Tougher Stuff
By Josh Slotnick. This story was collected as part of a 2023 open call for submissions. It is one of 17 stories that were selected to be published.
Take my picture
her voice came at me garbled
twin respirators muffling the tones
She held a cauliflower, dense, gleaming white, too big and heavy to sell at full price
without jokes about mortgages and interest rates
Cauliflower in hand, my wife stood in a lush field of vegetables, our farm, on the west side of the Missoula valley. Wildfire smoke bathed the scene in grey, ate the horizons, obliterated the mountains and literally colored everything in sight. At that very moment the last of Hurricane Harvey’s biblical rains pummeled Houston: 19 trillion gallons of water fell in five days, more than four feet of rain, while Irma bore down on the entire state of Florida, having already swept away good chunks of Barbuda, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. On the other side of the earth, new rivers coursed through Mumbai, atop city streets. Surging urban torrents pulled fleeing people into open manholes below the fouled water’s surface and swept them out to sea.
Local Montana news provides updates on percentages of fire containment, evacuation areas
event postponements
National media features colorful stories, gushes for
brave people using bass boats
to save their stranded neighbors, plucking pets off rooftops while fetid water laps
at the cleaving eaves
of suburban homes
The people of Albany, Beaumont, Houston, Miami, New Orleans
Denton, Montana
are made of tougher stuff
and will put the pieces back together
We always do
Therein lies the heart of it
Bridges collapse and we have an infrastructure review, white supremacists use cars as weapons and statues start to come down, in the wake of this year’s smoke and storms and floods:
We talked about how strong we are
The storms and fires came as a combination, a one-two punch of weather and climate – rising ocean temps, like rising air temps in the northern Rockies, brought on fiercer storms and hotter fires - natural occurrences for sure, just now, way, way, amped up. Scientists, struggling for defendable levels of accuracy, shy from certainty.
We who work on the ground do not carry those obligations, and can speak this straighter truth
Resiliency makes it worse
—
Josh Slotnick lives on a family farm and has farmed here in western Montana for 31 years. They have seen our climate change and have agriculturally adapted. His poem/story pushes at the myopia of such responses when considered without addressing the cause of the problem.