“I think we’re almost to the river,” says Fran. “So I’m just going to say one last thing. I’m sorry about your brother, Case. It is tragic, and it is unbelievably hard to lose someone you loved so much. There’s not really a timeline for feeling better. Butyourlife is not over. Do you get that? At least… not yet.”
And with that, Fran hefts the canoe over her head again. You follow her lead, and the two of you strain to get it back down to the ground, where there’s more of a creek than a river cutting between the tall grass in front of you. You look at the thin body of water as it slips around the bog like a snake. The haze is even stronger now. The others set their boats down behind you.
“You guys clocking this fog?” says Troy. “It’s weird.”
“Where’s Will?” asks Diana.
You try not to look at her differently, wondering how much of what Fran said is true. Did she really care about you from the very beginning?
“Who?” you say.
Diana frowns.
“Berries!” comes a sudden cry from the woods.
“That’s him!” says Troy.
As a herd, you all stand and lumber toward the voice, walking again over the soggy earth, and the tan rocks and thick grasses. When you find Will, he is pulling down the thickest branch of a large bush, plucking red globes off it and stuffing them in his open mouth.
“They’re terrible, guys!” he says, laughing. “The worst!”
You wait while Troy walks up to the bush and takes a long look at the berries. Even Will stops for a second to watch his face. Troy looks at a bloom and then examines the leaves, which look almost like maples.
“Am I going to die?” asks Will, squinting at the bitterness of the fruit.
“No…,” says Troy. “Highbush cranberries, I think.”
He grabs a couple and chews them to a pulp. He spits out a red seed.
“Not poisonous. Just really bad.”
At that, everyone dives on the bush, which is flush with the tart berries. Shockingly, you don’t have much of an appetite, but you know you need calories if you’re going to continue walking. So you manage to choke down a couple of handfuls of the astonishingly sour berries, while your friends look like they’re in a gameof Hungry Hungry Hippos. As this is happening, the sky behind you grows even darker.
But somehow you’ve developed enough instinct to notice that it doesn’t really feel like rain. It’s not humid at all. And the air doesn’t have that ozone smell that comes before a thunderstorm. Still, the sun has disappeared and you notice something that you haven’t witnessed before: an acrid scent that is blowing through along with the haze. Slowly, each one of you stops eating the berries. Diana is the first to walk into the clearing nearby and look up.
The sky is not just dark now. It’s orange.
And the smell only grows more pungent when you gaze upward and notice what appears to be a giant mushroom cloud hovering above you. There are at least ten possible scenarios battling for supremacy in your head. Nuclear test. Alien invasion. Tornado. In the moment, anything seems possible. There’s a humming sound too, and you’re pretty sure it’s not coming from inside your head this time. It’s louder than before. Then the wind blows again and carries with it the unmistakable smell of burn and char.
“Fire,” says Diana. “There’s a wildfire.”
FORTY
An hour later, the sky is bloodred, and the blowing wind carries visible particles of ash. The smoke-filtered light makes the heart of the afternoon feel like dusk. Most alarming, though, is the sound, which has gone from a distant hum to a slowly encroaching growl. You’ve been paddling the creek for an hour with Diana in your boat, but every half mile or so the water level dips too low, and you have to get out and lift the canoe over a hill of sand or past one of a seemingly infinite number of abandoned beaver dams. Everyone is coughing. Everyone is on the verge of tears. But out of all of you, Troy is taking it the worst.
Ever since the first glimpse of that smoke, he has been rattling off climate change facts nonstop for an hour.
“… and wildfires are burning seven million acres a year, which is up almost fifty percent since the 1990s. Can you even believe that? Fifty percent more of our country is burning each year! I mean, what the literal hell!”
At this point, you are all trying to tune him out, but nobody has the heart to stop him. It’s possible this monologue coming direct from his anxiety brain is the only thing keeping him from a complete meltdown.
“… and because the fires are way bigger, it’s tougher for theseforests to regenerate, which contributes even more to climate change because they can’t store carbon…”
When you turn around, he’s not looking at any of you. He’s just kind of blinking into the murky bog surrounding you. You look past him this time and try to figure out where exactly the smoke is coming from. Fran thinks it’s the southwest, which is good because you’re headed north, but you swear sometimes that it’s coming from another direction entirely.
Before Troy started in on his lecture, he told you that depending on weather conditions, these things can change direction and burn fast (“fourteen frickin’ miles an hour in an open space, guys!”). The uncertainty is making everything even more terrifying. Without any information, all you can do is try to move in the right direction as fast as possible.
“You okay back there?” asks Diana. “Still conscious?”
