I give him the rundown: where to go, what to take, be sure to shut off your AC to keep as much smoke as possible out of the house, all that.He just looks at me as I talk, like he’s hearing me but not necessarily listening.
I leave his house, walk to the next one, and as I’m about to knock on that door, I see him driving away in a pickup truck, still not wearing a shirt.I’m guessing he didn’t grab his important documents, either.
I tried, I think.
I knock on doors all day.A volunteer gives me a tuna fish sandwich for lunch, and I scarf it down, then help Lucy with her section, since she managed to get the problem houses this time.Afternoon comes, then evening, and after darkness falls I’m still knocking on doors of empty houses, making sure everyone is out.
My radio crackles every so often with updates: the hotshot crew is doing a controlled burn to the south and the west, though the heat and the winds are making even that dangerous.I try not to think about Hunter, out there in the middle of all that, but I can’t help it.
I wish I’d give him something better than a dumb rock, but I don’t have anything, and I definitely don’t have anything that can do what I want, which is keep him safe.
When we finish, it’s almost two o’clock in the morning, but every house in Eaglevale is empty, the stores closed, hardly any cars on the street.It’s eerie, a town with almost no one in it.A ghost town.
“You’re staying in Ashlake?”Mike asks as we walk to the Forest Service vehicles.
“Yeah, Lucy and I are staying with my sister,” I say.“I’ll be at the high school to help out first thing tomorrow.”
He nods.
“Thanks, Clementine,” he says.
ChapterTwenty-Six
Hunter
It’s a long walk,and there isn’t all that much to talk about.Plus, we’re walking single file, so it’s hard to hear or be heard.It’s not long before we all just lapse into silence.
Eaglevale is in the saddle of a hill.The Quartzite river runs to the south of the mountain, right below the steep, rocky slopes.Right now, the fire is burning hard to the west, on the north side of the river, and to the south, across the river from Eaglevale.
If it weren’t for the river, Eaglevale would already be fucked, but all that water makes a perfect, natural firebreak.We find a wide, gravel beach on the north side and set up our base station.It’ll be uncomfortable for sleeping, but the gravel makes it a relatively safe zone.Rock doesn’t burn.
Across the river, the blackened spikes of former pine trees poke up into the smoky sky like they’re trying to point upward.Every time the wind runs through the valley, ash swirls up from the burned area across the river from us.
We call that areathe black, for obvious reasons.It’s ugly and unsettling, but it’s the safest place to be, since there’s no more fuel to burn.The lush, overgrown forest, full of trees and undergrowth is the most dangerous.That’s the sort of terrain that goes up in seconds.
Once we’re set up, Porter gathers us along the riverbank.
“Everyone good?”he asks.
“Hell yeah!”we all shout, because we’re all crazy people who can’t wait to get to work.
You have to be alittlecrazy to take this job in the first place.
Porter allows himself one smile.
“Good, because I’m gonna work the shit out of you guys,” he says.
We cheer again.
“Our primary goal here is to keep Eaglevale from burning to the ground,” he says, pointing vaguely in the direction of the town, somewhere up the hill.“Right now, the fire to the west of here on the north side of the Quartzite is our main objective while we keep an eye on the area across the river.”
The Saturn Fire is big, hot, and incredibly dangerous.Most fires move along at the ground level, because that’s where most of the dry, dead material is: leaves, fallen trees and branches, undergrowth, et cetera.But this fire is large enough and hot enough that it’s spreading through the crowns of trees — the living top part.
Crown fires are even more unpredictable and therefore even more dangerous than a normal fire.Every so often we can hear a farawaycrackas a living tree gets so hot that its sap boils instantly and the whole tree explodes.
Porter’s still got a big laminated map of the area, and he lays it out on the ground, holding it down with river rocks.Because this fire is off the ground, we need to fell a wide swath of treesbeforewe can start the back burn.
And because fire travels uphill almost unimaginably fast, the burn needs to be on flat land, before the Saturn fire gets there.That means we startnow.
