time on fire
On being rattled by last week, Deep Time, bison, and wildfire
Last week scared me. Rattled me. And reminded me of the way time extends and pulls us beyond our current moment, while also speeding up and intensifying particular events. A shooting that disrupts a narrative — the latter. Glaciers etching into rock, creating riverbeds - the former.
Where were you when the recent twinned shootings occurred — one all-too-forgotten, the other all-too-monumentalized? I was in western Iowa, seeking buffalo, sitting on the banks of a dead river, walking the spine of a unique geological area formed by the glaciers.
Glaciers give me hope - even as they melt. It’s not the glacier itself, it’s the time it took to form. As our culture accelerates ever faster, pulsing in the background is Deep Time. Whatever we do with AI and extracting from the earth — however we spend our individual days — the earth keeps building and shifting at its original rate. Yes, we’re changing it with painful alacrity; no disputing that. AND it abides.
In a conversation a farmer, he shared the heartbreak he’d long held for the natural world, the pressure he put on himself to fix things. And then he let go and rested in deep time; it’s the only thing, he says, that gives him hope and helps him stay sane.
One of my favorite On Being episodes is with the Irish philosopher John O’Donohue, especially his thoughts on time:
Mr. O’Donohue: I think when you slow [time] down, then you find your rhythm. And when you come into rhythm, then you come into a different kind of time. Because you know the way, in this country, there’s all the different zones — I think there are these zones within us, as well. There’s surface time, which is really a rapid-fire Ferrari time.
Ms. Tippett: And over-structured.
Mr. O’Donohue: Yeah, over-structured, like, and stolen from you, thieved all the time. And then if you slip down … you imagine the surface of the ocean is all restless, and then you slip down deep below the surface where it’s still and where things move slower. - John O’Donohue in conversation with Krista Tippett
Words fail many of us in this moment — and many who keep talking through it often sound stretched, intent on being heard but with nothing new to add. And so in recent days, I’ve turned to numbers — numbers that don’t entirely make sense of any of this but that add perspective. Numbers that reflect time and our relationship to it. With a nod to the Harper’s Index, here are some working on my heart.
4,000 feet per second - bullet from a high-powered rifle can travel
$12,000,000 - Charlie Kirk’s net worth
3.5 million - Kirk’s Instagram followers added since the assassination
94.6% male and 54.5% white - mass shooters in the U.S.
109 - Number of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2000-2023
35 - number of mass shootings in 36 other countries combined during that same period
300 to 400 years - Age of oldest oak trees in Iowa
5,000 years - age to which world’s oldest trees — the bristlecone pine found in California — can live
Bristlecone pine and ledger art by Chris Pappan One-third - amount of U.S. that was once covered by prairie
60 species of grass comprised 80% of the prairie, which rivals the rainforest for biodiversity.
1 to 3 species of grass comprise the average American lawn
Up to 60,000,000 - number of bison* in North America in 1800
Fewer than 1,000 - number bison in North America in 1900
1833 - year Iowa was platted and opened for settlement by the U.S. government
1837 — year John Deere invented the steel plow, without which the prairie was nearly impossible to till
50% - amount of prairie-built topsoil lost between 1964 and 2014, almost entirely due to farming practices.
265 million gallons - amount of nitrate fertilizer NEW Cooperative spilled into the East Nishnabotna River in March 2024 over 48 hours
750,000 - number of fish killed in the spill
60 miles - length of the river deemed “dead” as a result
$10,000 - maximum amount the state of Iowa allows an entity to be fined for a pollution event
$71,590 - average salary of a NEW Cooperative employee
$2.77 billion - NEW Cooperative’s sales in 2023
See below for sources.
*Buffalo are a keystone species — a species on which other species in an ecosystem largely depend, such that if it were removed the ecosystem would change.
Can’t Get It Out of My Mind
FIRE IN PARADISE is a documentary (Netflix) that takes less than 40 minutes to watch, but will sear into your memory. Everyone should watch this.
Told entirely through interviews with people who lived through the fire, it begins at 5:30 AM with the report of a very matter-of-fact fire called in from a remote area over the ridge from the larger community of Paradise. The responders interviewed allude to it as a “normal” and “no big deal” report. But the wind had other thoughts. By 7:30 AM, calls were coming in reporting houses on fire — still on the other side of a ridge. Within 15 minutes, though, it had jumped the ridge.
This is a riveting account — much more so than any apocalyptic sci-fi coming out of Hollywood — of what it’s like to live through a wildfire. There’s the chaos as narrow roads become impassable with too many cars trying to leave, the heroics of two teachers and a bus driver who evacuated an entire school, a large group of people forced to lie flat on a concrete slab for several hours as their only way to survive the flames.
It is relevant to all of us, no matter where we live, with regard to whatever natural disaster is closest to our bioregion. Time speeds up and slows down. Things that took years to build — neighborhoods, small businesses — are erased in minutes; while memories of trying to get out clearly continue to repeat in slow-motion for the survivors.
Sources:
https://rockinst.org/gun-violence/mass-shooting-factsheet/
https://www.nps.gov/tapr/learn/nature/a-complex-prairie-ecosystem.htm
https://www.nrem.iastate.edu/research/STRIPS/challenge-1-soil-erosion-agricultural-fields
https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/2025/07/30/iowa-attorney-general-settles-dnr-cases-for-agri-star-and-nishnabotna-river-pollution/
https://www.salary.com/research/company/new-cooperative-salary
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/us/us-news/charlie-kirk-net-worth-utah-university-uvu-shooting-article-152762107