B
y Don Nelson
Next week we will publish a special one-year anniversary issue marking the onset of the Carlton Complex Fire. It’s an odd word to use, anniversary, because it suggests something celebratory, which is hardly what any of us have in mind. Shall we instead commemorate? Still sounds too ceremonial, almost congratulatory — nice goin’, Carlton Complex, here’s a birthday cake. Acknowledge? Too neutral, unemotional, detached — yeah, that happened.
I’m leaning toward “reflection” as a way to think about the year-ago events that unleashed a summer of challenges like nothing this community has ever faced, and there is plenty to reflect on, especially as our long recovery process evolves through its own phases.
This is how humans assess history and outcomes, in one-year, five-year, 10-year, 100-year increments. They are commonly understood demarcations. Not that the years in between don’t offer the same opportunity for revisiting events, but spaced-out anniversaries — there’s that word again — are a way to prevent informational and emotional overload.
We’ll save most of the more-profound reflecting for next week. What I’ve been thinking about lately are some of the overt, day-to-day consequences of our community-wide trauma, which we all experienced in one way or another.
We are on edge. Hyper-alert. Wary to the verge of distraction. Every brush-fire flare-up, every real or imagined smoke plume, or every siren grabs our immediate attention. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked in the past month about particular reports that turned out to be minor incidents, exaggerated rumors or just plain hooey. Smoke from fires elsewhere (British Columbia, Lake Chelan, the Pasayten Wilderness) lays a gray scrim across the valley and we wonder if we are burning again. Wenatchee gets hit with a horrific fire, and within minutes we are hearing absurdly lurid (and inaccurate, it turns out) accounts of the damage — not from any news outlets, but from the ready-to-believe-anything grapevine.
But that’s our frame of mind, and it’s both understandable and defensible: We want to know. It’s a new level of awareness and, we all hope, appropriate response. What’s more, everyone understands that the current conditions make most of the valley scarily fire-prone. It’s almost impossible to over-exaggerate the threat, and we have seen what the real deal looks like. Our memories are still fresh.
At the newspaper, were are trying to be vigilant about tracking down fires or rumors of fires, and providing the best information we have as quickly as we have it. We learned last year that the most effective way to do that is on our Facebook page, and we’ve built a following that looks to us for information.
Our standard is the same as last year: We won’t post anything we can’t verify, find a source for or attribute to another credible outlet. You’ll find a lot of chatter on bulletin boards, some of it factual, much of it less so (and yes, we read them too). That’s not what we do, and we remove inappropriately speculative comments from our postings. Our credibility is important to us. You can also help the community by being responsible about information, or purported information, that you pass along. It’s one thing to be attentive and ready, it’s something altogether different to be unnecessarily panicked.
The past year seems to have sped by quickly. Right now, however, it feels like we are trudging through a hot, dry, menacing summer and the time is crawling. Relief is months away. But the time will pass, and a year from now we will likely be reflecting again on another “anniversary,” from the deeper perspective of experience and, let’s hope, wisdom.
