Captured by Fire - Chris Czajkowski

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relax.

      Another problem was the dogs. They had to be tied full-time by the cabin, and walked on leads, something none of us enjoyed. I could usually let Harry loose once I got away from the buildings but Badger had to be kept on a long rope. His back legs were very stiff and not well co-ordinated, and if he fell into a hole he could not always get out of it. One time we walked on a narrow trail beside the river; Badger tried to get a drink and fell in. The bank was half a metre high; the river wide; the current swift and swirling—had it not been for the rope, I would have lost him.

      Because Katie suffered from asthma and was very allergic to dogs, I never brought them inside, not even into the cabin in which I was staying. They were normally outdoor dogs, so except for being tied, this was no hardship. Sometimes I drove down valley to a logging road where Harry could get a good burst of speed. It was stinking hot, and periodically he would dive down through the forest and plunge into the river below. Apart from these jaunts, we simply trudged, tethered to each other, back and forth, several times a day, along the driveway and a short stretch of road. For many city dogs, this is all they get; for us it was tedious and frustrating.

      Constant checking of the internet gave me a virtual picture of the fire, and the terror of the flames was still very fresh in my mind, but the cushioning of distance was almost worse than being in the thick of it. The websites couldn’t give me a real feel for the situation. And then there was the garden. Without water, it would die. When I left home, I assumed that my abandonment would be the end of it. But the idea of a fire on my doorstep was now becoming more acceptable. Isolated by distance, it seemed less fearsome. If I were to get home soon, I might just be able to save the vegetables. As far as I could gather, the only barrier preventing people from going into the Kleena Kleene area was in the east. It had not yet occurred to the fire planners that there might be people sneaking home from the west.

      On July 13, I packed everything in the hopes that I might be able to stay home, but I left early so I would have time to drive up there, turn the drip hoses on for a few hours, then drive back down before dark. The Hill was sunny but I ran into smoke fairly quickly on the Chilcotin; at first this was from the Precipice Fire, but that was fairly high and no more than a thickish haze. Through Anahim Lake, and then Nimpo Lake… From a hill not far before my turnoff, I looked down into a dense brown soup. The smell of smoke was strong; visibility was maybe two kilometres. Max.

      Just past my turnoff is a bridge. A cop car was parked there. The officer was leaning in a bored way against the parapet. At seeing me coming, he roused himself. It must have been quite a while since another vehicle had come by. “Oh no,” I thought. “He’s going to turn me back.” I didn’t stop but instead dived into my driveway, waving at him as if I had permission to be there. It worked, because he gave a half wave back and subsided to his post once more.

      I have only a slow trickle of water in my well. The garden is set up with drip hoses but they cannot be left running all the time. Also, there is not enough pressure to operate all the hoses at once. Usually I turn on a quarter of them at one time, running each section for an hour. I would normally spread this activity over a couple of days but this time I would run all four hoses, one after the other, and hope that the water supply lasted. The tap was outside and I started the first section immediately. It had been four days since the plants had received a drink. A lot of the early vegetables had bolted in the heat and other plants looked very wilted, but they were still alive. The poor potatoes were blackened to the ground. They would have been zapped by the frost on the night we had shivered in our vehicles at the float plane base. The frost did not kill the plants but it knocked them back. It is a struggle to grow potatoes here.

      There was a steady, light wind coming from the fire area, bringing thick smoke my way. I could barely make out Internet Hill, and this confirmed my visibility estimate, but of the main mountains I could not see a thing. Somewhere up above the sun was shining, but here everything was swallowed in a dense brown fog. I removed just a small corner of the tarp covering the back porch, and ducked underneath to get inside. I set up the laptop and checked the websites—the internet was working fine now. There had been some fire growth at Kleena Kleene since I had left Stuie that morning, and new red spots were dotted about within the yellow masses, but it still looked as though it hadn’t spread a great deal. However, the wind direction was not good. It was not only blowing the smoke my way, it had the potential to bring the fire closer as well.

      I lifted the phone. It was working. A series of beeps told me I had a message. This is an automated call from the West Chilcotin Search and Rescue. Evacuate now! Shut all windows and doors, turn off appliances except fridges and freezers, shut but do not lock your gate… You must evacuate NOW.

      It was dated the day I had left. I erased it and called Christoph at the guest ranch to see how he was making out. Like me, at the moment he couldn’t see anything of what was going on because of the smoke. He had been a firefighter in Switzerland and was a general fix-it sort of guy. He had acquired a pump and a hose long enough to reach his lake, and was ready to set up sprinklers around his lodge. As an owner of livestock he was able to get an official licence to stay, though he wasn’t supposed to move off his property without a permit specific to the day and destination of travel and to the names and number of the people riding with him.

      The steady wind, the thick gloom, and the unpleasant taste of the smoke did not make me feel at all comfortable. (I was to learn later that there had been a crucial flare-up on that date.) The watering finished, I decided to go back to Bella Coola. The dogs, at least, had had a bit of freedom.

      The cop was still by the bridge, and this time I drove up to him. “We’re worried that the fire might cross the road,” he said, “so we’re stopping all traffic except first responders.” I told him I had just been home to water the garden but was going back down to Bella Coola. It was not the same cop who had given me the evacuation order, and as long as I was heading away from the fire he didn’t seem to care what I was doing. I left him to his contemplation of the smoke.

      So back I went to Stuie. The valley was not quite so paradisiacal now as the change of wind was bringing smoke down the Atnarko from the Precipice Fire. Stupendous Mountain was hazing over and by the following morning we could barely see it. I shared the garden veg I had brought with me: Katie’s garden had some salad greens and kale in it, but most of her space was devoted to an incredible crop of raspberries and what might have been a decent crop of strawberries if it hadn’t been for the squirrels. Like most people who expect to grow fruit in the valley, Katie and Dennis have surrounded the garden with a pretty skookum electric fence attached to the original split cedar rails. It did a good job of keeping the bears out, but it couldn’t stop the squirrels. They would run along the top rail, fat strawberries in their mouths, and stop and stare at us, knowing there was nothing we could do.

      Life in the lowlands got back into its routine. Picking raspberries, dog walking, surfing the internet. The USDA Forest Service map showed the yellow blob of the Kleena Kleene Fire had indeed crossed the highway, but DriveBC—although it had four specific closure locations for Highway 20—showed none there. Everyone I contacted in my area had heard nothing about it. I assumed it was because the USDA satellite recorded heat. It was very likely, given the wind direction, that the heat had certainly crossed the road, even if the fire itself had not.

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