for a piece of Eldorado NF not far from where we lived for 24 years, where we hiked, explored, and trained our search-and-rescue dogs. We moved away almost 14 years ago, but watched the Caldor Fire for weeks on TV.
Elegy for Caldor Road
Our forest-away-from-home, just out the ridge from the house you built us
37 years ago, almost torched last summer when fire swept through.
Now I’m driving 2-lane, foothills climbing up mid-Sierra, muscle-memory
still knows all the curves. Here’s the singed fringe, turnoff onto one-lane dirt
logging road – hope I don’t meet a truck hauling out burned pine and cedar.
In that canyon the blaze started – the fire’s giant footprint shown in diagram
on TV news while the flames kept changing direction, sweeping through.
Now it’s gray December, I’m driving into moonscape, still-standing pine
crowns lost in cloud. Park at a logging deck – let my dog out. Loki’s never
been here, eager to explore. What’s dead ash and char to a dog? Our freest
hike ever – no people, no fences, no cars. Take a selfie with skeleton
of ponderosa; neither of us smiles. A chunk of quartz maybe left over from
Gold Rush – what does it care for fire? A log charred shiny-black as dragon
scales. And a manmade souvenir: a book? splayed silver against char,
each thick unreadable leaf rings like metal. What is the script, the secret
message? Loki marks a spot where some forest creature squatted, resuming
its forever home in gray-black landscape – but here’s a swath of new green
in disturbed soil – road that wasn’t there before, dozed last summer
as flames crested the ridge? And in midst of burn, a stringer of deer brush,
manzanita, oak, ponderosa, incense cedar untouched. This isn’t
an elegy. Caldor isn’t dead.
~ Taylor Graham
