This column originally ran in the Times Record newspaper on October 27, 2020.

One recent evening, I was getting ready for bed in the usual way: staring at my phone, anxiously doomscrolling through deeply troubling news stories. An article about the wildfires out west had caught my attention, and I was reading about how climate change had taken a bad situation and made it exponentially worse. Just as I was about to close up shop and drag myself to bed, a friend texted to say that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had passed away.

With that, a new fire was kindled. This one was in my chest, and it was a burning mix of sadness, rage, and panic. Certainly, a Senate majority leader with any integrity would abide by the outrageous precedent they’d set in 2016, waiting until after the election to confirm a new justice. The bald hypocrisy of doing otherwise would be too much for a normal human. The fire raged, of course, because Senator Mitch McConnell wouldn’t know integrity if it bit him in the filibuster.

Somehow, I went to sleep. When I awoke, it was to a series of distressed messages from neighbors. Overnight, a donkey statue on a friend’s lawn here in Bowdoinham had been set ablaze in an apparent act of political arson. In our small town, something like this reverberates especially hard. It was a jarring reminder that, cloistered as we may feel, we are not immune to the creeping fires of vitriol that are engulfing the nation.

Since then, the conflagrations have come fast and furious. We’ve gotten searing reports on the president’s taxes; we witnessed a presidential debate described by newsman Jake Tapper as “a hot mess inside a dumpster fire inside a train wreck”; and in a single weekend, the President of the United States contracted COVID-19, was hospitalized, received oxygen and steroids, and ignited Twitter with mockery of his own Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.

It begs the question: Is anything *not* on fire right now?

I find myself wondering that just about every day, and I expect I’m not alone. As I do, the title of a book by Charles Bukowski keeps springing to mind: “What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk through the Fire.” Whatever comes next, in so many ways this feels like the fire, and we are walking through it. How do you think we’re doing?

Fire is destructive, unpredictable, exhausting. It burns and it scars. But it can also be regenerative. In nature, fire clears the landscape, making room for what’s next. I recently learned that it also acts as an “environmental trigger” — just as some things respond to changes in temperature (like the peepers that start singing in spring) or light (the Christmas cactus that blooms when daylight dips under eight hours a day), others are called into action by fire.

Trees like the Jack pine produce special cones that are custom-built for fire. Called “serotinous cones,” they’re covered in resin and will stay sealed up tight for years, waiting for the flames they’ve evolved to know will eventually pass through the landscape. When the fire finally arrives, the cones open up and drop their seeds, preparing the ground for a new generation to rise in the wake of the burn.

Those cones were on my mind as I looked over images from Justice Ginsburg’s funeral. I was struck by the small army of her former law clerks who served as honorary pallbearers — young women and men who learned from her, and who are out there now, the next wave, working to uphold justice and equality. If how well we walk through the fire is truly what matters most, it would be hard to do it with more grace than RBG.

Whatever the outcome of this election, these fires won’t be extinguished overnight. Some have been smoldering for years, even generations. If they’ve been largely invisible to many of us until recently, we have the shelter and privilege of our economic status, our gender, our skin color to thank; so many of our fellow Americans have been walking through the fire their entire lives.

And now the flames are everywhere. We may not be able to control them, but we can control how we face the heat. If we let it be our environmental trigger — prompting us to speak up, to vote, to empower young people, to engage thoughtfully, to strengthen our communities, to love, and to spread the seeds of a better day — we’ll make the most of the towering inferno that is 2020.

After all, that’s how healthy futures are built. Just ask the Jack pine.

Jeremy Cluchey lives in Bowdoinham.