Rainreturn
I was at a new library branch, after nervous exhaustion had forced me to transfer out of my old one. A week earlier, I had tearfully emailed HR, attaching a doctor’s note listing all the ailments the old branch had caused, and now, for the first time in a year, I worked the reference desk without men sexually harassing me or calling me names. Patrons at my new branch didn’t get into fist fights over the computers. I hadn’t yet pulled a book off the shelf to find it covered in urine. I didn’t need to drink chamomile infusions at 10 in the morning to keep my heart rate down.
A new branch, a new beginning. It was October, my favorite month, and I had a beautiful view of some of the loveliest hills in the city from the library’s front door. The latitude and cloudless sky of Southern California mean that in fall and winter the sun is in your eyes all the time, but there’s nothing quite like the Autumn light hitting those hills. I walked outside one day on my lunch break and smelled something sharp and familiar. “It smells like fall!” I thought.
Then I realized what the smell was. The Saddleridge Fire was burning a few miles away. I wasn’t smelling the cozy wood smoke of fireplaces, but the ashes of plants, animals, people’s homes. I recognized the smell from the Woolsey Fire the year before, and the Skirball Fire the year before that.
The smell of fall is the smell of wildfires. This is how it is now where I live. Fall comes around and the fires begin; winter approaches and the land burns.
***
Starhawk’s speculative novel The Fifth Sacred Thing portrays a pagan utopia: the residents of the California Bay Area have organized their society around the principles of nonviolence and their lives around the cycles of nature. The novel takes place in a future that, when the book was written, was meant to feel apocalyptic, but now comes across as horrifically banal. In the novel, much of California is scorched and brown, and continual drought is a grim fact of life. The land is so dry that when a character gets her period, there’s no water to clean herself and she goes days trying to ignore the dried blood on her body. But then, in fall, the rainy season commences with an exuberant downpour, and everyone erupts in a celebration that would seem alien to most members of industrialized cultures. Starhawk writes:
Up and down the pathways, doors were opening and people were running out to dance deliriously. Children dashed about with pots and bowls to catch the first rainwater. Next door, the Sisters knelt in the mud to give the prayer of thanksgiving....Fireworks exploded and rained down in colors that mingled bright fire with the drops. Soon everyone’s hair and clothes were damp and streaming, but they only laughed. The rain had come, even a bit early this year, and they welcomed it in the hope that it would return again and again through the winter, turning the brown hills green, filling the cisterns and replenishing the aquifers, feeding the life in the gardens and the fields that fed the people.
Starhawk calls the event Rainreturn, and even if present-day Californians don’t dance in the streets when it comes, it is very real. Throughout California’s ecological history, the winter rains have kept summer and fall fires in check. In fact, fire—when it’s balanced by rain—is an integral part of our ecosystems. Small wildfires clear out dry brush so that it doesn’t accumulate into fuel for larger fires. Pyriscent plants, or plants whose seeds need fire in order to sprout, are dependent on the fire cycle, as are animals that take advantage of its aftereffects for food and shelter. The yearly dance of fire and water, water and fire, is part of why I so deeply and fiercely love this land; watching for Rainreturn each fall ties me to its rhythms and changes, its hopes and fears, its struggles and celebrations. Most of Southern California’s tap water comes from the Sierras and the Colorado River, and this arrangement gives us the illusion of a never-ending supply, so most of my neighbors don’t care much for rain. I like to think, though, that each year, all over the region, gardeners and conservationists and animals and plants watch the drenching of the land with gratitude and relief.
Now, though, that balance is off. The rains come later and later. The conventional wisdom among native plant gardeners is that you plant after Halloween (this arrangement gets very interesting when you start to think of Samhain as the day the land comes back to life), but now temperatures in November can reach the 80s and the rains might not come until Christmas. Plant life, already brown and dormant from the summer heat, becomes even drier. The Santa Ana winds come, hot and staticky gales from the east. They exacerbate the fires caused by decrepit power lines and careless humans, and the land burns.
Last year’s Woolsey Fire broke my heart because it burned one of the most sacred places I know: Leo Carillo State Beach, formerly the site of a major Chumash settlement. In 2017, when I was six months pregnant with my second daughter, I helped facilitate a Beltane ritual in the hills above the beach. We were surrounded by coastal sage scrub, flower-speckled and aromatic, and while I stood in the circle during the opening invocations and called to Inanna with one of my sister witches, a gentle and steady rain began to fall. I’ll never forget that rain, the cool drops on my bare shoulders, the scattered rays of sunlight that made the landscape glow. Sovereignty and its manifestations play a large role in my spiritual praxis, and according to the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, “sovereignty is not possession of the land or control over it. Simply put, sovereignty is the living relationship between the people and the land they live on.”
The Woolsey Fire ravaged that land. Now those hills are barren and brown.
Some plants survived, though. If you visit now, you’ll find mugwort and sacred datura growing by the beach, and California sycamores at the campsites. When I was there last, I stroked their leaves, admired the blossoms. I forced myself to hold two truths at once: that the surviving plants are miracles worthy of our thanks and joy, and that they don’t represent a realistic hope that Leo Carrillo will make a full recovery. The land is changing irrevocably. The datura and mugwort that thrive now may not be able to adapt to whatever ecosystem develops here over the next century or two. I cherish the life I find here and rage against the obstinate insistence, by those in power, on ignoring the thing slowly killing us all.
***
My job at my old library branch was supposed to be my own little Rainreturn, a respite from the abuse and negligence I’d been living under at my job before that. At my old job, I had a fancy title with no actual duties attached to it. I was asked to produce reams of internal documentation that no one ever read. I was expected to describe library work using corporate buzzwords like “key stakeholders” and “core competencies,” and when I gently criticized the library’s tech startup culture, administrators took such offense that they threatened to withhold my step increase. Because of the way the organization was set up, they had the power to do so.
I put out applications and was offered a job as a teen services librarian at a public library. My new job would involve leading arts and crafts programs and overseeing teen volunteers and recommending books, and I started writing down ideas before the job even started. I brainstormed plans for workshops on herbal sachets and watercolors and gardening. I looked up local high schools where I might do outreach.
My first day, I happily reported for training only to have a bombshell dropped on me. Teens, it turned out, did not use the branch at which I was now a full-time teen librarian. The neighborhood, which I’d known was seedy, contained mostly porn shops and bars and didn’t have much family housing; all the local schools and neighborhoods had closer library branches, so there was no reason for any young person to make the trek to this one. The training team and my supervisor were very clear: no teens would come to my programs or use my collections, so there was no point in my being there, and the only reason I’d been hired was because the system, for reasons that were unclear, mandated a teen librarian at every branch. My main task, like that of my many predecessors, would be to try and transfer to another branch as soon as possible. “Our job here is to pretend to be librarians,” the children’s librarian told me one day, as we surveyed the utterly deserted children’s area on a weekday afternoon while other branches were flooded with the cheerful afterschool rush.
The library’s main clientele were men who had hit rock bottom and had nowhere else to go. These men—along with a handful of women and nonbinary people—were in the throes of addiction, homelessness, and severe mental illness, sometimes all three at once. They smoked crack on the front steps and shot up heroin at the computers. They pissed and shit in the stacks and the elevator. They cornered us and groped us and screamed and broke furniture and pulled knives on us when they were upset. Some of the library’s rules were explicitly anti-homeless—no eating, no sleeping, no pets, no large bags—while others, like no masturbating, were more reasonable, and we spent most of our time grimly enforcing those rules. We looked the other way whenever we could, allowing patrons their desperately-needed naps and companion animals, but the branch manager was strict and we didn’t have much wiggle room when he was within earshot. It’s hard to describe exactly how joyless and prison-like the atmosphere was at that library branch. I started to come down with the stress-triggered ailments that would later go in my doctor’s note: shingles, eczema, breathing problems, a thousand colds and viruses. One day, while I was describing the situation to a union rep, I had an anxiety attack so severe I saw stars. Emotionally, I felt numb to the constant danger and vicarious trauma; my body, though, was sounding every alarm.
Wouldn’t it be lovely if this were the story of how I single-handedly turned the branch around and transformed it into a beacon of hope for its patrons? But this isn’t that story. Instead, it’s the story of how I did my best and quickly burned out. There’s an aggressive edge to many miracle-worker stories: “This person figured out how to save a thousand starving babies using only a bucket and a piece of string,” the narrative goes. “If you’re a good person and you put your mind to it, you can do anything you want with no help at all!” Except you can’t. Not in real life. Humans, like all things, are interdependent, and savior stories erase the massive amounts of community and resources that make change happen.
There were little moments here and there when I felt like I was actually doing something useful. The emergency shelters were always full and the day shelters had odd hours, but occasionally I was able to help someone get a meal or a shower. Once a month another library branch held an outreach event where people could get food, haircuts, cell phones, and other necessities, and I would go there to do intake interviews and give out coffee. The people who went to the outreach event were trying to scrape their lives back together, but most of the guys who hung out at my branch were either too ill to take care of themselves or suffering from what Father Gregory Boyle calls a “lethal absence of hope:” a despair so profound that they could no longer imagine futures for themselves.
I received a few hours of training in de-escalation and trauma-informed care, but it felt like aiming a squirt gun at a blaze. Our patrons needed social workers and counselors and addiction experts and tutors, showers and lockers and housing leads and job training. Instead they got overwhelmed and underprepared librarians who’d been flung there after a bait-and-switch. Even my coworkers who’d experienced homelessness and addiction themselves couldn’t do much for these men. We just didn’t have the resources.
“The problem, of course, with throwing people away,” Octavia E. Butler said in 1999, “is that they don’t go away. They stay in the society that turned its back on them. And whether that society likes it or not, they find all sorts of things to do.” Thanks to California’s spiraling housing costs and ferocious NIMBYism, 59,000 residents of LA County are currently homeless, with more getting evicted every day. The ruling class is playing a game of chicken to see how long they can ignore the housing crisis before it engulfs them. They’re playing the same game with the wildfires; every year mega-wealthy places like Brentwood and Malibu burn, yet the rich employ private firefighters and collect insurance payouts and stubbornly remain. The wildfires, it must be noted, are directly tied to the housing crisis, as wealthy city-dwellers block new urban housing construction and force the electrical grid to expand further and further out into wildlands, where poorly-maintained power lines ignite poorly-managed forests.
One day, when I was done serving coffee at the outreach event, a man came up to me and asked if there were any psychiatric services there. “I need to check myself into someplace tonight,” he said. “I’m afraid I might hurt myself.” There’s a retired woman in the neighborhood who spends her days serving homeless communities, hooking them up with food and clean clothes and social services. That is literally all she does all day and she is one of the best people on this earth. I grabbed her and told her what was up, and she grabbed a social worker, and they took the guy to a corner of the room. Over the next half hour, I snuck glances as they talked. He cried and seemed to have some catharsis. He wiped his eyes and I overheard him say he was saving up for a tent. I didn’t see him again after that day. I don’t know if he checked himself in somewhere or not. I have no idea what happened to him.
***
As I was drafting the first half of this essay, the Kincade and Getty Fires broke out. As I was outlining this section, the Tick and Easy Fires broke out. The day I finished it, I saw a plume of smoke over Griffith Park. There are so many fires these days, one after another after another. I have two sets of relatives in Northern California, my sister-in-law who works on a farm and my husband’s aunt and uncle who own a farm. My husband has been a staunch atheist and rationalist for as long as I’ve known him, but on the first day of the Kincade fire, while we were waiting for news, he asked me if we could do a ritual together for his sister. We put the kids to bed and I led him through a little protection spell that involved dousing a candle flame with water. That farm survived the fire more or less intact, so my sister-in-law's job is safe for now. The other farm was completely destroyed. One day a couple of years ago, I sat in a quiet corner of his aunt and uncle’s property, feeling frustrated about income inequality and the legacy of enclosure and my own complicity in capitalism, but also enjoying the peace of the woods, the gentle green of the gardens and oaks, the innumerable spirits who whispered and sighed in the wind. My husband’s aunt and a couple of her workers had gathered animal bones and rattlesnake skins from the woods and made gloriously macabre art on the walls of the barn. As I sat, a deer with two fawns ambled down the path and disappeared around a bend. All of that is gone.
***
The relief of Rainreturn each year used to feel like a covenant. ‘Hold on for just a few more weeks,’ the rain used to say, ‘and I will come.’ Rainreturn was always a promise renewed, a loving parent coming home.
Now that we’ve broken that covenant, though, Rainreturn sometimes feels like an opiate. The rains return later and later, smaller and smaller, but each time they do, the wildfires go out and the hills turn green. We pretend we still live in the California in which we grew up. Nothing is done to prevent next year’s fires. Even I’m infected by false hope: I decide—decide!—that surely we’ll find the grand unified solution to climate change soon, and the revolution will be easy and bloodless, and I’ll finally live in the folksy agrarian commune I’ve always dreamed of. Part of me forgets that the land as I know it is slowly dying. Even the most realistic part of me is unable to comprehend the scale of destruction and the fearsome transformation that is occurring, so at Rainreturn, the rest of me sullenly refuses to see it.
Really, all of the problems I've described here stem from a refusal to see. The administrators at my job decided to ignore the fact that one of their branches is failing its community and needs to be drastically transformed. NIMBY Angelenos refuse to see that simply blocking new housing again and again isn’t going to preserve their way of life forever. Everyone searches for the little respites that allow them to forget the bigger disaster: a successful homeless outreach event, a solitary teen who wanders into the library, a heavily-policed neighborhood whose tent cities have suddenly vanished. We all gawk at the wildfires, year after year, and pretend we don’t see the very obvious pattern.
I yearn for a massive Rainreturn, a deluge that will wash away the corruption and hatred and gluttony that allowed this disaster to happen. I yearn for a Rainreturn that will dissolve five centuries of capitalism and all the forms of brutality that flourished before that. I yearn for a Rainreturn that will wash our eyes clean and force us to see our ecosystems, our myriad non-human neighbors, and each other.
***
I wrote that the farm was completely destroyed, but it turns out that wasn’t entirely true. We found out that a single crate of chicks, which they weren’t able to evacuate, made it through the fire. They found the chicks alive on the bare and blackened hillside when they were allowed back in. The chicks, like the datura and mugwort at Leo Carrillo, force us to hold both rage and gratitude at once. A crate of trapped and helpless chicks survived the Kincade Fire. Somehow, they survived.
***
Now that I’ve transferred, I’m a children’s librarian in a neighborhood filled with children. I teach my arts and crafts workshops to kids who excitedly push each other aside to show me their creations. Once a week I lead a storytime for a roomful of rambunctious babies and toddlers. I have become well-versed in the art of the flannel board.
The patrons without housing are pretty chill. They just want a quiet place to read the paper and check their email. I haven’t used my inhaler in weeks.
One evening in November, I am working the closing shift at the reference desk. It’s a quiet night, with only a few patrons reading at the tables, and the only sound is the hum of the HVAC. In a few weeks my husband will fly out to a job interview in Massachusetts, where the climate is cooler and housing is cheaper. California is my home, and the home of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, but the thought of being able to afford a house with a yard, and keeping a garden without fretting over irrigation, fills me with a stinging want.
The library building has several skylights, and I hear a sound like pebbles rolling around on top of them. I stop scrolling through Instagram and listen. The sound grows into a roar that I haven’t heard in months, and, with my breath catching, I give a silent prayer of thanks. Our land is dying; our neighbors are dying; everything sacred is being hunted down and destroyed. But tonight, at this moment, all I can do is pause to feel gratitude for the rain.
***
References
Higgins, Lila, and Pauly, Gregory. Wild LA. Portland: Timber Press, 2019. 37-40.
Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. Native American Nations are Sovereign Governments. Last accessed on 1/18/2020 from https://www.santaynezchumash.org/sovereignty.html.
Butler, Octavia E. “A Conversation With Octavia E. Butler.” Parable of the Talents. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000. 416.
ASA WEST
is a sliding-scale tarot reader blending traditional witchcraft with earth-based Judaism. Her writing has appeared in Witches and Pagans Magazine, Luna Luna Magazine, and other outlets, and you can find her at tarotbyasa.com and @TheRedTailWitch.