I'm in a huge campground with no true tents, just open-walled booths--their roofs offer the only shade. Endless booths, and each one represents a different Plains tribe. If it's a powwow, it's a weird and formal one--the booths are carefully arranged to reflect the tribe's territories. It's like a living map of Native America east of the Rockies. No, wait, several booths represent Federal bureaucracies! As if they too are tribes. So strange. Is this some kind of treaty convention or continental council?

All the tribespeople wear big fuzzy yellow-orange blankets. I'm told they symbolize the dry late-summer prairie grass.

An Oklahoman or West Texan chief--he sounds Apache, but I don't know what group--gives a well-attended talk at his booth. He's projected what climate change will mean on the prairie, and it's alarming: more warming and drought in the north than south, and so many more fires from lightning strikes that all the northern high plains will burn annually. And it'll spread south steadily till every house from the Mississippi to the Rockies and Canada to Mexico will be under permanent siege!

Since this camp is a living map, that means a fire will soon sweep the booths and burn all those yellow blankets standing for groundcover. We'd better be on open ground and toss off the blankets fast...

Most of the tribespeople take his warning seriously. but the few white Republicans present pooh-pooh the chief's projections. "Just more liberal propaganda." Really? I run the Apache guy's calculations too, and they look right. But nobody listens to me. However, the staffers at the Bureau of Indian Affairs booth ALSO check his numbers, and they too think his projection's pretty sound.

Never thought I'd be cheering those BIA guys, but...

FEMA, the disaster agency, runs a quick projection. "If we take strong steps NOW the results will be costly but tolerable. Inaction? The best case is billions annually, the worst case is... zero. Not zero losses, zero economy. Whole states just get abandoned."

Not the new Dust Bowl that some of us feared. A Fire Bowl.

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Global warming, reactionaries still in denial: literal. Science News just reported new ice data from East Antarctica. It's melting. The more cunning global-warming deniers have long claimed East Antarctica's stable even if the West thaws; since the East is the biggest icecap on Earth, flooding won't be serious. Wrong, wrong, wrong!
• Blondish blankets: I'm sewing blondish fake leopard-fur on a lifesize cat-girl. Ailura's a recurring dream figure. This soft-sculpture isn't just a big plush toy--she has wood bones and duct-tape joints and high-density foam-rubber muscles.

  I've been proud of her--my first sewing project, and my biggest sculpture in any medium!--but the dream warns all that fur poses some hazard.

  
• Fire:
  1. Literal. Record fires all over the West, not just killer droughts. Yet Texas and Arizona still vote Red, even as their wells run dry.
  2. Fevers and night sweats I've had since starting sewing. Hints my illness is allergic--and serious. Even fake fur can be allergenic. If I don't cool it I could get really sick! And quite aside from allergies, fabric dust in the lungs is dangerous; millworkers used to die of "brown lung".
• ACTION 1: Comb out all the loose fur on the sculpture and fabric scraps, then vacuum my room thoroughly. Don't die for art!
• ACTION 2: Support candidates fighting the climate deniers. Start planning for a hot, hot future. And tour the prairie soon--before it's gone.

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