am not sure why this fire did not concern me from the outset. I should not have been so cavalier or naive about it. I had experienced fires before, the first going back to my childhood in Saskatchewan. My dad and uncles had lit a stubble fire in the spring after a heavy fall harvest. There was too much dry straw to work into the soil so they decided to burn it before cultivation. The fire was lit on a calm spring morning, on a small rise over a kilometre from my uncle’s house. Siblings and cousins were assembled to help. We each had burlap grain sacks to fan or beat the flames as needed—an exciting outing for a child of ten years.
The fire occasionally flared in the deeper straw and then crawled lazily between swaths until it reached more dry material and again sprang into life. For an hour or so it spread slowly within the perimeter of our wet sacks. But winds like fire and fires love wind. The field sloped from the crest of land where we had started down toward my uncle’s homestead, which was nestled behind a ring of aspen and spruce trees. The stubble was much thicker on the lower slopes, where more retained moisture resulted in greater yields. At the same time as the flames found more fuel in the denser straw, the winds picked up and began driving the fire toward the homestead.
Gentle laughter and conversation was replaced by shouts and screams of alarm. We could not attack the front of the fire as the smoke quickly robbed our breath, yet I remember rushing in to do what I could whenever I spotted a weak spot at the front of the fire. Voices came and went depending on the whim of the blaze as it captured our words in mid-air and sent them skyward with the smoke.
The adults, in a desperate panic, tried to create a fire-break between the raging stubble fire and the ring of trees. My uncle drove our tractor, pulling a disc plow between the flames and the homestead in order to try to mix some of the straw into the ground and thus reduce available fuel. However, the ground was much too wet. The tractor got bogged down halfway across the swale at the bottom of the long slope. Not only was the homestead in danger, but now we had a tractor stuck even closer to the advancing flames. I think it was the sense of panic and worry in adults that so firmly embedded such a memory into the mind of a child. I can still feel the intensity of the adults’ fear more than my own fear of the fire.
But the flames weakened as they descended the slope where there was more shelter and less wind. It was also combatting wetter soils and straw. We were able to move in with our charred and ragged sacks to stop the fire before it reached the stranded tractor. I had a huge sense of pride in having contributed to the defeat of that fire.
I had three other brushes with out-of-control blazes. The first was when I tried to burn down an old house on my farm in the Fraser Valley. I had started dismantling the house piecemeal, but it seemed such a lot of work, and I thought putting a match to it would be easier. The garden hose I had readied for emergencies proved utterly useless. The flames flew high into the sky and started to spread to a nearby tree. I was able to dampen the fire as it licked up the branches, but I had to let the house burn out of control. Fortunately, it was over within an hour. I didn’t fear the fire itself, only worried about the repercussions of authorities descending on the farm, giving me holy shit and fining me an outrageous amount of money.
Twice in the Precipice we had land-clearing fires get out of control. There is only a very narrow window—sometimes a matter of days—between it being too wet to burn because of the snow, and too dangerous because the forest is tinder dry. On both occasions, by dint of a great deal of panicky exertion, we were able to subdue these fires, not without some damage to my pants, socks and long underwear as I attempted to stamp out the flames.
It was not these experiences that made me so indifferent to the Precipice Fire, however. I was not arrogant, thinking that I could fight any fire. I put it out of my mind just because I did not want to be bothered by it, especially when it seemed so far away.
Monika and I had been slowly creating a small farm in the Precipice. We engaged volunteers to help us with the chores and to build some infrastructure. Over the years we had constructed a barn, a chicken coop, a greenhouse, a recreational building (called the “pool room” because it housed a pool table), two cabins, and three sheds. In July 2017 we had two volunteers from a French wood engineering school who had arrived a couple of weeks earlier, and a couple who had been on our farm in the past and returned for two months. The four young people were bonding well and I planned on using their help to build a machine shed and a new root cellar. I wanted to get on with the summer and, as far as I was concerned, a fire was not a part of the equation.
Monika, a recent German immigrant to Canada, in her early sixties, grey hair, cool eyes, and classically German in her concern for detail, was aware that the winds of summer blew predominantly out of the southwest—putting us in a direct line with fire VA0778. She phoned Lee Taylor, the rancher who owned most of the valley. Lee, in his early seventies, had severely injured his right knee in the spring, and had been lifted out by helicopter. He was undergoing rehab in Vancouver under the close supervision of his wife, Pat. Lee—the most knowledgeable about the area and very proactive—phoned two helicopter services and the BC Wildfire Service to see if anyone was doing anything. West Coast Helicopters (with a base in Bella Coola) had seen the smoke but had not been able to get authorization to attack the fire. Whether they could have stopped it on that first day would be debated most of the summer. Lee desperately wanted to be in the valley to help protect our homes, but Pat wanted to ensure he recovered sufficiently from his injury before he returned.
The next day I continued to try ignoring the fire. We had just completed a first cut of hay on the meadow next to the house. Matilda and Florian, the French couple, were beginning the strawberry harvest. Tabi and Katie had arrived four days earlier and were settling in to one of the cabins. We have a greenhouse built in terraces against the slope of a hill, and I spent the morning watering, tying tomatoes and generally putting things in order. I planned to have Tabi and Katie look after the crops in there throughout the summer.
I heard a soft whine, an alien sound that I could not place. I exited the top of the greenhouse to search for the source. Tabi and Katie had purchased a small drone just before coming to the Precipice and were down in the meadow below the greenhouse, doing trial flights. They were trying to capture pictures of the plume of smoke that hovered on the western horizon. I was annoyed by the strange mechanical sound that had interrupted my work. Little did I know that mechanical sounds were to dominate our summer.
Late in the afternoon we heard the dull throbbing of a helicopter from White Saddle Air approach from the west, circle our meadows and begin a descent. At the time this was not a common event, and Monika and I walked with some excitement to the edge of the swirling downdraft. Two red-shirted Forestry people and the pilot came to greet us.
“Are you Monika who reported the fire?” asked one of the two women. “I’m Kerry from Forestry’s field office in Bella Coola, and this is Sally from the Cariboo District.”
“I’m Jim,” said the pilot. “This is my second trip to the Precipice this year. I was the one who airlifted Lee in the spring.”
We were never to have an unfriendly visit from the people involved with this fire. There would always be great concern for us, often with stern warnings about the dangers—the fire’s heat, its speed and its smoke. This first visit was typical. They had just flown around the fire and they asked who was in the valley. We told them that there were four volunteers with us, and Caleb was caretaking the Taylor Ranch four kilometres to the east. They advised us to leave. We explained that we and Caleb would not likely be going. Caleb had worked at the Precipice for many years but had recently left; however, due to Lee’s injury, he had been contracted to come back for the spring to feed the cows and keep the ranch running smoothly. He was reclusive, independent and resourceful, with a healthy
