Flames In The High Country

Flames in the high country, Australia Day, Jan 26, 2003

…and Andre Wins the Australian Open

            The Parks Victoria boys drive their “slip-on” ute (a sort of small pickup truck with a firefighting tank on the back) down our steep gravel lane at a gravel-crunching crawl, having watched the behemoth hurricane of fire engulf our patch of forest from the relative safety of an already burnt grassy hillside up our valley. Hair wild, bloodshot eyeballs against sooty faces streaked with sweat, they come to a halt next to Carrie, wearing her plastic water sprayer backpack (no longer upside-down), and me, leaning on my fire rake. Their red water tank is the only color as far as the eye can see – otherwise the universe is gray and black. I gotta admit we’re awful glad to see other living beings. Typically laconic Aussie that he is, Mick leans an arm out the window, looks away, then down. It takes him a few seconds to compose himself, then he says to his lap:

            “We expected smoking corpses, mate.”

            They were fighting the grassfires out on the open slopes upstream, doing what they could to save grass and cattle. Like every other fire crew in the district, the moment the fires appeared they were told to high-tail it outta there by the higher-ups, drinking tea behind their computer screens in towns a hundred kilometers away. It’s weird that we were left on our own – civilization’s escapees, feeble of mind and staggering of step, boys and girls with garden hoses and rakes – by those big burly Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) fire guys with scads of equipment and keen to go into battle just like they’d been trained for. But few on the fire crew had the balls to tell those bureaucratic cowards behind their desks to screw off we’re going to help these good folk, and frankly they would have been fired if they had. It was simply shut up or lose your job. One who did defy them and turned around to save his neighbor’s shed was screamed at over the radio. Never got over the public humiliation, though his entire community honored him for his bravery. After the fires DSE stood for the Department of Scorched Earth to all us locals, so they just changed the agency’s name. In any case, our good DSE boys got hemmed in and couldn’t follow orders, left with little choice but to go back-to-back and duke it out with Mother Nature at her wildest.

Gerry and Anthony live in a metal shed in that same rolling pasture up-valley, strewn with broken tools and small oily motors in process of being repaired, or not. In the impromptu celebration of life at the local pub – the Blue Duck Inn – that evening after the fires, Gerry will describe that same fireball – our fireball – to the bone-weary crowd, raising a schooner of beer to chapped lips, looking deeply into nowhere in particular;

            “Sounded like a 747 taking off, mate.”

            Even the damn sky is gray, a blood-orange sun barely visible through still billowing smoke, scattered pockets of burning ochre stumps and glowing logs providing the only other trembling color. Everyone has the eyes: shot red with worry, stung with smoke, black soot around the goggle line. A bunch of frigging raccoons.

XXX

            We’d been told about the wind, read about it, tried to not think about it for nineteen infernal days of dogged preparation. Driest month in decades, brittle eucalypt leaf-litter crunching underfoot like broken glass. You could even hear the footsteps of the echidnas searching for ants. Cicadas screaming like bagpipes in hell, hordes of bushflies crawling up your nose and tickling your face and eyes and ears, making you want to scream along with ‘em. It finally came, in a rush to get it over with already. Being over with it was what we’d been hankering for for weeks.

Be careful what you wish for.

            In the midst of the most intense half-hour, flames everywhere and me bellowing commands to Carrie and Jill over the din, a terrified wallaby hopped past, not two feet away, fast and focused. “Pull that hose, it’s stuck behind that rock!” Puff, puff. “Quick, spray that stump before the door catches!” There we are, wrapped up on dodging the lick of a three hundred-meter wide scorching tongue, and this little fella appears out of the unburned landscape behind us, skids to a halt to eyeball me for a moment, then leaps directly into the flames like a Tibetan monk. Poof! Gone. We went back to the hoses, spines tingling, considering.

            I told Cathy – our tough-as-nails rancher neighbor – about this little affair afterwards at The Duck. She holds the kind of wisdom you only get from generations of hay-baling, putting down beloved horses who broke a leg or calves that came out the wrong way, walking through snake-filled grass to get to the dunny at midnight. She takes a swig from her low-alcohol beer and toasts the far wall.

            “Perfect, mate – rush through the front and come out behind it where everything’s already burnt. Nothin’ but a singed arse and she’s laughin.”

            Now, with smoking ruin surrounding us, tormented trees crashing all around, scotch in hand, I can finally sit and meditate on the passions of Mother Nature, and our reactions to same. We consider our fellows and how they fared. How they, and we, faced our fates, and what we learned about ourselves, or not. Come to think of it, how is this really any different from life? What’s the difference between the whitewater and the flame?

XXX

            Of course my mother-in-law is visiting. All five feet of her. With a country-bred invincibleness about her that reminds me a lot about my own mom, though Vallie really did walk miles in bare feet through snake-infested scrub to school. In her seventies and lame from a recent bad break in her knee, you could drive a truck between her bowlegs. And my city-girl niece Jill, visiting from America. We warned them both it was coming, not to come for their visits, but you just can’t get that kind of universal curveball across with words. I tell Jill to take photos and video, and she replies “Unka Jeff!!??” My response is “Look at it this way; if we die the tapes will be melted anyway, and if we live it’ll be a great memory.” She ends up being the perfect backup to Carrie and I as we battle to save our bacon and our home. My sister is going to kill me.

            It’s all happening just like it says in the bushfire manual. Tin covers the windows, water fills gutters blocked with plastic bags filled with sand. Three years of brush control, burning and clearing. One idiot neighbor told Cath last winter that we were “creating a moonscape with our damn fuel reduction burns.” Cath shook her head as she told us that and said simply “Goodonya, it’s gonna be hot this summer.” Did I take some satisfaction after it was all over when I heard how he cowered in wide-eyed terror in the corner of a neighbor’s house during the worst of it? Yes I did.

            Mum stays inside the metal shed, whistling to herself, sitting on a corner of her roll-out-couch pretending she feels just fine thank you very much. She helps wet some rags to cover the cracks below the doors and windows where sparks are flying in. After refusing our warnings to stay away, she’d admitted maybe she’d rather go back to town, but we told her it was too late, fallen trees were blocking the road for miles. Jill drags hoses around corners, brings us drinking water, films, all the while with a barely-concealed shell-shocked look in her eyes, and a firm set to her mouth.

In the lead up to it all, everyone in the valley came closer – an impromptu, tribal bonding that will last forever. It was a funny feeling, everyone clustered together on that hillside, all the while conscious that when the shit really hit the fan it’d be everyone for themselves. We’d all be too busy saving our properties – and our asses – to help anyone else much. Like a chain of islands connected by some submerged reef.

Nobody anticipated having nearly three weeks of fires everywhere around us to prepare for the contest. Frustrating as that was, it gave us precious time. Wooden picnic benches, welcome mats, stacks of firewood against walls all piled a safe distance away from the shed – which all turned into spectacular bonfires at what would have been the very wrongest moment. Leaves raked from around the flammable fuel and plastic water tanks. I even had time to put my precious kayaks inside so they wouldn’t melt.

            The night before our turn came, Carrie and I and a straggle of others coalesced at an elderly neighbor’s place about fifteen minutes down our winding mountain road. They’d wisely left days before. The night glowed hellishly at every hand, highlighting each ridgeline with pulsing, glowing rust. Our valley was still maybe seven kilometers from that particular front, yet there were so many “fronts” in this thousand-kilometer long fire-front it was impossible to keep track. A throaty, rumbling, monstrous surf of heat whipped the trees all along the backlit ridge, a parade of furious giants madly dancing like the damned. No wind at our dark station, it crawled along all night long while we waited (which is a lot of what firefighting turns out to be) in case it came too close to the oldie’s homes. We watched the Park and volunteer firefighters depart, shifts long over, having fruitlessly debated with their higher-ups for replacements that never came. We did not have that luxury. When we asked them when the next shift was due to arrive, they simply shrugged. Taking advantage of this little eye-opener, breaking the rules, some outlaws set a backburn, which just so happened to save our old friend’s home. We retired at 2 a.m., satisfied.

The next morning I called “The Major” up the valley, reporting some spot fires nearby. It had already burned around his place, nice and slow and without wind, a few nights ago. A retired army major, usually seen with riding crop and wearing camo, he was sanguine, saying the wind would blow it around “us.” I said no I didn’t think so, that the wind was blowing the bastard right up our bums, and went off to check things out, too fidgety to sit still.

            Going up our little valley’s dead-end dirt road, I round the bend in my Land Cruiser, fire pump and twelve hundred litre water tank on my trailer in tow – my own personal little fire engine. A half-dozen four-bee-fours (Aussie for four-wheel-drives), a dozer, and most of the valley’s residents appear as silhouettes on the smoky horizon, leaning on their vehicles. They’re lined up along the crest of a grassy ridge, smoking and contemplating the spot fires racing across the valley, still four kilometers from home but we’re next. After swearing and spitting over the mismanagement of the fire crews, our spontaneous little assemblage parts with the rising wind. Still meandering along with the currents, scouting the tongue’s progress, I come upon our nearest neighbor, Neil, watching another blaze galloping across a nearby ridge from the other direction. He has this feeling.

Me too.

After all these years of searching for a new tribe to replace the one I left behind in Chicago, the one I was born to but never fit into, it’s finally hit me: you can’t be the lone wolf one minute, then waltz up to a new pack and expect them to just embrace you. There’s this ritual hazing to go through, pecking order stuff, snapping and barking and sniffing and observing your response. Locals seem to dislike me a bit less when “the bloody Yank” takes “the piss” out of himself. These things are just as natural as the wind blowing upstream or holding your breath when you go overboard. You come through to the other side, or you try again. And again. Survival of the fittest. But fitness has just as much to do with spirit and heart as it does with the size of your biceps. Funny thing is, you don’t find a new tribe that you’ll fit into with a compass and map. It’s all about stumbling into that perfect fit, as much dumb-ass luck as anything else. As much about finding the balance between that irascibleness that makes you that lovable but difficult rascal, mixed with learning how to get along, be a true-blue friend. It’s not about giving up who you are, it’s about being comfortable with yourself, loving yourself, and treating others like you can hear their heart beating, too. Sometimes tribes disband after their purpose is over, leaving only a spark of memory and a fiber of attachment lying amongst the bones and ash, and a new one materializes out of nowhere. So here we are.

            Spot fires multiply across the Bundara River, hopscotching like a barrage of flaming artillery shells towards the farmhouses, towards Helen’s horses, towards us. Imagine a real big bonfire, but without the neat, civilized ring of stones to keep it just so. Then imagine gargantuan spectral hosts grabbing the flames out of the fire and hurling them into arcs in the sky, lighting countless raggedy fires downwind just like that – willy-nilly amongst the trees, along the hillside, horizon to horizon, all over the goddamn place. Countless flaming bushes, like in the Bible only more biblical. Spot Fires they call ‘em. The wind whips lines of fire through the tall grass along the slopes like huge ocean breakers in a storm, made of flame instead of foam.

Graham from the Blue Duck pub comes barreling up in his rusty pickup, hunting for his son. “Another fire’s jumped the Mitta River from the other side, it’s coming fast! Where’s Jack?” He heads upstream, not quite in a panic, but... So it appears there is a second front barreling in. His. Two minutes later he’s found Jack and they roar by in a cloud of dust, faces serious, briefly waving to their comrade troopers as they pass us. While helping put out a grassfire surrounding Marty’s wood-sided home, I hear the radio crackle in Jimmy’s cab. He stares right through me, microphone in his hand and a warrior’s steely stare.

“Head back home. Quick.”

            The moment of truth. At long last.

            Cath’s blocking the road with her truck, which just lost its drive shaft bumping over the paddock. It takes an elongated moment to move it off the road to let me pass. Three minutes and I’m barreling down our drive, skidding to a halt next to the shed. Carrie sings out, “You can see fire out back.” Sure enough, to the east the forest is ablaze. “Shit, it’s upstream of us to the west too… look.” Thick red smoke is billowing and belching like an oil rig fire from the gully just upstream…the “moonscape” section. I jog over to the ridge above it with my video camera.

And there it is, sprinting along the river, cornering our moonscape, finding fresh fuel and coming at us at full gallop.

            The wind howls in our blistering ears. Torn-off flaming branches whiz by our heads, crashing onto the metal roof and into the siding, adding to the cacophony. A snowstorm of burning embers rends the air, singeing our faces as we swat. Red and orange Cumuli Nimbi made of towering superheated smoke cartwheel through the heavens, darkening the noontime scene like a solar eclipse.

            “This is it!” I yell over the din. “I’ll put the last of the tin on the windows and skylights, get mum inside. Quick!” We detach the trailer and move the Toyota inside the house, fumble our gear on. Nobody’s driving anywhere for the time being, but who knows – if we need fifteen extra minutes of cool fresh air…

Game On.

            Carrie yells “Look! Spot fires across the river!” One, twenty, then instantly a hundred cluster bombs, tearing across the slope in the raging squall – a stampede from hell. In less than sixty seconds several hundred acres of mountain, the entire bloody mountain, is aflame. “Carrie! Call Donald next door and warn him it’s here!” But it’s too late. The three downwind neighbors are a little too busy at the moment to answer their bloody phones.

            A forest is thick trees. Trees are wood. Wood is fuel. Every single tree is ablaze. A forest of fire.

We run around like maniacs. “Get that bush!….look out…that tree’s on fire!…Shit, it’s coming fast…look out…the wood shed!” Carrie and I try to move fast without rushing. To breathe too hard means smothering and choking on smoke. “Which way’s it coming from?…damn it…it’s everywhere!” The wind’s howling from the west. “Quick…out front!”

Then, Carrie yells “The fuel tank!”

I look up to where six hundred liters of unleaded petrol are sitting sixty meters away, engulfed in ten-meter-high flames. My tiny little wife with her upside-down backpack full of a few of liters of water reflexively starts dashing uphill towards it. I yell, “Leave it! It’s outside our perimeter, just get ready to duck if it explodes!” She can barely hear my yelp. The fire is roaring so loudly it’s hard to focus. That wallaby hops frantically by.

            Our twenty-two thousand liter plastic water tank is also surrounded by flames. That’s all we have except the thousand liters in the small tank on the trailer. Glad I raked up the leaves and sticks yesterday. Hope it holds. Trees explode into flame, the smoke chokes us, we carry on. The manual says that when the front comes, we should shelter inside until it’s passed. Supposed to be maybe fifteen minutes or so. How the hell do I know when the front is passing, the fire’s everywhere! We struggle on, pulling hoses this way and that, coughing and spitting, eyes smarting, me idiotically calling out for Jill to film this or that, or to grab a hose and help pull it around some obstacle. The smoke alarms in the house scream. “Yeah we know! Yank out the goddam batteries!” I yell to Jill. Flames consume the firewood and home-milled timber piles, a little too close for comfort. I run the hose over to stop them from torching the woodshed and then it hits me; I can’t breathe. I can’t see Carrie or Jill. I’m choking to death. My face is blistering. Drop everything and go. I quickly soak the ground around the fire pump, turn it off, and sprint into the shed.

            Carrie’s not there.

            I crash through the back door in the lee of the tempest, dash around the shed scanning and gulping down bile. There’s a moving form up the crackling hill, and I sprint towards it, swatting embers off my shirt and puffing hard, and find her with the trusty backpack sprayer (right-side up this time), on one knee, coughing and spitting. I grasp her hand and together we blunder and lurch back inside, rubbing our eyes. She says, “Baby, you’re hurting my hand.” I glance at my great big dirty paw clasping her tiny one, stare into her eyes and release my death grip.

“Everyone okay?” Mum says yep, and I glance over to her sitting on the fold-out bed in the middle of the cluttered shed. She has a hardhat on, beer in hand, and I give her one of those puzzled puppy looks. She waves the can in the air and smiles and says, “I’m hydrating.”

            Sparks are flitting around and through the door and window cracks like shimmering moths around a candle. Carrie walks around the inside of the shed, water pack still on, spraying them out. I’m kneeling on the cement floor, spitting thick mucous and guzzling juice, gathering myself and trying to rehydrate. We’re all here. We’re all OK. Now what? “Anyone need any water?” BOOM. Carrie and I look at each other. “Donald’s gas tanks next door?”

            The hurricane outside is preposterous. The tin rattles like the whole place is going to fly apart, flaming airborne branches as thick as your arm smack the side of the shed, a freight train roars along some tremendous track just outside. If I go out the back door, in the lee of the shed, I can see just a bit and breathe. But what is within my view is a landscape from Dante’s Inferno, everything is orange, everything is dancing in flame, everything is kinetic; frenetically waving trees, flames leaping from the earth, smoke and cloud and burning ash and limbs rushing helter-skelter in a boiling sky. Amazingly enough, the firebreak around the shed seems to be holding, even seems—dare I say it? —substantial. Secure. Crash! Another tree falls, closer this time. Two minutes… ten… I check outside. I think I can breathe just enough. The wind tries to rip the door out of my hands as I exit and shoulder it closed behind me. But I manage to restart the fire pump (a little miracle in itself, considering my relationship with small motors), grab the hose, start putting out fires in drip lines, fires in garden plants, fires in trees, bushes – anything too close to the house. The rest of the world can go to hell for now. Actually, it has gone to hell. This continues for some time, and then I realize I can hear myself think again, which then allows me to notice the wind – or rather the lack thereof.

XXX

            We chainsaw two fallen trees off our driveway, then I climb a ladder to lop the top off another standing one which is aflame just meters from the shed. Then the power goes out. I go down to check the micro-hydro power plant in the river. Surrounded by water, it’s fine, but we hadn’t properly buried some of the wires running up the hill to the shed deep enough and they’ve melted in a few spots, so the batteries have since drained and now there’s no power. Some half melted pipes on the grey-water system too, but otherwise we’re mostly intact. The fuel hose from that petrol (gasoline) tank on stilts melted, and the top of the tank was dented from a large falling branch, but amazingly the dang thing didn’t explode. The branch’s image is outlined in ash on the ground next to the tank, like police chalk. Now that was close. The drainpipe on the outside of the plastic water tank melted, but like the old match under a paper cup full of water trick, the tank itself is marvelously intact. We fire up the generator till I can fix the wires to the hydro. Donald, our Scottish neighbor, saunters over, can of VB beer in hand as usual. “Broke a window, lost me fire pump” takes a sip. “Empty fifty-five barrel metal drum exploded from the heat. The lid must’ve been too tight.” Ah. So that was the Boom. He mentions his “bloody smoke alarms,” and we share a laugh. Now that there’s nothing left to burn, I consider all those others in another world, farther downwind, while I hook up the trailer and water tank and head upstream to see how everyone else in our immediate little province is faring.

Upstream next-door neighbor Jim Brown’s house is a hissing pile of blackened rubble and warped corrugated tin roofing lying in a twisted heap of smoldering ash… as is Tom’s cabin just downstream. Two out of three neighbors cabins gone, where nobody was there with a hose. Smoke rises from the remains. Just over the ridge, Jimmy Betts’s shed is gone, too close to a big pile of dried timber, but he and his wife Issy wave from their untouched verandah. Eighty-year-old Lil sheltered with them. Her house – the place the fire boys left after their shift ended the night before – is gone. We wave to them and old Lil, just like us soaking up life, surveying the ruin about them. Dead kangaroos, dead birds, dead possums litter the paddock. But Dinkie the mule can be heard braying his joy to the world, still standing knee-deep in the middle of the little cattle dam pool.

“You guys okay?” I call out.

“Yep, no worries. You?”

“Yep. No worries.” I glance at Lil. “Sorry.”

A shrug from Lil.

Young Jack is lying on his back, on the grass out front of the Blue Duck pub, knees up, arms spread-eagled, eyes shut. He was the gopher, sent to and fro to spots the old ones couldn’t manage. The historic wooden bridge had started to burn; they’d put it out with buckets since the hoses wouldn’t reach. It’s the only way across the Cobungra river, and would have blocked the entire Omeo highway had it gone up. In the process Graham’s eyeglasses melted in his shirt pocket. Jack had “chucked my guts out” after throwing the door open to the Duck’s generator shed to check for flames, and the mattresses they’d used to insulate the attic poured toxic smoke right smack in his face. He’d then watched from his hands and knees as an old bloke saved the cabins – garden hose in one hand, cigarette in the other. This man had fought bush fires for thirty-five years. “Never seen anything like this bugger.” A small leak had sprung in his hose, emitting a fine mist close to his leg. A wallaby appeared out of the smoke, eying him nervously. Slowly, slowly it edged into the spray and just stood there, warily watching him but never leaving his side.

            Trees, burnt black and leafless, sporadically crash to earth. This will continue for weeks. Gum trees are used to this sort of thing. Cath and PJ are anxious for their cattle, who sheltered in a gully up the valley. Got pretty hot in there. They will find them tomorrow, or what’s left of them. It’s getting dark and they’re buggered. So am I.

Neil lost his water tank. Full of water and still melted into a puddle of plastic, frozen in place on the slope below like a green lava flow. Lucky he had two tanks, and twice lucky that we loaned him one of our garden hoses so he and his son each had one. Got pretty hot on their little ridge just a few hundred meters uphill from us where the two fronts collided. They had to crawl under the floorboards to breathe. They arrive at our place, raccoon-eyed like the rest of us. Neil is one of those strong, silent bush-types who spent his whole life working outside­ – a “tree lopper”, a.k.a. arborist. Good man to have in a pinch, solid. Carrie glances at me, saying with her eyes what we both grasp; that this stout tree is near collapse. We share juice and energy bars, and Carrie points to the stairwell and tells him he needs to go upstairs right this very minute, take a shower and have a nap on our couch, don’t argue. He obeys. Back in Aboriginal times, the Bundara Valley was “Women’s Business” only. It’s clear that Carrie – really any and all ladies of the Bundar – means business.

They’re giving warnings over the radio to people in other towns and valleys downwind towards the ocean who are still in the beast’s path. We silently wish them well. The reporter also notes that Andre Agassiz is leading the Australian Open finals. We wish him well too while we’re at it. We hope the animals that survived will stick around, and that some will find a blade of grass here and there. There won’t be much for a while, and many more withered carcasses will soon appear to feed the ravens. All the plastic mile markers along Callaghan’s Road are drooping like a Dali painting.

XXX

            I dance a goofy victory-dance around my trusty Toyota and trailer-cum-firetruck. It is evening, and finally cooling off a bit. I am all alone out here in the paddocks, watching over PJ’s and Cath’s remaining hay bales as the grassfires trickle out. Still, the Bloody Yank keeps one eye peeled for farmers, not wanting to look too stupid.

            Now that night has fallen, the mountain across from us has countless pinpoint lights flickering in the blackness. They’re high up the slope and they look like stars in the sky. Which makes me realize I haven't seen the real ones in a very long time. Which makes me think of my lovely Carrie, and how calmly she got on with her job. Then it strikes me – when I hugged her during the crux of the thing, she was shaking.

            And, like a lightning bolt from heaven – like the fourteen lightning bolts that started the inferno that nearly took us – it hits me. This.

            This is what I’ve been seeking. This is the source. This, the essence. Sanctuary. Tribe. This!

            Standing there in the cool evening watching the fire-stars, wrapped in my arms, she gazes up into my eyes. Dark, almond-shaped, so gentle, her eyes reflecting the glow of the embers, that loving smile. There it is again, just like that time when Pop was wildly grasping at imaginary fireflies near the end of his life in our living room, needing someone to bring him back, and she was there. It fills my bones. Reflections of my mother’s eyes. Here it is, after all.

            “How’d I do?” she asks, and my tears flow.

Here's a link to a video: