‘Damage and renewal’: Santa Cruz native Manjula Martin’s memoir tries to make sense of the devastating fires of 2020

The color of the sky that day — those many days. Remember? 

Those who lived through the late summer of 2020 in Santa Cruz County (and much of coastal California) will often picture those days through a scrim of memory illuminated by a menacing and infernal red-orange that pervaded everything in sight. 

Writer Manjula Martin lived through it, and this is how she remembers the color of the sky at the peak of the Northern California fires of 2020:

“I called it red; others said it was orange. It was not the usual color of sunlight when there was wildfire smoke, which was sort of a rusty gray that I thought of as refracted fire. The sky was not quite the color of a winter fruit — persimmon or pomegranate, the fruits of mythology. It was not the glowing orange that sometimes permeated a certain fifteen seconds of the Pacific Ocean mid-sunset. It had hints of the artificial in its corners, like one of those endless lakes you fly over in an airplane that turns out to be pesticides or salt farms. Although it was smog that colored the sky, it wasn’t the color I knew as smoggy … There was nothing slight about this red. This was a sky told of fables and omens, cave art and science fiction. The red sky was a sight that might only make sense in a world of many gods, or maybe a world of no gods. It was the color of a sky from classical poetry, a color of high priestesses and jaguar kings. This was a Dante, Odyssey, war-ending red, it was dust storms over a burning oil well in Kuwait. It was a color to put people in our place, inside history. And it was impossible to describe.”

The cataclysmic fires of 2020 are now about three and a half years in the past, in that chronological window where the trauma is still vivid but the specific memories emerge as psycho-emotional postcards from another era in history. That makes the timing right for reflective, deeply thought-out and emotionally resonant memoirs to emerge from that tragic moment. 

One of the most immediate and locally relevant of those memoirs is Manjula Martin’s new book, “The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History” (Pantheon). Martin is a Santa Cruz native who experienced the 2020 fires mostly at her home in rural western Sonoma County. Her book chronicles her experience with the fires from her home in Sonoma, and during two trips she took to the Santa Cruz area during the crisis.

On Thursday, Martin will appear at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in conversation with Santa Cruz novelist Jonathan Franzen, about her new book. She will consider it a homecoming.

Martin, 47, is the daughter of Orin Martin, the longtime manager of the famed Alan Chadwick Garden on the campus of UC Santa Cruz. In fact, father and daughter wrote a book together called “Fruit Trees for Every Garden,” published in 2019.

Her new book covers the lightning strikes of August 2020 that sparked the fires, and the weeks thereafter, mostly from the home she shares with her partner, Max, in Sonoma County.

“It’s sort of a mirror image of Santa Cruz in a lot of ways,” she told me in a phone call, about the wooded area near the town of Occidental where she lives. Speaking mainly about the hills-and-canyons, oak-and-redwoods natural environment, she said, “Sonoma is like Santa Cruz on steroids.”

A recreation of our harrowing summer

The summer of 2020 was, of course, a medley of catastrophes, particularly in California. Emerging from a back-breaking, yearslong drought, that summer was still very much in the throes of a COVID-19 shutdown — the first vaccines were still months away. Donald Trump’s chaotic reign in the White House was barreling toward a reelection showdown. Then came the dry lightning of Aug. 16. 

Martin’s book is a compelling re-creation of that harrowing summer — during which Martin traveled to Santa Cruz and even to the eastern Sierras. But it’s also an examination of fire and its history in California, especially under the stewardship of the Indigenous peoples who lived in the area for centuries before European colonization. On top of all that, it’s a gripping memoir of a parallel struggle in Martin’s own life from just a couple of years before — a broken IUD birth control device had led to a painful injury, which in turn ultimately led to a hysterectomy and a life of chronic pain. It’s a book about California’s natural history and fire-management practices. But it’s also a book about post-traumatic stress disorder and grief.

“It’s a book about the relationships between people and the land that we live on,” she said, “and how those relationships can be harmful or caring. It’s also very much a story of damage and renewal.”

In August of 2020, Martin was working on a novel based on her experience as a teenager in Santa Cruz living through yet another disaster, the Loma Prieta earthquake. While she was working at home in Sonoma County, the encroaching fires compelled her to evacuate her home, and from her emailed updates to friends and family came the notes from which she could stitch together the narrative that became “The Last Fire Season.”

Writing about the 1989 earthquake at the time gave her parallels on which to craft the book that was to become “Fire Season.” Martin was 13 when the earthquake, epicentered in Santa Cruz County, laid waste to downtown Santa Cruz and several other cities in Northern California. 

“One of my earliest memories was the big flood [in 1982], and I have these strong childhood associations with some major cataclysmic events,” she said. “It can be destabilizing, this idea that any minute your entire world could be shaken up. But there was also a strong sense of community and camaraderie that came out of all that, and that was very formative for me. [For example], I can remember, the day after the earthquake, riding my bicycle around Soquel and Aptos all day, helping people sweep up their chimney bricks, and there was a real sense of community I had never felt in my life before then.”

‘We have to learn to see beauty in the way the forest is now’

The new book reflects that sense of community as she discovered it among her friends and neighbors in Sonoma County during the most frightening moments of the fire crisis. Like many touched by the fires of 2020, Martin said that she struggled to find some perspective on what had happened.

“There’s a scene in the book where I’m talking to my best friend about it, and we’re both just like, ‘I can’t even deal with this. Let’s talk about something else.’ These are huge events and it can be very difficult for the human mind to reckon with them. And it’s OK to take your time with them. I remember when I was able to go to Big Basin [Redwoods State Park] after the burn. That was a mind-blowing experience. It was really a pivotal moment when I came to the understanding in my mind that, these events aren’t occuring on a time span of my life, that I’m never going to Big Basin again the way I saw it when I was a kid in my lifetime. And that’s — well, I don’t know if it’s OK, but it’s what’s happening. And we have to learn to see beauty in the way the forest is now.”

What might be most affecting in Martin’s memoir is her characterization of the emotional state that many Californians — and many Americans — feel in a rapidly destabilizing world. In the book, she writes of the realization that in politics, in ecology, in many realms, the world we’ve all become accustomed to is never a given. “When I got this feeling,” she writes, “I experienced in my body a strong sensation not unlike slipping and falling. Except the fall never came; I was locked in a moment of slippage.”

“That slippage feeling is like that moment you’re about to fall into decline,” she said. “And, sure, I do feel that sometimes. But I also try to challenge that feeling. There’s a sense of determinism to this idea that ‘It’s the end of the world!’ that’s really very limiting.”

Folded within this personal and self-revealing memoir is also an examination of Indigenous forestry practices in managing fire, and how the rapid occupation of California over the past 200 years has thrown out of whack a once-sustainable system. 

“By this time,” she said, “most people who live in California are at least somewhat aware of the basic history of colonization and how that relates to overcrowded and unhealthy landscapes and ecosystems. But the coolest part of the process of doing this book is that I got to talk to and learn from Indigenous people who are doing fire-management practices now. I hadn’t spent time listening to or building relationships with Indigenous fire practitioners who are now doing amazing work and amazing activism.” Among those mentioned in the book is the Amat Mutsun Tribal Band, which is doing its work in Santa Cruz County.

Still, at the very center of the book, its beating heart in many ways, is Martin’s relationship with her garden in Sonoma. Having co-written a book on gardening and practiced it most of her life, it comes as close as anything to a spiritual practice that she uses to adapt to and understand the cataclysm of 2020.

“Some of my most formative childhood memories are playing at the Chadwick Garden where my dad worked,” she said, “just hanging out in the dirt.”

It was that connection with gardening that, she said, gave her the grounding (literally) to make sense of 2020: “The thing that made me notice and think differently and pay attention to the larger ecological crisis was when I got into gardening. I realized that, oh, the garden is the site, a physical place, where my body actually interacts with the ecosystem. And once I realized that the connective tissue with this book was the garden, I knew I had to include the story of my body also.”

That leads to the central assertion of “The Last Fire Season,” that the metaphors that most of us use to deal with threats like wildfire need to be reexamined. She writes in the book that “I had always thought of fire as that hungry monster, gobbling up everything in its path.”

“The language we use to talk about fire is very violent and very personified,” she said. “I’m trying to take down some of these metaphors and common narratives. As a writer, I love metaphor. But we also have to understand what we’re saying when we say that a fire is ‘consuming’ something. Do we actually just mean it’s spreading? That language makes a difference.”

Manjula Martin, author of “The Last Fire Season,” will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz, in conversation with Jonathan Franzen, on Thursday, Feb. 8. The 7 p.m. event is free, but registration is required.