FIRE IN THE CANYON

A rural California family, struggling to make financial and emotional ends meet, faces the destructive threat of wildfires.

In the gold country of the California foothills, a place of picturesque natural beauty, residents know full well that conditions are always primed for a forest fire, that, in the words of Wallace Stegner—used here as an epigraph—the beautiful land ultimately “imposes itself” on them, and “sets the rules for [their] existence.” Briefly imprisoned a decade ago for growing medical marijuana, 65-year-old grape farmer Ben Hecht has been keeping a low profile, a little tired but grateful to have returned to his challenging yet rewarding farm life and to Ada, his novelist wife. Like early-evening sunlight streaming down the mountains, their world lately has been looking good, even promising. Their son, Yoel, has been painfully estranged from Ben, but now, back home after working in Los Angeles, seems surprisingly interested in reconciliation. Family and new friends surround them, proffering glasses of good wine or an occasional joint, just as they are surrounded by a happy menagerie of dogs, chickens, geese, and emus. There has even emerged the distinct possibility of Ben starting a wine-making business. Then, one day, a distant black plume of smoke changes everything. The wildfire that eventually tears through the area hurts the Hechts financially, but it is the obliteration of Ada’s work in progress that tips the family into a tailspin—this, and Yoel’s sudden involvement with an environmental group preparing to move from complaint to physical action, and Ben’s now-constant, justified worry of another, greater fire that would plunge them into poverty. Gumbiner examines the minutiae of the Hecht family’s life, their viniculture, their industry, their mellow California woods culture, sometimes to the detriment of narrative action, but his characters glow tenderly on the page. They are a good group of people to root for, at the shifting mercy of the winds that blow past their heads, trapped inside an ecosystem heating up steadily, past the point of hopeful disregard. Gumbiner crafts an important story, the fictional equivalent of outdoor warning sirens screaming above smoldering pine trees.

An engaging, Steinbeckian look at climate change and its emotional costs.