13 Mar Writing + Video: Forest Fire

This story forms part of the backstory behind beyon/Sable Island Pony’s song Destriers — there’s a song intro, lyrics and full video of beyon performing the song accompanied by Olive Klug after the photos below

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Every year there is a season when the smoke from the wildfires out west travels across the entire continent to my window, here on the 2nd floor of the west-facing side of Lupinewood. The smoke is from burning houses, farm fields, whole towns, entire pine beetle-murdered forests that were stuck in the ground to replace the endless expanse of unburnable old growth trees over the last century. These fires can’t be put out, they burn all summer until they run out of fuel. My mother can see them approaching her tiny trailer outside of Penticton, in the semi-arid deserts of the interior of British Columbia, 5000 miles away.

The last time I spoke to my mother, she couldn’t go outside because there was no air to breathe. There was a weather advisory here too that day. The people down the street were wearing N95’s while walking their yappy little dogs through Temple Woods. I didn’t wear a mask. I wanted the smoke to be in my lungs too.

The sun was a perfect circle of red in a rust-colored sky, above amber hills scattered with bone-dry sage brush. Each was calmly waiting its turn to become smoke and smell amazing for a brief moment before blending with the smell of burning garbage and plastic, black mold and several million pesticide-soaked pine trees.

Someone in the house sends a text to one of the thousand group chats: “level 5 sunset alert.” People run to the prow and gather below my window to see. I wish these sunsets looked more like the things they represent. I’m resentful of the pretty picture they paint. It feels like a lie, incomplete, and it’s painted in colors I probably can’t even really see with my fucked up, football-shaped eyeballs.

It’s winter now. The sun is a hazy, white circle with feathered edges fading into cold grey. The fires of summer are almost unimaginable on days like this, wrapped in my electric blanket with the heat cranked. But I remember the red circle out my window. Bitterly beautiful.

When I look out over the valley here, the world sort of just ends at the power lines across the way, close enough that I can see an eagle landing in her nest atop them, on her way to or from killing and dismembering some small fluffy creature. That’s just how it is: we can only ever see as far as the other side of this valley we are at the eastern edge of. Sometimes I miss the prairies in Alberta, one of the handful of scattered places I grew up. Flat earthers would love it there. You can actually watch tomorrow’s weather accumulating in the far-off distance, and the sky is so enormous that you can’t look at it and only feel one thing.

Anyway, I know the earth is round. But when I’m watching the sun here disappear, it feels like if these hills and mountains were to all go away, I would see my mom’s trailer there clearly in the distance, wreathed in flames.

Fires like these used to start for a lot of reasons.

But that’s not why these fires burn. And I’m so angry.

I love you mom.

story by beyon, edited in collaboration with Terran

Destriers is a story about causing the thing you are most afraid of to happen. It’s told through the perspective of a forest fire who was born in a kerosene lamp, lit within a stable of warhorses some imaginary winter after some imaginary war. A crack of lighting that could be a gunshot, and the horses are back in the battlefield in their minds. They panic, rip the anchors from the wall, and break out of their stalls, knocking over the lamp in the process. The fire spreads quickly, destroying the barn, themselves, the forests, the world, everything.

I don’t know how obvious the metaphor is for anyone else who’s experienced extreme traumas in their life. But when I am reminded of some horrible thing in my past, my body tenses, my mind goes blank, my heart races, something so much more powerful than me just runs until it can’t no more, and I’m along for the ride until it arrives in fields far from home.

I sort of hate using the word “triggered.” I feel stupid when the situation arises and I don’t have a better, more descriptive way to say what I’m experiencing. It feels like trying to see a sunset from inside a valley. So, I don’t get triggered: I have a herd of wild horses who live inside me. I’ve spent years being dragged through the dirt behind them trying to “break” them. But they are horses, the literal unit of measurement for power, and I’m just a human who they barely know. I can’t drag them anywhere. So now I sing to them, and it works a lot better.

That’s sort of what the song’s about. I’m glad to have my voice back after so long it being lost.

Destriers

“I was born of the oil, of the lamp in the barn by the stable

I kept it warm though the winter tide. Rusted nails tacked to the wall to keep me alight.

On Sable Island, Caroline, Coleen, and Thyme.

Her jasper eyes saw everything in the middle of the night

The lighting strike the tree outside, the sky turn white

Drove her wild, feral as the day she fled the fields warhorses lay.

Knocked me down as she ran away, caught her foot on a root in the ground and broke her leg

I felt her life angel away as the barn burned down brightly as day.

Southern wind, she’s my friend again. Picked me up and drove me north and spread me thin.

Where i saw the grass, and the big tall trees. I watched the coyotes dig to get away from me

I burned them all. Burned everything. Watched the sticks fall down, bones baptized in the stream.

The big red fire walks toward the city, doesn’t give a fuck about me.

Doesn’t care about anything at all.

So we go down. Down where the roots grow. That’s where all the dead kids go

Down where the roots go. That’s where all the lost kids go.”