Martin (no relation to this reviewer) had lived through many prior Northern California fire seasons — she grew up in Santa Cruz, had lived in the Bay Area on and off throughout her adulthood, and had settled in her current home with her partner in 2017. But she knew immediately that this lightning storm represented an unprecedented danger, because its strikes hit “a landscape that was overgrown, dry from drought, and experiencing record-breaking heat and high winds.” She and Max began to pack, preparing to evacuate.
Thus begins The Last Fire Season, a melding of memoir, natural history, and reportage that traces four months in 2020 when wildfires in California broke records, burning more than 4 million acres. Those lightning strikes — more than 10,000 of them — were responsible for 650 wildfires large enough to be named; one such fire, the August Complex, became the first recorded “gigafire” in the state’s modern history, spanning more than a million acres. Martin lived a few miles south of the Walbridge Fire, part of the LNU Lightning Complex, in a former logging camp and vacation resort that was a “fire trap” filled with wooden houses.
A former managing editor of the literary magazine Zoetrope, Martin records what it was like to live through and alongside these conflagrations with a lyrical attention to detail and through a deeply personal lens. The Last Fire Season unfolds in four major sections, one for each month of August through November 2020, tracing the movement of wildfires, placing them in ecological and human history, and grappling with their repercussions. As she recounts months spent dodging and being followed by wildfires, months when the siren on her local firehouse blared almost daily and when smoke overwhelmed her senses, Martin reflects on what it means to make one’s home in a place that is destined to burn, and to live “inside a damaged body on a damaged planet.”