Jim Kauahikaua ’73 stands on one of a series of lava flows blocking a highway just south of Pāhoa, on the Big Island of Hawaii.

The eruptions on the island of Hawai‘i—better known as “the Big Island”—are a few weeks old, and it’s becoming clearer by the day that this time is different. Bigger. Less predictable. More explosive. At a press update at the Civil Defense office in Hilo, a tall man with a tangle of gray-white beard and a baseball cap turned backward steps in front of the cameras and introduces himself in a soft, gravelly voice.

“Jim Kauahikaua, U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. I’ll do a quick summary of what’s happening. Vents eight and 16 have reactivated. Twenty-two and 13 are still the main southbound channels going into the two ocean entries, though those have been quite weak today …”

His tone is quiet, his words measured—full of unembellished facts. His answers to questions are patient. If his eyes roll just a bit at some of the uninformed queries from mainland reporters, you can’t see it through his sun-darkened glasses.

His colleague Tina Neal, who succeeded him four years ago as the observatory’s scientist-in-charge, calls this “the voice of the consummate scientist.” And even as repeated explosions rock the volcano’s summit in the days ahead, launching vast columns of ash miles into the sky, that imperturbable baritone, explaining each day’s events, will remain strangely reassuring.

Born on O‘ahu and raised amid the volcanic starkness and splendor of the islands, Jim Kauahikaua ’73 has been studying the volcano known as Kīlauea for most of his life. The first native Hawaiian to serve as scientist-in-charge at the volcano observatory, he is one of a handful of people who can claim both a deep scientific understanding of the world’s most active volcano and a rich and intimate knowledge of its history.

While earning his doctorate at the University of Hawai‘i in Mānoa and throughout the early part of his career as a geophysicist, he probed the volcano’s subterranean secrets with scientific instruments, studying—among other things—the way lava tubes form. More recently, he has worked on assessing hazards and reconstructing the volcano’s past through vintage news accounts, many of them taken from now-defunct Hawaiian-language newspapers that have never before been translated.

As a result, he wasn’t completely surprised by the sudden violence of the 2018 eruptions. It simply reminded him of events from long ago. It’s the kind of connection he’s always on the lookout for as he searches for patterns from the past that can help explain how the volcano is evolving today and predict what it might do tomorrow. “We’ve known for some time that Kīlauea has had explosive phases,” he explains. “The most recent one killed at least 80 Hawaiian warriors at the summit.”

What he’s referring to is an event that happened in 1790, the final stage of several centuries of explosive summit eruptions that inspired one of the great Hawaiian sagas about the goddess Pele. Many years later, a geologist named Don Swanson connected the folkloric and scientific dots to recreate a vivid picture of what happened near the summit that day.

“Hawaiians had no written language prior to contact with the Western world, so we only know about it through oral traditions,” Kauahikaua explains. “We don’t know how many explosions there were or how strong they were, but we do know that the explosion cloud for one of them was viewed from the other side of the island, so it was visible above the summit of Mauna Loa. That means it was big—a 20,000- or 30,000-foot-high explosive column.”

He even has a good idea about how those 80 warriors may have died. They were probably the victims of what’s known today as a base surge.

“In an explosion, a lot of material is thrown up into the air,” he explains. “The very fine stuff drifts off in the atmosphere and can travel 100 miles or more. But the larger, coarser stuff will just fall right back down, and it falls down as sort of a superheated, gas-charged mass. So it doesn’t just fall and hit the ground. It falls and starts to travel very fast horizontally. That’s a base surge, and those warriors were caught in it.”

For Kauahikaua, Swanson’s work is a model for the kind of pattern-seeking research he’s engaged in today. “Our primary way of trying to forecast what is going to happen in the future is by knowing in detail what has happened in the past,” he says.

These days he’s focusing primarily on the 19th century, a period that he believes still has a lot to offer in understanding the cycles of activity that Kīlauea has passed through.

“I’ve mostly been concentrating on large lava flow eruptions,” he says. “One thing I’ve found is that they all kind of exhibit the same behavior the last couple of months of their existence, and that is that they start to stall and then pulse forward and then stall again. So it’s sort of a pulsating, rather than a steady advance.”

He found that pattern in eruptions in the 1881 event, when a lava flow from Mauna Loa was advancing on what is now the city of Hilo. And he found it again in eyewitness accounts of another Mauna Loa eruption that again threatened Hilo in 1935.

And he saw the same thing near the end of the 2018 eruptions at Kīlauea.

During these most recent eruptions, Kauahikaua found himself right in the middle of the action but, at the same time, frustratingly far from the front lines.

As the observatory’s liaison with the island’s emergency operations center, he saw very little of the historic eruptions with his own eyes. “I was at Civil Defense virtually through the entire thing,” he recalls. “I think I did about a half dozen of the overflights out there, and I was only on the ground twice.”

And yet, every significant piece of information reported back by the teams of observers who were patrolling the rift zone each day passed through his hands as he updated representatives from all relevant organizations—from utility companies to the National Guard—keeping them informed about unfolding events and the resulting hazards that might be facing them that day.

From the first, Kauahikaua says, the public demand for information was “crazy.” But just getting reports from the field was often a struggle. Some of the cell towers in the area had burned down, making cell phone reception spotty. And some members of the teams were novices who had to learn on the job how to make a clear report.

Another problem, Kauahikaua says, was the role of social media, which was handled by USGS geologists thousands of miles away on the mainland. “We were prepared for regular media with conference calls and information releases via email and our website,” he explains. “But social media added a whole new set of demands, sometimes seemingly favoring quickness over quality of information. And anything but quality information would defeat our mission.”

But the main thing that Kauahikaua says tried his patience during those long weeks was the bureaucratic conceit of some of the early incident management teams sent in by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which used the emergency as a training exercise. “None of them had Hawai‘i experience or eruption experience, so—for example, safety out in the field. All of a sudden, we had these people from God knows where, Georgia maybe, telling us what was safe and what was not safe. And that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”

Another Hilo resident who was quickly drafted to lead one of the teams on the ground, Professor Emeritus of Geology Rick Hazlett, seconds that opinion: “I’ll tell you that they didn’t know volcanic gas from a hole in Kansas. It was disgraceful, I thought.”

However, he believes Kauahikaua was the perfect choice to deal with all of those complicated communication issues. “He’s very exact about the certainty and clarity of detail,” Hazlett says. “So he’s a good filter in terms of making sure that he got good information. The last thing he’d want to do was spread a falsehood. Secondly, he speaks with calm equanimity, irrespective of how he’s feeling inside. And thirdly, he’s a voice that is trusted in this community, because he is Hawaiian, and he’s been here throughout his postgraduate career. He’s not passing through.”

That’s actually an understatement. Hawai‘i is not just Kauahikaua’s home—it’s pretty much the full range and scope of his professional interests and ambitions. “Many of my colleagues are interested in volcanoes, period,” he says. “There is this type, and there is that type. I can honestly say that I am way more interested in our volcanoes than in any other volcanoes.”

Part of that, he admits, is a love of the cultural side of the phenomenon. Native Hawaiians have had a complex and intimate relationship with their volcanoes for centuries and continue to relate to them in ways that outsiders have trouble understanding.

“As a matter of fact,” he says, “you can see this in the most recent event, where lava threatened people’s homes, and native Hawaiians would take the attitude, ‘Pele is related to us. She is in our family tree.’ So they would actually see it as if a relative were visiting, which made me think, ‘That is a very clear understanding of our place on this landscape.’ If you feel that you own a piece of land, it is kind of temporary.”

For Kauahikaua, that sense that everything is temporary isn’t just academic. Indeed, he considers every day that he is able to study the volcano that he loves to be a gift—one he almost lost 15 years ago when he began to have blinding headaches and double vision and was eventually diagnosed with stage-four nasopharyngeal cancer, a tumor just below his brain.

For the better part of a year, he and his wife, Jeri Gertz, moved to Honolulu, where an oncologist put him through more than 40 radiation treatments and five or six chemo treatments. “He said he was going to nearly kill me to cure me, and that’s how it was,” he recalls.

The treatment left him with one deaf ear, significant hearing loss in the other and an enhanced appreciation of his opportunity to keep doing the things he loves. “There are gifts inside the most difficult of challenges,” Gertz says, “and both Jim and I would agree that we found those gifts.”

Asked about retirement, Kauahikaua said he thinks about it often, especially now. The observatory’s offices at Kīlauea were so badly damaged by earthquakes that the organization has had to scatter its personnel among crowded, makeshift office spaces around Hilo—a situation that he finds less than appealing. But he’s not ready to retire just yet.

In any case, Gertz says she doesn’t think retirement would be a change of direction for her husband—just a change of employment. “He will always continue to be this man who studies volcanoes, whether he’s employed with the USGS or not,” she says.

The latest eruptions started at the end of May and petered out near the end of August. They left behind a changed island—not only in a portion of its topography but also in its expectations. As Kauahikaua likes to say, “Our volcano isn’t the type you run away from. It’s the type you run toward.”

He means that literally—Hawaiian volcanoes have enjoyed such a reputation for tameness over the years that they’ve actually been draws for millions of visitors. In fact, he explains, “the activity at Kīlauea was the initial attraction for tourists in the 19th century and the location of the first hotel in the kingdom.”

Indeed, in this idyllic Hawaiian setting, even something as powerful and potentially dangerous as a thousand-foot-high lava fountain can somehow end up seeming harmless, as happened at Kīlauea in 1959. The fountain was right at the edge of a long crater, he recalls. “And so if the winds were right, the winds would blow the fountain debris away from the viewing areas, and any lava produced would fill up this crater. So it was a perfect thing for viewing. It became known as the ‘drive-in volcano.’”

Today, people still come to Hawai‘i to see lava flows and fountains or to watch glowing streams of molten rock slide into the ocean amid roiling clouds of steam—as if it were all a show put on for their entertainment. “Even during this past summer’s explosions and collapses at the summit, there were a few that wanted to see the summit area,” he says. “Several were arrested or cited by the National Park Service.”

But all of those years of constant but fairly predictable activity—more effusive than explosive, in a volcanologist’s terms—might at last be coming to an end. Certainly, the 2018 eruptions seemed to break the mold in a big way—or maybe it would be better to say that they turned back the clock. “Basically, it erupted 10 years of Kīlauea lava in three months,” Kauahikaua says. And it did so with a violence that the island hadn’t seen in centuries.

One good thing he thinks might come out of it is a greater acceptance among island officials of the unavoidable dangers of development in a rift zone, something the scientists at the observatory have been preaching about—largely in vain—for decades. The destruction of more than 700 homes over a three-month period, he says, may have finally changed some political hearts and minds. At least he hopes so.

After all, living in close proximity to one of the most powerful and unpredictable forces on earth calls for a certain degree of humility.

As Kauahikaua says, “Volcanoes were here first.”

When Sia ’65 and Aim ’64 Morhardt decided to build their new home in the hills above Santa Barbara, California—on a site where a previous home (not theirs) had burned to the ground—they knew they had to do more than simply cross their fingers and hope for a wildfire-free future. So they decided to outsmart the fire before it starts. Completed in 2011, the house incorporates every available and cost-efficient measure they could find to minimize the prospect of another disaster, plus a few that they invented themselves. “We haven’t been tested by fire,” Sia says. But the Morhardts sleep better at night, knowing that they’ve made their house as fire-resistant as they could possibly make it.

The motif of feral children was in critically acclaimed novelist Pomona College Professor Jonathan Lethem’s index of writing ideas for many years. There was the concept of urban feral children in New York City. Archetypal fictional characters like Tarzan and Mowgli. Real-life stories of feral children. A Pomona College course he designed on animals in literature had a portion devoted to the idea of the feral. All things feral fascinated him. So, a feral child of a different kind was born: the book The Feral Detective. This wild detective-book child was local-born, with the story set in the surrounding Inland Empire, the mountains and the desert region (what Lethem calls “the scruffier east”). He took the feral even farther, exploring desert-dwelling communes and creating two off-the-grid communes, the Rabbits and the Bears, that he writes about in his book.

Pomona College Magazine’s Sneha Abraham sat down with Lethem, the College’s Roy Edward Disney ’51 Professor of Creative Writing and Professor of English, to talk about the conception, birth and growth of the book and more.

PCM: Where did this idea of a feral detective come from?

LETHEM: I’d been sort of creeping around this idea of “the feral,” thinking there might be something there for me to write about, but it was hard for me to get a handle on it. Then I had this idea which, like a lot of my best ideas, sounds ridiculous at first. “Oh, a feral detective? What would that be? What would that consist of?” It was just a phrase at first. But I thought, “I’ve written before about strange figures who occupy the detective’s role in a story. What would it mean if someone who’d grown up as a feral child became a detective?” Even that wasn’t quite a plan yet, more an inkling. It took thinking about the protagonist, Phoebe, a New Yorker who gets involved with this detective and hires him and is the reader’s surrogate for meeting this character—only then did I realize I did have a book that would work. It took coming up with the narrator for it to click into place. As well as my growing interest in this local terrain that I’ve come to live in.

I’ve been in Claremont now not quite a decade, but it feels increasingly vivid to me. I’ve begun traveling east, into the desert areas, and puzzling over the way life occupies that landscape. One day I felt I knew enough; I’d been stirred enough by the local environment to write about it in a way that would be meaningful. I believed I knew how to make the setting click into place with the characters. The final part of the book’s genesis was a strange and in many ways unhappy circumstance, but it became crucial as well. Just as I was planning to start writing—I’d been assembling my materials—Trump was elected. I felt disarranged—a sensation many people felt, I think. For a moment, my work appeared quite useless. Again, I suspect other people might identify with the sensation: “Why do I do the things I do? This is more or less a joke.” And then I realized that this book could be a pretty good vehicle for describing some of those feelings, that Phoebe herself could give voice to that kind of anxiety.

PCM: Do you go to the desert often?

LETHEM: More and more. As a New Yorker the whole West was mysterious to me. California was a fantasy and an image that I knew from the movies, and desert spaces seemed very imaginary. I knew them from looking at Western movies, set in Monument Valley or perhaps Pioneertown. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I even crossed the Mississippi River. At that point I moved to Berkeley, where I lived for 10 years, and began to have a relationship to the actual Western space. It’s not just a fantasy, but the fantasies pervade it. California and the West are places of myth. They’re implicated in the ideology of westward expansion, the frontier. I started traveling sporadically, in my 20s, to Arizona and some of the Utah Canyonlands. I suspect Claremont is a disguised desert. It’s all dressed up with these trees, but all you have to do is cross Claremont Boulevard and look at the Wash, and look at the way Upland is more yellow and scraped, to imagine how Claremont ought to look.

Increasingly, I was curious to get a sense of Rancho Cucamonga and Riverside and places farther east. I became interested in the Mojave and Joshua Tree in the last few years and started to realize that it was speaking to me. I was beginning to peel away my mythic response to the desert spaces—which has to do with the movies and American history—and just the weird planetary intensity of figures in open space and start to see that it was also a social or a cultural space, that in weird scrappy ways people had made lives out there. There were intimate histories that I could perceive. So I started spending time less in the Joshua Tree National Park than in the town of Joshua Tree and the other towns around there, Landers and Yucca Valley. And finding it really compelling for what it did to my head, but also for what I was beginning to observe—the way other people occupy that space. It attracts artists and weirdos—like myself—because there are certain automatic libertarian freedoms. Nobody’s going to bother you. People go there to just be whoever they want to be.

PCM: Live their lives on their terms.

LETHEM: Yeah.

PCM: Do you remember your first trip to the desert?

LETHEM: Well, my first real trip to the desert was with my then-wife, in the early ’80’s. Her grandparents lived in Globe, Arizona, an old mining town. We drove with her family—this is a long time ago—and on the way did some Canyonlands, visited Zion and Bryce and Coral Pink Sand Dunes. It was extraordinary for me. All I’d done before was drive Route 80 and drive across Wyoming and Utah, across the salt flats. But that was to get across it. This was to go to it, and that was different. And then staying in Arizona for a week or so and taking walks in the desert, meeting a scorpion on the patio.

PCM: Are these desert-dwelling groups that you describe in the book, the Rabbits and the Bears, real kinds of groups?

LETHEM: The Rabbits and the Bears are kind of a distillation. I’m quite interested in the history of intentional communities and communes in American life, and I think it’s an underappreciated, under-described part of the history of the West. Many people did come and create and make attempts to live in some different kind of configuration. Just under the surface of the history of a lot of localities is some group that came to make a new world, to found a small utopia. And there are some communes that are loosely comparable to the back-story that I gave the Rabbits and Bears. They’re not necessarily in the Mojave Desert. The desert is actually a fairly unlikely place to try and live the way they’re living—in that sense it’s fantastical. More typically, groups set up somewhere where there’s a little more arable land and shade available. The Black Bear Ranch was a point of reference. Its history intrigued me because there were such utopian aspirations, as well as such comically disappointing results. But people did also persist; they kept trying to live that way even when things went disastrously badly.

This circles back to the idea of the feral child. One of the forms of ferality that interests me—and that people are writing about in the form of memoirs and fiction now—is the children of, basically, hippies, or seekers from the Aquarian generation who went into wild spaces, rural spaces, and tried to live off the grid or to homeschool or non-school their kids. Some of those children from the ’60s and ’70s have begun testifying about the weirdness and wildness of their upbringing. So I was thinking about Detective Heist, one of my main characters, as being a product of that very real legacy. But my specific commune—and where I located it—is my own invention.

PCM: This is a return for you to the detective novel. Why the return and what was it like to come back to it?

LETHEM: Well, it’s a replenishing source for me. When I discovered my appetite for reading and then my ambition to become a writer, I really loved a lot of the hard-boiled writers—that first-person, private-detective style that you associate most strongly with Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I read many different things, but this was one of the key sources for me. I recognize now, when I look at my earliest writing, how things began to coalesce for me best when I used that voice as a template. Even if I didn’t have a detective in the story, I used that hard-boiled style. That romantic but also cynical first-person voice was incredibly versatile for me; it helped me learn to tell stories. I came back to it in the middle of my writing life with Motherless Brooklyn very satisfyingly. It became a vehicle for transforming my writing at that point; I used it to write about growing up in Brooklyn for the first time.

So it was a talismanic approach for me. In some ways, as I set out to write about Southern California, a subject that was increasingly rich and meaningful to me, but also overwhelming, and then to try to capitalize on this notion of the feral child—these were intimidating prospects for me. I didn’t know how to handle them. But just as writing about growing up in Brooklyn was intimidating to me, and writing about the neurology of Tourette’s syndrome was intimidating to me—difficult things to get onto the page—the detective story had given me a way to do it. It carved out an approach that was familiar and that I could handle. There’s a formal quality to writing a detective story that’s quite sturdy. It’s almost like you’re a poet reaching for the sonnet form. You always know where you are in this kind of story. So I thought that if I used this sturdy generic apparatus, maybe then I can handle all this crazy material that I’m thinking about and pour it into this nice strong vehicle.

PCM: How does one situate oneself in the perspective of the opposite gender? How does that work? What’s that process like?

LETHEM: If I approached it on the terms that your question suggests, as a kind of categorical task—“I am a man; I’m going to try to write as a woman”—I’d flinch immediately. It would seem forbidding, and impossible. Instead, I don’t think of Phoebe as representative or categorical, I think of her as an individual. My job isn’t to figure out a gender other than my own; my job is to figure out who Phoebe is. She’s my character, particular and distinct, and I need to believe in her before I can write the first word. And I was lucky in this. Phoebe made sense to me relatively quickly. I don’t know how that luck comes to you—certainly sometimes it doesn’t. In this case, when I wondered “Who is this person?” I had answers. I felt her. Obviously she was made up of pieces of myself and of people I know, including women I know, and made up partly also of other people’s fictional characters. There are those recognizable ingredients, but the ingredients coalesced into someone I had unique access to. When that happens, you realize that if you didn’t have the courage to write her down, write her thoughts down, Phoebe wasn’t going to exist. So I was now obliged to make her live on the page. By making this individual connection, you overcome the intimidating prospect of writing across difference.

PCM: Do you ever dream your plots or characters?

LETHEM: Oh, yeah. My dream life is frequently implicated in generating the raw imagery, the baseline ideas for a novel or story. Sometimes I’ll also dream about books as I’m writing them, and that will shape or transform the project. But, in many ways, once the books are in progress, they’ve become lucid dreams. They’re waking dreams. So they don’t need to be in my sleep life anymore. The dreams are most useful before I’ve produced any evidence of the book, and in them I feel the reality of a new book insisting itself upon me.

PCM: What’s your emotion when you know your work is complete?

LETHEM: There’s an initial exultation. But the question’s tricky because the meaning of “complete” is tricky. With each book, there are several finishings. There’s the day you write the words “The End.” And you think, “There it is. It’s done.” And then there’s the day you get over your infatuation with having written the last page, and you go back and you look at the beginning, and you’re like, “Oh, there’s a lot of work to be done here.” So there’s revision. Then there’s another finishing that comes when you’ve revised it to your initial satisfaction. And then you hand it over to early readers and to your editor, and you’re humbled—all sorts of questions are raised. And then you think, “Oh wait. I wasn’t done.” And so there’s yet another finishing. Beyond that, in a kind of diminishing but important way, in the production process first you’re given copyedits, and there you find things you want to change. And then you’re given proofreading, and you panic and you find things that still need correcting.

And so, finishing is a kind of … what is it? Zeno’s paradox. You’re always half-finished. And then you half-again finish. But still, there’s that day that you write the words ‘The End,’ when you write the last page. Because I’m superstitious, I think, “Oh, God. OK. I won’t die with this book as an unfinished project. It won’t be a Kafka book. It won’t have no ending.” So, no matter how many errors are still in it, at least if someone reads it, they’ll get to an end. I feel like I’ve delivered the goods. And I’m also just excited and, usually, very in love with the book in that initial feeling of finishing, before anyone else’s assessment can get between me and the thing.

Invariably there follows, shortly after, a kind of postpartum confusion. It’s not really a deep depression, but there’s a sort of “lost” feeling of “Oh, wait. I had this organizing principle. Every day I woke up knowing I have to advance this cause.” The way soldiers can be nostalgic for war because after they come back, life is no longer simple. They’re no longer clear on what they’re supposed to do every day. So I’m often surprisingly distressed or unmoored by finishing, and then the only answer to that is to find something else to work on.

PCM: You dedicate the book in part to the late Professor of English Arden Reed? Why Arden?

LETHEM: Arden was important to me even before I was hired, on my first visit. He made an impression on me. He reached out. He was such a defining presence in our department. He quickly became one of the people in my life that I wrote to impress. And he also showed me a portion of the desert, because I got to stay with him and his partner in New Mexico, where they had an extraordinary home, their second home, a kind of a desert compound that they had built themselves. And so there was also a material resonance, because his love of that desert space spoke to my interest in it. He passed away as I was writing the book, so the dedication just seemed a natural result.

PCM: What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?

LETHEM: Well, the simplest advice, which everyone gives, is this: You must just read and write inordinate amounts and allow yourself to be consumed by those tasks without being in a rush to publish or to see results. It’s typical to write for 10 years before you’re getting results that would matter to readers. Being patient with that is very challenging, but it’s important. And reading constantly, to fill up the well with different sources and different structural models for how it’s done.

But the other thing I advise is to remember to play with different forms. Do different things. Don’t lock down into one idea, thinking “Oh, I’m meant to be this sort of writer. I’m going to just bear down on this one style, or premise, or genre of work, until I break through.” In the apprentice phase when you’re beginning, you have an uncommon freedom. You need to make use of it and try things that don’t seem typical to you, or even seem funny or awkward. Just experiment a lot with forms and styles and tones.

Try to surprise yourself a lot. Diversify. Because you might find what you really want to do in that mode of play. Many people—and this was true for me—don’t end up exactly the sort of writer that they first visualized they’d be. Their writing teaches them that they have other strengths or other tendencies or other desires which are shrouded, initially. But it’s only by being polymorphous and playing in the realm of writing that you’ll uncover these things.

A few months after moving on to graduate school at Stanford University, physics major Eric Cooper ’18 learned that he’d won what Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy Dwight Whitaker describes as “the Heisman Trophy of physics.” Cooper won the American Physical Society’s LeRoy Apker Award for his work as part of Whitaker’s lab team, using high-speed video to measure the extraordinary seed dispersal rotation rates of certain plants. Reaching rates as high as 1,660 rotations per second, they are among the fastest in nature. Mathematical modeling of the seeds’ flight showed that rotation rate, vertical orientation, low drag and tight spin combine to launch those seeds at distances of 20 feet and more. The Apker Award—conferred each year upon two undergraduate students, one from a Ph.D-granting institution and the other from a non-Ph.D.-granting institution—is the highest national collegiate honor a physics student can receive. To understand the path Cooper followed on his way to this achievement, put yourself in his shoes.

Grow up in Seattle, Washington, the son of two science professors, and get your first electricity set at the age of 5. Become fascinated with building little robots (including a mini Mars rover) with Lego Mindstorms from the age of 8 on.

Start playing the cello at age 10 and keep playing through middle school and high school. Do so in part for the same reason you’re attracted to research—because it allows you to work alongside others while pursuing long-term goals and building incremental skills.

In middle school, attend a summer program on rockets and robotics, where you become intrigued by the mathematics of energy and momentum. Take a particular interest in air resistance and decide you want to do something about it for your next science project.

Join the Frisbee team at school and become fascinated with the physics of flying disks. Teach yourself to use video tracking techniques in order to win the eighth-grade science fair with a project examining the aerodynamics of a spinning Frisbee.

In high school, branch out into nonscientific disciplines with classes in philosophy, comparative government and politics. Realize you want to go to a college where you can do science while also exploring other interests.

Pick Pomona because it checks all your boxes, including a broad curriculum, strong programs in math and physics and the chance to do research. An opening for a cellist in the orchestra and appealing food options seal the deal.

As a first-year, get your first taste of college physics in Whitaker’s Spacetime, Quanta and Entropy class. Get an invitation to work in Whitaker’s lab, in part because of your experience with video tracking and the aerodynamics of rotating bodies from your Frisbee project.

After your first year, do a summer research project at the University of Maryland, College Park, in which you use computer code to track the location of sand grains in three dimensions. Bring that code back to Pomona to track flying, spinning seeds.

As part of Whitaker’s lab team, gather a lot of data during your sophomore year and spend your junior year analyzing it for a paper of which you’re listed as an author, published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Expand upon this for your senior thesis.

Learn that you are one of three finalists in your category for the Apker Award. Give a nerve-wracking 30-minute presentation before the selection committee in Washington, D.C. Learn after starting at Stanford that you won.

For years I’ve wanted to publish a retrospective about Roger Revelle ’29, the oceanographer and climate scientist widely credited with pushing climate change into the consciousness of the nation and the world. So I’m delighted, finally, to include Ramin Skibba’s beautiful story about the scientist’s life and work in this issue. But as I edited the piece, I was troubled to learn that Revelle was also one of the very first targets of climate deniers—and remains a target to this day.

In the last year of his life, between his first heart attack and the one that killed him, a severely ill Revelle was somehow persuaded to lend his name to an article he reportedly had no hand in authoring. The article, published after his death, seemed to indicate that he’d had a last-gasp change of heart about the seriousness of climate change. Not so, say those closest to him—family and colleagues alike. And yet, on a number of websites today, that article is still used to cast doubt upon his body of work.

That’s what led me to a remarkable book titled Merchants of Doubt, by Harvard Professor of the History of Science Naomi Oreskes and science writer Erik Conway.

It’s an eye-opening study of the weaponization of scientific doubt over the past half-century to combat a series of what Al Gore termed “inconvenient truths”­—beginning with the fact that smoking causes cancer and continuing, in pretty much a straight line, to the dangers of secondhand smoke and the anthropogenic causes of acid rain, the ozone hole over Antarctica and, finally, global warming.

Perhaps the most troubling part of the book is the common cast of characters that ties all of these separate episodes together—a few prominent scientists, mostly physicists who had made their names working on weapons systems, who cast their lot with the tobacco industry in the ’50s and ’60s and turned themselves into professional skeptics, generating the illusion of uncertainty and promoting legal and political paralysis on a succession of important environmental issues, in the face of overwhelming scientific consensus.

“Over the course of more than 20 years, these men did almost no original scientific research on any of the issues on which they weighed in,” Oreskes and Conway write. “Once they had been prominent researchers, but by the time they turned to the topics in our story, they were mostly attacking the work and the reputations of others.”

There’s a famous memo written by a tobacco executive in 1969 that pretty much explains it all: “Doubt is our product,” it reads, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”

Doubt, of course, is normally a good thing. If curiosity is the engine that propels science forward, doubt is the guide rail that keeps it on the right path. Doubt is the default setting for all scientists worth their salt, right up to the point at which the accumulation of evidence compels their belief. And even then, good scientists remain open to legitimate findings that challenge what they hold to be true.

But when doubt is artificially manufactured as an excuse for inaction, it becomes a problem. As Oreskes and Conway note, “It is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry’s key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge. As in jujitsu, you could use science against itself.”

The techniques of the doubt merchants ranged from character assassination to the funding of research aimed at blurring scientific lines to the creation of think tanks with the mission of high-profile misdirection. Whichever side of the political divide you may be on, if you read this book, I think you’ll be disturbed by what you learn.

Here’s the good news: In every case—  tobacco as carcinogen, the dangers of second-hand smoke, the role of pollution in acid rain, the role of CFCs in the ozone hole—the scientific consensus eventually won out. But here’s the bad news: If the doubt merchants’ purpose is to delay as long as possible the day of reckoning for the industries and political groups affected, it’s clear that doubt mongering works brilliantly. In the end, the tobacco companies had to pay billions in damages, but only after decades of winning every lawsuit.

Which brings us to today. All of those conspiracies of denial, it now seems, were just warm-ups, trial runs for the biggest show of all—the denial of anthropogenic climate change. And with the stakes no less than the future of our planet, the weapons systems from the battle over tobacco have been upgraded—they’ve gone nuclear.

On the denial side, it’s gotten harder and harder to argue that the jury is still out, given the 97 percent of publishing climate scientists who say the matter has been settled. So now climate scientists are routinely villainized—accused of being part of some massive liberal conspiracy. And as the changes in our climate assert themselves in our daily lives and become even harder to deny, we begin to hear yet another argument: OK, climate change may be real, but there’s nothing we can do about it, so we’ll just have to live with it.

“But there are solutions,” Oreskes and Conway argue. “Global warming is a big problem, and to solve it we have to stop listening to disinformation. We have to pay attention to our science and harness the power of our engineering. Rome may not be burning, but Greenland is melting, and we are still fiddling.”

Photo-illustration combining a photo the R/V Roger Revelle at sea and a photo of Roger Revelle ’29 at work on another research vessel many years before.

Calm seas and sunny weather greeted the R/V Roger Revelle’s maiden voyage in July 1996 as it traveled south from Mississippi, through the Panama Canal and then to San Diego. On board the 273-foot research vessel—the namesake of climate scientist Roger Revelle ’29—were his wife, Ellen Clark Revelle, and their daughter Mary Ellen Revelle Paci ’57, who shared a cabin and relished the chance to experience firsthand the ship’s first passage.

Revelle collects mud from the bottom of the ocean floor for his research as a Ph.D. student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“It was just a remarkable adventure, and we were both very proud of my dad. Really, it was an honor that I was on that ship,” Revelle Paci says.

Revelle died 27 years ago, but his legacy lives on—and not only in the ship that bears his name. A major figure in the early years of climate science and oceanography, he helped establish both fields and elevated them to the international stage. As the director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography (not affiliated with Pomona’s sister institution, Scripps College), he drew attention to growing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that would produce a global warming trend and encouraged other scientists to join him in studying the problem. He also served as science advisor to President Kennedy’s Department of the Interior, testified before congressional committees and was a professor and mentor for future vice president and Nobel laureate Al Gore.

The R/V Revelle today continues to enable the research of climate scientists following in Revelle’s footsteps. The scientists who use it are typically supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Office of Naval Research and even NASA. Owned by the Navy and operated by Scripps, the research vessel spends some 300 days per year at sea, facilitating a wide range of physics, chemistry, biology and ecology involving the oceans and atmosphere.

“The less I see my ship at port, the better,” says Bruce Appelgate, director of ship operations at Scripps. “We hopscotch all over the world,” he says, with brief stops as one researcher unloads their gear, equipment and people and another loads theirs, finally getting a chance for some field research they may have waited years for.

Like the Hubble Space Telescope, the R/V Revelle is popular with scientists. For example, Scripps oceanographer Andrew Lucas ’98 has been on the Revelle many times, and like Revelle himself, he’s a Pomona College grad.

“I’ve been studying the southwest monsoon in Southeast Asia,” Lucas says. “Something like 75% of the annual moisture in that region comes from this monsoon weather pattern. It couldn’t get any more important—it allows people to grow food. Failure of the monsoon, such as starting later or not as much rain, means people will starve to death.”

Lucas and his colleagues developed and built technologies to use on the Revelle to map the upper ocean and lower atmosphere at high resolution. They drive the ship to a particular location, such as the Bay of Bengal, and then use scientific equipment on board—especially the ship’s meteorological instruments and the onboard hydrographic Doppler sonar system, which maps ocean velocities up to 1,000 meters below the ship—while deploying dozens of autonomous vehicles, like drone gliders and floaters that move up and down in the seawater.

Such technologies weren’t available, however, when Revelle and his fellow researchers were just getting started, trying to probe the subtlest signatures of climate change decades before its effects could be clearly felt.

“He’d probably be amazed at how much we’re able to simulate now compared to what people were trying back in the 1950s. When you don’t have those kinds of tools, you have to be cleverer to find the measurements that are really going to tell you something important,” says Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University in New York. “That generation was exceptional at doing that—pulling things together for relatively simple measurements of a complex system. That’s a real gift.”

Revelle’s scientific talents weren’t evident early on. “He was not a stellar student at Pomona. He was almost kicked out,” says his son, William Revelle ’65, a psychologist at Northwestern University. He spent lots of time working as editor of the Pomona Student Life newspaper at the expense of schoolwork. But then the geologist Alfred “Woody” Woodford saw his potential and encouraged him.

Revelle (right) aboard a research vessel with Harold Sverdrop (center), then director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Revelle eventually got through and graduated. He pursued research at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Scripps, analyzing Pacific Ocean deep-sea sediments. Revelle went on to serve during World War II as an oceanographer in the Navy, where he helped establish the Office of Naval Research, and then he continued his leadership at Scripps. He also helped found the University of California, San Diego, served a term as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and became the founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean.

While at home, he often talked about oceanography, carbon dioxide levels, population-related issues and science in general. “Our dinner table was like a seminar. My father spoke slowly and thoughtfully,” says Carolyn Revelle, his youngest daughter. Revelle and his wife entertained lots of guests, including scientists from around the world and Nobel Prize winners he was recruiting to UC San Diego.

He also sometimes spoke about nuclear war, including the environmental impacts of radiation, which he had learned about from measurements taken during the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll. Revelle and his colleagues were concerned about how contamination from plutonium and its fission would harm fisheries in the region. Then in the 1950s, he wrote a paper about the ecological effects of atomic wastes at sea — which is again a concern with rising sea levels causing erosion near the coastal San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station north of San Diego.

A portrait of Roger Revelle ’29

Revelle invited Charles David Keeling to Scripps and supported his work on carefully measuring carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere with an infrared gas analyzer at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. At the same time, Revelle helped create the International Geophysical Year to promote East-West collaboration on Earth science research, including Keeling’s program. This research led to a record of atmospheric measurements now known as the Keeling Curve (see “Revelle & the Curve” on opposite page), a graph that depicts the relentless rise of carbon dioxide concentrations beyond natural seasonal variation—the “breathing” of the Earth. The measurements showed the concentration to be about 310 parts per million in 1958 and then 320 a few years late; now it’s up to about 410, making the trend a clearly upward curve with teeth.

“Given how important that has become—iconic, even—his role in producing it is really very significant,” Schmidt says. Gore included it in his 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

In 1957, Revelle and physicist Hans Suess published a seminal study arguing that growing carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities — namely, burning fossil fuels — could create a greenhouse effect, gradually warming the planet. They also were the first to show that the ocean surface increasingly resists absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Revelle and Suess calculated a quantity now referred to as the Revelle factor, which is the change in carbon dioxide in the seawater relative to that of dissolved inorganic carbon. They found it to be about 10, and more recent measurements show that it’s rising, especially at high latitudes such as those in the Southern Ocean, where less carbon can be absorbed and therefore future climate change cannot be so efficiently mitigated.

Revelle’s work on oceans acting as “carbon sinks” also has inspired current debates about geoengineering and climate interventions, including controversial proposals like spraying material into clouds to reflect sunlight into space, or pumping nutrients into oceans to encourage carbon-consuming photosynthesis of marine algae.

Later, while teaching at Harvard, Revelle raised concerns about issues involving what’s called “climate adaptation” today. Poorer countries, such as Pacific island nations with indigenous populations, don’t have the resources to adapt to climate change the way that wealthy countries like the United States do, yet they are feeling the effects first.

In the final year of his life, however, REVELLE became perhaps the first high-profile victim of vocal climate deniers. Physicist Fred Singer, already notorious for his skepticism about acid rain and ozone depletion, managed to manipulate the 81-year-old Revelle—his family and colleagues argue—into adding his name to a paper playing up uncertainties in climate change science and arguing against taking “drastic action.”

While talking to the American Association for the Advancement of Science about atmospheric and oceanic warming and efforts to reduce them, Revelle noted the wide range in the possible extent of warming in the next century. Afterward, Singer spoke to him about working on an article together, but then Revelle had a heart attack while returning to San Diego. As chronicled in the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Singer wrote a draft with a similar title to one he had already published, “What to Do About Greenhouse Warming,” but the ailing Revelle was not  particularly interested in it. When he read it he crossed out “less than one degree” Celsius of warming, and wrote in the margins “one to three degrees”—clearly beyond natural climate variability—but this was never incorporated in the published paper, which came out with his and Singer’s names on it after Revelle died.

Carolyn Revelle wrote an opinion piece on behalf of the family in The Washington Post, saying her father had not changed his views. There were significant uncertainties at the time, and like most scientists, he didn’t want to overstate the threat of global warming. But he clearly considered the warming trend to be a dangerous one.

“He was dying of heart failure, and I feel that he was vulnerable. It was a very unfortunate experience, but I do not think it indicates that he changed his mind on global warming, which was what the climate change deniers were saying,” she says.

Revelle’s secretary Christa Beran, his graduate student and teaching assistant Justin Lancaster and colleagues like oceanographer Walter Munk also sought to defend him.

“You had what was an insidious example of what I would call a lack of ethics in science and the use of scientists as hired guns by the industry,” Lancaster says. “It was very cleverly done; they pulled the wool over Roger’s eyes. I discovered it too late to intercede. I didn’t have the clout to get the right attention to this, and Roger had died. All I could do was make it as public as possible.”

He points out the ways Singer and a handful of other scientists have been supported by the fossil fuel industry, noting that Singer’s Science & Environmental Policy Project, a research and advocacy group, was financed by ExxonMobil and other private sources. Singer had also earlier consulted for ExxonMobil and other major oil companies.

Even decades later, Singer and a few other figures remained “contrarians for hire,” Schmidt says. Documents leaked to DeSmogBlog in 2012 showed that Singer and a few others had been receiving monthly funding from the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank financed by billionaire Charles Koch that has promoted climate skepticism. The Heartland Institute continues to try to influence climate policy through connections to President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency.

The real purpose of Singer’s paper, Lancaster believes, was to undercut Al Gore while he was running for president in 1992. Revelle had taught Gore at Harvard and had introduced him to the scientific and political challenges of climate change. Gore’s campaign focused on environmental and climate issues, and Singer’s paper came up in a question at the vice presidential debate.

Singer, now 94, responded in an email, saying that ExxonMobil and the Heartland Institute do not support him and have not influenced the positions he has taken. He also prefers to call himself a climate skeptic, not a denier.

Since Revelle’s death, climate change has arguably become even more politicized in the U.S. According to Pew and Gallup polls, over the past decade, the chasm between the views of Republicans and Democrats has widened: There is now at least a 30 percent gap between members of the two parties on whether climate change is occurring, whether it’s driven by human activities and whether addressing it should be a top priority of policymakers. That gap has kept growing even as the consensus among climate scientists that global warming is real and anthropogenic has topped 97 percent. And climate change has yet to make another appearance at a presidential (or vice presidential) debate.

The U.S. and the international community have made limited progress in mitigating climate change, and climate deniers remain as vociferous and influential as before. While it’s easy to despair at the thought of possible climate disasters to come if we reach an average warming of 2 degrees Celsius or more, Revelle likely would emphasize hope about humans’ abilities to adapt. “I know exactly what Roger would say: ‘There’s no future in pessimism.’ This was his whole viewpoint on the climate change problem,” Lancaster says.

In the meantime, scientists continue to collect data and conduct research about climate change and its myriad effects around the world. The Revelle just completed a trip to Tahiti and New Zealand, with scientists on board probing ocean chemistry, including spotting trace amounts of metals and isotopes in seawater. It’s due for its mid-life service and maintenance in dry dock this year, after which the research ship will continue its scientific journeys for two decades or more.

The Revelle clan in 1964: Front row: Christopher Paci, Ellen Clark Revelle, Roger Revelle ’29, Holly Shumway and Carolyn Shumway. Back row: Stefano Paci in the arms of his father Dr. Piero Paci, Mary Paci ’57 with young Mark Roger Shumway in front of her, George Shumway, Anne Revelle Shumway, Bill Revelle ’65, Eleanor McNown ’64 (later Revelle), Gary Hufbauer, Carolyn Revelle Hufbauer and Loren Shumway.

A wildfire burns along a ridge line above a Santa Rosa vineyard a few days after the fire that devastated Ancient Oak Cellars. —Photo by Paul Kuroda

The night of Oct. 8, 2017, was unusually warm, so Ken and Melissa Moholt-Siebert left the windows of their home near Santa Rosa, California, open to the breeze much later than they usually would have. Their farmhouse was perched on 31 acres, including pasture for their modest sheep flock and 15 acres of vineyards for their winery, Ancient Oak Cellars. Its redwood beam ceilings and a stonework fireplace hand-laid by Ken’s grandfather made it perfect for cozy late-night movie sessions. Tonight the air was much warmer than the usual cool evenings typical in Sonoma; before bed, they watched a documentary about Leonard Nimoy and enjoyed the breeze.

Around 10:15, the scent of wood smoke started to drift in through the windows, but Ken and Melissa didn’t worry, imagining it could have been from some distant neighbor’s barbecue. But when the smell didn’t go away, Melissa called the police nonemergency number to ask if she should be thinking about evacuating, but the police could offer no definite advice.

Ken and Melissa Moholt-Siebert with the new barn they’re building to replace the one that burned. —Photo by Brian Smale

Melissa fell asleep before the movie ended, but Ken stayed up thinking about the Hanley fire, which had rampaged through the area half a century before but missed the property. The wind was starting to kick up in strange, fitful gusts, flinging pine needles against the roof. Ken turned on his computer and, as was sometimes his habit, composed a poem—this one about “vanguards of embers and palls of smoke” and his grandfather wetting down the grass around the house, just in case. “Outside the sheep/Are dead silent—not a clank of the bell—but/The crickets strum and I mark the sound of sirens,” he wrote.

Just after midnight as he was finishing his poem, Ken heard a knock on the door. It was a neighbor, there to tell him and there was a fire in Fountaingrove, about three-quarters of a mile away. That was when Ken woke Melissa up. “You need to grab some stuff,” he told her. “We might have to run.”

Ken set about doing everything he could think of that might save the property if the worst were to happen. He drove to the other side of the property to turn on his agriculture pump. He grabbed a broom and got on the roof to brush the needles off. He cleaned out the gutters and tried to cut down a limb from a nearby tree that was leaning toward the house.

Meanwhile, Melissa was racing around the house gathering up what few valuables she could and packing the car. She knew, though, that there were some things she couldn’t bring even if she wanted to: not the sheep, scattered in the pasture, or the piano. And not the ancient oak down the hill in front of the house—the one she and Ken couldn’t fit their arms around, the one that was said to have predated Spanish settlement, the one that was the namesake for their winery.

There was no moon. At first, as he worked, Ken eyed the dark red glow beyond the hills to the east. By the time he was done, fire had circled around to the north and towered above the hillside in between; a sudden gust brought embers racing toward the house. One of them landed in the pasture up the hill, and before Ken could quench it, a backdraft from the south blew the flame into a wall of fire. Debris was falling all around; the drip lines in the vineyard had started to burn. Flames had begun to lick the side of the barn by the time Ken and Melissa drove away. The sound of the smoke detector inside their house followed them down the road.

Miles of rolled wire, salvaged from the ruined vineyard and awaiting reuse. —Photo by Brian Smale

Some 15 months later, on a December afternoon that’s blustery and dotted with clouds, Ken and Melissa show me around what’s left of their home. A visitor who doesn’t look too closely might never guess that a fire happened here. The hills, just greening up with winter rains, are speckled with straw that looks charmingly pastoral; a creek runs cheerfully through a little dell above the road. But the stumps of burnt trees and the blackened street sign at the front of the property tell a different story. The straw is there to prevent erosion in the newly tilled soil where the vineyard used to be. What looks like a gravel driveway branching off the little road through the center of the property is actually the spot where the farmhouse once stood.

Ken tells me about his earliest memories visiting his grandfather, back when the vineyard was only a sheep ranch and he’d come up during vacations to help his grandfather run it. “I always looked forward to coming up to the farm,” he says. “I enjoyed the physicality of it.” After the wool was collected in burlap sacks, it was his job to jump up and down on the fleeces to compact them. He would end the day sweaty and covered in lanolin, ready to hop into the back of his grandfather’s truck for a ride to the nearby lake.

Ken and Melissa met not long after those days, at Pomona in 1985 in a Human Sexuality class. People always get a kick out of that, he says wryly. She liked that he was something of a Renaissance man who studied classics, wrote poetry and attended feminist lectures. He admired her intelligence, tenacity and considerate nature. After graduation, they moved to Portland, Oregon, where he became an architect and she worked in a research lab. They had two kids, Austin and Lucy, who grew up tromping through the creek and running in the vineyard; by then the property had been planted with 10,000 grapevines.

When Ken’s grandparents died and the funding for Melissa’s lab began to ebb, they decided to take ownership of the farm, keeping the grapevines and opening Ancient Oak Cellars as a companion business. With help from farmhand Arnulfo Becerra, who had been working alongside Ken’s grandfather for decades, they learned to coax award-winning wines from the land. They continued steadily gaining experience and momentum until the night of the fire, when the flames destroyed the vineyard and everything around it entirely.

After the fire, Ken was the first to return to the property. Melissa was away on a wine sales trip that was now more critical than ever. Ken found every structure reduced to a thick layer of ash, occasionally interrupted by liquefied evidence of the recent inferno. The cast iron in the piano had split in half, and its glazing had poured out through the bottom. A pallet of wine that was set out for labeling had melted, the bottles transformed into glassy puddles only a few inches high. The steel barn roof had heated red hot and flopped over. Aluminum from Ken’s truck had pooled downhill from its charred hull.

Some of the winery’s 3,000-odd reclaimed stakes in front of vines on a neighboring vineyard. —Photo by Brian Smale

Today, Ken points out where the barn used to be—here was where the aluminum pooled, here was where the two domesticated geese and the mean rooster lived—and tells me there was little time for grief or anger in the face of such overwhelming destruction. Instead, the natural pragmatism he shares with Melissa helped them get through the first difficult months. They became “professional refugees,” as she puts it, dividing up the enormous labor necessary for rebuilding. “My new full-time job is insurance paperwork; Ken’s is being a contractor,” she says. “Maybe it’s fortunate that that’s the kind of people we are, the kind that just tackle the next project.”

The grieving process has thus been slow, with sorrow arriving in spurts. The first step for Melissa was seeing and accepting the reality of the burnt property; that really hurt. When FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers came to help with cleanup, removing some 130 truckfuls of debris, that hurt, too. And when it became clear that the vines weren’t going to recover, that was a new, entirely different kind of pain.

Now, she says, the gentle rise of the naked, grassy hills is almost beautiful. That, in a way, feels less difficult than before. “But then,” she says, gesturing at the empty fields, “you start thinking about what isn’t here.”

After our tour, Ken and Melissa sit at a little table set up by the creek, under a canopy of oaks that has recovered heroically. “The native trees did OK,” Ken notes; that includes the ancient oak, which continues its reign over the vineyard as the land struggles to recover. Finding out the oak had survived was a bright spot in all that destruction. Maybe it meant they could, too.

Ken points out an old redwood grape stake that appears to grow out of the base of one of the oaks—the result, his grandfather always told him, of a crow alighting on the stake and dropping an acorn on the ground. The sounds of the countryside underpin our conversation: the chirp of birds and frogs; the soft baaing from the herd of sheep, diminished after the fire but still here. Nearby, some of the 3,000 modern metal grape stakes and 121 miles of wire Ken, Melissa and Arnulfo removed by hand in the last year sit in piles near a half-constructed building that will one day be a new barn.

Ken is building that barn, although he occasionally hires help; aside from the Corps of Engineers, he’s had to do most of the recovery work himself. The permitting process has been especially difficult. Few vineyards were affected the way theirs was, so no methods of streamlining have been put in place, as they often are in areas of acute destruction. In fact, in the case of most Santa Rosa vineyards, the rows of vines acted as firebreaks, mitigating damage. But the speed and ferocity of the fire, the distance of the vines away from the neighboring houses and the topography combined to make the Ancient Oak vineyard a terrible exception.

A bottle of 2016 Ancient Oak pinot noir, posed in a burnt tree stump. —Photo by Brian Smale

Even so, Ken and Melissa’s insurance, although extensive, did not cover the vineyards. Instead, Ken stretches the assistance he’s received from disaster recovery funds and farm assistance programs as far as he can by doing much of the initial construction work himself and hiring crews directly to help with more-industrial tasks. Along with wine they had stored off-site and some Ancient Oak vintages made with grapes from other vineyards, that strategy has helped Ken and Melissa limp along financially as they reconstruct their lives.

The first step after the last destroyed vine and blackened stake had been removed was to use an enormous tractor with 5-foot claws to tear through the ground of the vineyard and to add nutrients to improve soil fertility—including, Ken notes wryly, wood ash. After that, Ken and Melissa ordered 15,000 new vines, which will arrive next spring; they are taking advantage of a bad situation to increase their crop, using some extra space where the old barn used to be.

“One thing I think is hard to understand is just how long the recovery period is,” Melissa says, looking around the property and counting. Out of some 13 neighbors whose homes were damaged or destroyed, there are only a few houses under construction more than a year later. In 2019, their new vines will be planted and grow waist high; the next year those vines will need trellises. Finally, in 2021, Ken and Melissa will harvest their first small postfire crop.

But the new harvest is part of a silver lining they both recognize here: the chance to remake the farm on their own terms. Ken’s grandfather knew and loved the land, but he wasn’t a grape grower by trade. And the farmhouse was certainly cozy, but it’s not the house they would have designed for themselves. Now they will be able to update the vineyard, bringing to bear all the wine expertise 2019 has to offer. And they’ll be able to design a house for themselves. Melissa fantasizes about French doors leading out onto a patio with expansive views.

At a recent wine club dinner in Ohio, someone asked her if she had thought about cashing out: deciding not to replant or rebuild and selling instead. She shakes her head, gesturing to the creek, the oaks, the hills. Yes, the first year back has been emotionally and physically challenging, she says. For a while, they stayed in a friend’s house in town. Then another friend loaned them a pop-up camper, allowing them to camp out on their own property, showering in the open. This winter, they’re still camping, in a slightly improved structure, showering at the YMCA and eating at restaurants that are struggling to keep going after a catastrophic postfire tourist season. But still: “We came here, leaving perfectly respectable lives in Oregon, because this land is a piece of Ken’s heart,” she says. “And this hasn’t changed that.”

In some ways, Ken admits, he has enjoyed this time—even having to sleep exposed to the elements. He’s come to love the proximity to nature, the frogs, the owls, the night sounds. “Melissa and I were talking recently, and I said, ‘Maybe we just don’t build a house,’” he says. He imagines more nights under the Sonoma moon or, in case of rain, in the barn.

Melissa looks at her husband across the table and raises her eyebrows, taking in the half-finished structure. “Maybe this could be our summer house,” she replies.

Melissa and Ken Moholt-Siebert, owners of Ancient Oak Cellars, sit on bundles of straw beneath the eponymous ancient oak tree, which survived the 2017 fire that destroyed their home, vineyard and tasting room. —Photo by Brian Smale