Deep Creek

by Pam Houston

  It’s all I can do not to hug her. It’s all I can do not to burst into tears.

  Duff: Layer of decaying forest litter consisting of organics such as needles, leaves, plant and tree materials covering the mineral soil. Duff can smolder for days after a fire. Extinguishing smoldering duff is key to successful mop-up operations (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).

  Pulaski: A combination chopping and trenching tool, which combines a single-bitted axe-blade with a narrow adze-like trenching blade fitted to a straight handle. Useful for grubbing or trenching in duff and matted roots (USDA Forest Service Fire Terminology).

  If this fire ever goes out, if this summer ever ends, I will never be afraid for the ranch in the same way again. I have seen a wall of fire two hundred feet high stopped dead in its tracks when it hit the big meadow at the base of Baldy. I have witnessed the expertise and tenacity of firefighters when they are determined to keep a fire from crossing a road, or a dozer track, or a river. I have seen a veritable army of men, women and machines descend upon our valley, and save every single structure within a 110,000-acre fire, except for one tiny pump house that probably hasn’t been used since the silver-mining days. I understand now the ranch does have defensible space, and a lot of it. For my lifetime at least, the ranch will have a natural fire line—that horseshoe of burnt forest will turn back into a horseshoe of protection, with my little aspen grove providing backup, if a fire ignites in the unburnt trees and somehow pops through.

  There will be many more fires in Colorado in my lifetime. And floods and droughts and every other outcome of climate change, every consequence of how carelessly we have treated—how carelessly we continue to treat—this planet that is our home. But I have a different relationship to fire now, which is at least equal parts fear and knowledge. Scary as it was, there wasn’t a single day of the West Fork Fire that wasn’t deeply interesting. And because I have studied the fire as if I were about to take a preliminary examination in it, I will never be afraid in the same way again.

  Safety Hazard Alert: The Eastern part of the West Fork fire received nearly three quarters of an inch of rain yesterday afternoon. Ash and mudflows will be a concern but plans are being developed for mitigation.

  On the Papoose Fire, a hand line has been constructed south of Red Mountain Ranch to prevent the potential for the fire to spread north back towards Highway 149.

  Containment is up to 25% (NFS InciWeb).

  By July 7, people start moving around the valley again in earnest, and I load up the dogs and drive to Dona Blair’s house. It no longer seems ironic to me that I will give Dona my final mortgage check with the fire still burning a half a mile from my kitchen, with Dick and Dona’s trees still marked with the orange blaze flagging of imminent doom. Now it’s impossible to imagine the story otherwise.

  “I might have been tempted,” I say, “if I were you, to go out in the dark and pull a few of those markers off your trees.”

  Dick is ninety-five and sharp as anyone you’ll ever meet. He’s been to war, a couple of times, and still owns and flies two airplanes—one he built himself from a kit. Now he gives me a look—not an unkind one—that says, “Darlin’, if you’d seen half the things I’ve seen, you wouldn’t worry too much about a goddamn tree.” He cared about those trees enough to compromise the shape of his home to save every last one of them, but had he lost them, he’d have found a way to adjust.

  “I try to nap every day,” he says. “I believe it will keep me alive a little longer.” He winks, which I know is my cue to leave. “Just a little,” he adds, as he shuffles off down the hallway.

  I write Dona a check for the final ranch payment. When I pull out of the driveway, the place I’ve lived for twenty years will be mine.

  “I have to tell you,” Dona says. “This has been one of the most satisfying business transactions of my entire life.”

  Tears spring to my eyes. “You didn’t think I was going to pull it off,” I say, grinning back the emotion.

  “You’re wrong about that,” Dona says, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not proud of you.”

  On July 8, sadly and confusingly, containment is reduced from 25 to 19 percent. InciWeb talks less about fire now and more about the increased risk of flash flooding and debris flow with the onset of monsoonal rains. We are urged to stay aware of our surroundings during “rain events” and not to drive or walk through areas that are flooded. We are also warned there are spruce and aspen snags all across the fire, trees with weakened or burned stumps that can fall at any time. InciWeb offers a rare scenic moment, reporting that at this morning’s daily briefing Safety Officer Paul Gauchy cautioned his remaining firefighters that “those snags are weaker today than they were yesterday, and a lot weaker than they were last week.”

  Correction—Earlier update listed Crooked Creek Subdivision as still under mandatory evacuation. It is not. It is the Wilderness Ranch Subdivision which remains evacuated (NFS InciWeb).

  I pause over the words “Wilderness Ranch Subdivision.” What in the fuck, I wonder, what in the fuck is wrong with us anyway.

  On July 9, the active part of the Papoose Fire moves back up into terrain so steep and inaccessible, so full of burnt beetle-killed timber, they pull the line crews back from direct attack and begin using only water drops from helicopters. To everyone’s dismay, our old friend Mr. Red Flag Warning is back, due to suddenly dry air, dry fuels and maximum relative humidity from 1 to 8 percent. Nobody pays that much attention. We are all pretty much over it. Now we just want the smoke to go away.

  Somehow, the size of the fire has shrunk to 109,100 acres (more accurate infrared flights, I imagine) and the personnel is down to 708.

  Cold Trailing: A method of controlling a partly dead fire edge by carefully inspecting and feeling with the hand for heat to detect any fire, and lining any live edge (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).

  I have never been able to resist the names of things. In fact, one of the reasons I got myself so involved with horses, and backpacking, and river running is that each pursuit came with a whole new vocabulary, a new set of words to roll over my tongue. In the last six weeks I’ve learned much about the ranch, and myself, and the properties of fire. I have also learned the language of firefighting, and in learning that language, I’ve learned yet another way to love the land.

  On July 11, InciWeb reports that at 8:00 p.m. Beth Lund and the Great Basin Incident Management Team will assume command of the entire West Fork Complex as the Central Coast Team completes their assigned time over on the western side. On the Papoose Fire, scattered interior heat is being monitored, but, Beth assures us, the lines look good overall. On the East Zone of the West Fork, only minimal areas of heat remain. After three consecutive days of red flag warnings, relative humidity is back on the rise.

  All evacuations have been lifted. Firefighters will continue to monitor, patrol, and start to haul back excess equipment and trash from the fire line. If any member of the public comes across some of this fire equipment that may have been missed or overlooked, please call 719 569-**** and notify us of the item and its location so it can be recovered. The equipment will be returned for rehabilitation and ready for use on the next incident.

  Containment is at 25% (NFS InciWeb).

  On July 12, we see another smoke plume back up valley above the 4UR Ranch. We have become expert spotters. That evening on InciWeb, Beth Lund assures us the spot fire was located and contained by crews within a few hours. Significant rain is in the forecast every day for the next seven. The air is the clearest it’s been in weeks and we take the dogs for a hike up into Shallow Creek, on the unburnt side of Highway 149.

  Even in a year as dry as this one, Shallow Creek, with its reliable, rushing water, its giant beaver ponds and its steep canyon walls that provide shade most of the day, is an oasis. The dogs run and splash all the way up the creek, and in the meadow, just before the trail really starts climbing, the columbine are blooming like always.

  On the ev
ening of July 13, the InciWeb status summary reports 66 percent containment on the West Fork Complex. It confirms no threat from the fire remains to any structures. It adds that threats do remain from falling trees and from the possibility of sliding mud and ash. On July 14 we receive the last daily InciWeb report on the fire. The total burn area is 109,615 acres, and at least in the official literature, 66 percent containment is all we are ever going to get.

  Today will be the final day the fire information team will be posting updates at area businesses. At 6:00 pm today the Great Basin Incident Management Team 1 will hand off responsibility to manage the Papoose and West Fork Fires to Phil Daniel’s Colorado Type 3 Incident Management Team. Beth Lund’s Great Basin Incident Management Team 1 would like to thank all the communities for their kind support of our firefighters and the local businesses and agencies for assisting us in sharing the changing status of this incident with the visitors and residents of this beautiful area.

  An interagency Burn Area Emergency Response (BAER) team will be arriving tomorrow to begin their initial assessments. The goal of a BAER team is to assess the after effects of a fire(s) and develop strategy for emergency stabilization and rehabilitation. Everything from erosion protection to what needs to be done to make trails, roads and campgrounds safe for people to reenter damaged sections of the forest (NFS InciWeb).

  The horses and donkeys stay in Gunnison until late July, when the monsoon rains have been at it long enough to turn the pasture from its desiccated brown to something that resembles hope. The monsoon brings several inches of rain, enough to put the fire out everywhere but perhaps the deepest pockets of beetle-killed forest. Greg returns to California, and I start turning the sheep out again to nibble the little green shoots that are coming up along the creek corridor. I put Sheryl Crow née Manson into a box and give her to a gentleman who wants to eat her for dinner.

  In August, my friend Kae comes up from Denver and we decide to walk into the burn area for the first time. We drive up Middle Creek Road to the trailhead above the Soward Ranch, the access point for Copper Ridge. For the first several hundred yards we are in an aspen and spruce mixture and the forest looks normal, but then Kae points to a burn scar, maybe ten feet in diameter.

  “Spot fire,” I say, and once we have seen one, we see a whole lot more.

  We can smell the burn line before we can see it, though I don’t know if what we are smelling is burnt trunks or scorched ground or the chemical residue of the retardant they dropped from the bambi buckets. All of the trunks of the aspens near the edge of the burn seem to have been splashed with an orange liquid. This is not the smell of the aftermath of a campfire—there’s something much more toxic in it than that.

  Fugitive Color: A coloring agent used in fire retardants that is designed to fade rapidly following retardant application in order to minimize visual impacts (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).

  Then we are walking through partially burnt aspens, some with a few leaves quaking above a half-scorched trunk. I can see here, just as Beth Lund described, how the aspens turned the fire back into the spruce. In the spruce forest every single tree is wasted. Most of the dead trees are still standing, though some have been reduced to charred stumps and others have been burned from the inside out or melted into shapes like hoodoos, like sculpture, like African masks. The ground is covered with ash and char; in many places the dirt has melted and cauterized.

  Alligatoring: Char patterns formed on the paint or burned wood remains, usually in the shape of blisters (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).

  Angle of Char Indicators: Standing fuels that are burned at an angle that indicates the direction of the fire spread (Glossary of Wildland Fire Terminology).

  Kae and I haven’t spoken since we entered the burn and finally she says, “I keep thinking of the word ‘church.’ ” There’s no doubt about it, there is something holy in the burn. Something purified. Something cleansed.

  It’s severe in here, but not lifeless. Woodpeckers and flickers flit from tree to tree and clear water trickles down through charred stumps and standing pillars of charcoal. It’s only been a few weeks and the fireweed is up already, short plants with tiny leaves and lots of purple blossoms. A few baby aspen shoots have started. We climb through the forest, awed, our boots turning black, our legs turning black, eventually our arms and faces. We put our hands on the cauterized tree stumps, spend too little time worrying about snags that might fall on us. There is something here that induces breathlessness, that threatens to stop the heart, but it is not despair.

  We come to the top of a little rise and see something in all that blackness that makes us both gasp: a tiny wetland, not much bigger than a backyard pond, filled from end to end with shoots of new grass of the most exquisite green imaginable. Above the charred ground and in front of the blackened trees it looks fluorescent, even neon. We stand silently, looking at it a very long time.

  “I was reading just this morning about the Great Fire of London in 1666,” I finally say. “Eighty percent of the city burned to the ground, thousands of homes and churches, but only six people were injured. It took Londoners several months to realize the fire also ended the bubonic plague epidemic that had killed sixty-five thousand people because the fire killed all the rats and fleas that spread it.” I don’t extend the metaphor to its logical conclusion where, if climate change is our bubonic plague, that makes us the fleas and rats. But it’s not lost on either of us that we are looking at some version of what might happen, what might be already happening, when the earth finally gets sad and mad enough to shake its most determined parasite off her back: a charred mountain, a million dead trees and one pool of clean water, new grass shooting through. Even this may be wishful thinking.

  I try to imagine myself gone from this scene, gone from the earth—a tricky mind exercise in any circumstance. A boy I dated years ago often said, unequivocally, that he would give his life to save his mother’s, even if she’d been alive, by then, an extremely long time. Would I give up my life to save the earth? Easy to say yes when the earth does not have a gun to my head, but I believe, if truly given the choice, I’d agree.

  We finally turn from the wetland and head back down the trail knowing that for today, anyway, this small corner of the earth has been rejuvenated. The clutter is gone. The mountain is clean.

  Ranch Almanac: Carving Rivers

  Today I’ll spend three hours carving rivers through ice with a pointed shovel and a maul, and by the day’s end I’ll have the blisters to prove it. It’s to do with Deseo, who finds all manner of things scary and off-putting. Purple buckets, flapping jackets, the wind whispering through the pines.

  The trough where the horses drink in winter is at the end of the pasture where all the water from the snowmelt drains toward Lime Creek. The trough is there because that’s where the frost-free hydrant is, and the frost-free hydrant is there because it’s the closest point to the house from which the water originates. The longer the line from the house to the frost-free hydrant, the higher the chance of the system freezing, and then we go back to hauling water again.

  Unfortunately, when we get into the freeze-and-melt portion of the winter, which can last from early March to mid-May, a pond develops around the trough, which turns into a skating rink every time the temperature dips below 30, which is to say, every single night. And to Deseo, a skating rink surrounding a horse trough might be the scariest thing of all.

  When Deseo doesn’t drink, his metabolic condition gets worse. When he refuses to cross the ice, I carry a bucket of water out to him. Sadly, then, the bucket becomes the object of his fear. I can leave it on the ground and walk away to prove it is neither strange nor alive; I can float little bits of carrot on the surface of the water to make it more enticing; I can even get on my hands and knees and pretend to slurp some of the water up into my mouth myself, but he simply won’t have it. He feels there is only one designated safe place to drink in this pasture and that is the water trough, the water
trough now booby-trapped by a nonnegotiable platform of ice.

  So I wait until the temperature crawls above freezing—about noon—and head to the pasture with my tools. The sun has felt truly warm all week, but this ice that formed on the bottom of what used to be deep snow has had a good four months of subzero to harden. I jump up and down as hard as I can and kick at it with my steel-toed boots and about detach my arms from my shoulder blades wielding the maul over my head to shatter the surface (this part is fun, how it must feel to break a car’s windshield). Once pits and cracks begin to form, I dig little tributaries into the ice with the tip of my shovel.

  In about thirty minutes, it has warmed up a few more degrees, and I get a satisfying little trickle to flow downhill, out of the skating rink, around the trough and into the yard. I hack some more, the thermometer ticks up another degree, and the water does what water does best—gives in to gravity. I follow it, assisting with a few hacks of my shovel all across the front of my property. Before too long, I have the world’s smallest river flowing from the bottom of my pasture, all the way across the yard, and into Lime Creek. I watch the creek water tumble toward the Rio Grande, imagine it running past the town of Creede, and then through Wagon Wheel Gap, down the canyon and across the San Luis Valley, through the Box near Taos, eventually forming the border between Texas and Mexico and flowing into the Gulf. I am filled with a completely disproportionate sense of satisfaction. For a second, I understand why those guys were crazy enough to think they could build the Panama Canal.