Jan 26, 2003, Andre Wins the Open, Australia
Day
Scarlet. Crimson Red. Burnt Orange. The rest–black and white. 19 days of smoke-obscured sun, a dried-out orange-peel through dirty fog. Bloodshot red eyes irritated by hours of nonstop firefighting. Everyone in the valley has those eyes. Black soot around the goggle line, nostrils, mouth. Raccoons.
Tears. Its over. We’re alive. Strong, silent, capable bush men, a streak down their sooty cheek. After having saved their homes, their loved ones, themselves. Hell and back again.
The house is untouched. The Park boys drive down our gravel lane. They had watched the hurricane of fire engulf our woods. Covered in soot, typically laconic, they pull up next to Carrie and I. Mick leans an arm out the window, looking away.
“We expected smoking corpses, mate.”
They were fighting the grass fires in the open grasslands upstream, doing what they could to save farms and homes and cattle. Jerry and “Ants” live in a giant metal shed in that same pasture, strewn with broken tools and other items in process of being repaired. Over beers in the impromptu celebration of life at the Blue Duck that evening, they describe the fireball exploding into and through the edge of our forest. “Sounded like a 747 taking off.” That wind, which we’d been expecting, finally came. All in a rush to get it over with already. What we’d been dreaming of for weeks.
Be careful what you wish for.
In the midst of it all, during the most intense half-hour, the front rushing through and around us, a frightened wallaby hopped by not two feet away, directly into the flames. A curious glance at it’s graceful figure in a seemingly suicidal gesture, another momentary glance into each other’s eyes, spines tingling, back to the hoses. I told Cathy–our rancher neighbor–about it afterwards. Her reply?
“Perfect, mate–rush through the front and emerge behind it where everything’s already burnt. Nothin’ but a singed arse and she’s laughin.”
Now, with smoking ruin surrounding us, trees crashing all round, recent chimneys of fire, we can finally sit and meditate on the passions of mother nature.
Of course, my mother in law is visiting. In her seventies and lame from a recent bad break in her knee. And my niece, on a visit from America. My sister will kill me if we die. She takes photos and video and helps my wife Carrie and I battle to save the house. It’s all just like we’d learned from the fire booklets. Tin covering the windows. Water in the gutters. Three years of brush control, burning and clearing. A neighbor told someone we were creating a “moonscape”. (This same accuser…? Panicked as the fires approached.) Now, the earth is black and smoking as far as the eye can see. The trees on our 12 acres miraculously still alive, blackened trunks hoisting gloriously green leafy crowns, seeking the absent sun, soot-dusted and crisped. Huge swaths of this two and a half million square acre fire have indeed been burnt through to the crowns. Destroyed. Our little valley, however, will have a few trees.
Mum stays inside wetting the rags covering the openings below the doors. Jill drags hoses around corners, brings water, films. In the lead up to it all, everyone in the valley ever closer, connected, bonding. Conscious that when the shit really hit the fan, it’d be everyone for themselves. Too busy saving our properties, and our asses, to help much elsewhere, in the end–a chain of islands. Nobody anticipated having nearly 3 weeks to prepare, but frustrating as that was, it gave us precious time. I was even able to put my plastic kayaks inside the house so they wouldn’t melt.
Last night Carrie and I and a straggle of others at an elderly neighbor’s about fifteen minutes away. The night glowed at every hand, highlighting each ridgeline with shimmering, glowing rust. Our valley still maybe seven kilometers from that particular front (there are so many fronts in this fire it’s impossible to keep track). Till 2 am. A sound like….well, like when you’re camped at Lava falls in the Grand Canyon; throaty, rumbling, transcendent, looming. Like a whirlwind in the trees but not. Like pounding surf. But not. Flickering flames illuminating the horizons, animating the valleys. No wind, it crawled in front of us all night long while we waited (which is a lot of what firefighting turns out to be) to jump if it came too close to the houses. The shift was over for the official firefighters. Gone home. We do not have that luxury. Breaking rules and instructions, someone sets a backburn. It works. We retire, satisfied.
This morning, I called “The Major” up the valley to report some spot fires nearby. It had already burned around his house, slowly and without wind, a few nights ago. He was sanguine, saying the wind would blow it around “us”. I said I didn’t think so, that the wind was blowing the bastard right into us, and went off to check things out. Impossible to sit still.
Going up our little valley on our dead-end dirt road, I round the bend in my Land Cruiser–trailer, fire pump and water tank in tow. There ahead are a half dozen trucks, a dozer, and most of the valley’s residents leaning on their vehicles lined up along the crest of a grassy ridge, smoking and watching the spot fires across the valley. Four kilometers from home, where Carrie is with mum, vigilant, gutsy. After complaining about the way the otherwise eager fire crews are being mismanaged, generally letting off some steam, the spontaneous assemblage parts as the wind comes up. Still meandering, fidgety, nothing really to do yet. I find a close neighbor, Neil, watching a spot fire right across from home. It’s growing. He has this feeling. Me too.
Back home. So far…so… Niece Jill and I head upstream to see what’s going on in the open paddocks. They’re heating up, briskly. Spot fires multiplying across the river, crawling towards the Bundara river’s banks, towards the farmhouses and horses of The Willows. The wind whips grass fires like ocean breakers in a storm across the slopes and towards a home. Graham from the Blue Duck comes barreling up looking for his son Jack, his helper to save the pub. “The fire’s jumped the Mitta river, it’s coming fast….where’s Jack?” … heads upstream. A second front barreling in. His. Two minutes later he’s found Jack and they’re off in the opposite direction in a cloud of dust. Must save The Duck. I help put out a grass fire threatening a holiday home, the radio in Jim’s cab crackles. He stares right at me, microphone in hand and a warrior’s steely stare. “Head back home. Quick.”
The moment of truth. At long last.
And oh, it is. Cath’s blocking the road with her ute and water tank. It takes an elongated moment to move it off the road to let me pass. Three minutes and I’m coming down our drive, park next to the shed. Carrie sings out; “You can see fire out back.” Sure enough, east of us the forest is ablaze. “Shit, it’s upstream of us to the West too…look” Thick red smoke is billowing like an oil fire from our gully just upstream…the one we burned this spring to reduce the dead fuel on the ground. I take the video camera to the ridge between us and it; all of 100 meters, and there it is, racing along the river, cornering our backburn and coming at us at a gallop.
The wind howls in our ears–steady, powerful. Torn off branches fly by our heads, crashing onto the metal roofs and into the siding, adding to the cacophony. Burning embers, a snowstorm of fireflies, tear past. Red and orange cumuli Nimbi made of superheated smoke billow and tumble over our heads, darkening the noontime scene as if it were night.
“This is it!” I yell over the din. “Put the last of the tin on the windows, get mum inside. Quick!” We detach the trailer and pull the Cruiser inside the shed/house, fumble our gear on. The game is on. “Look! Spot fires across the river!” One, then twenty…igniting as if by magic, tearing across the slope like a stampeding herd from hell, faster than we can comprehend. In less than 60 seconds several hundred acres of mountain, the entire bloody mountain, is aflame. “Carrie! Call Donald next door and warn him it’s here!….But it’s too late, the three neighbors downwind of us are a little too busy to answer the phone, also surrounded by a firestorm. We are intimately entwined, yet they remain unseen, unheard. Souls bound together in a fight for life itself, spread out across our little valley of darkness and light. Fire everywhere, we run around like maniacs…. “Get that bush!….look out …that tree’s on fire!…Shit, it’s coming fast…watch the wood shed!” Carrie and I trying to move fast without rushing. To breathe too hard means the smoke smothers and chokes us faster. “Which way’s it coming from?…damn it…it’s all around us!” The wind’s howling from the west. “…quick…out front!” Then, Carrie yells “The fuel tank!”, and I glance up where 600 liters of petrol are sitting sixty meters away, engulfed in flames. Just two days ago Carrie had raked up the leaves around it. She reflexively starts up towards it and I yell “Leave it…just be prepared for the explosion and duck!” We’re yelling. The fire is roaring so loudly it’s hard to focus. That wallaby hops frantically by. The world pauses on it’s axis. No time to reflect. The 22,000 liter plastic water tank is surrounded by flames. Hell, if that goes we’ve got 1,000 liters of water left. Glad I raked up the leaves and sticks yesterday. Trees explode into flame; the smoke chokes us, we persevere. The manual says when the front comes, to shelter inside until it’s passed…maybe 15 minutes or so. How the hell do I know when the front is passing? It’s everywhere! We fight on, pulling hoses this way and that, choking, eyes smarting, me stupidly calling out for Jill to film this or that, grab that hose and help me pull it. Insane, chaotic, precise. The smoke alarms in the house scream the obvious out to us, I yell to Jill to yank out the batteries. Huge flames are consuming the firewood and timber piles. I run the hose to stop them from torching the wooden shed I’ve just built, and it hits me. I can’t breathe. I can’t see Carrie or Jill. I’m choking to death. My skin is burning. Drop it and go. So I spray around the fire pump, turn it off, sprint into the shed.
Carrie’s not there. Mum hasn’t seen her. I exit the back door in the lee of the tempest, round the shed, gratefully find her with the trusty water backpack sprayer, (right-side up this time) attacking a tree. We go back inside, coughing and rubbing our eyes. I gulp my heart back down. “Everyone okay??”
Sparks are flitting inside around the doors like luminescent moths seeking a candle. Carrie takes a sprayer to put them out. I’m kneeling on the cement floor, spitting thick mucous and guzzling juice, trying to rehydrate. “Anyone need any water??” BOOM. Carrie and I look at each other. “Donald’s gas tanks??”
The hurricane outside is unbelievable. Thank God the tin covering the skylights is holding. If I go out the back door I can see and breathe. A landscape of fire. Dante’s inferno. Uphill. Downhill, across the slope. But the firebreak around the shed is holding. We’re okay. For now. Crash, another tree falls, close this time. Two minutes…ten, I check outside… Sure enough, I can breathe. Just enough. The wind tries to rip the door out of my hands as I exit, restart the fire pump, grab the hose, start putting out fires in drip lines, fires in garden plants, fires in trees, grass, bushes too close to the house. This continues for another fifteen minutes or so, the whole battle lasting for an hour and a half, maybe two. Then, as if the universe had audibly sighed, it calms. We just might beat this thing.
We chainsaw 2 fallen trees off our driveway, another which is aflame and threatening the shed, then the power goes out. I go down to check the hydro, but it seems fine….just some melted wires on the way back up to the shed. Greywater system has some half melted pipes, but mostly okay. Petrol tank… the hose is melted, tank dented from a falling branch, otherwise, no worries. Same for the water tank… melted drainpipe but otherwise the poly plastic tank, like the old match and paper cup trick, is miraculously intact. We fire up the backup motor for electricity till I can fix the line to the hydro. Donald, our laconic Scottish neighbor, saunters over, calm as a cucumber, beer in hand. Commonplace. Welcome. “Broke a window, lost me fire pump,”. Takes a sip. “Empty 55 barrel drum with a tight lid exploded from the heat.” Ah. So that was the Boom. He mentions that his bloddy smoke alarms were shouting at him, too. We share a laugh and a beer. Refill the mobile water tank, hook up the trailer, go see how everyone else is faring.
Upstream neighbor Jimmy Brown’s house is a twisted, hissing pile of rubble…so is Tom’s cabin downstream. Just over the ridge, Jimmy Betts’ timber shed is gone, all is otherwise well. We wave to him and Issy and Lil on their verandah, and it seems to me that they are soaking up life with renewed appreciation, surveying the ruin about them. The mule and pony are fine, and the chickens. Amazing, as dead roos and birds and possums litter the paddock. Eighty year-old Lil has sheltered with them. Her house (near where we were last night); consumed.
“You guys okay?” I call out.
“Yep, no worries. You?”
“Yep. No worries. Sorry.”
A shrug from Lil.
Young Jack is laying on the grass at the Duck. He’s been a gopher, sent to and fro where the oldies couldn’t make it up this ladder or over to that shed. The historic wooden bridge had started alight, they’d put it out, eyeglasses in shirt pockets melting. It can be driven on, but the dozer and truck drivers refuse. Jack said he’d “chucked my guts out” from the smoke, then watched as a calm old bloke stood there amidst the flames and confusion, saving the cabins with a garden hose. This man had fought bush fires for 35 years. “Never seen anything like this bugger.” A tiny leak sprang in his hose, next to his leg, emitting a fine, cool mist. A wallaby appeared, sheltered there, eyeing him nervously, refusing to leave his side until the fire passed.
Moonscape, indeed. Many trees remain standing, burnt black and leafless, sporadically crashing to the earth. This will continue for weeks. We can only hope they reshoot next spring. Cath and P.J. are anxious about their cattle. They’d sheltered in a gully. Damned hot in there. But they’ll have to find them tomorrow. It’s getting dark and they’re buggered. As are we.
Carrie and I embrace, like we’ve just come back from a long journey. High fives all around. Neil lost his water tank. A wooden cabin, surrounded by dense vegetation, built on a ridge. Crawled under the floorboards at one point. Sounded pretty furious. He and his son arrive at our place sooty and red-eyed, we share some juice and power bars with them. Invite them to rest and shower. They’re giving warnings over the radio to other people in other towns and valleys as this inscrutable power wends its way towards the only thing that’s going to stop it; the ocean. We silently wish them well. We wish them their lives and their belongings. We hope we find the “skippies” still coming around looking for a blade of grass here and there, though there won’t be much in the way of feed here for a while. Hopefully the few unburnt paddocks upriver will suffice till then. The brand new rubbish trailer is a smoking hulk of melted paint and tyres and warped steel, 200 meters from home. All the mile markers along Callaghan’s Road are drooping, melted.
I dance around my four wheel drive and trailer this evening, alone while watching over PJ’s and Caths’ remaining hay bales, as the grassfires trickle out. Abandoning usual social taboos but still keeping an eye peeled for the farmers and fire trucks coming down the track so I don’t look TOO stupid. But we lived. Now that night has fallen, the mountain across from us has a million small fires, brilliantly glowing like the stars we’ve so sorely missed of late. My lovely Carrie, the perfect partner, calmly doing her job, the consummate teammate. When I hugged her whilst sheltering inside during the crux of the thing, she was shaking. Hadn’t even realized it.
Standing there in the cool evening watching the fire-stars, wrapped in my arms, exhausted but victorious, she smiles that smile that makes me melt, dark almond shaped eyes gazing up into mine, reflecting the dying glow of the embers.
“How’d I do?” she asks.