Chapter 15 But it came, it came, it came, it came, it came
Kurt Van Ember is a tall man with an affable hostly manner. In April 2017, when he and his wife Brenda purchased the Chilcotin Lodge in Riske Creek, it seemed a remarkably good fit for them. They both love history; Kurt collects antiques and has restored vintage cars as a hobby. The lodge, a distinctive green-and-brown shake-and-log building set on a wide, grassy slope, was built in 1940 and is still furnished with period pieces from that era. When Gordon and I arrived on a cold sunny day in February 2018, Kurt went down to the basement to fire up the furnace—heated with wood, as it was in the old days. In 1944, the Canadian navy commandeered the lodge for a wireless relay station, probably to intercept Japanese radio communications. In the lounge, Kurt proudly showed me a radio that was the same model as the one the navy had set up during the war.
But there must have been moments during the summer of 2017 when Kurt wondered whatever possessed him to take on such a venture. As he recalled, “Riske Creek was the centre of the universe for the fire. It came from the south, it came from the west, it came from the north. The only place it didn’t come from was the east. You look at the dos and don’ts of running a new business. This whole fire thing was never in any document.”
On July 7, as Kurt and Brenda came home from the Williams Lake Stampede, they saw the lightning strikes to the west. Kurt said to Brenda, “This is not going to be good. It is so dry here. We are going to be in for one hell of a ride.” (They’d had nine millimetres of rain since the beginning of June, a fraction of the sixty-eight millimetres that is the historical average.)
Brenda left for Ontario to be with their daughter, who was about to give birth, but her eighty-year-old dad was still at the lodge visiting. “There was smoke everywhere,” Kurt recalled, “and we didn’t really know what was going on.” He urged his father-in-law to be safe and go home.
Kurt’s twenty-three-year-old son, Chris, a cheerful young man, was at the lodge too, but he had been working there and his plan was to stay and help his father. On July 8, he went into Williams Lake to get supplies. Anxiety was in the air. The Walmart parking lot was jammed with RVs. Many people had the same idea—to stock up while they could. All the plain bottled water in the store was gone but Chris could buy carbonated. He drove back to Riske Creek without problems. The next day, on July 9, an evacuation order was issued and the roads were closed—with reason, he said as we chatted.
Chris showed me the pictures he took when the evacuation order was issued. I could see the crimson clouds and the plumes of smoke to the west getting larger and larger as he clicked through the images on his phone. But then the fire was still twelve kilometres or so away; Kurt and Chris were not in any immediate danger. They spent the day rebuilding a deck at the front of the building. Taking the precaution of gathering up the wood scraps and chips generated by their work, they scattered them in a far field. They might still ignite, but at least there they didn’t pose such a threat to the lodge.
That evening when they were finished, Kurt felt celebratory. He said to Chris, “We’re going to have a steak, a glass of wine on our new deck. If we only get one steak, one glass of wine, that’s all it’s going to be. But we’re going to do it.” The red glow in the west was getting bigger and bigger. “The first time we saw flame,” Kurt said, “we were eating our steak. It was unreal.”
Highway 20 goes past the lodge and then angles northwest. When the fire broke over a hill a couple of kilometres to the west, it was on the south side of the road but still north of the lodge. Kurt noted the direction of the wind—from the northwest—and thought, We’re done. But he decided to have a closer look. He didn’t have much in the way of firefighting equipment, but he had two hand-pressurized water tanks, so he grabbed those, and he and Chris rushed over to the blaze in their vehicles. “The smoke was rich and thick,” Kurt recalled. “We got to the top of the hill and everybody was there. We started beating it down. All the neighbours came. I didn’t know half these people. I didn’t know who they were. Everybody had water trucks and skidders. We worked our butts off to keep that fire from jumping to the north side of the highway, because if it jumped to the north side, it would circle around and eat everybody. We managed to do that. There must have been fifteen, twenty people, from nowhere.” The fire abated about 11:00 p.m., and Chris and Kurt quit for the night.
On July 10, Brian Fuller, a neighbour, came over and dropped off a pump, a fire hose and an eight-hundred-gallon water tank that he knew weren’t being used. “I couldn’t believe it,” Kurt said. “That was a blessing.” Tanks were suddenly in short supply. “You couldn’t pick up a phone and order a tank, so that was a real sign of life.” Kurt thought, Wow, maybe I might have a fighting chance here.
Brian was an ex-logger, a heavy equipment operator and the site manager at the Old School, the former elementary school in Riske Creek. (The Toosey First Nation had converted it into an education centre for adults that offered training in building houses, operating sawmill equipment, being a care aide, and more. In July 2017, it got a contract with the Cariboo Fire Centre to open a fire camp on the grounds and used the profits to expand its curriculum.)
The Van Embers had gotten to know Brian in the three months they’d been living in Riske Creek and he had become a friend. At Kurt’s suggestion, I went to visit Brian at the school, about a kilometre up Stack Valley Road from the Chilcotin Lodge. A bear of a man, Brian was well versed in the ways of fires. He told me that you had to be strategic. “Once that fire drops down from the crown and gets to the ground, then you can manage it a lot easier. You can put it out with fireguards. But if it’s a full-blown hundred feet high, just get out of the way. It’s too hard, too dangerous.” He was wise in the psychology of firefighting too. He said, “Kurt is a good example of somebody that was really having nightmares. I said to him, ‘Drive up the road, you’ll see the fires right there.’ Everybody has this image of a fire, that it’s so crazy—dramatized sometimes on the media. I told him, ‘Go see it when the wind has died down, especially in these areas where there’s a lot of grassland, where you can manage it pretty quick with dozers. Just drive up there for five minutes, go take a look and see what the fire is and come back.’ It wasn’t as crazy as he imagined.”
Brian had already used a dozer to put a guard around the school, but he was worried about the fire farther west, where efforts to contain it were in danger of being overwhelmed. The day he dropped off the pump and other supplies, he also came to get Chris. “I need you, so let’s go.”
“Okay,” Chris said. He had no training in fire suppression, but he was young and energetic. Brian needed bodies,” he explained to me, shrugging. When Chris hopped into Brian’s truck, it was 8:00 or 9:00 in the morning. Chris was wearing a t-shirt and sweatpants, not exactly regulation gear for the task ahead of him, but Brian paid no heed. He drove forty kilometres west on Highway 20 and dropped Chris off at a spot behind Lee’s Corner.
“When I got there they had just finished the awesome eight lanes of fireguard that was to protect Riske Creek,” Chris said. “The guard was in an open field so flat,” he remembered, “you could literally land your plane on it.” The idea was to stop the fire and prevent the grass from burning and setting the trees on fire. “But it still jumped,” Chris said. “When I got there, they were trying to put out the fire in the gully. I was with some guys who knew what they were doing. They had an eight-hundred-gallon water tank and were sucking water from the gully and spraying with the hoses. They gave me a high-vis vest and a piss tank. I would follow them around and put out spot fires.”
Meanwhile, back at the lodge, “The phone was ringing off the wall,” Kurt said. “Everybody thought, doomsday, right? It was just a matter of chaos, pandemonium.” Brenda’s dad was phoning every day, every half-day. Brenda was phoning every twenty minutes. Kurt also spoke to his dad, a vigorous seventy-nine-year-old who still flew his own plane and who lived in Chilliwack. He told him, “Kurt, you’re in a hell of a spot. I’m not going to tell you what to do. You do what you need to do. I’ve been in your situation before in Alberta. The fire came on me and I was trapped. And the only thing I could think of was to dig a hole with a flap of muskeg. I got into that and pulled the muskeg over me. The fire rolled over me.”
“Well, Dad, there’s not much muskeg up here.”
“Yeah, you’re kind of hooped.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“I’ll pick you up.”
“Dad, it’s a no-fly zone.”
“I’ll come and get you, if you need me.”
Then two RCMP officers came to the door. “Who’s the owner?” one asked.
Kurt said, “You’re looking at him.”
“What’s your name? How many people are on-site?”
“My son and I are here. He’s not here at the moment. He’s fighting fires.”
“We have an evacuation order. You have to leave.”
Kurt had never been under evacuation order. But he wanted to stay to protect his place. And he was convinced that if necessary he could leave quickly. He had already packed his prints, china, sculptures he’d made, and family photos. His vehicles were pointed toward the road and had keys in them in case they had to go. His dad, who was on standby in Chilliwack, had access to five airplanes and could come and get them out if the roads were blocked.
Kurt is quite tall himself, but the officer was even taller. Kurt looked up at him and said, “Well, there’s two of you and one of me. I’ll lose, but I’m not leaving without a fight. I’m not leaving without my son. He’s out fighting fires and I don’t want him coming back and finding I’m not here. I ain’t leaving.”
“Calm down, relax. Okay, we’re not here to physically remove you. We can’t remove you from your building, your property, unless you’re a child. How old is your son?” one of the officers asked.
“Twenty-three.”
“I can’t remove your son. But if you leave your property, I will remove you.”
“If I leave my property because I’m fighting fires, how do you feel about that?”
“We’ll look the other way. If you’re just cruising around, I’ll get you.”
“Fair enough,” Kurt said.
And so Kurt was left to fend for himself. When Chris came home, his father took a picture. Chris said, “I did look like hell. I was wearing a white shirt which kind of turned to black and my face was pretty smoky.” Brian didn’t pick him up again after that. Other trained firefighters arrived and for a few days, the winds died down, making the situation somewhat less critical.
But on July 15, the fire roared back to life. In the evening, things looked grim to Kurt and he decided to release Indy, a horse they were caring for. Chris didn’t think the horse, with his black coat, would make it. The visibility was terrible at the time, the smoke impenetrable. Everyone was in a hurry and might easily miss seeing him on the road. Chris took the safety vest he had been wearing firefighting and tied it around Indy’s neck. He opened the gate, let Indy go and hoped for the best. An hour later, Indy trotted back up the road. The Van Embers decided Indy didn’t want to be on his own. “He’s a great horse,” Kurt said affectionately. Their next-door neighbour, David, who had a horse trailer, offered to look after him.
Close to midnight, the fire popped over a nearby hill. “You could feel the heat instantly.” Chris said, “It suddenly went up ten degrees.” The morning of July 16, the fire crossed the highway and started heading toward the lodge. “I knew that if the fire and the wind were bad, I wasn’t going to be able to save the building. I knew it, you just can’t. It’s too much,” Kurt recalled. But again the neighbours rallied. “We’re all beating it down,” Kurt said. This time he had the water tank Brian had given him, which he made mobile by loading it onto his tractor. “We’re going down the hill, beating this thing out. It was really, really stressful. It jumped the highway, right there.” He pointed out the window to a spot in the field in front of the lodge, about twelve metres away.
On this round, Chris said, “Helicopters were flying all over doing their thing.” There wasn’t much communication between those in the air and on the ground. But when Indy’s hay bale caught fire, around 2:00 in the afternoon, some firefighters who were walking along the road saw what was happening and called a BC Wildfire Service helicopter with their radio. “They had to drop two water buckets from the helicopter onto the hay bale, so we could get it out.” Chris said. “The burning hay bale had the weirdest sweet smell. I don’t think I’ll ever forget it.”
In general, Kurt observed, “We were doing very poorly. We’re all just yelling and screaming. You’re busy doing the fire right in front of you, and then it’s beside you and right over there. You’re doing that. This guy is fifteen feet away doing the same thing. So everybody is really focused on what they’re doing. And all I heard was ‘behind you’; everybody is yelling ‘behind you.’ Everybody was doing that because it was getting out of hand. So it was coming up the hill. How do you fight this? There were pieces of trees and branches and debris the size of the lampshades coming down. The fire creates its own storm. People think it’s just grass and that you’re going to be okay. You’re not going to be okay because there’s too much of everything. Too much dry grass. Too much wind.”
Still Kurt thought, “Well, I’m not leaving this building that’s been here since 1940—not without a fight. It belongs here. Too much history here to say, ‘I’m outa here.’ I couldn’t do it. Can you imagine if I would have left this building and all these local people fighting? I would never have come back. I couldn’t … Instantly everybody was like this.” And Kurt crossed his fingers to show just how tight the community had become. “The Chilcotin people stuck together and they fought. It was just amazing. You want to get to know your neighbours …
“I think the only thing that saved the lodge that day was the wind,” Kurt said. “There was a moment where the wind changed. You’re just so busy. You don’t see anything different. Then all of a sudden the wind backtracked on itself and stopped coming toward us. The fire went back on the grass that was already burned and kind of fizzled out. If it wasn’t for the wind change, I know for a fact that we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
Chris and Kurt called it a night around 11:00. They were covered in soot and worn out. Chris fell into bed and Kurt went to have a shower. When he came out, he saw blue and red lights flashing outside. He thought, “Here we go again. No sleep.” Two fire engines and three smaller fire trucks were coming down the laneway. He walked outside to see what was going on.
“You have half an hour,” said one of the firemen.
“Half an hour?” Kurt asked.
“The fire is coming from the north now.” Kurt looked and sure enough, the whole north was aglow. He’d been so busy fighting the fire coming up the hill to his place from the south that he hadn’t seen it.
“I’m telling you,” the fireman said. “We will not be able to save this place.”
“Why are you here?” Kurt asked.
“We are going to try and save all those houses next to the tree line. If we can stop it there, we can stop it here. If we can’t stop it there … ”
That night the fire never came over the hill. The wind changed direction again and blew out of the south. At 7:30 in the morning, after being up for about thirty hours, Kurt served the firefighters cinnamon buns and coffee. They were dispatched back to Williams Lake, but assured Kurt that a sprinkler crew was coming.
On July 18, as promised, that team, a local First Nations group, arrived. Its members did not protect dwellings, but the area around them. They were specialists in ground firefighting. They started poking sprinklers into the earth, connecting all the lines together and attaching them to Kurt’s pump. While they were doing this, a huge truck with a trailer came into the yard: more firefighters were coming on deck.
Kurt asked one of the new arrivals, “What’s up?”
“We’re the sprinkler crew.”
Kurt pointed to the folks who were already working at his place. “We have a sprinkler crew here.”
“We are the structural crew,” the firefighter explained. “Those guys are the ground crew.” He explained that the members of his group would be putting sprinklers on the roof of the lodge and attaching them to an eight-hundred-gallon bladder they had brought with them and that they would be filling with water.
“What about my neighbour?” Kurt asked, gesturing to the house on the east side of his place. He knew that David, whose father had bought the property next door, had lived there a very long time. The structural specialist said he would check it out. When he came back, he told Kurt, “We’re doing David’s place too.”
Now Kurt had ground and structural protection. He relaxed a little and all the attention he was unexpectedly receiving made him feel a bit giddy, so he decided to have some fun with the bladder. On a piece of paper, he wrote, “Chilcotin Lodge Management. No Diving.” Then he drew a picture of a diver in a circle covered with a X. And then, “Pool Closes at 10. Management Staff.” He held the paper against the side of the bladder and taped it on. “People got a kick out of it,” Kurt said. “Somebody put it on Facebook.”
On August 4, Chris felt like taking a break and went to see his girlfriend in Salmon Arm. Kurt’s wife, Brenda, came back from Ontario and the firefight dragged on. The lodge lost power a few times, and in Riske Creek a big effort was invested in protecting a communications tower critical for landlines, cell phones, the internet and data services in a large area stretching from Riske Creek to Bella Coola. The fire came close to the lodge property one more time—this time from the neighbour’s field. “We put that out,” Kurt said. And then on August 12, high winds started stoking the fire in several places and an evacuation order was issued—again—for properties all along Highway 20 from Alexis Creek to Riske Creek. But by August 15, cooler conditions had returned and the order was rescinded. Chris came back to Riske Creek and worked as a chef for the fire camp in the Old School and the larger BC Wildfire camp 1.8 kilometres away from the lodge.
A semblance of normalcy gradually returned, but the fire kicked up one last time. Chris remembered that on the evening of either September 11 or 12, he was sitting on the deck at the lodge, talking to a guest. He was facing south and the guest was facing north. The gentleman noticed the reflection of a fire in a window of the lodge.
“There’s a fire over there,” he said.
Chris looked and nonchalantly agreed, “Yeah, there’s a fire there.”
“There’s a building on fire,” the guest stated, his voice rising in alarm.
Chris thought to himself, What do you expect? You’re in a fire zone. And then all of a sudden, the significance of what the man was saying struck him. “What? There’s a fire there!” Chris exclaimed. He offered to drive over, see what was going on and report back if there was cause for concern.
The blaze was at the BC Wildfire camp and when Chris got there, he found the facility on high alert. All the sirens were going off. Apparently some hoses had caught fire. The camp was in the process of being shut down and the hoses had to be dried before they could be stowed away. For that purpose they were hung on a tower. Something went wrong with the propane dryer, or perhaps someone had cranked it up too high. In any case, the hoses ignited, and the tower itself burst into flame. Most of the firefighters had already left the camp; army personnel were in charge of closing the place and they didn’t know much about firefighting. A great melee ensued. People were running around, yelling and screaming, trying to figure out what to do. One man tripped in all the confusion and broke his leg.
When Kurt heard the story, he thought, “Now the fire camp is on fire. Does it ever end?” The fire was successfully contained, and the camp was decommissioned without further ado. But in a way, it didn’t end. As Kurt pointed out, the effects hung on: “When people come back from a war, they have battle fatigue and trauma. It’s a lack of sleep and really a lack of control. You’re trained to have the control, to do unbelievable things. You don’t realize how bad things were until after. Reality kicks in. I relate it to childbirth. You have nine months of prep, that day comes, and hopefully after a few hours that part is over. That’s what I thought the fire should be. I had days of prep and then the fire is gonna come and I’m going to beat it or lose. And it’s over. But it came, it came, it came, it came, it came … ”
I think almost everyone who went through the fires of 2017 was changed by the experience. But for Kurt and other people in Riske Creek, the feelings they had were especially intense because, in that community, the fires attacked repeatedly over a period of two months. As Kurt said, “There was no stop and finish. So I never had a chance to deal with it being over.”