Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

by John Vaillant

All morning, time had been moving in a peculiar way, but this is the nature of Nature on a deadline: things unfolding gradually across the intersecting horizons of landscape and time until that moment when, with astonishing suddenness, they merge and the event is upon you. You wonder where all the time has gone, when in fact it hasn’t gone anywhere, it is the events within it that have appeared to amplify in speed and scale—because they now include you. This is one of the supreme challenges facing humans in how we manage the physical reality of our planet: the deceptively simple tension between time, rate, and distance. A hurricane can be plotted and tracked a week out, where it remains an abstraction on a network weather map, and yet when it is upon you, time and events achieve a kind of singularity and, suddenly, nothing else exists; its immediacy—its presence—is overwhelming.