Prosperity: Damnocles

This Prosperity Story concludes that, unlike wealth, Prosperities are not natively inheritable. Mine will most likely seem mythical to my progeny.

Kamisaka Sekka: Samurai (1920s)

“Most of them must be lost in use.”

We, natives of the Inland Pacific Northwest, were blessed with some of the most beautiful wild country in the world. Since we were the last part of this continent settled, we have also been the last despoiled, though our scenery’s eventual demise seems certain. Through recent summers, wildfires have become more common, and each burn turns its victim into a generational eyesore. Indeed, its virginity will never be restored. Burn woodland covered in many-centuries-old forest, and you’re left with a ghost. No one now alive will see that parcel recovered. Neither will their grandchildren.

In our valley, wheat fires seem by far the most common, and while they destroy, the crop was likely insured, and the land will be returned to productive use the following year with fresh potash fertilizing whatever’s planted. A rare lightning storm can spark dozens of wheat and rangeland fires over a single evening. Tanker planes swoop low over the Columbia and Snake rivers to load up water they’ll drop on the fires. These fires seem almost routine. We rarely lose homes in these, since few people live near wheatland and those that do take precautions, plowing out firebreaks and such. The troublesome fires come when lightning strikes up in the National Forest, much of which has always been roadless. Steep mountainsides render many places inaccessible except by helicopter, and firefighters can’t build firebreaks by hand when the land cants 30 degrees or steeper. A single lightning strike might ignite a few acres, but the accompanying winds can quickly spread that spark to ignite adjacent hundreds, each of which will be essentially lost to the next three, four, or more generations.

Though these woodlands initially seemed essentially endless, they were finite, as all Prosperity must be. We might not think of such obvious vastness as limited, but it always was. Each fire retires a part of our past while heavily mortgaging our future. I feel justifiably proud of my clear Doug Fir front porch deck, but clear Doug Fir isn’t common anymore, and the forest it came from experienced a devastation perhaps even greater than fire by the simple act of logging its timber. Yes, I am complicit. I might not be lightning, but I find it frightening to contemplate how much of our birthright we’ve lost just in my short lifespan. Those Douglas Firs that became my front porch were alive when Lewis and Clark wandered through here a scant two hundred and twenty years ago. Forests take centuries to grow and minutes to erase. Prosperities seem equally fragile.

I argue for a certain reverence in the presence of each and every Prosperity we encounter, for their presence will likely prove to be fragile. It’s as if that damned sword of Damocles was poised over Dionysos’ head, held there only by that mythical hair. We stand a literal hair’s breadth away from absolute disaster whenever we enjoy a Prosperity. This needn’t make anyone paranoid, but it might serve to keep us humble. With reverent respect for the impact our presence surely induces, we are not free lunchers. We inevitably incur indebtedness just by our presence, which we might as well consider to be just as natively sacred as cursed because its both. Accepting Prosperity humbly, the same way we accept every other inevitability, seems at least necessary.

I’ve grown to despise my mid-Julys, when the sunsets and sunrises glow orange on the horizon and the morning breeze reminds me of campfires. The news reports that our watershed has caught fire again, the source of our water threatened once again this summer. Another deduction from the original inventory of suitable territory. Nobody’s making more, and even if they were, it would be for my great-great-grandchildren’s benefit, not mine. My Prosperities were apparently never destined to become my legacies. I will leave behind stories of plenty my progeny will probably consider to be mythical. They might just as well be. Prosperity seems to be a present sense rather than any future certainty. However I might be blessed, my family will be forced and blessed to discover their own blessings. Prosperities aren’t inheritable like wealth. They exist only within and for a specific space and time. Most of them must be lost in use.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved