In late January, when we were allowed to return home after the fire, we went first to the mountain trails. The beautiful land where we had walked everyday was unrecognizable. What struck me most was the silence. Where I had been used to hearing the sound of quail and hawks, coyotes and ravens, and the rustle of creatures I could not see in the brush, there was now nothing but the smell of burn and ruin.
The UCLA Health Letter in my inbox told that I, and everyone else in Los Angeles, am likely suffering from “solastalgia”, a word generated in 2007 to describe the “distress of the destruction of familiar surroundings”. * At first this seemed an appropriate name for the emotional stew of gratitude that our house was still standing, worried sorrow for our friends and the wild creatures who lost their homes, and grief for a place and time now gone. “Solastalgia” soon revealed itself as a word not nearly big enough to describe the outrage and mourning for the compounding losses of not only our familiar surroundings but our familiar beliefs as the current administration attacked all that was humane about the governance we knew.
Old-timer Topanga folks assured me that everything would grow again, the creatures would return, and the land was designed to burn. I went every day into the burn scar, looking for growth, looking for hope. On the third day of February, a tiny tendril of green stood up in the blackness, brave against the ash. I now recognize it was a wild cucumber, marah macrocarpa, native to southern California. In the coming weeks, more and more vines appeared, growing into patches of green that speckled the land. According to the Nature Collective, the genus name “marah” comes from the Hebrew for bitter, reflecting the bitter taste of the plant, which is toxic to eat, but used by the Chumash as healing medicine. ** I learned that wild cucumber is an “obligate resprouter”, meaning that the root holds enough nutrients so the plant can regrow immediately after fire; it does not need to wait for water to seed and re-sprout. The indestructible root is the size of a human or bigger, giving us the plant’s other name, manroot. ***
With the hills laid bare, our daily visits reveal the maze of animal tracks and the weirdly beautiful wrecks of cars from the last century that hid under the brush all these years. My walking companion, a car-loving guy, hikes down and reports that the pieces of Volkswagen date to the seventies, when Jimmy Carter was president, and we tumble into both nostalgia and solastalgia.
The rains wash away the ash down to scorched red earth. Like a healing balm the patches of manroot vines expand into green glades that soothe. On the tenth day of March the manroot vines blossom into thousands of tiny stars that smell like sweet water, spreading exuberant hope across the landscape.
Soon these blossoms are joined by native rye grass and the damaged oaks start to leaf out with green. Toyon also regrows from its roots, crowning with red leaves over its own charred branches. I remember the night we first heard, and then saw, a covey of quail and a hunting owl. In the ocean winds last week, a flock of calling shore birds took shelter in tall fresh grass. Our delightful first responder, the manroot, begins to blend with the varied veils of green that cover the earth. Occasional spikey pods appear at random. These will dry out, open, and deposit wild cucumber/manroot seeds in dirt enriched by ash. These recent days, we see bright lupine and poppies. No longer a wasteland, we now inhabit a magical place of resilience.
This wild space regenerates with jubilation, but the news from the nation’s capital strikes fear in me every new day for those whose opinions, nationality, or gender flow make them targets. Is there a word for this daily interlacing of fury and joyful regrowth?
On the fifth day of April, crowds upon crowds come out to march for humane democracy, spreading across the land like the manroot’s thousands of sweet healing stars. The roots of our beliefs are giant and indestructible.
- *UCLA Health Letter: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/lingering-loss-after-la-fires
- **The Nature Collective: https://naturecollective.org/plant-guide/details/wild-cucumber/
- ***The Calflora Database: https://www.calflora.org/
