams and portents. It is with this belief that we call for grief, for mourning—for the slow stepping into the shadowy haunted landscapes of our home.