by Pam Houston
Now my horseshoe of good luck is on fire. And still, it seems unaccountably lucky to have three fires raging with zero percent containment, all of them only a few miles from the ranch and none of them, at least for this moment, bearing down on the ranch itself. The leading edge of the Windy Pass Fire is safely to the south of us, still on the other side of the Divide; the leading edge of the West Fork is running hard away from us to the east, and the Papoose, which started precisely up the prevailing winds from the ranch, is all of a sudden moving on a longitudinal line, hell-bent for leather north.
I also know conditions can change in a heartbeat. Even a forty-five degree shift in wind direction could bring the fire back toward my pasture, my sheep and my beautiful barn. Every day since June 18 has carried a red flag warning, and every day forward predicts the same. The complex, InciWeb tells us, is now big enough to make its own weather. Convection columns are rising to 30,000 feet above sea level, then cooling when they finally hit cold air aloft. They collapse, sending all that hot air rushing back toward the ground, spreading embers outward and exploding the fire into even bigger and more ferocious flames, which send up new convection columns and so on. Even the scant amount of moisture produced inside the columns turns out to be bad news, because if that moisture condenses in the rapid rise, it can create pyrocumulus thunderclouds, which can produce lightning, which can start new fires. Tomorrow they’re calling for 10 percent relative humidity and wind speeds of 50 mph on the ridge tops, which is where the worst of the flames always are.
Fire Whirl: Spinning vortex column of ascending hot air and gases rising from a fire and carrying aloft smoke, debris, and flame. Fire whirls form from the stretching of the vorticity due to upward flowing air and can range in size from less than one foot to more than 500 feet in diameter and have the intensity of a small tornado (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
At bedtime InciWeb reports that in South Fork firefighters are still holding the West Fork Fire two miles west of town, though it made a run up Sheep Mountain to the east and is burning above Highway 160, which is still closed. The northern flank of the West Fork Fire, the closest flank to the ranch, has put up a significant column in the area of Wagon Wheel Gap, very close to the house where Dona Blair and her new husband, Dick Smith, spend their summers. I’ve been keeping my eye on them on the InciWeb map, but today the site says heavy smoke has prevented fire managers from determining the full extent of fire in that area.
The next morning, the twenty-third, Greg calls to say the Papoose Fire ran all the way north to the Rio Grande Reservoir on the back side of Baldy, and then made a sudden U-turn. It’s coming back south on the front side of that same ridgeline, which, if it wraps all the way around the back of Antelope Park, puts the ranch right in its path. “This is the first time I can see actual flames from the house,” Greg says, “but most of the time the smoke is too bad to see anything.”
InciWeb reports firefighters were up all night protecting twenty-five residences just west of the Rio Grande River at the foot of Baldy. I know those houses and the people who live in them. On a clear day, I can see those houses from the ranch. A red flag warning has been issued for the fifth day in a row with a Haines Index of 6. The Haines Index measures the stability and dryness of the air over the fire in order to predict “large plume driven fire growth.” A score of 2 to 3 is very low potential, 4 to 5 is moderate potential and 6 is the top of the chart. Teaching commitment or not, it’s time to go home and do what I can for the remaining animals: the man, the dogs, the sheep, the chickens and Mr. Kitty.
I teach my class at Pacific from nine to noon and make a reservation on a 3:30 p.m. plane. A conference volunteer is assigned to drive me in a nineteen-passenger van the forty-five minutes from campus to PDX. We plan to leave at twelve thirty, which should give us time to spare. As we head toward Portland, not on the highway but on surface roads, hitting light after light after light, I say to the driver, who is probably twenty but looks fourteen, “I’ve never gone this way before,” and she says, “Oh, I’m way too scared to drive on the highway.” I decide not to ask how she got the job driving the airport van.
Most of the roads we take are highwayesque, as in, they have two lanes in both directions, but no matter how slow the car in front of us is going, we do not engage the turn signal nor power the big van out into the fast lane and around it. We pass sign after sign telling us how to access the actual highway. We go straight through the middle of downtown Portland, a red light at every intersection for more than a hundred blocks.
We head out the other side of the city toward the airport on the slowest road so far, this one starting to back up with afternoon traffic. I fidget in the back of the van, eventually saying, “It’s only an hour until my flight time, and I’m sure there is some kind of luggage cutoff. Any chance we could get on the highway for these last five miles?”
“Oh, we’re almost there now,” she says, vaguely, though my phone is telling me the airport is precisely 5.7 miles away, a distance that would take us six minutes if we would just for the love of God get on the highway designed for such a purpose. When the light rail stops alongside us, I consider leaping out of the van and making a run for it.
When she finally runs out of surface road and has no choice but to get on the highway, she takes the wrong ramp and the cloverleaf turns us back toward Portland. “You’re going the wrong way,” I say, my voice suddenly shaking with rage.
“No, I’m not,” she says.
“Yes, you are,” I say, starting to wonder if there is some reason I am not meant to get to Creede today.
“Oh, sorry,” she says, and in that same slow motion she has done every other thing since we left the University, she flips on her turn signal and makes for the next exit.
“You have to go faster,” I growl, close to tears. “There is a wildfire bearing down on my house and I have to make this flight.” I know she has been told this is why I am leaving early. I jump out of the van before she has come to a complete stop at the curb, dragging my too big for carry-on suitcase with me.
“I’m sorry!” she yells, and it’s clear she really is. I am instantly ashamed that I growled at her. I arrive at the counter exactly thirty-one minutes before flight time. The agent squints her eyes hard at her watch, then takes my bag.
The plane lands in Denver a little after seven, and I’m both eager and terrified to get back to my valley. I drive straight to Target and buy five room-sized air cleaners with replacement filters. Then I stock up on good fresh groceries. (By now you are sensing a theme with me and calamity.)
Even with four-wheel drive, there are only two ways into or out of Creede: Highway 149 south, from Lake City, or Highway 149 north, from South Fork. Because of the shape of the mountains, neither of them is what anyone would call direct. My normal route from DIA is 285 southwest out of Denver for four hours—until I hit Del Norte, wrap around the mountains to South Fork, and follow the Rio Grande back up the canyon. With 149 closed between South Fork and Creede, my only choice is to leave 285 in Poncha Springs, climb over Monarch Pass to Gunnison and from there take 149, which climbs Slumgullion Summit and Spring Creek Pass before dropping down to the Upper Rio Grande Valley and eventually Creede. The mountains are so twisted up in this part of Colorado the Continental Divide makes a turn as deep as a river’s oxbow. My ranch, for example, is twenty-five miles east of the Divide at Spring Creek Pass, and yet longitudinally, it is west (by more than twenty-five miles) of the Western Slope town of Gunnison.
This is the route Becky used to get my horses yesterday. I call it the back door, because it is both the long way around and the foolproof route no matter the conditions. In twenty-five years of living here, the highway department has never closed Spring Creek Pass because of weather, even when every highway in southwestern Colorado is closed because of snow or ice or avalanche. It’s as if the Colorado Department of Transportation has decided if you know about Spring Creek Pass you are probably a local, and if you are crazy enoug
h to try it in a big storm, you’ve probably had some practice slalom skiing your car through a couple of feet of powder to get home.
I’ve heard mixed reports about 149 being closed just below Spring Creek Pass, but Becky wasn’t stopped so I hope I won’t be either. It’s 1:00 a.m. by the time I get on top of Monarch Pass and from there I can see the orange glow to the south, lighting the mushroom clouds that are still rising, even at that hour. As the crow flies I’m seventy-five miles away from actual flames here, and the fire has the sky lit up like a carnival.
As I roll into the town of Gunnison a wave of exhaustion hits me, and I don’t know how much luck I’ll have talking my way through a roadblock at three in the morning. Maybe some part of me is just too afraid to see the burning mountains at that most vulnerable of hours. I pay for a room at the Best Western and go to sleep in my clothes until first light. I take a thirty-second shower and check the internet, which tells me as of last evening’s infrared flight, the West Fork Complex has grown to 76,000 acres and is zero percent contained. We are now the number one priority incident in the country, which means we have nine new helicopters and another thousand firefighters on the way. The Papoose Fire has grown to 20,000 acres and is currently the most active fire on the complex. Firefighters spent yesterday trying to keep the Papoose from crossing Highway 149. If it does, and starts running along the top of Bristol Head, the town of Creede is ten miles downwind and directly in its path. Because of the volatility of the Papoose Fire, NIMO has ordered a spike camp set up nearby at Freemon’s Ranch.
The West Fork Fire is now more than 50,000 acres and has been divided (by the Continental Divide, as everything is divided around here) into an East Zone (our side of the divide) and a West Zone (the Pagosa side). On the East Zone today, firefighters will “evaluate and provide structure protection” (that means place giant portable water bladders in close proximity to houses) in the area between South Fork and Creede, and “will remove fuels adjacent to structures to provide additional protection” (that means cut down the trees). Firefighters have managed to stall the fire two miles outside of South Fork, and they are looking for natural firebreaks they can “reinforce” (that means bulldoze) and use as a control line. Containment lines on the Windy Pass Fire put in place to protect the Wolf Creek Ski area are holding. Incredibly (InciWeb does not say but must be thinking), no structure loss has been documented at this time.
This will be the sixth red flag day in a row with a Haines Index of 6. Winds are predicted to reach 15 to 25 mph out of the southwest, gusting to 35, but gusts could reach 50 mph on the ridge tops. Relative humidity will be 11 percent.
I am out of the hotel room and moving toward home before sunrise.
When I hit Becky’s black wall of end-of-the-world smoke, I slow down and try to comprehend what I’m seeing. My river valley, usually so blue and green at this time of year, looks like the aftermath of a war zone—the word “Beirut” jumps to mind, unbidden. Charred, smoldering, the sun a sickly orange ball in the sky. The entire mountainside, to the west of 149—miles of it—is nothing but blackened stumps and rubble. Firefighters line the edges of the giant meadow, where just last winter I watched a herd of three hundred elk gallop through chest-deep snow. They are putting out spot fires that have spilled from the trees onto the grass, working to keep the fire west of the highway. Even the Rio Grande, that glistening, serpentine jewel, is muddied and dull with ash and charcoal runoff.
As I approach Freemon’s Ranch, I see four cowboys moving a herd of horses across 149, in an attempt, I suppose, to get them to safer pastures. The horses are wild eyed, red rims flashing around brown pupils, their nostrils crusted with snot. I want to get home, but I stop to take pictures. What will it be like to live in this valley from now on?
In the first big meadow beyond Freemon’s, I see Camp Papoose has been established, and it is filled with beautiful, dirty, exhausted women and men. I read this morning that by tonight there will be 895 firefighters in town, which is more people than live in this county. And here are a whole mess of them, our literal heroes, sitting in folding chairs outside of tents, eating cans of whatever with plastic forks, half-melted boots still on, suspenders loosened, charcoal-scarred arms coming out of filthy T-shirts, deep fatigue visible through the ash-exaggerated lines on their faces.
I thought the sight of the burnt forest would make me cry, but in fact it’s the sight of these off-duty saviors that bring tears. I’ll go home, I think, and make the biggest sign imaginable and hang it on the front gate. THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS! WE YOU! There’s nothing that undoes me like the possibility of rescue.
Everyone greets me enthusiastically when I get home, but the dogs know there’s trouble and are looking to me, their alpha, to fix it. The first thing I do after petting them and hugging Greg is check on the sheep and chickens. All of the sheep have black and green goop in their eyes and crusted around their noses, but no one is coughing, and when I give them their hay it’s clear there’s nothing wrong with their appetite. Their water trough has a slightly ashen color to it, so I dump it and refill.
It looks to me like Sheryl Crow has been pecking Martina’s head. I have been told chickens do this to each other when they’re under stress or sometimes just out of meanness. I pick up Martina, pet her feathers and smooth what’s left on her head. I tell her everything will be all right, but I don’t think I have the wherewithal to convince anyone of that, even someone with a brain as small as a chicken’s.
I’m out in the sheep pen a total of twenty minutes, and when I come inside my lungs ache worse than when I had pneumonia. I set up all the air cleaners—one in each room—then make buffalo burgers for lunch. Even with all the air cleaners running it’s smokier than hell in here, but it’s so much worse outside I decide the dogs can only go out for five-minute runs. I get to work making my THANK YOU FIREFIGHTERS sign.
Criteria Pollutants: Pollutants deemed most harmful to public health and welfare and that can be monitored effectively. They include carbon monoxide (CO), lead (Pb), nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2), ozone (O3), particulate matter (PM) of aerodynamic diameter less that or equal to 10 micrometers (PM10) and particulate matter of aerodynamic diameter less than or equal to 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5) (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).
After lunch, InciWeb reports the Papoose Fire continues to threaten structures along Highway 149. On the northwest side the fire has slopped over Rio Grande Reservoir Road, and firefighters are working to improve Forest Road 521 so it can be used as a control line. Newly arriving firefighters have been assigned to the area in an effort to keep the fire from moving north.
Meanwhile, down in South Fork, a dozer line has been created between the edge of the fire and the town, and sprinklers have been put in adjacent to immediately threatened houses. An air quality monitor has been set up in Del Norte and we are invited to consult the Colorado state website to learn more about health issues associated with smoke. As of 6:00 p.m. this evening, no structures anywhere on the West Fork Complex have been damaged or destroyed.
Slop Over: A fire edge that crosses a control line or natural barrier intended to contain the fire (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).
On the morning of June 25, I walk down my long driveway to check out the roadblock. There are a couple of guys in T-shirts—suspenders holding up their bright yellow fire-resistant bottoms—sitting in folding chairs with their big booted feet splayed out in front of them. The guy with the radio chirping on his belt tells me everyone on Middle Creek Road has been evacuated, and everyone on the Spar City Road to the east of me as well.
“I didn’t get a call,” I tell him, and when he squints at me I realize he’s a kid, maybe not even eighteen. “It’s okay,” he says, “the people at the Soward Ranch decided not to leave either.”
“No really,” I say, “I didn’t get a call.”
He looks down at his soot-blackened forearms and then turns his palms to me, which are startlingly white by comparison.
&n
bsp; “I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “But I reckon we can keep a pretty good eye on you from here.”
Back at the house, Greg and I speculate about why we haven’t been called. Does my pasture give us some magic amount of defensible space, or is it because the firefighters can see my house from this new checkpoint? Or is it simply an oversight? I imagine a fingernail running down the list of people to call and skipping over Houston, moving on to Huntzinger or Jackson or James. As long as the phone doesn’t ring, we decide, we are not going to try to find out.
The thing about evacuation is they can’t physically force anybody to leave their homes, but once you agree to leave, they can physically restrain you from coming back. The people in South Fork have been out of their houses for six days now, with the power turned off. I imagine fish tanks full of floaters, science projects in refrigerators. I imagine my own sheep, my chickens, surviving the fire and then dying four days later, of thirst.
For the first time in a week, we are not under a red flag warning, though the strong winds, InciWeb warns us, will continue (yesterday’s were measured at 62 mph on the top of Wolf Creek Pass). As of this morning there are 1,313 personnel, 68 engines, 1 dozer, and 11 helicopters on the fire, which last night’s infrared flight measured at 79,182 acres. The latest worry on the northern flank of the Papoose is that the fire will cross Squaw Creek and threaten the Rio Grande Dam.
Under the command of Phoenix National Incident Organization Commander Curtis Heaton and Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team Commander Pete Blume the East Zone of the West Fork Complex now includes the Papoose and the Eastern Part of the West Fork Fires. As of tonight, a night shift will be established for this fire (NFS InciWeb).
On the morning of the twenty-sixth, when I take a thermos of coffee and a blender full of peach banana smoothies to the firefighters at the bottom of my driveway, I learn that late yesterday afternoon, right about shift change, the Papoose Fire made a run down into Crooked Creek, and it required all firefighters from both shifts to protect the structures in that area. The night shift fought the fire hard all night, and when the wind finally stopped and the light finally dawned, there was still no structure loss on the West Fork Complex.
