Smoked Out, Trying to find hope and meaning in the fire season from hell
I couldn’t write until the rain came. With all of the fires that were burning and all the smoke in my brain, just the scratching of ink on those little white sheets of notebook felt as if I was encouraging one more thing to burst into flames in this Rocky Mountain tinderbox. As if the very mention of crowning trees and black clouds of soot might make my words combust.
You could smell it first, before anyone even told you something was burning, like the black stench of some over-microwaved bag of popcorn, bitter and tired by the time it reached us. Then you could watch it come in like weather, blowing along on corpse-like clouds, as rotten and jaundiced as the evidence of burnt water that it is. The streets filled up with a kind of stinking fog you could touch, and everyone closed their windows and their doors, and disappeared inside the house. It was only when I was out in the dark in my yard that I was surprised to hear the sound of critters, of birds and fast claws across the chips, rutting and running and doing just about everything but taking flight. I felt like I was blind then, underground, listening to the subterranean diggings of hidden life.
We woke up with headaches every day. The kind that feel as if they came from a tightness in the back of your neck. Our eyes burned. Our throats. My wife wanted to put the dogs in the car and drive north. And because someone has always seen it worse, or actually lost something deeper than sleep, a friend from Montana said, “I can remember when we couldn’t see across the street.” It was just our turn, he said, as acre after acre was scorched into charcoal every night.
So I looked out the window like some kind of summer-day invalid and wondered if the blossoms on the apple and the peach trees would taste like ash. I imagined it was all just a setting against which I could create some epic heartbreak of blazing love and adapted (i.e., stolen), indigenous art. I got out the tequila to oil the inspiration and wrote, “La Llorona will never weep in a town with no rain. The fires are so hot that they have dried and dispatched even her drowned, water-soaked children’s ghosts. There are only things here to burn now—the beetle-killed trees, the close-set cabins and crosses, and only liquor on which to drown. There is only the bottomless rasp from the deep dehydration of sand-bottomed arroyos, and the rattle of a world that looks like yellow paper in the light.”
“Sex is nature,” I wrote, and went off to tell my wife how happy I was to have written the same thing that I always write.
It was a Saturday so we danced on the tile with the dogs dancing around us, and as I looked out through the window I could see on the ridge that first detonation of new smoke.
“Oh shit.”
In barely an hour it seemed as if the whole world was at risk. I thought I would see the entire mountain burn by the time it was dark, and, helpless to stop it, got some beer to watch.
When my wife came out on the deck and asked me what I thought started it, I looked her right in the eyes and said, “It was probably a lightning strike.” And she looked back with a look that said, “Jackass.” But what she said instead was, “I haven’t seen a cloud in two months.”
From 25 miles away it was like watching flares the way the trees would ignite. A good friend was 10 miles further south, and he called to ask, “Can you see that?”
It turned into a fireworks display in the dark. The oranges, the reds and the way a place you weren’t even watching would suddenly erupt. It felt as if I were witnessing a riot, and I kept waiting for that moment when the entire ridge would burst.
I think I know where the fire stalled, because I got lost there once. There is a box canyon, there are probably several box canyons, and the fire just didn’t seem to have the energy to go over the top. Which was how it burned for the rest of the week. It would be misting in that kind of fireplace haze in the morning, dramatically pluming in the afternoon with that same sense of impending disaster that started it, then pulsing into the night.
The fact that the ridge did not catch fire leaves me believing that some energy up there stopped it. There are forces far older than I will ever be that may have decided what to do next. It is an old place. I imagine if there were a meeting like that, there would be a lot of different languages spoken.
When the first rains did come, they all smelled like smoke. To celebrate, I went for a run. Just three cars that passed me, and from the window of one of them, the driver dropped a lit cigarette. I screamed at him and started sprinting. I have no idea what I thought I would do if I ever caught that car. No dog ever does. But still, I ran like I might.
Peter Kray is Elevation Outdoors’ editor-at-large and co-founder of gear review website The Gear Institute (gearinstitute.com).
