I want to tell you all a story about a woman named Alice. Alice is a woman that I met at the RNC, and Alice isn’t her real name. I mean, it could be, but I never caught her name, and just decided to call her Alice as a rhetorical indulgence. I know, old news, that shit was, like, a week ago, in the before times, when Joe Biden was still running for office. Also known by me: You’ve already been inundated with stories and selfies of who we met at FascFest 2024. You’ve read about how fucking thirsty Mike Lindell was, and about how Madison Cawthorn tried so fucking hard you guys to out thirst Mr. Shitty Pillow guy. But you haven’t read about Alice.
One of the more curious things about the security in Milwaukee was their decision, on the second day of the convention, to not allow matches into the secure area. A lot of people got caught by surprise the first day, when they weren’t allowing disposable lighters, and the huge uptick in the number of matchbooks on day two must have raised some eyebrows. Wouldn’t want anyone starting a fire. I was fine, though, because of how I had a matchbook in every one of my damn pockets, and one in my shoe (à la Richard Reid, minus the flammable goo). As a result of this policy, areas sprang up throughout the convention grounds where smokers milled around in groups, jump starting each other’s cigarettes in turns. Any time I pulled out my matches, it was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, someone would notice, make a loud shrieking sound with their gaping mouth, and I would be mobbed by Republican smokers. One of them was Alice.
Alice was nice. Alice was appreciative. Alice wanted to know where I was from, and then why in the Hell would a sane human being ever move to Detroit, on purpose. I have answered this question, put this same way, so many times that I have bullet points:
The bigots. The right wing racist fucks who glared at me every time they saw me out with my mixed race granddaughter. The ones who drive around in trucks they need to climb up into with window stickers that say “Fuck Off, We’re Full.” Sometimes they are in the shape of the US, other times they are in the shape of Montana. The ones who assumed I was one of them and gave me all the knowing nudges and winks. Those dicks.
The fires. So fucking many fires. Montana has a 90 day growing season, and for about 60 of those days, the lake we lived on was not ice water, and was fun to swim in. But over the past decade, those same 60 days stopped being high summer, and switched to being fire smoke, hazardous air, stay inside if you breathe with your lungs season.
Restaurants, museums, art, culture, all that other bullshit that weighs into the decision, but that isn’t really relevant to this story, and also, people always get hung up on the first two points, so I rarely get this far, and don’t have a polished response.
Being a Wonkette who was not only behind enemy lines, but ensconced within the hard security zone of enemy lines, I declined to mention the first point to Alice. I told her about the fires, and about the things we lost in the fire, which was most of summer. She nodded, her eyes full of understanding. Alice got it. Turns out that Alice knew a thing or two about wildfires. And that thing, or both those things, as the case may be, was/were that we needed to rake the forests. OK, so she didn’t really say those words, because if they sounded dumb coming from Felon McBadWig, they would sound even more dumberer coming from some rando. She said that it was the undergrowth, that we needed to be controlling the undergrowth, and that Joe Biden, personally, was not doing that, and that he should be drawn and quartered by the Lorax for not raking the forest. I mean controlling the undergrowth. Alice was not wrong, but in the same way that a broken clock is not wrong twice a day. Let me explain.
In the year 2000 (which must be read with an echoing, futuristic voice, go ahead, re-read it correctly), your humble Shypixel was living in picturesque Missoula, Montana, when Montana burned entirely to the ground. Well not entirely, but it was the worst fire season ever recorded to that point. The smoke in town was so thick, you could put out your hand, and what looked like a sprig of pine needles would land on it, but it was ashes, ashes that had held the shape of the pine needles as they drifted through the sky on their journey into your lungs. Every day looked like a new seal had been broken and smelled like fire and smoke and death. I took a job at the Smokejumper Depot, refurbishing equipment that had been out in the field and was desperately needed back on the fire lines. They had me working six twelve-hour days a week, from when I signed on in mid-July all they way through October. I made all the money that summer, repairing drip torches, rewiring headlamps, cannibalizing broken tools to make working ones.
The post-mortem on that hellish fire season revealed that Alice was right, just 24 years late. The thick pine forests of Montana had been aggressively defended for a century, allowing all manner of fuel to build up. The Forest Service said as much. But then a funny thing happened, the Forest Service changed its policies regarding when and how to fight wild fires. They started allowing small fires in remote areas to run their course. They paid more attention to clearing potentially explosive undergrowth. They fucking actually raked the forest. But not with an actual rake, because who the fuck does that? The new policies were science based, and might have been effective if it hadn’t been for a pesky insect.
Meet the Mountain Pine Beetle. These little pricks are very hard to kill, but they do have one major weakness: the cold. Specifically, sub zero temperatures that last for a few days will destroy pine beetle eggs. Brrrrr, sounds cold, don’t it? It is. And it is something Montana dealt with since forever, or at least since there stopped being dinosaurs there. But for reasons we will not get into here, in this paragraph, that doesn’t happen very much in Montana any more. The freezing CLIMATE that had long held pine beetles in check, was giving way to a kinder, gentler type of winter. It was a CHANGE we in Montana noticed.
Pine beetles kill a lot of trees, and those they don’t kill, they weaken. If you drive the I-90 corridor through the western part of the state, you can see where they’ve been, you don’t even need an entomology degree from an Ivy League level school. So many dead trees. The optimist in you might be saying, “but some lived,” and that annoying aspect of your personality would be correct. In fact, many trees lived, having survived their version of tree cancer, they emerged scarred and weakened, but alive. Good thing that Smoky Bear taught us all not to start wild fires, and also that electricity doesn’t sometimes shoot down from the sky in highly charged bolts. What’s that? He didn’t? It does? Oh, well that’s not good, a beetle weakened forest would be full of trees that burned super easily, even when wet.
Which is exactly what happened, and keeps happening. Montana is on fire this year. Again. Just like last year, and the year before, and the etc etc etc. So is California, and Oregon, and Canada, and probably other places. Maybe in those other places, it is not primarily pine forests burning, and so maybe things are different there. I don’t know. But I do know how the past 24 years of fires have played out in Montana. You know who knows even more about it? My boy.
My son runs a rural fire engine in a tiny Montana town. The man has spent some time on the front lines of Montana’s fire battles. He told me the other day about how a lightning caused fire had shut down a power substation, and when they finally restored power, the sudden surge caused another substation to spark onto the hot, dry grass, starting another fire. So now putting out fires is causing fires. Cheap electrical infrastructure, a thing that good friend of Wonkette and known dickhole Greg Abbott knows ALL ABOUT, is causing fires. Looking at YOU, PG&E in California. Also California, we have some dumb asshole starting huge fires by pushing burning cars into gullies. OK, so it was just the one burning car in the one gully. Police have yet to release the guy’s name, but I did a little sleuthing, and his name is Dumb Asshole. The Third. Maybe he was trying to join a pine beetle gang.
Anyhow, I put a big smile on my face and started gently explaining all of this to Alice. Remember Alice? This is a story about Alice…
I was gently leading a horse to water with the hope that it might drink, when enter, stage left, Rebecca, my tiny and adorable wife, and your supreme overlord of benevolent doom. This is the same Rebecca that can’t help but tell every server in every red town roadside diner that we are “filthy liberals” BEFORE we get our food. (What is the RDA for spit? It is zero.) So what does Becca do, what can Becca do, besides walk up beaming the world’s beamiest smile and say quite loudly, “CLIMATE CHANGE! IT WAS CLIMATE CHANGE!!!!!” Yes, you could hear the all-caps, and yes, you could hear each individual exclamation point.
Alice, and all of Alice’s friends, stood up in unison, collected their things, and left quick, fast, and in a hurry, with nary a word. Like they were a species of vampire for whom the words “climate” and “change,” strung together, were like a clove of garlic in the shape of a holy cross lined with silver and holy water and sunlight. Don’t ask how to line things with sunlight, if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. With her abrupt departure, Alice left me without a real ending to this story, so complain to her climate denying ass, not to me, but that’s a wrap.
You know we had a longtime Wonker cancel her subscription after the RNC, because she felt we treated it too cavalierly, as if it was just fun clowns.
I mean, maybe. But also I went and made people VERY ANGRY.
GOOD JOB ME. :D
What I tell people who "don't believe in climate change:" It doesn't matter what you believe--it matters what the insurance industry believes.