The Character of a Creek

I drive by a creek on my way to work. Like most of my commute, it's along a country road through California scrub. The hills shine golden brown in the morning sun; the creek runs green and lush through the valley.

At least, mostly green.

This area burned in the Lilac Fire, maybe five years back. Santa Ana winds pushed the fire west, where it overran ranches and houses near the town of Bonsall. Nobody died, at least nobody human, and Lilac ended up being, in terms of acreage burned, the 38th largest fire in California. That year. The 38th largest fire in California of 2017.

The biggest that year was the Thomas Fire. It was the largest wildfire in California history, at least until it was overtaken by the Ranch Fire eight months later. Which then ceded the title to the Dixie Fire in 2021. But I digress.

This creek I drive by is a typical Californian riparian habitat. Live oak, alder, cottonwood, sycamore, mule fat, and poison oak. Lots of poison oak before and I’m sure more now. The live oak are the backbone of this ecosystem, the only ones with dense enough wood to survive the occasional burn that comes with life around here. All the others, poof, they’re supposed to go up, then their saplings sprout from the ashes. When the Lilac Fire came through, hotter and bigger than anything evolution had prepared them for, even the live oak burned. It all burned.

Five years ago now. It seems so recent in my mind, but my sense of time has been as warped by the pandemic as anyone. I remember the creek black and charred, with the skeletal arms of the live oak twisting into an ashen sky. I remember seeing the water run in the creek, across carbon-blasted rocks. I remember the first few shoots, tender green against the soot. Then I don’t remember, because I was laid off for fourteen months. I played with my daughter, caught up on a million tasks around the house, pushed forward with my artistic pursuits, and generally lived a far better life than I had while working. Then the news came: I had to go back.

The next time I drove by that creek, an overcast May morning, I noticed how much had grown back. The creek was green again, highlighted by white flowers and long runs of grass. The only memory of the fire were a few blackened oak branches, still defiantly thrusting out of the cover of the sycamores, still daring us to remember the fire. Maybe there are little saplings growing from acorns, their hardwood keeping them close to the ground while the softwoods spring up. Maybe the oaks are well and truly dead now. I don’t know. I can only drive by, looking at the contrast between fire and leaves, watching the shattered branches beg me to remember.

I think about this creek a lot when I write. People rarely recover from trauma. We move on, we forget, we repress, but when something big burns through our lives, we never again become whole. There will always be some little sooty branch dead inside us. Sometimes, many years after, it only peeks through the canopy enough for people driving by on the freeway to notice, to wonder about what happened.

It’s not where I start when I’m conceiving a character. My first thought is to a character’s role in the story: are they the main character or a secondary? Do they support the main character or antagonize them? Are they quick-witted or slow, charming or boorish, deft or clumsy, grounded or dancing through the clouds? And only once I have a good picture of what I want this person to be can I begin the real work of understanding why they are that way. How was their childhood? Are their parents alive and, if so, are they estranged? I peel back layer after layer of fluffy cottonwood until I find the charred oak at the center.

Sometimes that trauma is never mentioned in the story. Their creek has grown back enough to cover up even the tallest branches. They enter the story, they laugh, they leave with a cheery wave and only I, behind the keyboard, know what happened to them. Other times, like in this quarter’s Vaquero-Tribune story, the fire has only now burned through. The ashes are still on the ground; life has not returned, and the trauma is laid bare for anyone who looks. Both types of characters, as well as anyone in between, are deep and meaningful; both have important stories to tell.

Their lives, like ours, are messy and complicated. They are their past, but also their present, and we need to consider both as they lead us into the future.