With fire season, it’s a more active fear. You know when it’s coming, give or take a month or two, though no one can say exactly when or where the next big fire will be. In the meantime, there’s always something to check — the weather or the air quality, the Cal Fire website or Google Maps’ wildfire layer — always a chance that the wind will pick up and one of the small brush fires nearby will jump the highway. The fear of fire is a constant threat, a loss of safe harbor and refuge that, as a parent, I find especially difficult to reconcile.
You want your children to have less anxiety than you do. (That’s the American dream, right?) Still, there’s only so much you can hide from your kids. Given all the talk of fires and smoke, it’s not surprising that my 4-year-old daughter has started to pick up some of the fears swirling around her.
“Is there a fire right now?” she asked a few weeks ago when our air filter kicked on with a little whoosh, a sign of less than optimal indoor air quality.
“No,” I said, willing myself not to verify this on my phone, “there aren’t any fires right now.”
Reassured, her face relaxed and she settled into the couch next to me.
“Dada,” she said, eventually, “where do the fires come from?”
It’s a good question. And I tried my best to give her a good answer, to explain that wildfires are both natural and man-made, that sometimes there’s a stray piece of charcoal or an errant match, that sometimes people aren’t as careful as they should be, and then there’s the question of wind. I tried to explain that fires are actually good for the forest, that they clear out the underbrush, and some trees, like the Giant Sequoia, need fires to regenerate.
That’s not the whole story, of course. But how can you explain climate change and political inaction to a 4-year-old? How do you tell her that the fires were created by all us — by the choices we make at the grocery store, by our trip to the store, by our trip to visit her cousins in Philadelphia? How can you tell a 4-year-old that we knew this was going to happen, that we’ve known for years and did nothing to stop it?
