Too Close to Home: Living with a Wildfire for Seven Weeks
Written by Sarah Marino
Note: This essay reflects my personal experience of living with a wildfire for most of the summer. Hundreds of people have lost their homes in this year's fires and I am not comparing our experience to those serious tragedies in any way.
In late June, on a hot and windy evening, we looked out our windows toward the mountains to the south and saw a thin tendril of dark smoke swirling into the sky. We relied on irrational hope that first evening, even though we could see the red glow of flames spreading up a mountainside by nightfall. Of course it will be quickly put out, like the fire started by the logging crew last summer. That fire started with a very similar tendril of smoke and was out the next day. And with all the other fires around us, surely there is some aerial support to help get this under control before it spreads.
Forty thousand acres full of favorite places later, our fire is still burning.
I can’t describe the first days, and weeks, as anything other than terrible. Red Flag Warnings turned into Potentially Dangerous Situations, with strong winds blowing the fire, relentlessly, to the north. Before the first federal Complex Incident Management Team fire crews arrived to start managing the now-complex incident, information about what was happening was so sparse. From our living room, we could see the fire moving, quickly, in the general direction of our town and neighborhood yet had no sense from any experts of what to expect or how to prepare. We stopped getting our county’s emergency texts right in the middle of the emergency and our local paper, while doing its absolute best with a very small staff, couldn’t share information that they didn’t have.
With so little information, such quick progression, and the relentless wind, we made a little pact with some of our neighbors that should things start looking for-real-worse, we would wake each other up in the middle of the night. It is impossible to have read about Paradise, California or Jasper, Alberta or about the Marshall Fire in Colorado or the fires around Los Angeles, and now the fires in Spokane, Washington, and not think that there was a tiny chance that our town could be next.
So where else does a person turn in those first moments and days of a crisis? Facebook. I logged into the app, which I hadn’t used in many years, and its addictive power immediately surged back. I succumbed to pull of constant refreshing and doomscrolling because maybe, among a fetid sea of posts, would be a bit of positive news about the fire’s progression. Amid mostly useless rampant speculation and intentional stirring-of-the-pot, some bits of helpful information surfaced but none of them were reassuring. Thankfully, we soon learned about Watch Duty, an app run by a nonprofit organization, with volunteers and a small staff consolidating reliable fire information in one place. Within a few days, with Watch Duty’s maps and hotspot overlays, we could see that the fire would soon crest over the mountain closest to our home and that it was burning toward some of the most special drainages in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains.
Standing in one spot on our deck, we could gaze upon two separate worlds. During the daytime over those early weeks, thick smoke obscured most of what was happening, with flames and charred land only occasionally visible from our vantage point when the wind shifted and revealed the fire’s leading edges. Even though we could see the fire raging to the east, the strong winds kept the smoke away. If we looked to the south, away from the fire, we could see a different world of clear blue skies and idyllic summer. It was helpful, during the hottest parts of the day as the smoky fire clouds grew in size, to find a bit of comfort by focusing on the summer to the south, not the summer to the east. The worst moments came as darkness set in each night and the smoke started to settle, revealing the extent of the burning red glow across a huge swath of the landscape (as of today, the fire’s scar is about thirteen miles long and nine miles wide, at its widest). Being able to see a burning mountain, night after night, from one’s bed is unsettling.
Our home was never at any real risk but seeing plumes of smoke expanding across the mountains and getting closer each day made it all feel dire at the time. The fire spread extremely rapidly during the early days, with the wind pushing it away from one town and into National Forest land and wilderness. After viewing a YouTube video from a retired expert on the spreading behavior of wildfires and listening to his predictions for “our fire,” we decided it was probably time to pack up our valuables in case we needed to evacuate.
What exactly is a valuable? I still have no idea, even though I packed a bunch of things. A quilt made by a family friend using my dad’s shirts, taken from his closet after he died. Our Synology filled with our photo files. Family photos I should have digitized a long time ago but didn’t. Shells from our trip to New Zealand. A few irreplaceable photo books from favorite photographers. A duffle full of clothes I especially like. Two hand-knitted hats, one from my mom and one from a friend. Expensive camping gear. A stack of bills and paperwork. Notebooks from my botany classes. This mishmash of stuff seemed reasonable at the time yet made little sense as we were unpacking everything a few weeks later. Logic and rationality can easily fade into the background as you contemplate the possibility, as remote as it might be, that your house might burn down.
At the time, the fire was burning parallel to where we live with the edge about four miles away. While our neighborhood seemed mostly safe due to the prevailing weather patterns and topography around here, a shift in the wind paired with this fire’s erratic behavior felt scary enough to maybe leave for a few days, especially after the nearby animal shelter started actively looking for foster homes in preparation for its own evacuation. I had a class a few hours to the north so packing the questionable mix of valuables into our camper and taking a bit of a breather from watching it all play out on the mountainsides and on the apps seemed like the prudent decision. And it was, in terms of our mental health.
The closest edge eventually came within about three miles of our house, a number that is both comforting and terrifying. Finally, after weeks of steady progression and growth of the fire, the hot and windy weather eased and a smattering of cooler days with rain, and flash flooding, arrived. Without the wind to blow everything to the northeast, a shifting veil of thick, grey smoke arrived as well, settling into our valley or wafting through at completely unpredictable intervals. This shift in weather has, thankfully, mostly halted the fire for now, with only a few obvious hot spots still visibly smoldering plus an occasional plume of smoke when the wind picks up and draws the fire into an area of unburned fuels.
With the shift in the weather, we have switched our frequent app refreshes from Watch Duty to air quality monitors. Although the towering pyrocumulus clouds and massive plumes of smoke have mostly stopped forming, many days are still too smoky to go outside or open our windows. We have been spending far too much time hoping for short periods where cool temperatures align with fresh air so we can get a bit of relief. We live in a place where air conditioning is uncommon because oppressively hot summers have been uncommon. With cool nighttime temperatures in the summer, it has been, historically, easy to get by with just opening the windows in the evening. Not this year. With our outside weather station regularly registering temperatures in the mid-nineties and our inside thermostats reaching into the high eighties (or even the low nineties) for days on end, and our neighborhood air monitor showing poor air quality at most times over the last few weeks, we moved from being worried that we could lose our home to being trapped inside a smoky sauna.
This week, days of steady rain and cooler weather arrived, offering the first extended respite from the fire, the smoke, and the heat, and a chance at emotional recovery.
This is what summer is now like in the American West and it is horrible. The toll on humans and our communities, wildlife and birds, livestock and farm animals, and the landscape is almost too painful to think about. I look at the burn scar for our fire and I see places I deeply love. Specific trees, which I have photographed across spring, summer, and fall, are likely no longer there. The special patch of corn lilies interspersed with sunflowers might regenerate, or might not. The delicate ferns growing at the base of the grove of old aspens, or the colorful tapestry of oaks, aspens, and pines expanding in perfect layers across one favorite hillside — both are in areas that look fully charred from our vantage point and will never be the same. Or the place we stood last fall with three good friends, joking around and telling stupid stories while waiting around for sunset — we know that spot has been decimated. In addition to the challenge of living in close proximity to this much smoke for almost two months and the emotional weight of the unpredictability of a wildfire, I also feel like I am grieving the death of a close friend, the landscape, as I think about the demise of these places that have become part of me.
Watching the fraying of our civic fabric in real time has also taken an emotional toll. Having Facebook and other social media platforms at the center of our information ecosystem during an emergency situation has some tiny positives and an overwhelming burden of negatives. Generally, the human aspects of this wildfire have mirrored our society, with glimmers of real generosity and kindness making it all feel less awful. And, the fact that people choose to be wildland firefighters astonishes me, with men and women with no ties to this community putting their lives and health at risk to end this situation under often extremely challenging work conditions. These positives and acts of selflessness have been punctuated by extreme acts of selfishness, with many of them fueled by the desire to get attention online: influencers behaving incredibly irresponsibly by sharing inflammatory and inaccurate information, people ignoring the fire closures because they want to create content (and in one case needing a rescue near an area where the fire was actively burning), drone pilots regularly causing shutdowns in aerial firefighting operations after deciding to fly when they know it is illegal, and deeply unhappy people looking for an opportunity to make everything into a culture war.
This is a landscape adapted to fire, but not fires like this. I have never felt so angry, hopeless, and powerless with regard to our political climate or climate change. The US Federal Government seems content to just let this happen in different places each summer. There are solutions and things we as a society can do to prevent and mitigate the effects of these massive fires, and yet our "leaders" continue to choose to do nearly nothing, or do things that make the situation worse. Across the last decade, entire towns and neighborhoods continue to burn down and we collectively shrug. Our congressman, as an avatar of the lack of leadership around this issue that affects half of this country, is happy to show up to pose for photos with the ruins left behind by the four massive wildfires that just burned across his district but doesn’t seem to have any ideas about what to do about any of this. This is not a partisan assessment since our two US senators from the opposite party have been equally feckless.
As of early August, more than $53 million has been spent on fighting this one fire and, across Western Colorado this year, four firefighters have died. What a massive waste… Now that the worst fires have shifted to Oregon and Washington, the resources have gone with them and our fire camps have mostly emptied out. News reports out of the Pacific Northwest often lead with lamentations about how firefighting resources are stretched impossibly thin. Our country has billions of dollars for aimless overseas adventures and domestic vanity projects but simultaneously doesn’t have enough resources to protect communities of Americans, engage in real mitigation work, and carefully steward special landscapes here at home. Unless smoke from Canada wafts across New York City or Washington, DC, no one east of the Mississippi River seems to care about the apocalyptic conditions playing out, now on an annual basis, in communities and landscapes across the American West.
One of my recent classes for my Colorado Native Plant Master program took place at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, which was affected by a wildfire last summer. Recalling my four visits there this May brings a little solace, at least in terms of how this landscape might recover. That fire was far more patchy than I would have expected based on the reports and fire maps at the time, and from afar, our fire seems pretty patchy, too. At Black Canyon, the oaks have already started to re-sprout in some areas. The spring wildflowers were prolific, with flushes of some typically uncommon species that benefit from fire filling the voids. As a friend who has had far too much experience with wildfire herself reminded me, there is space for both grief and curiosity. This fire happened and the only thing to do at this point is accept it, with an openness to seeking a greater understanding of what happens as this fire-adapted landscape starts to regenerate.
When we drove into town a few weeks ago, we saw a man under a sun canopy selling gaudy commemorative t-shirts for our fire. Although I now understand that the fire crews often want souvenir t-shirts from their assignments, my snap reaction was disgust. Making money off of this tragedy seems ethically dubious and who would want a commemorative souvenir of this awful situation anyway? I have felt the same way about photographing the fire and although I left my camera sitting out on the kitchen counter for its duration, I felt moved to photograph what was happening only a few times. On one evening, as an example, the fire clouds were particularly beautiful and that beauty let me temporarily separate the sadness of what was happening from its visual appeal. I guess this collection of photos is my commemorative t-shirt — a very incomplete representation of what has happened, a set of souvenirs showing how awful it has been, and a reminder that it could have been so much worse.
Pretending the smoke was fog.
A rainbow on one of the first days with clouds and rain since the start of the fire.
I love this little butte. It often catches interesting light and I have photographed scenes with it included hundreds of times. You can see here that the left side has burned whereas in earlier photos above, it still has vegetation.
