Chapter 14 The fire draws everything toward it
“You better go,” Mike Jasper said. It was one in the morning, but Mike thought he’d better stop by his sister’s place and warn her anyway. He had been driving around Riske Creek all night looking for flashpoints when he saw fire jump Highway 20 and reach the garbage dump. The flames were uncomfortably close.
I was sitting at Noreen McDonald’s kitchen table beside a massive stone fireplace, drinking coffee and listening while she and her husband, Ed, talked about the summer of 2017. Noreen told me that fire had first arrived in their area on July 7 but burned fairly far west of them. Her brother had knocked on her door when the winds flared up a second time. That night, she and Ed spent a couple of hours packing, then drove to Williams Lake, where they stayed with their son, Jason.
Almost as soon as they were out of their home, they began worrying about it and the fact that no one was there to protect it. Three days after their departure, they returned. It was lucky, Noreen said, that they were in a tow truck. The police let them through the checkpoint at the Fraser River Bridge because Ed was the owner of Chilcotin Towing, based where they lived. He was the only person around capable of providing emergency towing. He was an essential service.
Ed has lived in Riske Creek since 1975, when he came to visit a friend and never left. Noreen has been there for all but two of her sixty-five years. Those she spent not far away, in Williams Lake. Her grandfather, Wes Jasper, came to the area from Kentucky in the early 1920s. Her father, Delmer Jasper, was born in 1925 at Meldrum Creek, just forty kilometres away. Both Wes and Delmer loved horses and established the Milk Ranch; they had cows and raised sheep. Noreen and her seven siblings grew up in the house that her grandfather built on the ranch, living the way pioneers did. “When we were kids, we used to heat our water to bathe and we all used the same bathwater. There were four or five kids in one bedroom. We didn’t have hydro or TV. Now times are totally different,” Noreen said. But the family is still a mainstay of the community. Three of Noreen’s brothers, Mike, Pat and Leland, live there. Mike and Pat work as cowboys and were inducted into the BC Cowboy Hall of Fame in April 2018.
On July 14, there was another knock on Noreen’s door—an RCMP officer. “The wind is going to be bad tomorrow. It’s coming,” he predicted. This time, Noreen had no intention of going anywhere. “For me it was like, ‘Let’s get it over with.’” The next day, around 11:00 in the morning, Noreen’s sister-in-law, Lorraine, called. Her place is about ten kilometres away, where the Milk Ranch and Noreen’s childhood home used to be. She was alone and the fire was on its way, she said. She wondered if Noreen could help her move the dogs—all nine of them.
“Yes, I’ll be right there,” Noreen assured her. She was alone too. Ed would have come with her, but he was in Williams Lake with their son.
Noreen recalled, “I go up the road about a mile to a place we call the Big Rock. The cops were there and had the road blocked off. There’s a house there and two helicopters were dropping water. They wouldn’t let us through.” Noreen talked to one of the officers and explained that she wanted to help her sister-in-law farther west along the highway. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll go back and give her a hand,” the officer promised. Noreen turned around and headed home, but she didn’t make it. When she got close to the garbage dump, about a kilometre and a half from her place, she saw a blaze on the property of some neighbours, Ken and Tracey. “I was scared,” Noreen told me. She ran into their place, yelling, “Oh my God, it’s here.”
The scene was chaotic. While Ken was falling trees to clear a break, Tracey was fighting the fire with a hose attached to a water tank on a truck. Noreen grabbed a couple of two-gallon pink and green buckets from her vehicle and used them to douse flames. “What do you do?” she asked. “You gotta help.” She laughed at the memory of herself tackling a wildfire with those incongruous pink and green buckets. Two other ladies showed up to help and Noreen began moving antiques out of the house. Then the fickle wind veered and pushed the fire toward a creek. More neighbours arrived, and finally, a crew of firefighters.
While this spirited defence was underway, cars were barrelling along the highway at a great speed, even though it was smoky and the visibility was poor. One of the firefighters asked Noreen if she could flag the vehicles to make them slow down. She directed traffic for a while and then noticed flames leaping south to her side of the highway. After observing them for a few minutes, she handed the “Go Slow” sign to one of the firefighters “That’s my house over there,” she said, pointing. “I’ve got to get home.”
When I asked Noreen if she was ever concerned about getting burned, she said, “It’s funny. I was really scared at Ken and Tracey’s. It was going through my mind. ‘Ed’s not here. Jason’s not here. There are no firefighters. We don’t have any bladders set up.’ It was just like, ‘Okay, I’m on my own with the dog.’ But when I told that guy ‘I’m going home,’ I was calm.” Lynn Bonner, a friend of hers, was surprised by how unperturbed she seemed to be. ‘How can you be like that?’ Lynn asked. Noreen was a bit surprised by herself at the time. She thought maybe the panic would kick in later.
Just as Noreen got to her place, Ed, Jason and his girlfriend, Alena Mayer, arrived. Hytest Timber, a local logging company, appeared with low-beds and Cats to put fireguards around the McDonalds’ property. As well as the house, the McDonalds had a barn, a shop, a pumphouse, a fuel tank, a couple of chicken coops and some sheds. A yard filled with used cars was in front near the highway. Ed, who has owned his towing business for twenty years, acquired the vehicles in various ways. Some were damaged in traffic accidents; others were impounded by the police because they were stolen, or abandoned and unclaimed. Ed kept them for their salvage value.
A crew of firefighters from Terrace set up bladders. Ed and Jason helped them to install sprinklers on the roof. “We tied one to a chimney and put another at the other end,” Ed recalled. “We know that when the fire is going, it draws everything toward it. You don’t want to put a sprinkler just on one end because it would be sucking the water away from the house.” By the time the sprinklers were in place, the fire was practically on the McDonalds’ doorstep.
Noreen had nothing but praise for the firefighters from Terrace. “They were really, really good guys, really, really on the ball,” she said. Blake Chipman also liked them. He told me they were not only on the ball, but ballsy. Luckily, Noreen’s worry that she would be battling the fire with only her dog as a companion did not materialize.
Noreen and Alena had been spraying the lawn and the house, but the firefighters took over that task. “You’ve done what you can, it’s time for you to leave,” they said. Noreen grabbed her dog, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. It always slept in one of used vehicles and now it was too late to look for it. The firefighters started yelling at Alena and Noreen: “Get out of here!” As they ran down the driveway, the firefighters shouted, “Watch the hydro lines. Don’t fall.”
The sight of the fire licking its way through the property had attracted a crowd. About fifty people were standing on the north side of road watching it. Human beings have had a relationship with fire for a million years or more. During that long association, we’ve learned to tame it. Every day we light fires. We have furnaces in our homes. Our vehicles are propelled by tiny explosions that go off hundreds of times per minute. We even take to the sky, airborne on jets of burning gases. But rarely do we see what the residents of Riske Creek witnessed that day—the raw force of a fire, undirected and unharnessed.
Experts talk about the “frontal energy” of a wildfire, the energy expended over one metre at the fire’s front. When a fire is roaring through the crowns of trees and flames are shooting up for fifty metres or so, the intensity can hit 150,000 kilowatts per metre.47 In one hour, a metre of fire releases enough energy to power fifteen homes for a year. The throng of people at the side of the highway were mesmerized by a majestic power.48
The McDonalds joined the onlookers and saw Ed’s collection of used cars succumb to the inferno. Ed remembered, “When those vehicles started to go, it was like World War III. The gas tanks, the tires would go, even the drive shafts, because they are a sealed unit. The roar was unreal, just like a big blowtorch.” One of Ed’s neighbours said, “I think your house is on fire.” When the thick smoke cleared a bit, Ed could see that it wasn’t the house, but he didn’t know what it was until afterwards when he discovered that a truck behind his place had burned.
The firefighters let Jason stay behind and help, so he sprayed down the shop. “We didn’t even know he was there until the smoke opened a little and we could see him over there,” Noreen said. And then the smoke closed in again. Noreen no longer felt so steady. “I was just about to cry,” she told me. “I said to a firefighter, ‘Our kid is over there. Where is he?’ He was, ‘He’s okay, he’s okay.’” When the smoke cleared again, Noreen realized that Jason was now spraying the tractor. He was drenching the machinery they had moved to the middle of the field.
The fire was selective about what it consumed. While all thirty-three vehicles in the front yard burned, the fuel tank was, mercifully, untouched. And a circle of cars behind the home was disdained except for the one white pickup in the middle. “The grass that burnt went like a snake around all those other vehicles and got to it,” Ed said. This was what his neighbour had seen burning. “A two-year-old truck with not a mark on it—except for the tires,” Ed recalled, shaking his head ruefully.
Thanks to Jason’s efforts, the shop survived, although there was no paint left on one side of the building. He’d rescued the tractor, too. But the pumphouse went, along with the willows in the creek. Ed said, “What hurt was that we lost a bunch of stuff in the sheds from my dad. He had lots of old lanterns, coal oil lanterns.” The kitty was never found.
The fire burned around the house on both sides. It was so close that it scorched the telephone lines and the McDonalds couldn’t make any calls for eight days. But the house itself was not singed. In all, it didn’t take long for the fire to go through. Not even an hour passed before it was over. It tore over the hill and when the folks watching the display couldn’t see it anymore, they dispersed.
Noreen told me that when she was a kid, “We’d have a fire every summer. Dad would go to burn the grass and burn Mom’s greenhouse down. He’d have to rebuild it—every year. She got so mad,” Noreen recalled, laughing. “‘Don’t you burn the grass this year,’ she’d say. He’d shrug and say, ‘It’ll be okay.’” The McDonalds’ shop had burned down one year, due to a propane explosion, but the fire didn’t spread. These were manageable fires, not like the ones of the summer of 2017. They were something new, Ed said, not like the old days at all. These fires blew hotter, spread faster and went farther than anything anyone had experienced before.
When I asked Noreen what she felt like when she discovered her house had been spared, she said, “I can’t explain it. It was just weird. When the firefighters told us we could go back, we are walking up the driveway, and we see our house is here. The log barn and the chicken houses are gone, but we’re here, Jason is here and the house is here. ‘Carry on,’ I thought. ‘You just have to keep going.’”
The firefighters left the McDonalds a bladder, a pump and hoses. Even six to eight months later, Ed could see wisps of smoke spiralling up from the ground. Finally he went in with a machine and dug up some burning roots, a hidden menace. The McDonalds got nothing for their cars, although their contents insurance covered a portion of their other losses. Ed and Noreen are planning to rebuild some of the structures after the fences are replaced and are waiting for fallers to carry away the charred trees. “They’re logging a lot of burnt wood around here,” Ed said. “They have a few years to get it. Otherwise it dries out too much and there’s too much crack in it.”
The McDonalds found that cleanup takes a long time and there were after-effects they didn’t think about; for instance, the ruin of their buildings left the land littered with nails. They had to buy a magnet to pick them up so they wouldn’t get flat tires.
The spectacle of the burned cars was another kind of magnet. For a long time, Ed said, people were snapping shots of it. “They would drive in, take pictures and drive out again,” Noreen said. “Sometimes a car on the highway would stop, the window would roll down, you’d see a camera with a very long lens. They knew what they were doing.”
Jesaja Class, a young photographer (and magician) from the Nemiah Valley was one of the people who took a picture of this icon of destruction. In it, you can see the pitted, heat-warped metal, twisted and distorted shapes, shattered glass, rust and sepia-obliterated colours. Cars have been a potent symbol of our age with their promise of freedom and power. Behind the wheel, you feel like the master of your fate. No wonder there are a billion cars on the world’s roads today. To see them utterly wasted is sobering and compelling—like looking at the graveyard of a dream.