Fire in the West, Snow in the East, and a Mighty River in Between

In later years, will I wonder why I only paid attention to sea level rise and flooding as signs of impending doom?  Will I wonder why I didn't write more about fire?

Frankly, with the exception of the Hawaii fire, most of the fires that have captured national attention have seemed to explode in places that were remote and more like wilderness than city spaces.  But the fires that have exploded across the Los Angeles area seem a harbinger of something new.  There was no brush clearing that needed to happen.  There was no building in ill-advised areas.

I will confess that my attention has been captured by an impending winter storm much closer to home.  I am happy that Spartanburg Methodist College made the pre-emptive decision to move to remote learning tomorrow when the storm is expected to arrive.  The timing of the storm made it hard to decide exactly when to close, and so they are taking the safer course of action and having us all work from home.

Every time my school does something that shows a level of care for the people who work and study there, I am struck with sadness about how many places I've worked where there was no level of care and concern.  I think of how often I've reported to Florida schools, even when we were under tropical storm force conditions.  Oh, sure, we were told that we didn't have to come in, but it would be a vacation day or a day without pay.

I have spent the morning toggling between a variety of tasks:  work for my online classes that I teach at a different school, weather reports, news coverage of various apocalypses, and Huckleberry Finn (the novel, not the character).  Today in my American Lit class, we begin with that novel, and returning to it, I'm struck by how much it encapsulates various issues that American Lit and American history will grapple with, are still grappling with.

I plan to begin the class by asking how many of them have ever backpacked, camped out over night, went on a canoe or kayaak trip, headed west with no plan for where they were going (OK, maybe not this one).  I look forward to the conversations we'll have.  The energy in the room was good, and I think starting this way, by thinking about how we currently feel about spending time in the wilderness, might be a good entryway into the novel.

And then I'll come back here to my mountain house and bring some firewood inside, just in case the weather gets worse than expected tomorrow.