The woman at the Weaverville post office knows me by first name now, which is either a compliment or a flag, I honestly can’t tell anymore. Last Thursday she looked at my stack of flat-rate boxes, each one rattling with amber jars cushioned in organic wool roving, and said, very slowly, “Brooke. Honey. What is in these.” I told her the truth, which is grass-fed beef tallow rendered three times, frankincense, a little calendula from my own garden, and the prayer of a mother who watches the news. She blinked at me for what felt like a full liturgical minute and then charged me $94.20.
I am telling you this because the wildfires in Los Angeles are a $250 billion event, by the estimate of some insurance analyst on a podcast my husband Garrett listens to while he splits wood, and nobody — not one single person on the national news — is talking about what the smoke is actually made of. I’m not going to list every single thing it’s made of here because I don’t want this flagged. But the women in my Facebook group (Clean Air Mamas: The Particulates They Won’t Name) have been compiling a spreadsheet, and let’s just say “brake dust” is the least scary item on row 14.
My sister-in-law Denise, who works the front desk at a pediatric allergist in Greenville and is basically a nurse, told me that children exposed to this kind of urban burn smoke can develop what she called “a sort of cellular homesickness,” where the body essentially forgets what clean air tastes like and starts producing its own internal weather. I had never heard of this but the second she said it, I felt it in my ribs. My four kids have never been to California. I still ordered air purifiers for all of them. You cannot be too careful about things that travel on the jet stream.
So, a week ago Tuesday, I got on the group call with the Asheville chapter of Mothers Rendering for Mothers — we’re a loose collective of about sixty women who render tallow on full moons for mutual aid — and I said: the Red Cross is handing out bottled water and a blanket. These people’s skin barriers are being stripped by particulate matter we don’t even have a name for yet. We have GOT to mobilize the balm.
We mobilized the balm. Within forty-eight hours we had 340 four-ounce jars, each hand-labeled by my oldest daughter Wren with a little sticker that says “You Are Held.” A woman named Tabitha from the Fairview group contributed a colloidal silver nasal spray she makes in her garage, which I did include in the first shipment, though after some discussion we pulled it from subsequent boxes because Facebook flagged the words colloidal and silver when used in the same sentence, which I find, personally, to be a data point.
I want to be clear that I am not criticizing FEMA. I am simply observing that FEMA has not, to my knowledge, rendered a single ounce of tallow in its eighty-six year history, and at a certain point you have to ask what federal agencies are actually for. Garrett thinks I’m being unfair. Garrett also thinks that our homeowner’s insurance covers “acts of God,” which it does not, I have read the entire policy aloud to him twice.
The most astonishing part of all this is how quickly the need outpaced supply. By Friday I had DMs from women in Altadena, Pasadena, a woman named Mireille in Pacific Palisades whose home is, she said, “technically still there but spiritually a total loss,” and she wanted to know if the balm would help her golden retriever, whose paws had started shedding. I told her yes. I have no evidence that it would not. A doula I follow on Substack who goes by Moonmother Clinical (she has a master’s in something, I have not verified which thing) posted a reel last week making the case that tallow, because it is rendered from the same fascia layer as our own subcutaneous fat, essentially “recognizes” a burn victim’s skin as kin. I cried watching it. Wren cried. The dog left the room, but the dog leaves every room.
Some of you are going to ask about the fires themselves and whether I think they were, you know, started. I’m not going there. I will say that the Telegram channel that my cousin Jeremy’s wife forwards me screenshots from has raised some interesting questions about insurance company filings in the 72 hours prior, and I’ll just leave it at that, because I am a lifestyle columnist, not a detective, and I know my lane.
What I do want to talk about is the way deep winter plus a wildfire of this scale is creating what my friend Soren (he’s a breathwork practitioner, former actuary, lives in a yurt outside Mars Hill) calls “continental lung.” His theory, which tracks with what I’ve been sensing, is that when smoke this dense enters the upper atmosphere, every single American becomes a passive participant in that burn. I have personally been waking up at 3:47 a.m. for eleven nights in a row, which is exactly the hour Soren said the collective lung releases its grief cycle. You cannot make this stuff up. I mean, you could, but why would you.
So here is what I am asking. If you have a kitchen, a slow cooker, and access to grass-fed suet (Ingles carries it if you ask Raymond at the meat counter, and you do have to ask Raymond, it’s behind the case), you can render a pound of tallow in an afternoon while you fold laundry. Ship it to me and I will ship it west. The address is on my Substack. Please do not put anything else in the box. Last week a woman sent me what I can only describe as a homemade tincture in a Gatorade bottle and the post office lady found it and I have not been able to look her in the eye since.
The kids and I lit a candle last night — pure beeswax, cotton wick, nothing that off-gasses — and sent it west. Wren asked if prayer travels faster than a flat-rate box. I told her yes but the balm helps on the landing. She seemed satisfied. She is seven, and already she understands more about logistics than most of our elected officials, and I mean that with my whole chest.
If you want to help and you cannot render, you can Venmo. I will not tell you the handle here because last time I did that a Bitcoin account tried to impersonate me within ninety minutes, which is its own kind of wildfire, isn’t it. Subscribe and I’ll send it. In the meantime: open a window, but not one facing west. Drink water with a pinch of Celtic salt, which is a mineral, not a food. And hold your people close. The air is carrying more than air right now.