Three Forks after the Wallow Fire, August 2011
Two months after the Great Wallow Fire had finished its dreadful work the man pulled his old truck off the deserted gravel road and camped on the shore of a tiny island of unburned trees in the middle of a wide, flat valley. To the north and to the south tall ridges presented the stubble of limbless charred trees, the slopes below a stark black burn. The half-cremated remains of an old corral stood silently nearby, grizzled posts charred and leaning, bits of coiled wire and long lines of bent nails lying useless in the dirt where they’d fallen.
Before leaving the last outpost of civilization he’d stopped to ask for updates at a tiny besieged burg filled with realties and vacant storefronts, the whole lot surrounded by bastions of sodden sandbags and hay bales. At the small government office a girl in a green uniform, possessed of a frightful and manic cheeriness, had given him a computer printout map with roads and safe-zones outlined in yellow and red and brown. She’d delivered a polished, well-rehearsed pitch about how there were still green places to see, things looked worse than they really were, and on and on and etcetera and etcetera.
He’d nodded and smiled, watching her eyes, thinking all the while about the seared and blistered slopes of grand old Escudilla Mountain only a short distance away. When she’d finally run out of words the haunted look he’d seen flicker behind her smile betrayed the lie. He’d left that accursed place as quickly as he could, hurriedly topping off the truck’s gas tank before gunning the little engine into overdrive up the pass and into the bruised and busted mountains.
Closed Road, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011
A light drizzle of rain began to fall as he pitched the tent, more mist than actual rain. The meal, cooked over a tiny jet of blue flame, tasted of ash and bestowed no cheer beyond mere sustenance. He was bone tired after having driven a thousand unpaved miles through the wasted land, occasionally waving with two fingers to grim-faced men in white and green pickups. Somehow, through an accident of timing and political pressure he’d become one of the first citizens to venture back into the newly reopened environmental catastrophe; the men in the pickups seemed both surprised and maybe a little resentful to see him there. He guessed that they’d grown accustomed to having the disaster zone to themselves, their own private little patch of Armageddon in which to play.
Every stream crossing and drainage had its own personally assigned road grader, eagerly anticipating the onslaught of mud, broken logs, and soupy ash that was inevitable at the next hard rain. After thinking through the implications of all that trembling machinery he’d found himself constantly checking the map and GPS on the passenger seat beside him, determined not to drive any road with less than two confirmed exits. To enter a blind alley in that place would surely invite disaster when the storms came.
Great decks of blackened trees lay discarded and rotting along the roadsides, every tree within striking distance of the road brutally felled away from the paths by crews of men with chainsaws and great, ugly machines that had crosshatched the embankments with their caterpillar tracks. It was an ugly and permanent sign of desperation, a “get the roads open at any cost” measure. That those managing this land had resorted to such a thing spoke volumes of the shadowy forces at work, of economic and political pressures jostling and shoving at one another. After seeing it firsthand he didn’t think any of this land should be opened to the public, the conditions still too dangerous, the landscape still too angry, too vengeful.
Approaching Storm, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011
With the light failing and the clouds dropping ominously the man finished his meal, fetched a water bottle from his backpack, and climbed one of the nearby ridges. A thin line of surviving trees lined the bottom of the slope, their canopies a quilt of damaged green and deepening brown. Thick carpets of cinnamon needles blanketed the ground below their scorched trunks.
He climbed higher, the slope becoming a smooth grade of compacted gray and bits of muddy charcoal, exposed rocks poking at the thin skin of the mountain. When he reached the top, sweating hard in the humid air, he found himself in a roofless cathedral of anti-forest, the canopy burned away and replaced with black, hard edged silhouettes, the exposed rafters of the forest.
He crouched next to a spider’s web of white aspen roots lying naked upon the surface of the ground. The fat roots were singed in places and split open lengthwise, burst open like over-boiled hotdogs by the heat of the inferno that had consumed the mountain. Buried deep the tree’s roots should have survived the flames unscathed and by now there should be a burst of green atop the ridge, thousands of suckers extending in great twisting, chaotic, and wonderful circuit tracings along the slope. He saw none of that. Only a few forlorn sprouts here and there poked above what was left of the hydrophobic, sterile soil.
The man had hiked the same ridge the previous year during some poorly planned camping trip to photograph Fall aspen colors. It had been a crisp, late October afternoon with perfect yellowing sunlight angling in from the west. Old and twisted aspen stood atop the ridge then, heavily encroached upon by waves of spruce and fir and pine. The weight of the millennia had hung heavy and claustrophobic, the relict aspen trees’ presence denoting the true age of the forest, just how long it had been since any great disturbance had come calling there. He had paused for long minutes, soaking up the ambiance of the forest around him, listening to birds calling from the shining canopy above. He thought there might have been nuthatches, but he couldn’t remember for sure.
Cooked Aspen Roots, Wallow Fire burn area, August 2011
None of the pictures he’d taken of the trees on the ridge had come out. Every last one had been underexposed and dark, the golden aspen reduced to silhouettes and flat lifeless cutouts. Later, clicking through the photographs he’d dismissed it as a trick of poor composition and misconfigured camera settings. But now, crouched amid the destruction, he wasn’t so sure. Had the lens somehow punched through the thin veneer between what was and what was soon to be? Had the trees already begun to fade away, their life force dimming ahead of the impending catastrophe that was barreling down upon this land? Had he unknowingly stood among a gathering of ancient treeish ghosts, the last man to witness them before they’d slipped away into oblivion?
Somewhere off to the south the thunderstorm that had been lurking about all evening was finally beginning to build up a head of steam and a low, menacing growl of thunder worked its way up the valley. A gust of outflow wind blew through the dead trees overhead, a hostile, threatening hiss of a sound. Fat raindrops – the kind that mean business – began to explode around him like mortar shells. For the first time since arriving in the land of charcoal he felt the stirrings of real fear in his gut.
The end of the world was coming, gray and black and crackling with rage and lightning.
And then, with his throat tightening, the confidence he'd been tenuously clinging to abruptly snapped and he fled before the approaching storm.
