The Wildfire Season

‘You’re looking at me. What do you see?’

‘A lot of things.’

‘Name one.’

‘I see someone who’s wondering if she can trust this guy she’s never met before, but thinks that she’d like to.’

‘Well,’ Alex laughs, pulling away before she could spoil everything by lunging forward to bite his lips. ‘I guess I’d better have some of those. You can’t be the only mind reader around here.’

Inside, the party gets suddenly louder, as though from a single twist of a volume knob. Alex can hear Jen squealing, pretending to be ticklish. A shattered glass receives a round of applause. The bass line from ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ trembles through the kitchen window, entering the steel bones of the fire escape along with Miles and Alex themselves.

But nobody comes outside to interrupt them. Huddled close, their voices low and secretive, as though the simple facts they share are instead shocking revelations they had every intention of taking with them to the grave. They talk about the towns they were from, their majors, the four years that separated their ages (Miles was older), all without telling each other their names. Yet when they finally get around to introducing themselves, with a mannered, lingering handshake, they feel they already knew that they were Miles and Alex, and that speaking these words aloud merely satisfied a formality demanded of them.

‘Have you climbed the mountain yet?’ he asks her, and at first she thinks he is speaking figuratively, of some spiritual challenge he has already overcome that she hasn’t even heard of. But in the next second she realizes he only means Mont Royal, the slope that rears up over campus and all of downtown, a patch of Canadian Shield in the middle of the city with an illuminated cross on top.

‘I’ve worried that I’d get lost.’

‘I brought my compass,’ Miles says, tapping the side of his head.

Alex pulls off Jen’s heels and clanks down the fire escape stairs after him, barefoot. Up St Dominique, turning to catch their reflections in the windows of the Vietnamese and churrasceira restaurants on Duluth, north again past the musky, shivering nightclub lineups on St Laurent. Alex wonders if it’s the mushrooms that make her feel like she is levitating a half inch off the sidewalks.

They enter the park at L’Esplanade, emerging from the enclosure of streets into the expansive night. Alex can see the graphite outline of the mountain now, the white bulbs of the cross. When they move into the forest at the mountain’s base they don’t bother searching for a trail. ‘This way’s up and that’s where we’re going,’ Miles tells her, dodging his way around maple saplings and warning her not to stub her toes on the larger rocks poking through the soil like half-buried skulls. Even though she can still hear the mechanical murmur of the city behind her, Alex imagines she is being pursued. Some wild thing—an animal or fire—hunts her on the slope.

At the crest, she scratches through a patch of burrs to find Miles lying on his back, panting. Alex looks behind her, expecting to see the grid of lights and the Olympic Stadium oval as she has in postcards, but the trees block her view of all but strange flickers between the trunks, dancing like embers.

‘It’s bigger than you’d guess, isn’t it?’ Miles asks her, and she follows where he’s pointing at the cross directly above them.

‘And brighter.’

‘Bigger, brighter, better. That’s the shrooms.’

No, that’s you, Alex nearly says.

Now that they are lying close they discover a comfortable silence between them. Miles finds Alex’s hand and links his fingers through hers, a grade-school gesture of affection that disarms her nevertheless. They stay there, splayed out in the one piece of wilderness on an island of three million, until the first cold of autumn brings them to their feet.

‘You guided me up here,’ she says. ‘Now you follow me.’

Alex’s apartment is a small 31/2 over a bagel bakery. From the front window, the two of them look down on the street, where a line of assorted last-call drunks wait to get something to eat before the long stumble home. Even the curtains smell of coalfire and boiled dough from downstairs.

‘It makes me constantly hungry,’ she says, pouring both of them glasses of ice water. ‘But I love it. So do the mice.’

‘Have you set traps?’

‘Jen wants to, but I’ve been stalling. I know it’s ridiculous, but my thinking is, they’ve got to live somewhere, right?’

‘That’s not ridiculous.’

‘Do you have mice?’

‘No. But I don’t have walls, either.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘In my van.’

‘Don’t you have friends you could stay with?’

‘Some. But I’ve found a very picturesque parking lot. It’s like they say: location, location, location.’

In the morning, Alex awakens with Miles’s arm wrapped around her, pulling her into his body. She remembers the delicate but insistent way that he took her clothes off under the covers, only to lie close, their whispers getting tangled in her hair. Sometime in the night they must have drifted into sleep, but she feels that even in their dreams they continued their talk, adding new confessions to the ones already offered, trumping each other’s Most Embarrassing Moment and Worst First Date stories until her laughter shook her awake.

She turns over as quietly as she can, hoping to study Miles’s face, but his eyes are already open. Alex lands her fingers on his shoulder and presses down, feels the muscle there yield to her. Her hand strokes lower and touches something stuck to him. A round button of fluff.

‘What is that?’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That.’

Miles tries to look over his shoulder but only Alex can see what’s there. A furry grey circle the size of a dollar coin pressed into the skin. Alex pulls on the string attached to it and peels it off Miles’s back.

‘A mouse,’ she says, dangling it between them.

‘A flat mouse.’

‘The poor thing. Snuggled up under the sheets one minute, and the next, the giant decides to roll over and phwat!’

‘So much happens when you’re asleep,’ Miles says, genuinely amazed.

Alex places the mouse on the bedside table. It’s only then that she kisses his mouth.

When she bites, he doesn’t pull away.

Jen moved out the next week. It wasn’t supposed to be Alex, the naive Canadian, but Jen who found the cute older guy to skip class with for three days straight and spend all of them in the bedroom, living on sex, magnums of red wine and Thai takeout. The injustice was so intolerable she unhooked the shoe racks hanging on her walls and took a room in the all-girls dorm where she didn’t have to deal with ‘shared bubble baths and bare asses running down the hallway all the time.’

Alex and Miles didn’t mind the mice, and though the apartment was small, it was, as Miles liked to point out, a good deal bigger than the back of a van. At first, they told each other it was an arrangement of convenience. For the first months, happy as they were, both of them found it easier to speak of their lease on the place over the bagel shop as the thing that brought them together, instead of something more truthful but overwhelming, like love or fate.

Still, they couldn’t help themselves from making plans. Alex was taking education and, after some obligatory internships at special schools, discovered she had a talent for working with children with learning disabilities. Miles had to admit that Intro to Anatomy was the first course he’d ever taken where he saw the point behind it all, the practical link between science and people. He pored over textbooks with their painted pages of interconnected organs, arteries and bones, and could recognize not only the beauty in it but the ways he might fix them if the system failed or came under attack. Alex envisioned him as a surgeon. She told Miles he had all the natural skills for the job, which, in her mind, consisted mainly of a kind face and strong hands. Although Miles had never seriously thought of being a doctor before, within weeks she had persuaded him to apply to medical school the year after next. The University of Toronto was near the top of the field for both of them. The bagels weren’t as good, but they figured they could handle just about any deprivation so long as they were together.

That summer, they sublet the apartment and Miles drove out west for the same job he had worked the past four years, taking a position on a forest firefighting crew in the British Columbia Interior. Alex joined him for the ride as far as Vancouver and found work at an East End daycare. They saw each other as much as they could, Miles coming down to the city on his breaks and Alex taking the eight-hour bus ride to Salmon Arm on Saturdays to spend the night with him before taking the bus back on Sunday morning.

On the return cross-country drive, in a Robin’s Donuts parking lot on the outskirts of Moose Jaw, Miles gave Alex a ring he’d won from his foreman in a poker game.

‘It’s collateral,’ he said.

‘You want a loan?’

‘I want your time.’

‘I don’t get it.’

Miles placed his hands against the sides of Alex’s head. She could feel them shaking.

‘Next summer is going to be my last one working the fires. And when I come back, I want to give you something with a real rock in it.’

‘Are you looking for an answer now?’

‘That’s up to you.’

Alex slipped the foreman’s ring on her finger, a silver band with the name ROY on it in raised fool’s gold. She turned it against her knuckle until the metal warmed her skin.

‘It’s not really my style. And it’s way too big,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep it anyway.’

They spoke frankly, always and right from the start, and best when of grave things, confessions, the conveying of bad news. For Miles, this involved the story of his missing father. A chemical engineer at the Nanaimo pulp mill who married Miles’s mother, bought a modest house near the harbour, and on the day before his son’s fifth birthday, left without leaving behind a note, an address, anything to suggest he was ever coming back.

Honesty was never an issue between them. They were truthful out of the need to be together, and plain talk came as naturally to them as desire itself. Before they knew it—and for the first time in their lives—they were speaking as man and wife.

Miles was accepted to the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine and Alex took a position at the Arrowsmith School for learning disabled children in the same city. Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before the beginning of their new lives together, of true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season.

His name is Tim, but everyone calls him the kid. Every attack team Miles has ever worked on has had a ‘kid’, a nickname automatically assigned to the youngest member of the crew. But this one deserves it. He has the sort of face that is an indisputable foreshadowing of how he would look twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, and how even then, he would still be the kid. Round and shinychinned, his skin so flushed as to be an almost laughable display of good health. At first, Miles told himself to call the boy by his proper name, so that at least one of the crew saw that he was doing a man’s job and deserved to be recognized for it. But by the end of the second week even Miles couldn’t fight the obvious and called him nothing but ‘kid’ from then on.

The fire camp Miles has been assigned to is about twelve miles out of Salmon Arm, at the petered-out end of a logging road. When Miles arrives, he is taken into the camp office, where the fire director as well as a rep from the pulp company sit on the other side of the room’s single desk. Miles wonders what he could have already done that would justify being fired.

Instead, they make him foreman. The pay isn’t much better than a crewman’s, but the desk will be his, and use of the camp’s only phone, which will allow him to call Alex in the evenings and catch her before she goes to bed, three hours ahead of him in the east. And he knows there likely isn’t anyone in camp more knowledgeable than himself. Alex calls him a pyro-nerd. When he reads for pleasure, it’s always scientific studies of how fire starts, how it lives, how it dies. Government ‘burn pattern’ reports. Historical accounts of smokechasing disasters—Mann Gulch, South Canyon, Peshtigo.

‘You have two things to take care of out here, Mr McEwan,’ the pulp company guy says at the end of the interview, the only time he speaks at all. ‘The trees and the men. Just know that the company owns the trees.’

‘What about the men?’

‘They’re all yours.’

Miles never thought of the crew as his, but he felt his responsibility as its leader at every moment, not so much a weight but something added to his blood to thicken it. It made it easier that Miles liked them, especially the kid. Another pyro-nerd in the making. Asking questions about the origins of pulaskis, the combination rake-hoes designed for cutting fireline in different ground conditions. Volunteering for the nastiest tasks—staying the night to keep an eye on spot fires extinguished the day before, axing a snag into pieces to see if the smoke had hidden inside it, manning the radio when everyone else opted to make a dent in the beer stocks. He did all of this not to seek approval but because he wanted to see how it was done. The rest of the crew liked him for this, too. Not only because the kid relieved them from unpleasant work but because he so plainly loved doing it. It was hard even to make fun of someone like that.

Miles also admired the way the kid could spend time with him without disturbing his thoughts. As a result, he spoke more freely with him than with anyone else on the attack team. Although Miles never brought up the topic of their friendship, he knew that this is what they had found together. Alex asked after him in every phone conversation they had. She always called him Tim.

‘There’s a pattern to every crewman’s career,’ Miles remembers telling the kid on one of their long drives between watchtowers. ‘The first year you learn, the second year you complain, and the third year you actually enjoy yourself. There’s almost never a fourth year.’

‘How long have you been doing it?’

‘Five years,’ Miles says, laughing. ‘But I’m still learning. With fires, there’s always something you think you know but don’t.’

What Miles neglected to add is that without fires to work on, there’s not much to learn anything from. This year, June and most of July turn out to be curiously uneventful months, despite the above-average heat and string of eighteen days without rain. Aside from a handful of smouldering snags lit up by lightning, and a burning garbage can at a roadside picnic area fifteen miles to the south, the camp is fire free.

The crew spend the time inventing increasingly complex practical jokes, eating too much, pretending to be soldiers. Miles has experienced stretches like this before, though not nearly as long, and is coming to the end of make-work tasks. The two pockmarked pickups had been waxed into glittering auto show pretties. The cache’s store of tools were sharp as butcher’s cleavers, the other supplies hung upon hooks or lined in straight aisles according to an ‘attack priority sequence’, just like the manual dreamed it might be. The bunkhouse was painted top to bottom four times, followed by a poll on each colour’s aesthetic merits. By the middle of July, it was neon pink. A unanimous vote (Miles abstaining) determined it would stay this way for the rest of the season.

It isn’t until the first week of August that they receive notice from a spotter plane of a smoker at the bottom end of a gulch funnelling down into the Mazko River, two hundred miles north. Miles had known that something was there for the past twenty-four hours, as the spotter had to pass the site twice to determine whether it was an actual fire or merely a ‘ghost,’ the mist that can rise in locations near water. The delay in identifying the fire hasn’t allowed it much growth, though—the plane’s last report was of a tight congestion of small spot fires, each one no bigger than the smouldering sticks left behind at morning campsites.

There is a tradition among attack teams of naming a fire they have fought on, large or small. Most of the time it arrives at the end, after mopup is completed and some detail of the location or episode that occurred over the course of the job lends itself. But when they disembark from the helicopters in the lee of the smoke-fogged valley, the kid tosses a name out right away. The crew stand at the crest looking at the Mazko a half mile below and the four or five dozing spot fires where the gulch’s walls meet. The slope down is steep, but they should be able to get to the fires and back up again without climbing gear or ropes. What will slow them are the loose pieces of shale scattered over the hillside, black diamonds of sharp armour like the scales of a serpent buried just below the surface. Although there is usually some debate surrounding an initial suggestion’s merits, the kid’s first try sticks without question. The Dragon’s Back.

Miles is reluctant to touch the dragon’s skin at all. It is one of the first principles of firefighting to avoid cutting line partway down a hill with the fire below. Better to come at it from the lower point and push it higher, the entry in this case being the banks of the river. But when Miles radioes the fire manager, he is told to continue down the slope and fight from above.

‘Get a jump on it and it’s simple as pissing in an ashtray,’ the manager says.

It’s not in Miles’s nature to argue, and his men are so bored with the disappointments of a fireless season that some are already sidestepping into the gulch, shouting jokes about taking long enough to make it down that they might be in line for some overtime. Miles, on the other hand, tells himself it will have to be quick. The longer they stay down there, the more chances there are to be surprised.

When their eyes begin to sting from the smoke, their cheeks freckled with ash, Miles looks back at the crest and judges it to be about four hundred yards up. Next, he does a size-up of what they have to face: a few spot fires, all more than twenty feet apart, licking at green stalks of cheat grass and fescue. Off to the side, a small patch of oak scrub stands untouched. They’ll take the smokers one by one and get them early enough that they won’t have to cut any fireline. Miles doesn’t want to give it that much room to play.

‘Split up in threes,’ Miles tells them. ‘Pick one and hot-spot it. When it’s done, hustle on to the next. By noon, the sun is going to roast us like turkeys down here.’

The day is already showing temperatures that are well above average, and the valley walls only contain the heat, the shale a million dark mirrors magnifying the sun on their backs. Still, for the first half-hour, the men go at their labours with something near joy, the simple pleasure of cutting the earth with the blades of their pulaskis singing up the muscles in their arms. They complain about the work when they aren’t working, but now that they are, they bury the smoke in purposeful contentment.

The kid is the first to hear it.

Less a sound than its absence. Nothing like the silence that can sometimes visit a crew in the way a break in the conversations around a dinner table can leave a room in an accidental quiet. What the kid hears is not an interruption but an end. It makes him think of the project he submitted to his highschool science fair. A perfect vacuum. The demonstration involved sucking away all the air in an empty fish tank, an invisible violence taking place within. Now it’s like he’s inside the tank, looking out.

‘The fuck was that?’ he asks nobody in particular, but Miles hears the question. And now that his attention has been called to it, he can hear what the kid hears too. Unlike the kid, he knows exactly what it is.

‘Let’s move out!’ Miles shouts, circling his arm over his head, directing the men up the hill.

For a time, they only look at him. They’ve just arrived, the spot fires not halfway to being buried. It seems the new foreman is something of a joker. One of the crew acknowledges Miles’s gestures with a honking laugh, and the rest of the men except the kid join him in it.

‘I’m not kidding. Take your shit and haul it on up.’

‘Quittin’ time already, boss?’ the first of the laughers shouts back.

‘We’re not quitting. We’re pulling back. Right fucking now.’

All of them look up at the sound of thunder. Shade their eyes with their hands, searching, but the sky remains a cloudless dome. The thunder rolls on. More a tremor in the atmosphere than something they hear, like standing over a pot of water coming to a boil.

A fire whirl. That’s what the kid heard, what they can all hear now. A conflagration creating its own wind. But what terrifies Miles isn’t the vacuum of a fire whirl but the fury that he knows must follow it.

He glances back to see the fire roiling up at them from the bottom of the gulch. At this distance, it looks to him to be a swarm of yellowjackets spewing forth from a rupture in the earth.

It’s happened sooner than he had guessed. A blowup. The most feared event in fighting fires in the bush, but rare enough that most crewman’s careers go by without seeing one. What begins as a series of spot fires sends hot, lighter air up, and the cooler, heavy air sweeps in to take its place, creating a kind of burning tornado. The spot fires that had stood apart a moment before join together. Invisible gases rise into the air hotter than the white heart of a flame. The ground itself is ignited.

‘Drop your tools!’ Miles orders them, only now noticing that the men, including himself, have been slowed by the heavy pulaskis pulling at their shoulders. ‘Let go of whatever you’ve got! Now! Now!’

Most do. But despite his repeated command, a couple of the men refuse to release the grip on their shovels. Whether from an embedded sense of attachment or from shock that has seized their minds on nothing but the crest above them, Miles couldn’t know. The rest of the crew, now sixteen pounds lighter and with the benefit of pumping both of their arms forward, are able to move at a quicker pace than before.

From Miles’s broader perspective as last man back, he calculates that it still won’t be enough. The men farthest ahead have already grown sluggish against the steepening hill face. At best, they’re managing a couple hundred feet per minute. A fast fire will make triple that in forest conditions, and as much as eight hundred feet a minute in long, graded grass like this. Even faster if it’s a blowup.

They’re caught. A textbook firetrap, and he led them into it, allowed himself to be bullied by some shithead over a radio. Miles can do nothing now but will the men on, ordering one leg in front of the other in his head. Go, go, go, go. So long as he pushes them with these unspoken words he tries to believe they cannot fall.

There is no strategy to what they do now, nor could there be. Miles would be unable to find a single tactic in the wildland firefighter’s training manual to help even if he had it in front of him. It is a foot race and nothing more. There is the fire, the crest, the closing yards between them. There is the searing muscles in the men’s thighs, already cramping, reducing their strides to useless penguin hops. There is a window of time about to be shut. A situation that calls only for what Miles’s first foreman used to call FEAR. Fuck Everything And Run.

From his position at the end of the snaking line, Miles watches and, in half-second evaluations, takes note of his various crew members’ progress. Men he would have guessed to be the most nimble end up tripping over their own ankles, one falling chin first against the rock-strewn hillside and sliding helplessly backward. Another runs with his arms straight above his head, as though at gunpoint. None of them call out to each other. None of them scream. But the humanless quiet that results terrifies Miles more than anything else. They are frantic and inarticulate as vermin. In less than a minute the fire has taken their identities from them, their language, their dignity. It kills them before it touches them.