The air purifier has been running at max capacity for two days straight. Bluey is stir crazy from potty breaks cut down to five minutes. My eyes and lungs feel raw from soot that has drifted down from the wildfires burning through northwestern Ontario, wiping out homes and forests and cutting off entire communities.
Instead of working on a patio, which is my usual temperate day activity, I am rewatching a Taylor Sheridan mini-series. The end scene in season 2, episode 6 of 1923 tugs at the heart strings. Hard.
Isabel May’s Elsa has been the closest thing this franchise has to a matriarch since 1883, when it was her choice that decided where the Duttons would eventually settle. Her narration across both prequels does more than describe what’s happening onscreen. It reads like an observant essay running alongside the plot, and it’s the thread that ties Taylor Sheridan’s two Yellowstone prequels together, the same voice carrying the theme from one show into the next. You can hear her age in the accent, young, but never naive. She was adventurous and worldly in a way that made her an unlikely pioneer, and that same quality is what makes her final monologue land the way it does.
Dying, she delivers it to Alexandra (Julia Schlaepfer). “Man destroys everything,” she says. “He has been at war with this world since he first entered. War with its trees. War with its weather. So is everything else.” Nothing coexists, in her telling. Every living thing is fighting for its own survival, and the only real winner is the planet itself.
The scene closes with this: “Earth is not benign rock condemned to endure countless little rapes from its inhabitants. It is a living, evolving, interactive being, capable of wiping all existence, by the simplest of wobbles on its axis.”
What makes the scene land is the timing of it within the show. Alexandra realises, in real time, exactly how much trouble she is in, freezing on the wrong side of the Rockies in a winter the new settlers were nowhere near prepared for.
My brother and sister in law run Rocking K Ranch in real life, and the gap between a romanticised version of a hard life and the actual work of it is something we’ve talked about before, most recently over Yesteryear, which is a much less fatalistic book but is still, underneath the satire, about the same heartache: how hard it is to live off land that does not care whether you succeed.
Watching 1923 again this week, in the middle of a state of emergency and a sky the colour of rust, the parallel felt uncomfortably close. Different century, different circumstances, but the same throughline: human error and greed, and a natural world that answers on its own terms and its own timeline.
I want to be hopeful about it. I keep landing on disappointed instead.
Winter would be a respite right now, from the heat, from the air quality warnings, from checking the AQI before deciding whether Bluey can go further than the end of the block. Next post will be more positive.