Because I live forty minutes away from a gas station, I keep cans of fuel handy. I tipped the contents into the vehicles’ tanks; empty cans would be far less flammable. Propane tanks would explode, whether they had gas in them or not, so all four were put into the trailer. Behind the seats in the pickup’s half cab went a few winter items—a couple of excellent wool blankets, my best winter boots, down coats, and a few out-of-print and irreplaceable plant reference books. A couple of thick sweaters. My favourite huge cast-iron frypan.
And what about all my personal stuff? Years of memorabilia from around the world; albums; art work, both mine and countless items from friends, either bought or traded; skull, fossil and shell collections—the copious attic was stuffed to the brim. I rescued a few documents like my birth certificate and journals, but as for the rest, I didn’t know where to start. The task seemed so overwhelming that in the end I packed none of it. Was there a sneaking feeling of relief in the back of my mind? Before I came to Canada in 1979, I had travelled for a decade round the world with a backpack. I’d had no possessions, very little money—but I was rich. Now I have property, vehicles, taxes and boxes of essentially useless stuff that I can’t really bear to throw away. It was as if it was no longer me who owned these possessions, but the possessions that owned me.
At some point during the day we lost the internet. I phoned a neighbour who received a signal from the same tower, but his signal was also down. Christoph and his wife, Corinne, own the Terra Nostra Guest Ranch on Clearwater Lake. Their resort is two kilometres southwest of my place (although it is a ten-kilometre drive to get there). His power was also out but he had a generator backup and was functioning with that. I hadn’t realized that BC Hydro had failed, for I have solar power. Christoph told me that a long string of power poles had burned near Lee’s Corner when the restaurant had been destroyed. I pictured the owners where I had last seen them in the temporary parking lot, waiting for the wind to drop so they could go home and guard their property. All they had left of their twenty-year Chilcotin life was their old pickup, a load of pop and chips, their little dog, and the clothes on their backs.
Still not a lot of wind, and we went to bed with a certain amount of reassurance. But how quickly things can change.
Evacuation
Chris
Kleena Kleene, July 10
Katie Hayhurst and Dennis Kuch are friends from way back living at Stuie in the upper part of the Bella Coola Valley. They’d had their fair share of fires to deal with and were cognizant of my situation. They had already emailed me with an offer to go down to their place. They live in what had been a resort, and there were several old cabins on the property. I had stayed in one or another of them many times.
I checked the internet first thing the following morning. It was still not functioning. I tried the phone (there is only a land phone here; no cell phone service) but it was dead as well. Suddenly we were cut off from all information except whatever we could deduce with our eyes. Fine as long as we could see, but if the smoke got worse…
I have lived in the bush for nearly forty years. At first I had no power at all, and my sole communication tool was a very unreliable, battery-operated radiophone. It has only been in the last fifteen years that I have been able to afford the internet. I didn’t miss what I didn’t have, but now I don’t know how I’d live without it. With its sudden cessation in this time of potential disaster, I felt vulnerable and powerless.
Miriam and I had planned to fly to Nuk Tessli from the float plane base at Nimpo Lake. Tweedsmuir Air had a different internet provider, and the pilots, with their eyes in the sky, might also have some information, so it seemed a good idea to go there. Nimpo Lake is forty minutes’ drive west.
When we turned up, the owner of the float plane company, Duncan Stewart, asked us if we were going into the mountains. Nuk Tessli was well out of the fire zone, but I certainly did not want to be up there and then find that my home had been burned while I was away. I had already emailed details of the road closures to the new owner of Nuk Tessli, but he had not yet experienced a bad fire season and replied something to the effect that things might change in the five days before the clients were due. “Good luck with that one,” I thought.
Nimpo Lake had both phone and internet. We caught up on email, checked the fire sites (not huge changes at Kleena Kleene and the Precipice but a veritable chaos farther east) and made a few calls. Katie and Dennis in the Bella Coola Valley were glad to hear from us.
There had been a thin haze of smoke when we left home, but now the wind was freshening. As so often happens, the stronger breeze cleared the air. The lake beside the float plane base was blue and sparkling, and the low, snow-streaked mountains over which one would have to fly to reach Nuk Tessli were sharp and smoke free. A strengthening wind would likely stir up the fires, but as the winds varied tremendously from valley to valley, there was always hope it wouldn’t amount to much at home. But as we turned back south we could see the smoke beginning to build over Kleena Kleene. We drove on past my driveway and called in at the Terra Nostra Guest Ranch to give Christoph and Corinne the information we had gleaned while in Nimpo Lake. They told us the good news that the internet had just come back on.
Our internet provider is a local husband and wife team. They had set up a tower on Tatla Hill as a hub to bounce signals in several directions. This tower acquired the internet from the Telus phone line, a fibre-optic cable that had been strung on the same poles as the power lines. When the poles burned, the wires all lay on the ground. It was found, however, that the fibre inside the phone cable was still functioning; the only reason the internet was down was that the power source was out. When our local providers discovered this, they rounded up extra solar panels—and we were back online.
The Terra Nostra Guest Ranch looked over Clearwater Lake toward the burning ridges. Black plumes of smoke were beginning to roll, and we could see more smoke pouring from the Colwell Creek Fire. “If only,” said Corinne exasperatedly, “they had dropped retardant on it yesterday! Just one plane load—what a difference that would have made!”
I just laughed. Corinne and Christoph had bought Terra Nostra three years ago and, like the owners of Nuk Tessli, had yet to experience a serious fire season. “I bet that’s what at least ten thousand people are saying about their own fires right now,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of this stuff over the years. Any available personnel and machinery—and that won’t be a lot at present—will be concentrated around the cities. And with so many lightning strikes all at once, it must be chaotic in the fire centres. I bet it will be a couple of weeks before we get much outside help.”
Christoph was worried about his horses. “They are so quiet with people but some of them have never been boxed. I would never be able to take them out of here.” Terra Nostra was much closer to the fire than my place and, being south of the river and highway, they did not have these barriers to protect them. They had the lake, but it was not that big, and given the right wind, a fire could whip around the edge in no time. “The Williams Lake Tribune had an online article I looked at when I was in Nimpo,” I said. “Ranchers are opening gates and cutting fences to let their livestock have a better chance out there. I guess if you have to go, that’s what you will need to do.”
Before we went home, we drove down to the hayfields. Huge towers of black smoke now poured into the sky. We plunged under the smoke. Below it, the thick black shadow was a stark contrast to the hot, bright world outside. The state-of-the-art irrigation system stood tucked against the highway fence. “Why isn’t he running the sprinklers?” Miriam asked. I wasn’t sure at the time but of course the system needed electricity; besides, the owner lived an hour and a half east and he had his own fires to deal with.
The power of the fire close up was terrifying, even though I knew this one was comparatively small. We saw trees flare sporadically within the black smoke. There was no wall of flame like the one I had witnessed in 2004, when being evacuated by float plane from the Lonesome Lake Fire. Then, each lake had a tree-high ribbon of fire burning along its shore, and the front of the fire was many kilometres long.
A red-tailed hawk was perched on the phone line (which was still standing here). Predators know that animals