S4E30: Episode 100 | Former Wildland Firefighter Ruth Nolan's Literary Mission

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe and welcome to this hundredth episode of 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I, as always, am your host, Chris Clarke and we recorded a lot of really wonderful things on the evening of Thursday, August 7th. So much great work from half a dozen wonderful activists, journalists and writers. And because we have so much good content, we are breaking this episode up into six pieces rather than have an hour and 45-minute episode. We're considering all of this the hundredth episode in our hearts, but we are numbering them as distinct episodes to make the podcast distributors happy.

0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): So don't be too confused. Some of them will be a little shorter than usual, others will be a little bit longer. I am just pleased as hell with what people brought to the table last night. This final chapter features Ruth Nolan, a former wildland firefighter and the grand dame of desert poetry, at least in California. She's a longtime friend. Ruth is the first person I really met in the desert writers’ community back when I moved to the desert.

0:01:44 - (Chris Clarke): She immediately invited me to show up at readings with my own work. That was a decade and a half ago. I couldn't be more pleased than to close out this special barrage of episodes with Ruth's work. Closeness out. I couldn't think of a better person to bring this to a really good close than Ruth Nolan, who is, aside from being another member of the KCET mafia. She still writes there. I stopped a few years ago.

0:02:11 - (Chris Clarke): But she still is repping the desert really nicely in kcet. She's a former wildland firefighter with the blm, California Desert District and the US Forest Service, is a prolific writer and scholar who grew up in the Mojave Desert. She now lives in Joshua Tree and works as a professor of English, Creative Writing and Native American Literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. She is the author of Ruby Mountain Finishing Line, editor of no Place for a Puritan, the Literature of California's Deserts, which is Heyday Press from that was about 15 years ago, wasn't it Ruth?

0:02:47 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, and co editor of Fire and Rain Eco Poetry of California Scarlet Tanager, which won a 2018 Eric Hoffer Independent Publishing Finalist Award in Poetry. Ruth, thank you so much for joining us tonight.

0:03:01 - (Ruth Nolan): Well, thank you for having me. It's really a huge honor. Just really, really blown away by everybody who's spoken and read and just really motivating inspirational and what's better than to hear a lot of really creative and important and urgent desert voices, especially in the times we're in. And I'm with you. I think we need to do another desert environmental reading at the Beatnik. It's been quite a long time Rally some like what you're doing here at the Beatnik.

0:03:31 - (Ruth Nolan): I'm going to read a couple of poems from my first book, Ruby Mountain and this goes back to the kind of beginning days of the solar push back back in 2010. 11 Chris was there ahead of me. There weren't many people in the desert then, not many of us who knew what was going on. But just knowing all that was suddenly coming down the renewable energy thing, it was a lot to bear and so I wrote a poem about one of the protests Beautiful Remains U HA. Desert, California I saw three golden eagles on the morning of an all night mourning ceremony sponsored by Kumeya Indian tribe who for centuries have called this part of the desert home.

0:04:12 - (Ruth Nolan): I saw three golden eagles on the night of a night long morning ceremony for the eagles being killed for the tortoises being killed, for the tall ocotillo being killed for all that is being sacrificed in the name of renewable energy. The first eagle landed in the fast lane of I60 in the Badlands as I drove through and was waiting there. He lifted slowly as I approached, fattened with its kill. I continued on my way along the lonely drive to the ceremony.

0:04:47 - (Ruth Nolan): The second eagle was painted on a truck on i10 near Palm Springs. I kid you not. And rode beside me. Eagle trucking for more than 30 miles. The Santa Ana winds at our backs, stronger than life, taller than wind towers. The third eagle was a piece of fine art carved into the bolero tie of the tribal chairman in ivory white. Every fine detail of feather chiseled like a wind heart. I'm telling you this story because it's true.

0:05:20 - (Ruth Nolan): Because all three eagles flew above our heads. Men shook rattles and sang bird songs all night long from sunset to dawn. Because we all wept on the hill by the medicine wheel. And then the sun grew too warm and the wind suddenly died down. Chris, I think you might have been there. Did you go to that?

0:05:43 - (Chris Clarke): I. There were a couple of times. I was down in Imperial. This was in Ocotillo?

0:05:48 - (Ruth Nolan): Yeah, near Alcotillo.

0:05:49 - (Chris Clarke): Okay.

0:05:50 - (Ruth Nolan): Preston Arrow Weed was one of the movers and shakers behind that one. Yeah. Anthony. I Can't remember his name, but one of the Kumeyaay tribes. The next one, this little bone I've been picking. Because all of a sudden all these things are being published all over social media about the King Clone Crusoe. And this one writer published in the San Francisco Gate. The title of the article was there's a 14,000 year old creosote. Nobody cares.

0:06:17 - (Ruth Nolan): And I mean. And then the article went on to tell people exactly how to get there. I just, I don't know, I was having a bad day. Oh my God. So I wrote a really long comment to the author. I've not heard back. I'm like, dude, you gotta take this down, you gotta change this. So I actually written a poem about the King Clone, but I call it Queen Clone. I hope you don't mind because we care. We care. Start from the tight knit center. From a seed excreted by a condor, nurtured by a drop of water off the back of a saber toothed tiger. And suckle the melting ice from the thaw of the ice age when it tunnels where it flows. One day they'll measure the aridity of where you've been.

0:06:58 - (Ruth Nolan): Or think you are. The depth and range of soils you've known for 14,000 years and more. The underground love you've shared with miles of other broken tortoise shells. It's then that you'll feel and know that your name is Queen Clone ruling your magic. Miles of creosote filling the deserts in frozen eternities. And I believe that King Clone has long been known as the oldest living plan on earth. Although it might have been superseded by the ancient oak tree over near Riverside. You know about that? It's very endangered. It's the middle of like an off road area and they're trying to offer protection and the city won't let them put a fence up, but they're about in the same age range. So yeah, I just had to read that in honor of a real place that really matters that a lot of us love and know about.

0:07:47 - (Ruth Nolan): It's not just some place to write about when you're doing a drive by and then have a flippant friggin headline about it just because my daughter says it's clickbait. They just want to get hits because they sell, make money. That's happening all over the desert. Couple poems from my next book, my more recent poetry book, after the Dome Fire. So some of you might be familiar with the devastating dome fire of 2020. That got a lot of thoughts on that one because I used to work on fires in the East Mojave Preserve quite a bit.

0:08:18 - (Ruth Nolan): The Apple Valley fire station is only about a 30 minute flight. Typically we would have gotten a call and been out there. We worked on lots of lightning strike fires and I kept wondering why is this fire not going out? How can this be getting so big? We should have the resources along with an engine crew, two engines from Apple Valley. And was very upsettingly had to realize that resources are running thin. And now we're in this time of year and more resource cuts and the priorities. The desert once again becomes the least priority because the fire personnel were dispatched to the Sierras where there were fires happening.

0:08:57 - (Ruth Nolan): I didn't have a helicopter out there for three days and normally there would have been a helicopter in about 30 minutes and a ground crew would land and then put the thing out very quickly. So I was just very frustrated because I felt like I should be out there doing something. You know, I can't do that work anymore. I would be dead in five minutes probably. So I have a couple fire poems and that's what the gist of this book is about is Meditations on fire. Literal and metaphoric in the desert fire behavior.

0:09:27 - (Ruth Nolan): Hobo arsonists, dry lightning, exhaust pipes, climate change, weed whackers, illegal campfires, utility lines, some of them dead. Gender reveal parties. Epic drought, high winds, fatal heat, brittle plants, vertical terrain, lack of resources, lack of concern, Fractious combustion, Champagne bottle explosions. People trying to escape but nowhere to go. Bluebirds, warblers, sparrows plummet aflame. The air hot and thick as tar.

0:10:00 - (Ruth Nolan): Blind evacuation, fatal migration. We did this to ourselves, people. And we keep doing it again and again and not again. This poem is called Invasive Species and I originally I know this is really bad but I took it out. But I'm going to say Ode to The people of LA feels like 29 Palms and Joshua Jerry. Just like neighborhoods of LA now. And it can be really hard to bear when you've lived here your whole life because that's not really what a lot of us signed up for and how to adapt to that.

0:10:37 - (Ruth Nolan): So I hope nobody takes offense but just trying to articulate what that's like if you're some of that's been in the desert for many many years. Invasive species. You with your untimely yellow heads. Stealth bombs from coastal hills and cityscapes hidden in plain sight until someone sees you and reveals your true name. What are your intentions of being here? You pretend that you aren't causing harm to the Indigenous flora and fauna.

0:11:06 - (Ruth Nolan): That you won't make the bighorn sheep sick. That you won't scent up the land or mark up a Joshua tree with a sign. You, with your exotic fragrances and fast cash, do you really belong in the Mojave? Because when you're here it doesn't look like it's supposed to. With unlimited views of Joshua tree juniper woodlands with nothing in them. No people, just wildlife. Yet here you thrive, fueling wildfires, regenerating so easily into something cheaper, costlier, some undesired thing else.

0:11:46 - (Ruth Nolan): Lover of flames on scorched earth. You are invasive species feeding on death. Death of a place this place hated secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, but here to say to stay. Of this we must make the best. And I read a poem called Teaching My Daughter to Put Out Fire. It's a true story. It isn't your typical scenario. A young mother who worked seven years ago as a wildland firefighter driving her Jeep in four wheel drive up 3 and 14, the back road to Big Bear with her daughter just 5 years old to reach the rattlesnake fire burn zone.

0:12:34 - (Ruth Nolan): It was one of the first fires she ever fought. This is another July day just like that one not so long ago. The mother wants to see for herself how the mangled landscape looks today. What remains of the Joshua and pinyon trees, if anything, what bird sounds might filter now through barren air. What reference points to negotiate by without the jeffrey pines or live oak, without the juniper. She worked on this fire.

0:13:02 - (Ruth Nolan): She watched a lot of it burn away. Huge boulder scatter revealed ominous ghost wails rising from the heavy smoke. Back then she had no idea what was being lost. It was just a cool job, fun guys to work with. Being the only girl. It was kind of cool. Now she wants to reassess as a responsible mother. Look for signs of life now that so much has been taken away. One careless toss of a cigarette, One careless finger on a trigger.

0:13:33 - (Ruth Nolan): Her daughter's father locked away, his best friend dead. Some things have been destroyed forever. Maybe that's why we're here again. Some things have been saved. I can already see out the window. And some things new and strange are growing in this place. My daughter wants to know. Will we see birds? I tell her the ravens may be western jay, she says. Will we see wildflowers? I say. There might be a few suckling on the pathetic dark dirt.

0:14:04 - (Ruth Nolan): Perhaps a few deer are negotiating their way across a moonscape on their way to a small spring. Jackrabbits hopping in and out of the slowly dying and grotesquely regrowing Joshua trees, the ones that aren't dead. Before they reach the lonely place. They stop at an empty campground so her daughter can run and play. The little girl spots it first. A wisp of smoke tickled by the light. Wind in rising.

0:14:30 - (Ruth Nolan): A careless camper. A campfire not put out. Here we go again. The mother reaches for her army shovel she always carries in the car and hands her daughter a bottle of water. It's fun for a little kid. We have work to do. This is how you put out a fire before it has a chance to erupt. Just something big. Look for the small things. A wisp of sultry smoke. A gleam of orange eyes. A seduction of tiny flame.

0:15:01 - (Ruth Nolan): This is where it starts. This is where it will stop. Nothing more will burn here today. I have one more poem I'd like to read. This one's a little bit kind of cheeky, but it's also important and serious. So it's called Barely There Peyote Run. A few bakers dozen years ago. True story. After I got my red VW van airborne near Furnace Creek together with a bunch of boyfriends back in my popular beauty queen days, I hiked all the way to the top of Rhyolite Peak.

0:15:48 - (Ruth Nolan): Three guys from the fire crew, a quesabira and me surveying the fancy ghost town fixins below, prepping our hell yeah shot. Super windy, not hot. Hungry for supper later on. Tom, my boyfriend at the time, strictly vegetarian, he liked to take my VW engine apart and put it back together again just for fun. Vince. Native American of standing rock, but often mistaken for Italian. Future father of my daughter, Kevin.

0:16:18 - (Ruth Nolan): There's nothing to say about him. We hiked the steep, jagged landscape, lacking trails to the top of that lovely godforsaken peak. Then we took turns firing the AK47 at rock outcrops and more. I cannot tell a lie. Shooting that gun was sexy and fun. A lot of fun. I promise you. We didn't kill anything or anyone. But still. And just below the uneven summit, on our slippery way down, we found something.

0:16:46 - (Ruth Nolan): A chaired parrot. A bighorn sheep. Horns resting near a cave balanced atop a black rock. We had no idea what it was. We guessed that the sheep had died. Then a wildfire had burned through here long ago. Then Kevin picked them up and carried them all the way home. I told him not to. He died of cancer two years later at the age of 24. My dear Southern Paiute elder friend from Tecopa tells me this. Those horns were probably placed there as an Offering by Shaman.

0:17:26 - (Ruth Nolan): He prayed for us all. He was alone out there. He touched the stars. So thank you, Ruth.

0:17:38 - (Chris Clarke): That was some magnificent stuff. Thank you so much. And is the after the Domefire book, is that published now?

0:17:46 - (Ruth Nolan): Yeah.

0:17:46 - (Chris Clarke): Okay.

0:17:47 - (Ruth Nolan): I have copies here if you want me to. They're really cheap, too. They're only like. I usually just give them away sometimes. Nice poetry doesn't really sell unless you're like, Italy Mon or Lee Herrick, the poet laureate people. But I think poetry is important because it's not so much read as prose writing. And I think it's a way to really capture a lot of the soul feelings of the desert and the feelings of how people like us feel about all of these ravaging, destructive things that are just crashing down on the desert and our wild lands. And we have to love it. But we also know there's a lot of darkness.

0:18:32 - (Ruth Nolan): And it's not something that's just started recently. It just seems to have really picked up momentum the last 10 years. And it's important to be able to articulate through the language of poetry how all of this affects us, because it really does have a lot of stress. Those of us who really into it. It's really hard to keep going, really hard to stay positive. There's a lot of depression and anguish in it. But I think it's just so important to gather as we are tonight as well, to give each other hope. And it's very hard to feel isolated in the face of this ugly corporate billionaire crap that we're all suffocating with.

0:19:13 - (Ruth Nolan): Yeah. On so many ways, social and environmental justice and all those intersections. Because it's all related. Thank you for having me, Chris. And I really loved hearing everybody. It's just so exciting to hear all these different voices and perspectives on the desert, how we're all fighting for the desert and celebrating it at the same time.

0:19:34 - (Chris Clarke): And we are going to have to do it again, if for no other reason than Louise Mathias, who we had on the bill, was stuck in Tomales with a power outage and couldn't call in. So this will not be the last online or in person reading sponsored by this podcast.

0:19:52 - (Ruth Nolan): But awesome.

0:19:53 - (Chris Clarke): This has just been really spectacular. And to our loyal audience here, just really glad you showed up here. And special thanks to our mysterious volunteer help desk person who's remaining incognito for now. This has just been really, really nice. So thank you. And that's it for this chapter of our 100th episode. Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this, namely Mason Vail Morgan Sjogren, Cameron Mayer, David Morales, Ruben Martinez, and Ruth Nolan.

0:20:29 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks as well to our voiceover guy Joe Jeffrey and our podcast artist Martine Mancha. Our Nature Sounds recordist Fred Bill will be showing up in our 101st episode. I know I said that he would be showing up in our hundredth episode and I was mistaken. I apologize to Fred and to you. Don't forget we only made it to 100 episodes because people supported what we're doing. If you like what we're doing and you want us to keep doing it, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com

0:20:57 - (Chris Clarke): donate if you'd like to get us to Tucson and El Paso at the end of September to spread the word. That's 90 miles from needles.com elpaso thanks for listening and here's to the next 100 episodes. Bye now. 90 miles from needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Meeting Media Network.