Race to the Last

When I drove through the Columbia River Gorge on my way to Multnomah Falls in summer 2016, I couldn't imagine having to write this blog post.

I have blogged before about the feeling of losing what was the Pacific Northwest to global warming. Although many of the changes brought to the region by the warming climate, including the staggering heat of July 2015, the shrinking glaciers at Mount Rainier, and the die-offs off starfish, birds, and other species along the cost, helped me realize that the PNW had already become something different from the place of my youth, they didn't prepare me to see the gorge consumed in the red flames of wildfire. So last week, when fireworks set ablaze the gorge's tinder-dry forest, which had been parched by months of relentless heat and rainless skies, I realized with new sadness and urgency the magnitude of our increasingly hot situation. Seeing the flames close in around Multnomah Falls, I felt a powerlessness akin to watching time slip away. To gain a sense of the awful scene still developing in the gorge, watch the video from The Oregonian below:



In recent years, I have increased my efforts to see places in the PNW precisely because I felt the need to race the changes that would alter them forever. In spite of the changes they've already seen, most of those places retain part of their essence and a good amount of their iconic beauty. For this reason, the trip to Multnomah Falls last year left a satisfying impression. I was glad I had taken the time to know and appreciate that place better; I felt at home below the high walls of the gorge; and I considered it a place I would hold in my heart despite any of the changes I imagined coming to it.

As it turns out, I haven't been racing change; I've been racing erasure. I will always have the memory of the 2016 gorge trip. Still, until last week, I didn't think the situation so dire that the drive would stand as my last time seeing the gorge in that state of beauty. Firefighters protected some of the area around Multnomah Falls, including the historic lodge, but much of that stretch of the gorge on the Oregon side went up in flames. The smoke and ash from that fire combined with the output from numerous fires throughout the region to blanket and choke the PNW in a hazy, red hellscape so alien I hurt to even think it the same place I once knew.

Nearly beyond our imagining but definitely beyond any doubt, we find ourselves in a race to the last and quickly disappearing remnants of something special.