New Jersey is on fire and so are its local Facebook groups wondering what’s burning
When you kayak through the Pine Barrens after a fire, the charred trees might break your heart if you don’t know they require the regenerative properties of fire to survive. Pitch pine bark is fire-resistant. The boughs may burn; the canopy lives on. The seeds inside pinecones dropped by pitch pines are sealed within. Only the heat of fire can coax them open to release their seeds. Fire cleanses the forest floor of scrub brush and dead pine needles to allow sun and water to reach the seedlings. After the forest burns, the Pine Barrens flourish.
Drought kills pitch pine seedlings. The fires burning right now, in the middle of the worst drought New Jersey has seen, mean the Pine Barrens will stay dead through the next growing cycle. Seedlings that began their life last year will die from lack of water. This drought will prevent seeds dropped this year from taking root.
For $500 you can buy a can of Dragon’s Breath Flame Thrower rounds for your shotgun. The rounds are full of magnesium which, when fired, burn at over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit and shower your target with a wall of flames.
This morning, because flame thrower rounds are a thing people in the United States get to own, I had to spend $500 on air purifiers.
Where does one person’s right to bear arms end and my right to not have to spend money on things I shouldn’t need at 6:15 on a Sunday morning begin?
I feel very, very tread upon.
The morning after the election, while New Jersey has been suffering an unprecedented drought and is under a Red Flag warning to not have open fires, a complete and utter douchecanoe decided the thing he needed do on this day was toss his substitute penis into his truck nuts bedazzled coal-roller*, drive to the gun range, and use it as a flamethrower. The resulting fire almost burned down the entire town and isn’t done burning yet.
*I don’t know for a fact this is what he drives, but since this tends to be the sort of vehicle someone who does these things drives while they wait for their Cybertruck to be delivered, we’re just gonna go with it.
There are so many levels of stupidity baked into all this my brain has fried, along with my throat, lungs, and tastebuds.
It’s not just the stupidity, it’s the disrespect. It’s the entitlement. It’s the fuck your feelings, I do what I want of it all that gets me.
(NOTE: I wanted to vomit, but if you need to see what a Dragon’s Breath Flame Thrower round does like I did, skip to 4:30 for a gleeful demonstration by a fine Russian comrade.)
People who own Dragon’s Breath Flame Thrower rounds watch videos like this and enjoy them. I know there are bad people in this world, but I truly didn’t grasp the level of depravity until I watched this man demonstrate the many different types of things you could shoot out of a shotgun and his cackling excitement about the types of wounds those things could cause.
The irony is that sharing this is now more likely to land me on a list of enemies than the person who made this video.
I woke up this morning gagging on the smell of smoke. Not a little whiff of hmmm maybe there’s a fire in town. The smell of being in a box full of burning unseasoned wood with no ventilation. The smell of my house is on fire and I need to get out now. This should have startled me all the way awake, but I went to bed knowing New Jersey is on fire and has been for the past week. I pulled the blankets over my head and went back to sleep.
I woke all the way up and closed my bedroom windows. I live in a Victorian house with old timey radiators and it gets roasty toasty on the third floor where my bedroom and Art Attic are. When the heat is on to keep the other floors warm, the third floor becomes an oven, so the windows stay open year round.
It was even harder to breathe downstairs, where the windows were all closed.
My kids’ grandmother was the kind of smoker who would take her oxygen cannula out and light up a Doral five times an hour, around the clock. Her need for a steady stream of nicotine coursing through her blood was so great it disrupted her sleep. She loved to bake for our holiday gatherings. Her cookies sat, untouched, year after year. They tasted like ashes.
This is the taste of my coffee this morning.
I buy air purifiers online, one for each floor of the house, and look forward to spending some quality time in my airtight car later when I go pick them up.
The sun is up. The sky is pink. The fog won’t lift.
I live forty miles from the Pine Barrens. There are two separate fires close to me, less than fifteen miles in either direction. We’ve never had fires in these places, next to people’s houses.
New Jersey used to get enough rain to cleanse the air during fire season in the Pine Barrens.
Now it does not.
Despite being a Superfund Site toxic wasteland, New Jersey folks who don’t own beachfront property like to comfort themselves by believing they’ll be spared the full experience of climate change. We take pride in our lack of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and unexpected wildfires. Those are other people problems. This, despite all evidence to the contrary – we experience all these things with increasing frequency. A couple of years ago I stood on my porch in the rain confused by the sirens blaring from the firehouse only to later learn a tornado was tearing through town a few blocks away.
A sobering thought: if we ever need to shelter in place because the chemical trains that run behind my house derail or a nuclear power plant melts down, we’re fucked. There is no safe place in my house.
Maybe this is what we needed, for democracy to be set aflame by people who need to own Dragons’ Breath Flame Thrower rounds, so that it can grow back stronger. Or maybe we’ll just continue to pretend it’s another one-off, accidental fire, and that we don’t have a responsibility to the people around us to fix it because it wasn’t our fault and for sure won’t happen again.
While pushing my cart full of air purifiers to the car, a man stopped me. “Do you think those are gonna fix the air?”
“Yep,” I say. “Absolutely,” sure that with right amount of extension cords and a bit of ingenuity, I can rig up a system to protect us from the smoke, the drought, the ticks, the bird flu, and the good guys with guns who just need to blow off a little steam at the firing range on a random Wednesday afternoon.