Josh Jackson Author

They say a lot can change in a year.

As someone who essentially lives outdoors, I know this all too well.

The changing of the seasons, inexorable and constant. The seasons never really settle in, but instead move incessantly. There are always small, if not imperceptible changes. And they’re fleeting, ephemeral. Staying close to Mother Nature reveals these things to you. She tells you the truth.

The only constant is change.

As the season turns from spring to summer this month, those of us living along the Oregon side of the Columbia River mark not just the ever-constant change of season but another now yearly date.

The day of the Rowena Fire. June 11, 2025.

Fire changes things. It’s part of Nature’s repertoire of tactics to keep moving, to keep the life cycle rolling. And the Rowena Fire certainly brought changes.

Part of me wants to say “except for me” but that’s not fully true. I’m not the only one. But I’m not surprised.

As I took stock after the fire, trying to pick up the pieces and find the path forward, I noted the surprisingly strong -but painfully brief- outpouring of community support. Moments like that, where people throw open their pantries, closets, fridges, and offer freely what they have to someone who just lost it all, they can really restore your faith in humanity.

And it did. No one went without, and everyone was helped in some way or another. Even I was granted a free week in a motel room, but when that ran out, the help dried up as well.

I’d cynically assumed, after the embers were out and the smoke cleared, the ashes starting to wash away, that I would be the only person left standing who still had nothing after the fire. Whose “house” would never be rebuilt. I was wrong, but only partly.

Even today, taking a fire anniversary ride through Rowena, a contractor was rolling out roof trusses. A house which was under construction five months ago looks finished and like new.

But there are still people living in motorhomes and trailers in Rowena. And some lots which appear to be left to the weeds and wildflowers. Maybe one day someone would like to build a house there. But not today.

And what of my year since the fire?

At first, shell-shocked and traumatized, I just tried to survive. Moved from camp to camp, avoiding scary people or bad situations. I even found a spot near Rowena to camp out. In January, I got some relief when a relative let me stay in her spare room for a few months. I took the opportunity to finish my first-ever novel and get good progress on my next book. I was able to eat a good healthy diet and get all the exercise I wanted.

My stay felt like a sort of mental and physical reset, where I got back to where I’m supposed to be. Normally I’m in good shape and have athletic ability, and so getting back to that felt great.

But change is constant, and my time there ran out. And, being located in suburbia, I was miserable. I’m a nature lover through and through, always at my most mentally healthy in the deepest, most remote wilderness. So I had to go.

A horrible red-eye bus ride complete with debilitating motion sickness and dry heaves through most of Oregon got me home, and I immediately headed out to camp on the lower Deschutes River for some relief. I knew it’d be quiet, peaceful, and most of all, devoid of the hordes of people I’d spent five months with in Central California.

Mental health restored, summer looming large. But with no sign of where I go next, what I do.

Obviously getting going on my next book is important, and that’s not hard to do, even living in a campsite. It’s 2026, we have the tech.

But what else? Normally I’d look to Ma Nature, and follow her lead.

And she’s long since gotten over the Rowena Fire. Driving through the Gorge today, you’d never know a fire roared through, torching nearly 100 structures and putting the city of The Dalles on its back foot with a fire racing right up to the edge of town.

I recall looking over at that burning hillside half a mile away and wondering what would be left by that time tomorrow.

Apparently everything. Those firefighters didn’t screw around, and by the next morning it was all over.

I hear all too often from nature lovers when faced with the aftermath of a wildfire, just how devastated they are for nature, how horrible they feel, and how awful the whole situation is. I’ve done one-year-later fire videos, and so I’m fully aware of just how quickly nature can recover.

Far faster than man, that’s for sure. When a year after the fire they’re only just now putting up a roof on a rebuilt home, and yet the entire fire scar is indistinguishable amid grasses and wildflowers and leaves, well, we should certainly worry more about our own ability to recover.

I’m still homeless. Some folks still have no replacement house. Some simply never came back.

Nature’s change is neverending. She’s always at work. So don’t worry about her ability to recover from the fire. She’s good to go. She’s got this.

It’s the people I worry about. But when help dries up only two weeks post-fire, that worry ratchets up. Where has all the compassion gone? Where is the solemn recollection in the news?

Indeed, the local news carried no one-year anniversary stories that I’m aware of today.

So you can understand, then, how the one homeless person who lost their home in the fire could find himself so utterly abandoned. How people can still be stuck in RV’s or see their lot sit empty 52 weeks later. Compassion springs not from a bottomless font but instead comes and goes as quickly as nature changes seasons.

The only constant is change. And the only change, good change, that you can count on, comes not from the ephemeral and fleeting charity of humans but instead Mother Nature.

So when my reality consists of living outdoors once more, wrapped in nature’s embrace without cessation, I embrace change.

What’s another year, then? A number on a calendar. 2025 became 2026. Then it will become 2027.

And Mother Nature couldn’t care less. So neither should I.

Who knows what the next year will bring, but it is true that a lot can change in a year. Just as Ma Nature.