Tending Sheep at the End of the World

I enjoy writing for many reasons - I write to inform, to entertain, to educate, and sometimes to persuade. But I also use writing as a form of therapy - to work out how I feel about a particular topic, to deal with depression, or anxiety, or anger. This piece will be of the latter variety - I suspect the handful of folks who read it won't find it funny or educational. You've been warned - turn back now!

Over the last 8 years, every place I love, and many of the people I love, have been severely impacted by wildfire. When the Rim Fire blew up near Yosemite in 2013, it tore through the Evergreen Road country west of the park - an area where friends grazed cattle and where my family enjoyed the Strawberry Music Festival. In the years since, places like Stumpy Meadows, Mountain Ranch, and Dardenelles Resort have burned. The Camp Fire destroyed Paradise. The Bear Fire devastated a friend's multi-generation cattle operation. The Dixie Fire leveled Greenville. The River Fire, close to home (and so far, thankfully, much smaller) drove farming and ranching friends from their work and their livestock. All of us in the foothills and Sierra Nevada, even if we're not directly impacted, have endured day after day of air so thick with smoke it seems chewy.

Not coincidently over that same time frame, we've faced some of the most severe drought conditions in a thousand years. 2012-2015 was the driest four-year stretch in California in a millennia. Mother Nature said, "You think that was dry, hold my beer!" The 2020-21 water year was the most severe combination of warm weather and low rainfall in my memory - and in the memories of ranchers who are much older than I am. We sold sheep in 2014 because of the drought; we're contemplating selling again this year if conditions don't improve.

All of this is probably old news to most who've been paying attention. But all of it came back to me Thursday as I was driving home from Likely, CA. Smoke from the Dixie Fire turned the world an eerie red color. I stopped between Madeline and Litchfield on US-395 just before 5 p.m., and the light was so dim and weird that the crickets were singing. A half-hour later, when I stopped for gas in Standish, the sky was a deeper, darker red, and ashes were falling. Someone else at the gas station mentioned the ashes were pieces of Westwood and Chester. When today dawned smoky again here in Auburn, I found myself depressed about our present, and anxious about our future.

This year's smoke and monstrous wildfires come after a record-setting year last year. And during an ongoing pandemic, civic strife, and other crises. I'll admit, I'm exhausted by the nonstop crisis mode we've all been in for the last 18 months.

For me, the evidence that our climate is changing, and that we humans are responsible for the change, is incontrovertible. I know some of my friends will disagree, and that's okay. For me, though, it seems like the pace of this change is accelerating. The cool pot of water we humans jumped in originally is starting to boil - and it hasn't seemed real to me until now. I think my depression and anxiety come from a feeling of powerlessness - I feel incapable of doing anything but just putting up with these conditions. What can one sheepherder/scientist do in the face of global calamity?! Last fall, when it finally rained and extinguished the fires, I thought, whew - that's over. I'll never have to live through a fire season like 2020. Little did I know. And what can I do now?

Some days, things seem to be unraveling. I've always thought preppers - the folks that seem to be waiting for the collapse of civilization with relish - where at least a half bubble off of level. But after the last two years, especially, I begin to see how easy it would be to slip into that mindset. Mostly, though, I take comfort in the fact that I can (and do) raise a good portion of the food we eat (especially this time of year). I appreciate more and more the fact that I know how - and have taught my daughters how - to raise animals, to hunt and fish, to garden. Even as I type these words, I realize they seem a bit melodramatic. But maybe we're living through melodramatic times.

Staying in the melodramatic vein, though, I sometimes think how lucky I am to be raising sheep. Sheep were probably among the first animals we humans domesticated. They produce milk, fiber, and meat. They seem to be infinitely adaptable - they are raised from the arctic circle to the equator, and back to the tip of South America. One of my favorite Far Side cartoons is of the fisherman watching nuclear bombs explode on the horizon and saying, "You know that this means? Screw the limit!" I'll admit to having bizarre ideas of grazing sheep on golf courses and in county parks and in other places currently off-limits when the final unraveling occurs.

I usually try to end my essays on a positive note - on a call to action, or on a realization that has occurred to me during the process of writing. I'm at a loss, with this essay, to find a happy ending. That said, I suppose every insurmountable problem can only be solved by small, incremental actions. I can do things like cut back on my use of fossil fuels, continue to work towards local self-sufficiency in terms of my family's energy and food needs, try to transfer my skills (limited as they may be) to others. Maybe that's what adaptation looks like - micro-actions that ultimately add up to something meaningful.