Chapter 24 You get used to riding with flames
On September 12, Gus Horn, a rancher who lives close to 100 Mile House, posted a video of what he saw when he flew over a number of nearby lakes with a couple of friends. Sheridan Lake, Watch Lake, Green Lake, Thomas Lake, Jack Frost Lake and Pressy Lake all unfolded below him. There was no voice-over, just the steady thrum of the engine. I found it heartbreaking to see the scorched land, the black lifeless stumps. Great swaths where there wasn’t even a blade of grass, just the naked scarred earth burned to a light grey colour. Without its normal green cloak, you could see every crevice and hummock. The land’s contours were all exposed. I felt its vulnerability.
I met Gus on his own place, which was untouched by fire. A busy man of broad interests, he was also the proprietor of Critical Mass Pop-Up Gallery, a venue in 100 Mile House for shows of photography, paintings, musical performances and films. We had a hard time arranging when to meet; Gus didn’t want to take time away from work to talk to me and suggested that I interview him while he was doing something else. His first idea was that I should accompany him on a trip to take some of his cattle to an abattoir. The timing didn’t work out, so in the end our discussion took place during what was for me at least a more conventional errand, while he drove into town to gas up and do some other errands. We rattled along in his truck with his faithful dog, Torch, sitting quietly behind us. Only after his chores were done did Gus allow himself to sit down in his living room. I also met Gus’s mom, Helen, a spry ninety-three-old. (Actually, “spry” hardly does her justice. For her ninety-third birthday, she went whitewater rafting on the Fraser River for nine days, from Soda Creek to Yale, and pronounced it “the trip of a lifetime.”) While we sipped the homemade smoothies Helen served us, I noticed that multi-tasking seemed ingrained in the Horn way of life. Their furniture was like that too: a dog cage doubled as a coffee table.
Gus’s grandparents homesteaded near Roe Lake around 1912. In 1947, his father bought the ranch just east of 100 Mile that Gus now runs. It turned out that we shared a connection. Gus’s great uncle was Carl Nath, who settled on the north side of Sheridan Lake and was helpful to Gordon’s mom when she and our friend Jane bought property on the south side. Carl was the pioneer who walked from Ashcroft to Sheridan, using the same route that the Elephant Hill fire later followed. He and another early settler, whom I know as Old Man McNulty, built our boathouse. In our cabin, we have a photograph of Carl and his wife, Sarah—the black-and-white picture hand-tinted in soft pastels.
In September, Gus went riding with a friend, Ron Eden, to help drive the cattle Ron had in the fire zone south of Sheridan Lake. (Ron and Gus go back a long way: Ron’s father was the best man when Gus’s father got married.) About a dozen of Ron’s cattle had burned to death, but as he and Gus rode through the countryside, still pocked by fire and smoke, they discovered that most of Ron’s animals had managed to save themselves. “Cattle at that time of year, especially yearlings, are in little batches,” Gus said. “You’ve got three head or five head or six head together. Occasionally there’s one by itself. You know where the water holes are and they find water regularly. They move around all the time, but it’s not that they’re trying to escape from you.” Ron and Gus set up temporary corrals behind the lines, brought the cattle they found to the nearest set, and then transported them out with a truck. Gus also took videos and pictures while driving cattle through the smouldering rangeland.
“The fire was moving slow enough while I experienced it. If it was burning hot in the bush, if it was candling, usually that was in the evening, when things warmed up during the day. You might be riding or driving on a road, you’re a hundred yards away or maybe even closer than that. There were lots of clear-cuts, lots of open areas. It will burn across those areas. You get used to riding with flames.” Gus and Ron kept an eye out for trees at risk. “Certainly we took it upon ourselves to cut lots of trees off the road. But if there is a tree fallen on the road and you’re cutting one off, there’s a chance that another one might come down. You don’t want to be there when it’s windy, no doubt about that.” And they were always conscious that the full-throated blaze was not far away. Gus recounted, “At one point, a conservation officer said, ‘Turn off your vehicle.’ So I did. He said, ‘Hear that?’ We were close enough, you could hear the fire. It was a roar. It was really heavy. You’re aware and you’re not going to hang around there.”
Gus spent two weeks in The Zone. “It was horrible. You have to be careful, it’s dangerous,” he said, “but after coming out, everything seems so banal. After such a big crisis, it’s hard to get used to the day-to-day. I had a buddy who was in Vietnam, who went back for a second tour. I couldn’t see why, but now I have a glimmer of understanding.” Gus had hit upon something I had not thought about much—that sense of excitement you got when being in The Zone, just being away from the “day-to-day.” Jeremy Vogt, the pastor of the Cariboo Bethel Church in Williams Lake, had mentioned something similar. “You know, Claudia, some of it was just fun. I mean the empty city. The mill was shut down. I was the only one in my house. I was the only one on my block and it was just dead quiet. One of my friends had parked their big motorcycle in my garage so I took it out for a drive. Big empty streets, you know? All the RCMP were out of town.” He chuckled at the memory and I smiled too. I had this image of a pastor on a Harley gleefully roaring through Williams Lake, robes flying, and no one around to check him.
Attitude made such a difference. As the poet Charles Bukowski said, “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” I thought back to the people I’d met and how brave some of them had been during the crisis. Cory Dyck calmly looked at the conflagration heading for the Becher Ranch and said, “We’re ready for that.” This was both admirable and necessary. As Blake Chipman remarked, “In firefighting, if you panic, you die, or you cause somebody else to die.” Heather Gorrell drove through flames to help a woman rescue her horses at a place north of Williams Lake. It was so dangerous the RCMP who had been manning a checkpoint on the road to that property had abandoned it. But Heather suppressed her fears and helped the people around her.
The individuals I spoke to were resilient, resourceful and hard-working. If they had not been, the outcomes might very well have been worse. The community of 16 Mile House is too small to fund an official fire hall. Still, the residents took it upon themselves to prepare for the possibility of fire. They built trailers capable of carrying from one thousand to six thousand litres of water, an innovation that helped them save the Woodburns’ ranch. Dean Miller at the Chilco Ranch had his own excavators, cats, low-beds, water tender, fire pumps and thousands of feet of hose. When the fire came, he and his grandsons were ready.
Many of BC’s firefighters went all out in their battles during the summer of 2017. Glen Burgess was deployed as an incident commander for eighty days during the summer of 2017. “A lot of those nights I’m getting three hours sleep, maybe four.” He worked fourteen-day tours and although he was supposed to get three or four days off between deployments, often that didn’t happen. Some firefighters went for long stretches without any sleep whatsoever. The smokejumpers on the West Fraser Road fire stayed up for thirty-six hours straight to make sure the blaze they were attacking was properly contained. Members of the Blackwater Unit from Quesnel were up all night while the fires threatened Williams Lake Airport.
Not only were the days long, the fires were long as well, which affected the self-esteem of the crews. But they stayed on the job nonetheless. “It’s hard when we’re not succeeding because we are all people used to succeeding,” Glen Burgess said. “A fire season like this where we weren’t successful every single time was very demoralizing. One of our crew members was on the Elephant Hill fire for six or seven rotations. That’s unheard of for these guys. They’re used to going in, kicking some butt, getting done and moving on.
“Emotionally there’s a big toll on us,” Glen continued. “I still think about [the] Rock Creek fire, for example, a couple of years ago. It was my team that was there, you know. That was something. To get to where we were set up, we had to drive through the fire. I think I’m pretty good at suppressing emotions. But the next spring, I drove through there to visit a friend of mine. I had to stop, it hit me so hard. So you know there’s that lasting impact.” Glen reminded me that some of the worst scars the fires left were the invisible ones.
During the summer of 2017, the province relied on a mix of paid workers and volunteers to fight the fires and assist those affected by them. When BC declares a state of emergency, the Office of the Fire Commissioner gains the ability to send resources—personnel and equipment—anywhere they are needed. In 2017, firefighters who were sent out of their own communities were paid either what they would earn at home or $41 an hour, whichever was greater.84 Many communities pay firefighters on an “on call” basis—that is, only if they are actually working on a fire. If they are paid by their local municipality or district, they typically earn considerably less than $41 an hour. Golden fire chief Dave Balding, who writes about firefighting issues, said in a phone interview that in his town, “firefighters get between $13 and $18 an hour, depending on their qualifications. And some communities still have true volunteers that get no money whatsoever.” In Ashcroft, when volunteer regular firefighters put in long hours during the summer of 2017, they earned less than the wage of $7 an hour for hot, dangerous work. They went way beyond the call of duty.
I talked to people who were deeply committed to supporting their neighbours. Lyn Arikado codirected emergency support services in Kamloops that ran the evacuation centre there. Herself a volunteer, she started with a core group of thirty-six volunteers when the fires broke out on July 7. By the end of the summer, 1,540 more people had signed up to assist. The Kamloops Reception Centre provided a total of thirty-eight thousand hours of volunteer services to over eleven thousand evacuees. Also in Kamloops, volunteers spent nearly thirty thousand hours caring for animals that had to be relocated due to the wildfires. Many organizations, agencies and individuals pitched in.85 The Thompson-Nicola Regional District estimates that over the whole region, volunteers working on their own or with organizations spent over 150,000 hours to help people and animals affected by the fires.86
Val Severin, a manager of the South Cariboo Search and Rescue, is not paid at all for her work. Assisting with evacuations took up so much time she had to take leave from her regular job. When I asked her whether she got anything from her employer during the summer, she said, “A bit. I did receive some wages. My employer was awesome. Many businesses did get some insurance for loss of business, so they were able to share that with their employees.” But as much as she appreciated what her employer did for her, she is still out of pocket due to lost wages.
I was pleased to see that in their 2018 report, George Abbott and Maureen Chapman suggested compensating people who house evacuees for any expenses and paying search and rescue “volunteers.”87 But I think we need to revisit our reliance on volunteers in general—especially if mega-fires are becoming more common. Volunteers may be able to help out for one season or two. But year after year? It hardly seems fair or sustainable. Roger Hollander, the fire chief at 100 Mile House, also has concerns about depending on volunteer firefighters. “Gone are the days of the old bucket brigade. We’re no longer passing buckets to each other to throw on the neighbour’s house. We’re at the level of a professional. Would you ask your doctor or your surgeon to volunteer? Do you think the pilot who is flying you to your next vacation is a volunteer? What I’m seeing is what the fire services North America-wide are seeing: there is a drop in volunteering.” This is due in part to the fact that the fire service is demanding more of its volunteers, both in terms of the level of training required and the number of calls to which they are asked to respond. Roger told me that the 100 Mile House department used to get “twenty-five, fifty, maybe a hundred calls a year.” In 2017, it responded to 450. “Obviously there’s only so many tax dollars to go around but, boy, something has to change if you’re going to sustain a professional service, because we don’t ask that from any other group,” Roger said.
While the volunteer firefighters that Roger mentioned were part of an organization, people often saw a need and took it upon themselves to fill it quite spontaneously. In Ashcroft, for about a week Heather Aie and other volunteers organized meals for the firefighters and members of the community who weren’t able to cook when power went out in the village. They served up hamburgers, spaghetti dinners, pizzas, breakfast sandwiches, pancakes and sandwiches. They got donations, which they distributed: water, baked goods and fruit from a local roadside stand. “More and more people came trickling in to help. They wanted a purpose and something to do,” said Heather. “It just snowballed.” When an evacuation order was issued for Clinton, Jin Kim, the proprietor of Clinton Shell Gas and Budget Foods, dropped his gas prices to help customers who were leaving. Pam Jim, who owns Jim’s Food Market in Little Fort, gave away sandwiches to hungry evacuees. Many other businesses, large and small, also donated food, services and supplies.
And as we have seen, volunteers helped animals as well as people. Lana Shields coordinated the rescue of over three hundred horses from Williams Lake and surrounding areas. Most were transported to Prince George over a period of five days, an effort undertaken completely by volunteers. On July 7, Dawn Bigg, who lives in Horsefly, took in a family of four evacuees. She accommodated not only a mom, dad and two kids, but also their three horses, one cow, three or four goats, one sheep, two cats and two dogs, as well as two pet rats. “I didn’t find out about the rats for three days,” she said with a laugh. This meant, of course, getting them to fit in with what she termed “our own crew”—fourteen pigs, twenty-four chickens and three dogs. A week later Dawn welcomed another family, who arrived with three ducks, nine chickens, two dogs and two cats. The family also had six cows for which Dawn found another shelter. Catherine Clinckemaillie, who owns the Skookumhorse Ranch north of Clinton, had twenty horses (some were hers and some were boarded with her), fifteen yaks, twenty Markhor goats, sheep, chickens, dogs and cats. When she was evacuated, the Cherry Creek Ranch near Kamloops gave her menagerie a refuge. Malcolm James, who lives near Canim Lake, had four horses and twelve cows, as well as dogs and llamas. He found a safe place for all his animals with friends in the Columbia Valley, near Cultus Lake.
No humans died as a result of the fires. One way or another, officially or unofficially, people were notified about evacuation orders. Access to our property at Sheridan Lake was by boat only and we figured no one was going to knock on our door, so we registered with the Cariboo Emergency Notification System. As we had surmised, when the evacuation order was issued, no one came to our place. But Gordon and I both got texts, phone messages and emails. Evacuating people in the Interior of BC can be complicated because some of the homes are remote, on back roads and out of cell phone range. Two hundred and fifty people were caught in Bowron Lake Provincial Park when that aggressive wildfire started. Park rangers and operators stayed up until midnight to make sure everyone was informed and safe. Despite the smoke and the wind, no boaters capsized. Raylene Poffenroth in Riske Creek recalled that her husband, Bryan, was building a fireguard when he told her that he was concerned about a couple of neighbours—Mike and Connie Jasper. “I go to their house and there’s nobody home,” Raylene said. “So I just go in the house and call Connie at work and say, ‘The fire is coming. What do you need? You’ve got to get out.’ I started evacuating some of her stuff and bringing it down here.” Cultural factors added complexity. When I talked to Francis Laceese, Chief of the Toosey Nation in Riske Creek, about the evacuation of his people, he said, “Some of the elders don’t understand English. Tsilhqot’in is their first [only] language.” So when the Toosey Nation signed an evacuation order, the police went door to door accompanied by a council member who spoke Tsilhqot’in, to ensure that everyone understood what was happening.
From newscasts, articles, Facebook posts and conversations, I heard and read again and again that the fires of 2017, though unprecedented in ferocity, were not an anomaly. A report by Canadian federal scientists, published in April 2018, warned that by the end of the century large parts of Canada’s boreal forests could die due to disturbances brought about by climate change—fire, mountain pine beetle, spruce budworm and drought.88 Werner Kurz, a senior scientist with the Pacific Fire Centre at the Natural Resources Canada office in Victoria, put the point to me this way: “We are on a trajectory of increasing climate warming, greater drought and higher temperatures. What we saw in 2017 and 2018 were stepping stones, or steps on a trajectory, for even greater fire risks in the future.”
The folks in the Cariboo will step up to the plate to cope with changing conditions, as they have always done. They will fire-smart their places. They will buy pumps, hoses and sprinklers. In so doing, they will defend not only themselves but their neighbours. But I am afraid that unless we all do our part, these efforts will be for naught. We need to grapple with the fundamentals, re-examine what stewardship of the land really entails and revise our forest management practices.
We also need to address the climate crisis. This is often framed as an exercise of denial: we are told we must give up flying, using plastic, eating meat and dairy, and so on. Such a future can seem small, cramped—not very appealing. But there are rewards in rising to an existential challenge: being swept up in a cause greater than yourself can be deeply satisfying and enriching. As pastor Jeremy Vogt said to me, “It was an amazing time. I just reflect on it in many ways as a positive event for our community because it brought us together.” The RCMP’s Svend Nielsen said something similar: “I don’t want it to happen anywhere else, but just for that feeling, part of me wants to have it again. It’s that camaraderie.”
As British Columbians demonstrated in the summer of 2017, remarkable things can happen if we take responsibility, come together and act.