“You won’t find any accommodation there,” the officer warned tiredly. He was parroting what he had been told to say, but without conviction. I was likely not the first person who had countermanded his edicts. The Fisheries officer had a very tiny smile on his face.
“Oh yes, I will,” I retorted. “A friend has already offered us a cabin.”
The cop shrugged resignedly. Before he left, he tied a piece of red flagging tape to my house. “It means you have left,” he said. “Yellow means the place has been visited but no one was home”—I told him that the neighbours beside the river were not living on the property at the moment—“and blue means people are staying. We’ll put these symbols on the house numbers by the highway as well.” “Well,” I thought. “That’s good news for looters.”
I emailed Katie and informed her we had been told to leave. I wrote that it was now getting late so we would probably spend the night at Stewart’s Lodge in Nimpo Lake, where the float plane company is based. Duncan likely wouldn’t mind under the circumstances. Still no phone. Duncan is not a happy user of the internet so I didn’t bother to contact him. I packed up the computer stuff and put it on the van’s seat. I shut the greenhouse vents and door, and screwed a piece of plywood over the dog door. Strong gusts of wind sometimes flap it open and sparks could fly inside. All windows were fastened tight. I even locked the door, which I very rarely do, even if I am away overnight. But who knew when I would return?
Our last job was to nail and staple a tarp over the opening to my porch that surrounds the main door. Scraps of useful wood are stacked in there; if a spark got among them it would have a field day.
The sun was going down as Miriam started the truck and began to move along the road. The dogs were already inside the van. I jumped out to take a few last photos. The garden, which was just starting to produce nicely, looked fresh and innocent beside the house. Without water, it would die. Then there was that small hitch, that small lurch of the heart that was now familiar to me. Would I ever see this house again? All the bits and pieces I had saved were conveniences, but amounted to nothing. The house was a different story. For my whole life I have been short of money. I have lived without power and conveniences in cramped, rough-built cabins. Over a period of many years I scrimped and saved and I had finally built myself a decent home. I don’t enjoy building, but have spent a quarter of my life doing it. I was now seventy years old. If this house was destroyed, I would have neither money nor energy to start again.
I could not dwell on such thoughts and I pushed them away. Miriam was already disappearing around the first corner. I climbed into the van and turned the key. For the third time in my life I was running from a fire.
Preparing for the Fire
Fred
Precipice, July 10–14
I turned my back on the fire in some form of denial, angry with myself that we were so unprepared for such an event, living as we were deep in a forest so dependent on a cycle of fire. Evidence of past burns was all around us. Evidence that we had ignored. The densely packed pine we hiked through on outings to Crazy George Lake, a small lake we named after a hermit who had lived in the bush near our valley in the seventies, was regrowth from a fire seventy years ago. The charred remains of logs along the ridges of our hikes, and the darkened bark of the mighty Douglas fir that grow at the very edge of our meadows, stared us in the face at every turn. How could we have ignored these warnings?
In the afternoon Arlen flew in with two Initial Attack crews (IAs) of three firefighters each, a handful of sprinklers bought at the hardware store in Bella Coola, and some two-centimetre hoses that would be connected to the mainline. Arlen explained that they were not trained for structural protection but felt it was necessary to do whatever they could, because if the winds picked up, the fire could reach us in a day. The Bella Coola Forestry field office had limited resources on hand but expected a Canadian Air Force plane to fly into Bella Coola at any time with a container of structural protection equipment. I followed Arlen around like a puppy dog, anxious to learn what I could about how to protect our place. He asked what buildings were of highest priority. Monika and I accepted that some would be lost (the sauna and lumber shed had wooden roofs and the greenhouse was covered in plastic). We decided the house and the pool room should receive the protection of sprinklers. We would try to protect the barn with our own hoses and nozzles, drawing water from a standpipe near the barn. By early afternoon the IA crews had added three sprinklers to our system (two on the house and one on the roof of the pool room) then left for the Taylor Ranch to place their remaining five sprinklers. This was grossly inadequate for all the buildings, but we were very grateful that they showed such concern for us and were willing to do whatever they could.
Arlen pointed out that falling embers were the biggest danger. They could find their way into cracks and onto piles of fuel in the form of dried wood, grass or other combustibles. After Arlen left, Monika, Hoss and I began removing firewood from our sheds by the house and the greenhouse, dumping the piles onto the green meadow at a distance from the buildings.
Everyone had much more fire experience than we did. Hoss told of a ride out of the mountains driving his pack horses ahead of a wildfire with the embers falling around him. David J was steeped in firefighting, as if weaned on it very early in the forests of British Columbia. And there was Arlen, so nonchalant about the fire, acknowledging that “it would burn” but doing all he could to protect us and our buildings.
The Precipice Fire smouldered in the distance but was not growing quickly on this day. By late afternoon Mark flew in and told us the fire had increased only from 650 hectares to 680 hectares—but it was now only three and a half kilometres from us, on a point jutting out along the north slopes of the Hotnarko Canyon. He again urged us to leave. We were too tired to consider leaving and too busy to take pictures—the western horizon was a featureless wall of smoke in any case.
Tuesday, July 11, was one of the darkest days of the fire. David J phoned in the morning. The Kleena Kleene Fire was raging and they needed all the resources they could muster to fight it. The folks of Anahim Lake were concerned because new fires were breaking out and the existing ones were expanding rapidly. Although it was thirty kilometres away, Anahim Lake was directly downwind from the Precipice Fire. People felt that the hoses, sprinklers and pumps that had been lent to us were needed to protect their own homes and ranches. David J was coming in to pick up his pressure pump. I was stunned by this turn of events. We were the closest to the fire and directly in the path of its most likely onslaught. It had to come through us to get to Anahim Lake. If it could be stopped at our place, Anahim Lake would be safe. We were the first line of defence and in the most need. How could David J consider such a thing?
Monika was in tears with the news. She phoned Lee immediately. I walked to the pump uttering a continuous string of expletives. Hoss stumbled after me.
I shouted, “If I had a gun I would go to the gate and not allow him on the property.” Then I turned to Hoss, a friend of both David J and me, and said more softly, filled with dejection, “But I don’t have a gun and I probably wouldn’t do that anyway. It is his pump after all.”
Hoss and I stood next to the pump as Monika approached. “Lee phoned back. He talked with David. He will not be taking the pump.”
But David’s call had added to my stress and mixed emotions about those helping us. My confusion and numbness would continue in the following days as we scrambled to improve our protection and waited for the fire to come.
For the second straight day the fire was quiet. We could hardly see evidence of it—only small plumes of smoke from time to time. On these days my fear lessened, but we were warned that it was still out there and that it could not be stopped. Mark and Arlen flew in daily
