Claire Jussel on “Regarding the wildfire smoke covering the sky that originated 1,000 miles away”: A Climate Angst Craft Essay

“Regarding the wildfire smoke covering the sky that originated 1,000 miles away” emerged in summer 2021—specifically in the few weeks that felt too apocalyptic for comfort as pandemic anxiety leading into climate crisis anxiety and the long days filled up with dead grass and thick smoke that yellowed the sky. Growing up in Idaho, I was accustomed to dry grass and wildfire smoke in late summer, but I was aware that this was not the norm for Minnesota, where the park grass normally stayed lush and verdant all season. I had never seen smoke that dense while being so far away from the source fire(s). It was a sullen time, commuting through the smoke that accumulatted over the upper Midwest from numerous megafires burning miles away, drumming my steering wheel to Big Red Machine’s “The Latter Days” on repeat.

If not already obvious to you, reader, it was an angsty and dread-filled time for me. In that season, I also found it very difficult to write. This poem was guided into creation through a class led by the wonderful J. Bailey Hutchinson via the Loft Literary Center. The class was dedicated to offering attention and celebration to the everyday, the mundane, and even the ugly. Ultimately, the prompts and conversations in the class allowed me space to let what was troubling my mind spill out into a poem. Part of the class addressed how to write about fearful subjects, offering approaches to either subvert the topic or to state and acknowledge the very reasons why it induced fear. 

This poem originated in an attempt to do the latter: to reject any effort to wrangle beauty out of the smoke and instead make room for my despair on the page. The poem in its final form exists in three parts, the first of which names this refusal. There are many doorways through which I could wax poetic about a smoky sky—the bright dark power of a full forest blaze, the searing red sunsets brought on by smokescreen skies—but here I (perhaps stubbornly) wanted to address the evidence of loss, of catastrophe, of irrevocable change, and the suffocating exhaustion that came from witnessing this evidence day after day.

The second part of the poem, an interlude of sorts, was recycled from a cruddy draft of a different poem about fear and my sister’s childhood fire phobia. This resulted in a silhouette version of my sister (thanks, Anna) as a sort of archetypal oracle figure that riffed off the mantra to “protect the planet for future children” while also reckoning with the impact of climate change only a few decades removed from my own childhood. This middle section of the poem was meant to evoke an ominous, fretful tone and to compare a house fire with wildfires threatening a larger-scale home place. As I allude in the transition between the second and third section of the poem (“I’ll be heavy-footed. My skull / is too choked for delicacy”), at the time of writing I felt that this comparison was both a bit heavy handed and that it suited my mentality at the time (which could be boiled down to throwing my hands up and saying “screw it!”). In trying to processes mourning on a large scale, it felt somewhat appropriate to lean grandiose. Additionally, this section is an attempt to inject a global, zoomed-out view with a brush of the personal and anecdotal to transition towards the last part of the poem. 

And finally, at the end of the poem: the tomato, my small scope salvation. The tomato plant, both in the poem and in my lived experience that summer, was a small way forward, a kind of tangible evidence of things growing, greening, continuing, even in the midst of calamity. My friends I lived with at the time and I decided to buy a few potted tomato plants to grow in on our deck. I was comforted by seeing them when I returned home, stooping down to check how they were doing, the ritual of watering them, smelling their leaves and admiring (and later, eating) their beautiful red fruit. We did our best to tend to them despite not really knowing what we were doing. The “vine held up / by drum sticks and duct tape” is both an homage to our DIY garden stakes and to the sentiment that we did the best that we could and figured out how to keep things alive and thriving as we went along despite this uncertainty. In addition to being a reprieve of domestic delight, the tomato became a way to shift focus to the world within reach: an anchor that was not an entire solution to the ongoing troubles, but certainly a balm for the burns.