I have just come home to Salt Lake City and Utah is on fire, and I do not mean this poetically, although honestly, Utah does enjoy making everything biblical and dramatic and vaguely Old Testament in July, so here we are, once again, surrounded by dry grass, hot wind, evacuation alerts, smoke maps, firefighters working themselves into ash-covered saints, dogs hiding under beds, veterans and refugees and babies and every person with a nervous system bracing for the nightly neighbourhood reenactment of “freedom,” while fireworks are stacked for sale in the aisles of the grocery store as if this is perfectly normal, as if this is not the sort of cognitive dissonance that should make all of us stop next to the ice machine and the rotisserie chickens and the family-size tortilla chips and say, wait, hold on, are we really doing this right now?

Before anyone starts clutching their sparklers and typing with their thumbs full of liberty, I know what month it is, I know where I live, I know Utah in July is not so much a month as a prolonged ignition ceremony with snack breaks, I know we begin with the 4th of July and then we just keep right on going until the 24th when the pioneers allegedly rolled into this valley, wiped the dust out of their eyes, looked around at all this dry, flammable majesty and said, “This is the place,” which apparently, generations later, has come to mean this is the place where we spend most of July scaring the bejezzus out of every dog, every sweet person with PTSD, every baby trying to sleep, every elder trying to remember what quiet feels like, and every canyon full of sweetgrass waiting for one yahoo with a lighter and a pocketful of constitutional fireworks to become the plot twist nobody needed.

I am not anti-fire.

Please.

Let us not be ridiculous.

I am a Burner, for fuck’s sake, a woman who has spent a good portion of her adult life hauling water and snacks and weird forms of devotion across a dry lake bed where people build impossible things out of dust and scaffolding and crazy grit and love, then set them on fire under the supervision of people who understand wind, perimeter, safety, ritual, consequence, and the very important difference between sacred flame and Chad from down the street launching aerials into a neighborhood full of juniper while declaring himself a patriot.

I love fire.

I love the bloom of fireworks in a night sky when they are handled by professionals who know what they are doing and have permits and water trucks and actual plans that do not begin with “hold my beer” and end with the county sheriff asking everyone to evacuate.

I love spectacle.

I love celebration.

I love light.

I love the crack and shimmer and gasp of it, the moment when a whole crowd looks up together and forgets for three seconds how divided and tired and mean we have all become.

What I do not love is carelessness dressed up as tradition.

What I do not love is selling explosives in grocery store aisles while Utah is literally burning in every direction, while we are watching acres disappear, while animals are running, while people are packing medication and photographs and dog food into cars just in case, while firefighters are out there trying to convince the flames not to become weather, while smoke sits in the valley like an unwanted relative who refuses to leave and makes everyone’s lungs feel personally insulted.

I do not love the part where we ask for help with one hand and sell the problem with the other.

FEMA has authorized federal funds to help fight the Iron Fire, which is a sentence I find almost darkly comic in this particular American moment, since depending on which political carnival ride you happen to be strapped into, FEMA is either a vital public agency or a government bogeyman hiding under the bed with your tax dollars, but apparently when the hills are on fire we all remember very quickly that mutual aid is not communism, it is what keeps the flames from eating the next ridge.

And still, here we are, Utah, with the fires burning and the air turning into a throat lozenge from hell, selling fireworks next to the groceries, smiling brightly through the smoke, acting as if we can call something a national emergency and then we spin around and hand out spark boxes with patriotic branding and a coupon for more for the arrival of all those pioneers.

I do not think we get to have it both ways.

I really don’t.

I do not think we get to say we love this place, we love these mountains, we love these canyons, we love this big dry weird holy bowl of a valley, we love our families, we love our neighbors, we love our firefighters, we love our dogs, we love our veterans, we love our freedom, we love our pioneers, we love our heritage, we love our God, we love our country, and then spend the hottest, driest, most flammable weeks of the year treating the entire state as if it is a disposable party favour wrapped in red, white, and boom.

I know fireworks are legal.

So are many dumb things.

Legal is not the same as wise.

Legal is not the same as kind.

Legal is not the same as neighbourly.

Legal is not the same as, perhaps we should not tempt the desert into becoming a funeral pyre just so Kyle can light the “Mega Patriot Screaming Eagle Thunder Dragon 5000” in the cul-de-sac while everyone’s Labrador trembles behind the washing machine.

This is the part where someone will tell me I am trying to ruin everyone’s fun, which is hilarious, truly, since I am a woman who believes very deeply in fun, possibly too deeply, a woman who has built entire temporary civilizations around coffee, glitter, grilled cheese, electrolytes, radical hospitality, art, dust, nakedness, body joy, and the spiritual necessity of occasionally doing something weird under the stars, but I also believe fun has to survive contact with the actual world, and the actual world right now is hot and dry and on fire and full of living creatures who did not volunteer to become collateral damage in Utah’s annual month-long pyrotechnic identity crisis.

I am asking for restraint.

Not forever.

Not joylessness.

Not a statewide ban on wonder.

Just the tiniest little teaspoon of common sense stirred into the Pioneer Day punch bowl.

Maybe this year, while the fire crews are out there doing the kind of work most of us cannot even imagine, while families are refreshing containment maps, while the air smells wrong, while the mountains stand there looking dry and tired and entirely too ready to go up if we breathe on them funny, maybe we could decide that freedom also includes the freedom not to light shit on fire.

Maybe we could decide that being a good neighbour matters more than making the sky explode from your driveway.

Maybe we could decide that dogs and babies and veterans and refugees and exhausted people and traumatized people and firefighters and wildlife and lungs and canyons and whole communities deserve one July where we do not confuse noise with patriotism and sparks with devotion.

Maybe we could put the fireworks back on the shelf and go eat pie.

Maybe we could stand outside and look at the mountains, while we still have mountains to look at, and remember that they are already dramatic enough.

Maybe we could wave a flag without setting the hillside on fire.

Maybe we could let July be July without turning every night into a tiny war.

Maybe we could be brave enough, just this once, to celebrate by not making anything worse.

I know.

Radical.

Possibly un-Utahn.

Someone alert the Governor.

But here I am, home again, looking at fireworks for sale in the grocery store while the state burns around us, and all I can think is that irony has finally put on boots, walked into the aisle, picked up a box of TNT Pop-Its, and asked all of us whether we have completely lost the plot.

And honestly?

I think the answer might be yes.

But we could still choose differently.

We could still choose the mountains.

We could still choose the dogs.

We could still choose the firefighters.

We could still choose the air.

We could still choose not to be the spark.

Wouldn’t that be something?