The Maui fires, from New York.
Images from Lahaina
I want to write about the Maui fires, but I want to write about them from here — from New York — because I think the distance matters. When something terrible happens somewhere else, the question isn't only what happened and why. The question is also: how do we hold this from a distance, in a way that is honest without being either numb or consumed?
Lahaina burned on August 8th. By the time I'm writing this, more than a hundred people are confirmed dead. The death toll is expected to rise. It is the deadliest wildfire in the United States in over a century. The images are what images of fire always are: orange and terrible and somehow still beautiful in a way that makes you feel guilty for noticing.
My daughter, eleven, saw the images on a phone. I hadn't planned for her to — I was trying to find a moment to introduce it carefully — but she found it before the moment arrived, which is how things happen now. She came to find me and said: it's very bad, isn't it.
Yes. It's very bad.
She said: what do people do when something like this happens? And I started to answer — emergency services, disaster relief, the infrastructure of response — and then I realised she wasn't asking about logistics. She was asking something else.
What do people do. Not what do institutions do. What do people do.
What do people do. My daughter asked the logistics question first and then the real question. The real question was what to do with the knowledge of something terrible happening far away, to people who are not you.
Materials, steps, what to notice — the hands-on part that makes the edition usable at home with your children this week.
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