by Pam Houston
Meanwhile, on the south side of Highway 160, the Windy Pass Fire gains 500 acres, coming within a quarter mile of the buildings at Wolf Creek Ski Area. Firefighters are trying to hold the fire west of the Continental Divide there too. Highway 160 is still open, although smoke is limiting visibility. Total acreage for the West Fork Complex is now 12,710, though heavy smoke is making it difficult for aircraft to accurately assess the exact perimeter of the fire.
Large Fire: 1) For statistical purposes, a fire burning more than a specified area of land e.g., 300 acres. 2) A fire burning with a size and intensity such that its behavior is determined by interaction between its own convection column and weather conditions above the surface (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
Convection Column: The rising column of gases, smoke, fly ash, particulates, and other debris produced by a fire. The column has a strong vertical component indicating that buoyant forces override the ambient surface of the wind (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
At 8:00 a.m., on the morning of June 20, as I’m getting ready for my last class in Aspen, I find out the West Fork Fire has crossed the Continental Divide (“spotted across the Continental Divide” is the language on InciWeb), not right behind the ranch, but several miles east near the Big Meadows Campground. InciWeb reports that a crew from the Rio Grande National Forest team is on their way to the “spot fire.” I understand these words have been chosen consciously, to make this new fire sound small, manageable, occasional, even. But I am two long weeks into this party by now, and I know better.
There are certain words I always miscapitalize in a first draft, and sometimes I don’t catch them, even in revision. Elk, Paddleboard, Monsoon, Sushi. When my late editor Carol Houck Smith wrote in the margins of my otherwise clean manuscript, “Pam, why?” all I could think to tell her was I tended to capitalize things I really liked. In other words, Elk, Paddleboards, Monsoons and Sushi were the Gods of my Universe.
Big Meadows Campground sits on the border of the Weminuche Wilderness close to the Divide. I have taken the dogs for walks up that road during the spring runoff, photographed July’s embarrassment of wildflowers, listened to the elk bugle in September. The thought of all those elk being burned alive nearly bends me in half.
I find a website that says animals are smart about forest fires, can get out ahead of trouble and do, that the elk mortality rate during the 1988 Yellowstone fires was only 1 percent of the 31,000 elk who live there. But, it continues, when the fire fronts are wide and fast moving, when the fire is crowning and there is a lot of smoke on the ground, elk can die of asphyxiation just as a human can, or a deer, or a mountain lion, or a bear.
At 8:30 a.m. that same morning of June 20, Sheriff Hosselkus issues pre-evacuation orders to residents and visitors on West Fork Road, as well as private landowners in the East Fork drainage area on the south side of Highway 160, many miles to the south of the ranch. The website is quick to add that a pre-evacuation order does not mean an evacuation is imminent; however, residents and visitors should be prepared to leave within an hour if an evacuation order is issued.
By 11:00 a.m., “just as a precaution,” InciWeb insists, the Forest Service is closing Big Meadow and Tucker Ponds campgrounds as well as Forest Roads 410 and 430. It is hard to ignore the quaver in the voice, even on the screen, even in the bureaucratese. And sure enough, by 2:30 p.m. they post an update that the fire is now fully established in the Rio Grande National Forest on the east side—our side—of Wolf Creek Pass.
Extended Attack Incident: A wildland fire that has not been contained or controlled by initial attack forces and for which more firefighting resources are arriving, en route, or being ordered by the initial attack incident commander (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
At this point, everything slows down to that filmstrip quality of trauma, and simultaenously starts moving very quickly. The Lake Humphreys and 4UR areas are evacuated, as well as the Metroz Lake area. Now all the place-names are on my side of the mountain. I know the people who have been evacuated. My ranch, like all of these properties, sits on the northern border of the Weminuche Wilderness. How long, I wonder, until we are added to the list.
Every structure along Highway 160 west of South Fork and every structure on 149 north of South Fork is on pre-evacuation, all the way to Wagon Wheel Gap: Park Creek, Wolf Creek Ranch, Fun Valley, Elk Creek, Masonic Park, Trout Creek and Riverbend. This time InciWeb insists residents should be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice (what happened to that hour?). They should gather medications, important documents, pets, etc., and wait to be notified by a sheriff’s deputy.
Effective immediately: Highway 160 will be closed to traffic in both directions at the chain-up areas on the east and west side. The highway will be open to fire traffic only (NFS InciWeb).
In the three hours it takes me to drive from Aspen to Denver so I can fly to my next job, at Pacific University near Portland, the fire makes a seven-mile run in a northeasterly direction. At 5:49 p.m. on June 20, Eric Norton, fire behavior analyst for the NIMO team, calls the fire behavior “so extreme, it is undocumented and unprecedented.” It rips through Big Meadows and Metroz Lake, burning downhill to within a quarter mile of Highway 160. By the time I land in Portland the fire has more than doubled in size, from 12,710 acres to 29,000, but for the moment it’s racing northeastward, away from the ranch and straight for the town of South Fork. There is now a mandatory evacuation in place from the top of Wolf Creek Pass to the city limits of South Fork, and shelters have opened in Del Norte High School for people, and the Sky High Complex in Monte Vista for RVs and large animals.
You are wondering, at this point, why I don’t go home, and I guess the honest answer is I am the sort of person who always shows up where and when I am supposed to. Greg is also that sort of person and he talks me into staying. “In the first place,” he says, “nobody who’s spent their life in the Oregon rain is going to be able to picture what is happening here. In the second place, the fire made a big run, not at us but parallel to us. It would have to do a hard 180 to come at us now, and the Divide seems to be holding whatever fire there is to the south.” South Fork is nineteen miles southeast of the town of Creede—about twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, east southeast from my ranch. Because of the prevailing westerlies, the fire is eating up much of the mountains between us. What burns and how fast depends on how hard and which way the wind blows.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Divide, firefighters are combating the Windy Pass Fire with indirect containment as it continues to threaten to burn down Wolf Creek Ski Area. Wolf Creek is family owned, a homey resort with chairlifts instead of gondolas and tickets regular people can afford. It would be sad for everyone in the region to lose it. It also happens to get 400 inches of snow in a good year, the most of any ski area in the state. That is if we have a good year. That is if we ever have a good year again.
In Oregon, I don’t get to campus until two thirty in the morning, so it seems like not such a bad idea to stay up hitting refresh all night. At 8:00 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time, InciWeb reports this will be the third red flag day in a row and that because of the abundance of volatile fuels, the fire is expected to make significant runs.
My first class starts at 10:00 a.m. MDT, and at 9:52 I get word the entire town of South Fork is under mandatory evacuation and all residents must be out by ten. Highway 149 has been closed between South Fork and Creede; 160 remains closed over Wolf Creek Pass, and there is no estimated time for reopening. Fire resources from across the state and all over the country are headed to and arriving in South Fork. For the first time this morning, our fire makes the national news, CBS reminding its national viewers by point of reference that the fictional Griswold family was camped in South Fork in 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation during the famous scene where a dog urinates on a picnic basket.
I go off to teach in a daze, hitting refresh on my phone under the desk while the students are writing. At noon, all Denver news c
hannels report a high probability the entire town of South Fork will be lost. Its mayor, Ken Brooke, who took his family to safety and then came back to help the firefighters, is quoted as saying, “I just tell them it doesn’t look good. I tell them the truth; that the fire is coming. I just tell them to keep themselves safe, evacuate as need be and don’t come back.” One Denver TV station claims the town has been lost already.
It is easy to tell, even from the government speak on InciWeb, this fire is blowing everybody’s mind. Even the experts. Especially them. Forest fires, in the time of climate change, are forest fires on steroids, and beetle kill is demanding a whole new approach. The standing dead trees are so moistureless they are exploding into Roman candles, starting new fires in all directions, which are quickly engulfed by the big fire, which wants to eat everything in its path.
Candle: A standing tree with a broken top which often continues to burn after the main firefront has passed. Candles usually send up a fountain of sparks and burning embers which may travel some distance and be of concern if near the unburnt side of a control line (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).
“Prevailing winds are easterly,” Greg says on the phone, “at about 50 mph at the moment. Everyone’s saying South Fork is history—it looks like the H-bomb is going off continuously over there—but now we are straight upwind.” I finally get the nerve to tell Shelley, who runs the residency in Oregon, that if the wind changes direction, I’m going to have to go home.
I picture driving five hours home from the airport, getting to the place where South Fork was (I’m in the home stretch! I always think when I get there), and seeing it vanished, incinerated, burned off the map. Colorado fires have taken out subdivisions in recent years, but no actual towns. Creede burned to the ground a few times in its boomtown days, back in the 1890s, but that was because the miners built their shacks out of plywood and there was always somebody drunk enough to kick over a lantern.
At 3:05 p.m., Colorado time, InciWeb reports the leading edge of the fire is between two and three miles west of South Fork and still approaching, but air tankers have been able to fly for the first time in forty-eight hours and are dropping retardant on the fire, cooling it and slowing it down. Power has been turned off in town and all the surrounding areas. Thirty-six fire engines have arrived from all over the state and are standing ready to try to protect the town.
Late that night, when I make it back to my room after the readings, Greg calls and with a not quite imperceptibly shaky voice says he thinks he has seen another smoke plume, just before sunset. This one is immediately to the west of us, behind the mountain we call Baldy, where no smoke plume related to the West Fork Fire should be.
“I’m not positive,” he says. “It could have been a dust devil or maybe some trucks up there kicking up a whirlwind.”
My skin prickles and I get that same wash of cold through my veins I got whenever I could feel my father turning his rage in my direction. We are precisely down the prevailing winds from Baldy. If Greg is seeing what he thinks he is seeing, the ranch will soon be surrounded by fire on three sides.
“Honestly,” he says, “this is the second day in a row I have seen it. But it is so small and inconsequential compared to the mushroom clouds to the east of us, I didn’t want to scare you anymore.”
No matter how I twist my logic, I can think of no scenario in which there would be trucks up on Baldy, two days in a row, kicking up a similar plume of dust. It is not, for one second, lost on me that our luck has apparently run out on June 21, the solstice, my favorite day of the year.
Back in my early days on the ranch, in the time of life when throwing a party sounded like a good idea, I’d throw one big one a year on the summer solstice. My friends would come from all corners of the country—Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, New York—and even England. We would play music and sing, put my rafts in the Rio Grande and float down the river, play epic games of horseshoes and darts. Paul Stone, a local inventor, would come out and shoot his black-powder-fired bowling ball cannon into the national forest beyond my pasture, and the horses—so much younger then—would come dashing toward the barn at the sound of the explosion, manes and tails high, eyes wild.
Because I am a prose writer, I’m compelled to find meaning in the fact that the West Fork Fire has its biggest and most dangerous day so far on the only holiday in the whole year I ever feel like celebrating. In two weeks and after twenty years, I’ll be taking my final ranch payment to Dona Blair. What message if it burns down the very same summer I make it mine? What message if the very same day? And even if the house and the barn are saved, what will I be left with? Charred mountains on all sides of me to look at until I die. And what if the elk are gone, the mule deer, the bears and the birds? No more giant stands of aspen quaking gold in the third week of September, no more fresh scent of living spruce forest on my daily cross-country ski.
Another lesson from my childhood: once the thing I fear most happens, there’s no place to go but up. Being cut out of my father’s Cadillac with a chain saw by highway patrollers on Christmas Eve, for instance, was so much better than sitting in the bar with him while he had his fourth martini knowing black ice was forming on the road outside. Being in the safety of the hospital while they applied my three-quarter body cast with all of the nurses making a big fuss over my four-year-old self was so much better than knowing my father was about to pick me up and throw me across the room.
Waiting is terrible, but soon, maybe very soon, the bad thing will have already happened, and I’ll be able to start from whatever I have left. The forest has needed to burn for a long time, I say to myself, before turning off my computer for the first time in days, putting my head down, closing my eyes. If the worst happens, I will spend the rest of my life watching it recover, one stalk of fireweed, one tiny aspen shoot at a time.
By the morning of June 22 at 8:00 a.m. Colorado time, Greg’s smoke plume has been given a name—the Papoose Fire—and added to the official literature on InciWeb. Started by lightning on June 19, it has grown in three days to 4,000 acres, bringing the total of the West Fork Complex to 66,200 acres. The Papoose Fire is threatening to close Highway 149 in the other direction, up and over Spring Creek Pass toward Lake City. Because this closure would effectively seal the valley off from the rest of the world entirely, InciWeb assures us that in the event of closure, police will escort people with medical emergencies over Spring Creek Pass.
Greg sounds the shakiest on the phone he has so far. The valley is filled with so much smoke he can’t see the mountains. There is some kind of setup on Middle Creek Road, not far from the bottom of the driveway, which he thinks may be a roadblock. He hasn’t received an evacuation call, but he’s afraid if he leaves the house, they might not let him come back. It’s a whole different thing, he says, when you can’t see the fire that’s coming at you. He is worried about, among other things, my elderly horses’ lungs.
I call my friend Becky Barkman, who has horse property a hundred miles away in Gunnison, and ask if she’ll come get my equines out of the valley. Owner of the Lucky Cat Dog Farm kennels as well as a handful of long, leggy Thoroughbreds, Becky is a force of nature. She spends her winters taking tourists on winding dog sled runs through the canyons and sometimes, over the holidays when she gets too busy, I get to drive an extra sled. It’s my favorite way of all to move through space, clinging to the back of ten pounds of wood and a canvas bag stuffed with tourists wrapped so tightly in blankets they look like dolmades, twelve wagging, laughing dogs pulling the sled for all they are worth—20 mph on the downhills—as I steer it though the snow. Becky wears the same bright red one-piece snowsuit all winter—she’s one of those flinty, lean horsewomen, and with her short shock of white hair, Top Gun sunglasses and full-on attitude, I think of her as the Annie Lennox of mushing.
To get to the ranch from Gunnison, Becky will have to talk her way through one or possibly two roadblocks, but if anybody can do it, she can. It’s a five-hour
round trip from Becky’s house to my house in the best of conditions—six hours minimum with a livestock trailer, but by four thirty that afternoon, Becky texts me a photograph showing Roany, Deseo, Simon and Isaac standing knee deep in green grass in Becky’s pasture, a blue, smokeless sky behind them.
Months from now, when this is all over, Becky will tell me when she came over the top of Spring Creek Pass and hit a wall of smoke blacker than anything she had ever seen, she thought about turning back. “It looked like the end of the world,” she’ll say, “but I knew in the same situation if it were you, you would drive straight into that wall and rescue my horses.”
On the afternoon of the twenty-second, the winds shift from the west to the south, sending the Papoose Fire north, up toward the Rio Grande Reservoir and the Ute Creek and Squaw Creek trails, some of the best hiking in the state. If the infrared map weren’t so frightening, it would almost be funny. My ranch is sitting in the center of a deep bowl made of burnt and burning trees. For two decades I have felt protected by my position, protected by these mountains. I have felt vulnerable only (I would admit if pressed) on the northeast—a small window that opens to the valley, to Middle Creek Road, and the state highway beyond. But even to the north, on the relatively “mountainless” side, the Rio Grande snakes past, a softer barrier than the mountains, and beyond the river, and the state highway, the cliff called Bristol Head.
