home, n. the place where a person or animal dwells.… a collection of dwellings; a village, a town.
home truth, n. 1. an unpleasant fact that jars the sensibilities. 2. a statement of undisputed fact.
Susan Prichard grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a green, placid place—on an island in the estuary that curlicues around Seattle and into Canada. She and her family were avid hikers. So as a kid, she spent a lot of time among trees, along the coast and in the mountains, and she loved especially the old-growth forests—the gnarled and mossy stands of centuries-old trees that inhabited the coastal Pacific Northwest.
But at a young age, she was also haunted by a pair of big-world worries. One was global, about the cold war. Nuclear holocaust was a really big topic when we were teenagers, she recalled later. And then the other one was much more local; clear-cut logging was everywhere. She worried as she watched the old trees fall.
Slim-framed with straight cedar-colored hair, Susan is levelheaded and also passionate about the things she cares most about. And at the age of thirteen—partly as an act of rebellion against her dad, who suggested once that she might not be cut out for it—she decided to become a scientist, so she could equip herself with hard evidence that would help people understand how to keep this place of forest and water and mountains safe and good and healthy.
Her college years coincided with the peak of the “Timber Wars,” when environmentalists lashed themselves to trees to stop clear-cutting. But she found the activists’ views strident and sometimes distorted, and devoted herself instead to science—searching for solutions in evidence gathered from the forests themselves.
Then, in graduate school at the University of Washington, in the early to mid-1990s, Susan realized that there were even larger forces of upheaval at work here than the logging crews. She began to immerse herself in what is called disturbance ecology—the study of volatility in nature. She learned how to extract buried lake sediments, which could collect and preserve bits of ash and pollen over millennia. Under a microscope, she could sift through the grains of plant matter and particles in order to reconstruct a picture of the forests. And she also studied climate change, poring over the predictions about temperature, rainfall, snow, fire, and tree habitat that climate scientists and ecologists had spun with computer models.
Much of the American public had first become aware of climate change in the 1980s, especially after NASA scientist James Hansen testified on the subject before Congress. (Scientists had predicted a possible crisis in the Earth’s atmosphere from carbon dioxide emissions since at least the 1950s.)* By 1992, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen to nearly 360 parts per million—just above the level that Hansen and his colleagues would later identify as the crucial threshold for keeping the planet safe for humans, 350 parts per million. The planet had already warmed by less than half a degree Fahrenheit, though some places, like the Arctic, were feeling more heat. (Moreover, even a small uptick in temperature can alter or upend natural systems. Consider the difference between 32 and 33 degrees Fahrenheit: one is ice, and one water.)
But the impacts the world witnessed then were still relatively mild. In that moment, climate change was mostly a problem of the future, and scientists had already predicted, with a great deal of accuracy, what it would mean. In 1990 and 1992, the first reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the IPCC, the most authoritative international scientific body studying climate change—made it clear that global warming was already happening and that it could lead to drastic changes in the world as we know it. One of the many impacts these reports described was to forests worldwide: some tree species and forest ecosystems would “decline during a [hotter] climate in which they are increasingly more poorly adapted,” read the report, and “losses from wildfire will be increasingly extensive.” So scientists like Susan and her colleagues were trying to figure out with greater precision how such losses would actually play out: What would happen to the trees and the humans living in areas affected by wildfire?
There had always been, and there would always be, wildfires in the American West. In both the historic and the fossil record were major seasons of fire, sometimes burning millions of acres. Through her lake-sediment detective work, Susan’s doctoral dissertation offered a sort of arboreal history: an account of how different tree species advanced and retreated as various blazes burned around a mountain lake. And fires were often ecologically good—wildflowers and vigorous tree seedlings springing up in their wake. Some plants crave fire almost as much as they need water and nutrients. Some trees, like lodgepole pines or the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada, even make cones that will only open and drop their seeds after they are heated and broken open by flames.
But as climate change grew into a more significant crisis, the future would bring worse fires than anyone had experienced in living memory. The new age of fire would be amplified by the carbon the world was emitting from burning even more ancient forests—the forests that had rotted and become compressed into coal, oil, and natural gas. Fires would become more massive, more destructive, and more difficult to control—“megafires,” as they would later be called.† Susan could envision this happening in a theoretical way—but the idea belonged to a set of abstract trend lines running into the murk of the future. A great distance away, glaciers and sea ice were already shrinking in the Arctic. But in that moment, climate change—the gorgon of fires and hurricanes and droughts—wasn’t yet looming over her roof, wasn’t yet menacing the lives of anyone Susan knew. It was a thing of decades to come. In that moment, Susan was stalwart and optimistic. She believed that good information would persuade people to take steps to fix the problem. So she set to work studying wildfires with the hope that she could help people prepare.
She couldn’t then imagine how soon that hotter, fierier future would arrive.
In her early thirties Susan took a research job working with both the University of Washington and a federally funded laboratory focused specifically on wildfires. Her employers agreed to let her telecommute, and she moved with her wife, Julie, from Seattle to the Methow Valley, a river basin on the east side of the Cascade Mountain Range that enfolds a collection of tiny rural communities. Their new house was nestled against pines, aspens, and cottonwoods just south of the Pasayten Wilderness that stretches northward to Canada—just the sort of forest Susan wanted to study. It was several miles outside Winthrop—a town of a few hundred whose city planning decisions are governed by a “Westernization ordinance” that requires storefronts and signs to appear as if part of a Clint Eastwood movie set, wood siding in rustic frontier colors, for the purposes of attracting tourists.
By this time, Susan was pregnant with the couple’s second child, and they wanted to raise their family in a place close to nature. The pair wondered how the conservative community would regard them. We definitely worried a little bit about being two women and having kids in the valley; that was very uncommon. But when their daughter was born, neighbors brought them casserole dinners and stews for two weeks thereafter. The valley community turned out to be more accepting than dogmatic. People were just used to taking care of one another.
The Methow Valley had witnessed plenty of fires. Many were kept under control and quickly snuffed. But some had been deadly: in 2001, four firefighters died trying to put out a more-than-nine-thousand-acre blaze called the Thirtymile, and many in the valley were still mourning their loss.
In 2006, a heat wave radiated across the United States, sometimes called the “Great Heat Wave,” described as “epic” and “epochal” by the San Francisco Chronicle, though others would turn out to be grander and deadlier in years to come. Record-breaking temperatures struck California, and sweltering weather caused heat-related deaths from the West Coast to Missouri, all the way to New York City. In late July in the Methow, after the temperature broke a hundred for three straight days, a towering, toadstool-shaped column of smoke rose from the darkly forested mountains above Susan’s house. A wildfire had lit the wilderness.
She hoped it could be a beneficial fire, the kind that birthed seedlings and regrowth. And she and her wife collected their son, then age four, and their eighteen-month-old daughter and drove down the road to watch the red glow in the distance, as if it were a performance. And the fire at first was really exciting. I remember, we just watched it and were just stunned by the smoke plume. But the power of the fire was also ominous. The smoke plume resembled the aftermath of a bomb explosion, Susan wrote later in an article about living with wildfire.
On the mountainside, the blazes leaped into the crowns of lodgepole pines and mountain spruce—each becoming a roaring torch, spraying embers onto the next. Two fires merged to become the Tripod Complex, named for a nearby peak. The Tripod burned east and crossed the divide between two rivers, then fanned out and merged with a second wildfire. The flames tore rapaciously through the trees between the valley and the Canadian border, less than twenty-five miles from where the fire started—through stands of pines already weakened by infestations of beetles—and eventually grew to more than 175,000 acres, one of the largest fires in the state in more than half a century (and bigger in land area than the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that would destroy Paradise, California, in 2018). Finally, the smoke became so suffocating and dense that it drove Susan and her family out of their home; they evacuated to her parents’ house on the west side of the mountains. A combination of luck and firefighting confined the fire’s physical impact to unpopulated parts of the forest. The Tripod smoldered in the wilderness for the rest of the season. More than $82 million was spent on efforts to contain the fire. In October, snowfall finally quenched the last of it.
A year later, Susan and some of her colleagues in the Forest Service began searching the burned forest for clues to help them interpret what the fire meant for the forest ecosystem. Over the next three summers, she devoted several weeks to wrapping her arms around burned trees in the wilderness, winding a measuring tape around their trunks to record their diameter (sometimes a proxy for tree age), and she developed a fondness for the charcoal scent of charred trees postfire.
Later, in the reports and images of blackened acres that she spread across her desk, the theoretical and the immediate seemed to merge. The Tripod Complex was a megafire, and it had happened next to her home. Climate change was arriving in her valley, and there would be more fires like this.
But Susan was an optimist—she studied images from before and after the fire, captured by satellites, and found therein a story about hope. And her optimism would never really waver, not even after the much larger catastrophes that would come.
I lived in Seattle for nearly a decade before I understood that it was not just a place of rain—but also surrounded by forests that could go up in flames.
Older locals who had grown up here mostly boasted about the dampness—don’t expect a real summer like in other parts of the world, they would tell you. Keep your rain jacket on for Memorial Day. And some scientists and public figures predicted that the Pacific Northwest, its western edges buffered by the Pacific Ocean and shrouded for eight or nine months in rain and cloud, wouldn’t feel climate change as quickly as other parts of the country. This region would be a refuge, they said, and millions would come here to escape the hotter conditions elsewhere.
But the Pacific Northwest is cleaved into two halves by the Cascades, the jagged volcanic peaks that slice north to south through the region. To the west is the rainy, green coast, and to the east, the rain shadow, the arid zone that forms on the leeward side of mountains—making the region where Susan Prichard lives a not-so-mild place of searing, dry summers and deeply snowy winters. The two halves of the Northwest are knit together by the forests that stretch from one set of mountain flanks onto the other, transitioning across the miles from stands of dark-barked Douglas firs and redolent cedars into rust-colored ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, and larches. Large fires are far more common on the eastern side, but all of these forests can and sometimes will burn.
In recent years, Pacific Northwest summers have often arrived early and sprawled languidly across the long days of June well into September. A too-hot summer sun seems sometimes to glare down on the mountain peaks—which are no longer capped with as much snow as in years past. The Seattle of the past rarely sweltered, but now hot weather is becoming more routine. And on the eastern, rural side, the heat waves grow ever longer, more extreme, and more savage.
In July 2014, when the high temperatures rose into the mere 80s and low 90s Fahrenheit—which used to be considered sweltering for Seattle—several days in a row the Stranger, the city’s famously snarky alternative newspaper, named it “HOTPOCALYPSE 2014” and offered a “survival guide,” including a list of the rare establishments with air-conditioning. But though parts of the region burned fiercely that summer, the characteristic dampness of the western wet side spared it from major fire, and wind patterns kept most of the smoke from eastern wildfires out of the city.
The following summer, however, was not as lucky for Western Washington. The smoke arrived abruptly, blowing south from wildfires in Canada. Fourth of July weekend, 2015, as I boarded a ferry and crossed between two of the San Juan Islands off the coast, I stared into a mustard-colored, acrid sky. The air clung oppressively to my skin like an itchy blanket, so that by the end of a daylong excursion riding the seaside hills on my bicycle, I felt like I had a fever, like my body itself was ablaze. That year, the Seattle Times posted a series of images of smoky sunsets—the sun an orange bulb behind a curtain of ash.
When the smoke came again in late summer 2017, I felt with a stomach-clenched certainty that this was a sign of climate change—the crisis I had written about for years—showing up to leer at me from above. The sky dropped ash, which clung to garden spiderwebs and the leaves of plants. It clotted onto the surface of my fresh cup of tea. The whole experience felt eerily like being cupped inside a terrarium, like there was no way to step outside and breathe freely. “The fires’ impact—the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air—feels like a preview (and a mild one) of what’s to come if we don’t take immediate and drastic steps to halt and mitigate climate change,” wrote Seattle-based columnist and author Lindy West.
July and August 2018 were even more oppressive. Rivers of smoke gushed from both the interior of British Columbia and the center of Washington state across hundreds of miles to merge in the skies above my house. Seattle’s air quality was suddenly among the worst in the world, worse than smog-choked Beijing’s, and drifted into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s “very unhealthy” range, vicious enough to threaten the well-being of anyone who was breathing. The city skyline appeared as a smudged pencil etching through the ash. When I walked the streets, I wore an N95 respirator mask purchased from the hardware store—similar to the kind that healthcare workers would later use as protection from the spread of coronavirus. But my throat stung anyway.
A year later in August, I drove over the mountains and visited the North Cascades Smokejumper Base in the Methow Valley, run by the Forest Service. The valley is also the “birthplace of smokejumping,” which is something like the firefighters’ equivalent of the Army Rangers, an elite style of firefighting that involves parachuting into the wilderness. The campus—which included a runway; a brown house that functioned as an office; a metal-sided warehouse; and what looked like a barn but was labeled the “Lufkin Parachute Loft”—lay halfway down the valley between Winthrop and Twisp, an unpretentious town with a family-run lumber store on one end and on the other, the old Idle-A-While Motel, in a set of cabins originally built by the U.S. Forest Service. In the summer and early fall, the base offered free tours to any curious person who might stop in, and I had long wanted to get a better handle on the reality of fire.
A fire called the Williams Flats was burning about seventy-five miles to the southeast, and there had been seven thousand lightning strikes in Washington and Oregon that weekend, though any flames they’d ignited hadn’t yet grown into big fires in this part of the region. The firefighter who led me through the base had his eye on some more thunderheads brewing above us. He was wiry, with sturdy arms like tree limbs, in a red T-shirt, talking in a low voice, monitoring my face to make sure I was catching on.
“Storm chasers,” he said, referring to himself and his colleagues. “We’re going to monitor anywhere there’s lightning.” He pointed to the sky. It was full of scraps of cloud, like torn fabric, blue gaping between them. “Look right here. See the little bumps, the swirls? We’re right on the edge of that thunder cell.” He pointed again, drawing my attention to pebbly and divoted surfaces in the matrix of clouds. “If you look just under there, where the blue meets that wisp, that’s part of that cell that’s trying to push up. You can see how it’s kind of cauliflower-looking.” There were generally only two proximate causes of fire: lightning and humans.
He led me to a small but muscular airplane, white with a maroon stripe, a military craft built in the 1980s. “She’s a savage,” he said, giving the plane an admiring look. “It’s not uncommon to see this in Afghanistan flying for our troops.” But this aircraft’s intended purpose here was to allow up to eight people to parachute to a location near the edge of a fire, hike in, and try to get the flames under control. It was a hazardous job, more so in this region of the world, where the weather could swing suddenly. The topography is also tricky to navigate and could trap a firefighter in dangerous, even lethal conditions. “In the fire world, there’s a lot of us that call this R5 times two, as kind of a slang,” explained the firefighter to me. The Forest Service had defined nine regions, and California, a place of extreme wildfires, was number five or “R5.” But this part of eastern Washington had similarities to that more southerly location. “A lot of guys will not come up here. It’s a very extreme place.”
The parallels to the military were not coincidental. The U.S. Forest Service had battled against wildfires from the early twentieth century until now, in order to allow people like me to live in a tamer West. Beginning in 1921, U.S. Army planes were used to patrol for wildfires. The history of smokejumping was closely entwined with World War II paratrooping, and the only all-Black airborne unit in military history had been tasked first with responding to the threat of Japanese “fire balloon bombs” and then with fighting actual wildfires via smokejumping. By 1935, the Forest Service’s official policy was that every wildfire should be extinguished by 10:00 A.M. on the day after it was first reported. (The policy was reconsidered and changed in 1978. But in the last decade, the Forest Service has invested more than a trillion dollars every year in fire suppression and still describes itself as “the world’s premier firefighting agency.”) Engineers eventually developed specialized firefighting airplanes—such as air tankers, which can drop flame retardant on a blaze; water scoopers, which can pull freshwater from a nearby water body and drop it on a fire; and smokejumper aircraft like the one I was now looking at. But the Forest Service still sometimes uses military planes during the height of fire season.
Places like the North Cascades Smokejumper Base had waged a war against wildfire for decades so that western communities could be safe. Home here had developed almost an adversarial quality—the presumption was that you had to fight fire to live here.
But now climate change had arrived, and fire couldn’t be held back any longer. The flames would come again and again, and in some battles with even the best-trained firefighters, the fire would win.
In the years after the Tripod Complex Fire, Susan Prichard became more vocal about both climate change and wildfires.
In 2006, in response to a community member who had expressed denial, she wrote a defiant though polite letter to the editor of the local paper explaining the science of climate change. A few days later, when she stopped to pick up some cuts of meat from a local lamb farm, the farmer—a tall man in suspenders, quizzical—asked her to explain further. I didn’t feel like he necessarily completely believed me, she thought later. I knew he was probably pretty conservative. But the conversation was respectful, and she began to have more of them, tentative but factual and levelheaded.
She, Julie, and the kids moved closer to the center of Winthrop—to a barn-red house surrounded by an ample lawn of green grass and beyond it, patches of wild grasses and bitterbrush, a spiky shrub with flowers like tiny wild yellow roses, and a scattering of ponderosa pines.
From her new home office, Susan continued to study the behavior of the Tripod Fire. Parts of the forest that had burned in 2006 were old-growth. Parts hadn’t seen another fire in decades. But some others had previously been clear-cut, some just cleared of small trees and brush and then selectively logged, and some charred by past wildfires. And some had been deliberately burned in a management practice known as “prescribed fire,” in which low ground fires are lit, usually during mild weather, in order to consume “fuel”—the brush, grass, little trees, and understory that might feed a hotter wildfire. She searched for answers in this landscape: What could the Tripod and the experiences of this forest tell us about the more severe fires that would come in the years ahead?
In the distant past, before European Americans inhabited the area, there had been much more fire in this place, which had generally been a good thing, ecologically speaking. She knew this partly from her studies of ancient pollen. Those past fires had been on average smaller, more frequent, and less severe than the Tripod. They would have turned the landscape into a collage or a mosaic of little patches—different burn ages, different mixes of trees, diverse habitats for many kinds of animals and plants, including those that preferred deep tree cover and those that sought open spaces. Each of these little fires would also have consumed some fuel and helped keep the next wildfire from spreading as quickly or growing as hot. But Susan’s sense of how and why past fires had happened also changed over time. She used to think a few were set by humans, but most were the product of nature and randomness—which is to say, they were ignited by lightning.
Then came a paradigm shift in how Susan and many other scholars understood the history and ecology of North America. When early anthropologists and historians tried to estimate the population of the continent at the time that Christopher Columbus arrived, they had often turned to incomplete colonial census data gathered much later by Europeans, and they had failed to account for the scale of the devastation that occurred when Old World diseases, combined with colonial violence, wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities. These omissions produced lowball calculations of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population. Some evidence of this distortion lay in plain sight—in Indigenous oral histories and records that had never been given their due by most academics. But the dubious assumption that Indigenous societies were tiny and American landscapes largely untouched has lingered in many fields, including ecology. In the 1990s, the scientists who became Susan’s mentors were still sometimes leaning on these assumptions to try to understand the historical forces that had shaped the Pacific Northwest.
But over at least the past couple of decades, some historians, geographers, Indigenous scholars, and other researchers have called for a reckoning with evidence that had been ignored. Before Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous communities were not “living with minimal impact on unspoiled nature,” wrote Indigenous scientists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake in a 2001 paper, but strongly influencing North American landscapes. Advances in fields like molecular anthropology, which uses genetics to answer historical questions, allowed for new reassessments of the past. In 2011, for instance, researchers from the University of Washington and Yale analyzed ancient and modern DNA and surmised that the number of people living in the Americas had dropped by more than half around the time European diseases were introduced.
If you revise the pre-Columbian population upward to account for such a catastrophic loss and you correct outdated and biased assumptions about Indigenous knowledge and ecological expertise, the whole continent becomes a radically different place, managed by large and influential societies long before Europeans arrived. This means that North American landscapes were never just wild, not just the design of nature; for many generations, they were managed deliberately and skillfully by Indigenous people.
Susan’s next-door neighbor in Winthrop is a historian and an expert on legal issues affecting North American tribes. He had learned via oral histories that tribes such as the Wenatchi and the Methow—both now part of the twelve Confederated Tribes of the Colville, a 1.4-million-acre reservation about thirty miles east of the Methow Valley—had used prescribed burning, also sometimes called “Indigenous burning” or, more recently, “good fire,” every year to increase habitat for wildlife and berries. Later, a California ecologist named Will Harling reached out to Susan with even stronger views on how profound a role Indigenous communities have in managing both ecosystems and fire. Good fire is part of a process of Indigenous “world renewal,” he explained. “It’s humans’ responsibility to manage fire on our landscapes. It’s how we manage for future generations. We don’t leave them a fuel-choked tinderbox. We leave them a landscape where there’s diversity and abundance, and there’s safety and security.”‡ In other words, Indigenous communities had given the West a legacy and a strategy for how to care for the land and keep communities safe—a set of traditions and knowledge base that scientists and government land management agencies had largely neglected or pushed aside.
The practice of deliberate fire-setting had endured in some places over the decades. In southern states and in many tribal reservation communities, including at the Colville Reservation, the tradition of setting controlled fires to manage land never went away. In the 1950s, the famous wildlife biologist and policy advisor A. Starker Leopold began making the case that fire could have a healthy role in ecosystems; his work led directly to the creation of some of the first federally run prescribed fire programs in the national parks in the 1960s. But government agencies have budget constraints, tribes only have authority over their own landholdings, and both often have to contend with thorny legal hurdles. In the West, efforts to bring back good fire have been tiny compared to the vastness of the landscape and the fires of the past.
The question remained, could these kinds of practices still be relevant in an era of megafires and climate change? Susan and her colleagues ran an analysis based on field research, the count and measurement of trees they’d done in the area that had burned in the Tripod Fire. Then she and another scientist used satellite data to search for patterns over an even larger area of forest. What factors determined whether trees lived or died during the severe conditions of the Tripod Complex? They saw a pattern emerge—the Tripod had spared more trees in the places that had experienced prescribed fire in the recent past.
Despite the threat of climate change, Susan hung on to a vision of the future in which her valley, her home, could return to the kind of collage-forest that had existed in the past, a landscape that would be better able to tolerate the heat of the future. But old policies of fire management were slow to change, and the new, warm summers didn’t leave the West much lead time for such preparations.
In mid-July 2014, as HOTPOCALYPSE came to a close in Seattle, the heat on the east side of the mountains rose into the upper 90s Fahrenheit, then into the triple digits.
On Monday, July 14, lightning lit four fires around the valley near Twisp, Winthrop, and another tiny community, called Carlton. As with the Tripod, Susan and her family wanted to see it for themselves. So they drove to a spot south of Winthrop where it was possible to look across the valley and watch the fire glow in the distance. Susan found the flames to be mesmerizing at night, almost like an astral phenomenon, the aurora borealis or an eclipse. A couple days later, she left for Seattle for a set of professional meetings.
By Thursday, the day before her birthday, Susan heard that the fires had grown. Eighteen thousand acres, not yet a megafire, but menacing in the torrid winds that were then heaving across the valley. Collectively, these fires would be called the Carlton Complex.
She was determined to head home over the mountains to her family that night and arranged a ride with a lawyer friend who also lived in Winthrop. She and the friend made a stop at a hardware store so he could pick up a generator and cram it in the backseat of his Volkswagen Golf. Susan’s belongings were a tight squeeze around the four-foot-wide appliance, and there was no room in the little sedan for a second generator for Susan’s house. Damn it, she thought. We’re probably going to lose power. Her house, like many in the valley, relied on well water supplied by electric pumps, and when the power went out, so did water for drinking and for sprinkling the yard (which could actually provide a buffer against a traveling wildfire). As Susan and the friend set out on the interstate, Julie called to say that the power was already down at their house.
They drove north to Highway 20, then headed east—up through North Cascades National Park—past one of the hydropower dams that feed Seattle’s power supply, winding up through about eight hundred square miles of wilderness. One of those impossible roads that swoop across a valley and sidle up to cliff edges, curving and arcing up and up, with gravel pull-offs for gawking at jagged granite mountain faces, wide green lakes, churning rivers, and plunging waterfalls. The road offered an almost mythic transition between one side of the mountains and the other, from city up into sky then back to home.
It wasn’t until they exited the wilderness and hit the valley floor that they could pick up static-fuzzed radio and the first cell phone signals. The news was worse than Susan had imagined. We were getting radio reports of major evacuations of the communities of Carlton and Pateros, about 15 and 30 miles south of Winthrop, respectively—and no one had ever predicted the fire would spread so far.
The day had reached dusk, and as the road snaked back down, they entered the valley full of pines and finally saw it. It was just horrifying to look down-valley and see just this wall of black smoke. And then at the base of it was this glowing red.
Susan began to cry. It just hit me that I had no idea how all those people living in the backwoods were going to survive it. When I saw the smoke plume—and the winds were easily over thirty-five miles per hour—I just assumed not everyone would get out.
Unmistakably, the Carlton Complex had grown into a giant, a megafire. And unlike the Tripod, this one was coming for people’s homes.
Susan couldn’t sleep that night. The official government-run website for tracking wildfires wasn’t updated yet, and the only reports she could find were anecdotal, on Facebook. In the wee hours, she left the house and drove the country roads, a safe driving tour that would not be in the way of any emergency vehicles, just to look at the fire. The initial front of the fire had already passed. There was this huge column of smoke in the distance. But then the flanks of the fires were still burning. Individual trees were torching. Bushes were burning.
On Friday, the cell phone lines went down and would be out for more than a week. Susan and her family drove to the post office, which had suddenly become a primitive form of social media, sprouting a series of paper notices about whose houses had burned down.
That evening, they went to the house of some friends for dinner. It was one of their regular gathering places: they were all part of a group that held rotating soup nights through the winter. The friend ran her house on solar panels, and therefore still had electricity. At the gathering, they swapped stories, shreds of information, and rumors people had heard about what was happening, what had burned, who was safe, and who was not.
Then they sang to Susan. People kind of ruefully lit the candles on my birthday cake. They’re like, “Yeah, a little bit more fire for you. How are you feeling about this, fire ecologist?”
The battle against the Carlton Complex fires began as a routine operation.
Carlene Anders was a volunteer firefighter who ran a daycare more than thirty-five miles down the valley from Susan and Julie in the town of Pateros on the Columbia River. She had deep roots here. Her grandfather had been the Pateros mayor in 1952, and her mother had graduated high school in a neighboring town. Carlene had served for seventeen years as the ski school director at a nearby mountain pass called Loup Loup (French for “wolf, wolf”). She had noticed how feeble some winters were becoming—across the West, the ski season has shortened by about a month since the 1980s—and she found it heartbreaking.
She also knew fires—by firsthand experience. She became a wildland firefighter for the state in 1984, and two years later, at the age of twenty, had served at the North Cascades base as one of the first two women smokejumpers in the state. Early in her career, she had also worked on some prescribed burns for the Forest Service. By 2014, she had spent seventeen seasons fighting fire in one context or another. Fire is alive, she felt. It’s a live thing, and it takes its own shape. And you have to have seen enough of it to understand what it’s going to do.
Carlene had seen big fires before, including a devastating cluster of fires in Oregon in 1987. But when the Carlton Complex arrived in July 2014, it was the first time Carlene witnessed fire conditions that were so thoroughly dangerous and intractable.
When the first lightning strikes hit the valley on that Monday, she left the kids at the daycare under the supervision of her staff and rode out with Engine 1511, Pateros’s yellow fire truck, crisscrossing the area to respond to different reports of fire starts. Four separate fires lit in different parts of the valley. They were still small, but they could not be quelled on that dry, hot day.
On Tuesday, Carlene and her crew drove up-valley. The largest of the four fires, called the Stokes, stood at about six hundred acres that day. Seven rural households evacuated as the Stokes raced across the grass, and more than a hundred firefighters tried to rein in the blaze, including a Canadian crew manning an air tanker.
On Wednesday, the torrid winds picked up, and the Stokes fire grew from about 1,700 to 7,000 acres, and there was no time to rest. We had a meal on Wednesday at four o’clock, and I think I laid down for twenty minutes right there on a trampoline while we were protecting somebody’s house.
But it wasn’t until Thursday that Carlene fully realized how different this fire was from anything she had seen in her almost three decades of experience. That day, gale-force winds surged through the valley. The fire spread monstrously—from 18,000 acres in the morning to 45,000 in the afternoon to 168,000 by the end of the day. Embers flew: not the moth-size bits of campfire ash you would normally associate with that word but chunks of burning debris bigger than a person’s forearm, up to two feet long and suspended in the air. When they landed, they lit more fire, a phenomenon called “spotting.”
Normally you have a head of a fire and you can flank it and pinch it off and actually fight it and have control of it. But this, there was no control. We would hit a house. We would think it was taken care of and then come back—it’s on fire again.
The number of firefighters battling the Carlton Complex grew to about five hundred. But it wouldn’t be enough.
That afternoon, Carlene fought fire on one side of the Methow River. Across the valley on an opposite hill stood the house where she had spent her adolescence, from eighth grade onward. The whole family had built it together; they’d spent twenty-three Christmases there. Her mother now lived there and rented out a cabin on the same property. It was just beyond Carlene’s line of sight. Then she watched the wind tilt a column of smoke toward her family’s land and saw fire dashing up the hill and over the ridge. Fire is propelled by wind, running in the direction of its own smoke plume, like an animal chasing its tail. I knew when that column up there laid down that there was a good chance that my family home was getting burned down. And then it was going to reach my mom.
Time seemed to distort for a moment. There was a cabin right by the water. I just remember the helicopter dropping water on that cabin and just everything was slow motion, like the rotors. I remember doing this 360 around as I was trying to move this hose off the highway and thinking, we are not going to contain this. We’re not going to be able to handle this.
She could have left right then, she thought. If she’d had an oxygen tank ready, so she could breathe through the smoke, maybe she could have rushed to her mom’s property and most likely saved at least that much—the house, the cabin, her family’s history. But firefighters have a sort of creed, like a military ethic, not to leave their crew. So she stayed with the engine.
Then the fire lieutenant got a call that the fire had charged toward Pateros and was endangering the city water supply. Carlene and her crew piled into the engine and took off down the serpentine highway that followed the Methow River. For a moment, Carlene’s cell phone had reception, and she was able to reach her husband. They made a plan to meet at the Pateros fire hall—Carlene, her husband, her son, and her mother.
But when her engine arrived that evening, still before dark, none of her family could be found, her cellphone battery had died, and the whole center of her hometown was ablaze. Fire had spotted over the crest of a hill and spread to the grass around water towers, the cemetery, the parsonage on the hill. The entire landscape seemed to glow and roar eerily, as if a volcanic eruption were spreading across the ground. Fire on the edges of the highway, fire along the railroad tracks. Carlene was with a fire engine crew of three people, and, at first, there was only a handful of other firefighters defending the downtown—including a second engine crew and someone manning a tender, a fire truck equipped with a water tank, and a couple of additional privately contracted firefighting rigs. She saw her daughter’s car parked at the fire hall. Her kid had just turned eighteen years old, had signed up to fight fire, and was probably also out battling the Carlton Complex somewhere.
There was no time for Carlene to contemplate whether her family was okay. The assistant fire chief and the firefighters made a quick decision to defend the center of town. They didn’t want the whole community to wither. If we didn’t keep downtown, nobody would come back. First, they had to evacuate the residents. A growing line of cars was already trundling slowly onto the highway, but there were people everywhere still. The fire trucks drove the streets, looping through the center of town and up the hillside, shouting over the engine PA, telling people to evacuate. This isn’t a drill. Please leave town now, Carlene repeated. The summer sun hadn’t set, but the smoke grew so impenetrable and dark that the streetlights came on.
The district fire chief had put out a call for help to any firefighting crews in the state, and a series of engines from Chelan, a town about fifteen miles to the south, showed up at the edge of Pateros. The crews doused the flaming yard of the hardware store, the shrubs and trees at the edges of the streets, the strip of grass between the railroad tracks. Carlene drove the yellow truck as they advanced toward the Methodist church. Her companions sat on top of the engine and tried to blast the adjacent foliage. The whoosh and gasp of the fire was so loud that none of them could hear, so the other crew members would thump the roof of the engine to signal to Carlene, one tap to stop and two to go. It was so hot that they could barely handle it. I mean the fire was blowing right into them. And the transformers were exploding. So you’d hear these huge pops. And then all the propane tanks were releasing.
The crews blasted the town with so much water that they drained the water towers by 10:30 P.M. Some of the firefighters drove to the neighboring town of Brewster to fetch more water, but they were drawn into a battle against flames to the north and never returned. The remaining crews pumped water from the Columbia River. At nearly 11:00 P.M., Carlene got a call from her mother and teenage son from an evacuation center in Chelan; they were safe. But she would not see them again until Saturday, when she would also sleep briefly, her first chance to rest in four days.
The hours stretched out into an endless moment, across day and night, outside the normal movement of time. Everything Carlene had was on the line: I knew we lost mom’s home, and my grandma’s home in Brewster was threatened, and our house was threatened here, and I thought, Oh my gosh, our whole family’s gonna lose all their homes at some point. By luck, her own house and her late grandmother’s were spared. But her mother lost her home and her rental cabin; moreover, she had owned an orchard down the valley, and there, two houses, eight fruit pickers’ cabins, a bathhouse, and a cookhouse were all consumed by fire.
Still, the battle wasn’t over. The firefighters pursued the fire south of town. The fire moved, jumped this ridge, went down and jumped the highway all the way down to the river. We lost homes out there.
That weekend the winds changed direction, pushing the fire toward Twisp, Winthrop, and Chelan. The governor sent a hundred members of the National Guard to assist.
The following Tuesday—a week and a day after the Carlton Complex began—President Barack Obama arrived in Seattle, a place that felt farther away from this valley than usual, for a pair of campaign fundraisers. He agreed to send emergency federal aid to the burning communities. By then, an estimated 150 or more homes had been destroyed in a region of just forty thousand residents. (After all the damage had been assessed, the number of razed homes was more than 300.)
The emergency dragged on inexorably through the summer. We were going back out almost every night for fires. For weeks and weeks, we were out at night till two, three in the morning. A lot of times, we’d get calls that people just were scared to death because there was outlying fire that was going the whole time. On Wednesday, July 23, about ten days in, rain fell on the hillsides and dampened the Carlton Complex Fire but also triggered some mudslides.
In mid-August, another fire lit—directly across the river from the smokejumper base—when a car was pulling a trailer with a broken wheel along the highway, and the friction of metal against pavement sent sparks into dry grass. A firefighting crew dashed across the river to defend a house on a hill above the valley and prevent a second Carlton Complex–size fire from cutting loose. That fire was under control within four days. But several other residences and outbuildings were razed. (One of these belonged to one of Susan Prichard’s soup-night friends: a house, two cats, eighteen chickens she kept, an art studio, and a vegetable garden were all gone.)
At the end of August, rains arrived again, triggering even worse mudslides that trapped cars on the roads, knocked a house off its foundation, covered a highway with a five-foot-thick layer of debris, and swept a firefighter off the road, trapping him in his truck, though he was able to escape.
On August 24, the Carlton Complex Fire was finally declared fully contained. It had scorched 256,000 acres, or 400 square miles, a footprint larger than the five boroughs of New York City. It was the largest fire on record in the state.
In Pateros, the water towers were scorched. Several children in every grade were houseless, along with about one-fifth of the school district staff and one-third of the fire department. Many months would pass before the kids in town would stop “playing fire” (like playing house, except your house is burning down and you have to pack up and evacuate).
Afterward, Carlene and her neighbors looked at the burned-up town and felt that they could never let this happen here again. But another year would pass before Carlene realized she had crossed over into a new sort of reality. They would all meet this sort of fire again, and they would all have to learn how to protect themselves, how to recover, and how to help one another through.
So many stories about disaster close the curtain before you see what happens afterward. Especially in this era of catastrophe, we can always distract ourselves with the next fire, the next flood, the next tragedy—ride the crest of the drama without asking what happens in the years after a place burns. But it seemed especially important to me to understand what makes it possible for people to recover in this era of more common disasters. I wanted to know what had become of the Methow communities now that the smoke was gone. So I made repeated trips there.
On the day that I visited the town of Pateros, five years after the Carlton Complex, two museums were open. The first occupies a part of city hall, a building that formerly served as a combination jail, court, police department, and fire station. In rows of dusty glass cases lay an array of various artifacts and mementos, including a series of black-and-white photographs that were like a love letter to the commercial apple growing that began here around the turn of the twentieth century—a cider-making party, well-known orchardists of the era, the irrigation pipeline bridge that brought water to the fruit trees. Mounted to a set of wooden panels was an outdated-looking painting of Paleolithic people with wooden clubs pursuing a saber-toothed cat. But I was really here for a meeting with Carlene Anders, who had become the mayor of Pateros, and when she finally found me, studying a sign about the region’s first inhabitants next to an array of what looked like cowhides, she said I had come to the wrong place. It was the second museum that told the story she wanted me to hear, and she led me out the door into the sun-drenched afternoon.
She wore a loose-fitting purple tunic over a pair of jeans, and her hair, the dark-yellow color of end-of-season grass, was pulled into a ponytail. She had robust hands, the kind you might expect to find building houses or kneading dough, and the well-defined lines in her forehead gave her a perpetual expression of earnestness. As she marched me through the tiny downtown riverfront, she recited a list of facts and figures about the town without pause. Behind us to the east, the Columbia River shone wide and pale blue, the same river Woody Guthrie exhorted to “roll on” in his famous anthem to hydropower, and there was a dam about seven miles downstream. We began to walk along the path that the Carlton Complex Fire had traveled. As I squinted into the dazzling sky to the northwest, Carlene pointed to a pair of round, squat cylinders with colored tiles decorating the sides of a golden bluff that rose above Pateros. “Those are our water towers that got burned up there.” Both had been repaired. But in the fire’s aftermath, manganese, a heavy metal, had rushed into the water supply and filled the pipes, a common trouble after wildfires loosen earth and liberate certain minerals from the soil. The problem had never really gone away. “Over the last three years we’ve been working on replacing the water system here for the city,” she explained. “It’s a $7.6 million project.”
Immediately in front of us lay the bare ground of a construction site and a partly assembled concrete wall. The city was building a new well here after its previous ones failed—and was incorporating a stage and an interpretive center into the design of the pump house.
I couldn’t observe any evidence of the wildfire. But Carlene gestured to the many things that had burned down and were now gone, as if conjuring ghosts. “It was all on fire. You used to have trees and all kinds of stuff between the railroad tracks and the highway right there.”
We walked through a parking lot and followed a sidewalk, made a stop at her office to collect some keys, then crossed the street to a retail building with a red metal roof and dark windows. It was only temporarily a museum. She and her husband owned the building, she told me, and were planning eventually to open a restaurant there called Fire and Ice, in recognition of Carlene’s history as a firefighter and ski instructor. The name was also, as her mom would point out, an inadvertent Robert Frost allusion (“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice”). When she opened the glass door and switched on the lights, we were facing a large square mirror, mounted in a white wooden frame and propped against a cloth-draped stool. Carlene grinned sheepishly as I took a photograph of our reflection. Hand-painted across the mirror were the words WELCOME TO THE SMOKE AND REFLECTIONS EXHIBIT. Stepping farther into the room, we encountered a series of room dividers covered in black cloth with displays of images mounted on them, then a table set with an array of burned and warped metal and glass. Some of the items laid out here were recognizable. A glass bottle with a curved and distended neck. A shovel end with no handle. But some had liquefied and re-formed into the sort of bizarre shapes candle wax can make when it drips. “Everything melted, all the radiators, all the cars; all the wires melted in place,” Carlene said. Then quietly, “This was my mom’s stuff.”
Above the table hung a photograph of the metal frame that once sat beneath a modular home, warped and sunken and covered in bits of ash. “This was my mom’s.” It had stood on the orchard property. “It was her retirement plan. She had rentals. She lost all of our homes except for one.” The house that remained, also at the orchard, had been equipped with woodpecker-resistant cement siding, which had also turned out to be fire-resistant. The thirty-acre orchard that her mother owned had been uninsured. “She had gotten mad,” Carlene explained. “A year and a half before, she had had welding equipment stolen, and the insurance company wouldn’t pay for the welding equipment. So she canceled her insurance. She lost the shed, the tractors, the eight picker sheds, the kitchen, everything, lost it all.” There were other similar stories throughout the community. Three-fourths of the people living in Pateros and surrounds had been uninsured or underinsured at the time of the fires. Some people had believed they were covered only to discover loopholes and exemptions in their policies.
The entire exhibit had a handmade feeling, laminated photographs pinned on black fabric. An image of a brick chimney still standing while the rest of the house it had belonged to was nothing but ash. An ATV so warped it looked like folded cloth. Some images were donated by community members, including a local photographer. Some were Carlene’s. A picture of a young woman and an older man clearing a yard full of ash beside a concrete wall. “This is my daughter. This is the house that we built when I was young. This is my husband,” she said and gestured to the image. It occurred to me that she had been reciting these same details to people for years.
“Is it hard to keep telling this story?” I asked.
“It depends. People told me that you had to tell the story eight to twelve times before you start to lose that emotional piece of it, and so telling a story probably helps.”
Plus there were reasons to keep reminding people. As she and I walked through the exhibit together, she worried aloud about the complacency that can set in even after a crisis. “The problem is, five years down the road, are we still going to remember?” she reflected. “And it’s going to get worse. There’s no way it’s not going to get worse. So we better be prepared, better do as much as we can while we can.”
“I’m scared to death for the other side of the mountains.” She looked at me meaningfully. “The earthquake when it comes will be tough on everybody too, be lots of fire then.” The west side of the mountains, my side, had active and dangerous tectonic fault lines, and while the forests there were damper, they could certainly burn if warmer weather dried them out enough.
“Where do you live? Just saying,” she said.
I mumbled something about my house in Seattle, realizing that I had no particularly solid plan for any of the situations she was alluding to.
How do you write a story about this era of disaster that doesn’t end in tragedy? How do you make a life and a community in a recurring set of crises and still offer any kind of stability or safety? I sensed it would require some combination of preparedness and pragmatism—the kind I had seen from Carlene Anders—and imagination, the variety Susan seemed to cultivate in her work.
So on a different day, an autumn morning of overcast and diffuse light, I went to visit Susan up-valley from Pateros. I wanted a dose of her optimism. And she volunteered to take me in her silver pickup truck to see the scars of the Rising Eagle Fire, the one that had burned through her friend’s neighborhood.
As we turned off the highway, she pointed to the weedy roadside. The couple whose broken-down trailer had sparked the fire had later been sued by nine insurance companies that were trying to recoup money from property loss. The claims were ultimately dismissed. “It was the most ridiculous thing because, for one, the state had obviously not maintained the weeds along the highway,” she said. “And you could blame all of us for this exceedingly dry summer. We’re all complicit in climate change.” (Arguably some, I thought, like the CEOs of top carbon-emitting companies, carried far more blame than an elderly couple with a rickety trailer, but that was a subject for another time.)
We drove into the Rising Eagle neighborhood and trudged around a bare lot where a house had once been. By then, the ash and debris and mess had been cleaned up so thoroughly—no more walls, no old windows, no scarred pipes or other debris from human habitation—that it seemed as if the house had been sucked straight into the heavens. But a band of gravel remained and some concrete blocks, probably marking the edges of what used to be landscaping, along with a wilted lilac bush. Beside these, in the sparse shadows of charred pine trees, the land itself was reclaiming the space. Thick and bushy willows, serviceberry bushes, and buckbrush (often called by its Latin name, Ceanothus) had sprouted, their branches gnawed short by local mule deer. Across the ground lay the feathery leaves of yarrow, a wildflower and old herbal treatment for toothaches, and the golden bunches of a native wheatgrass. Aspen seedlings lifted delicate branches, their pendulous leaves winking in the breeze. “They do such an amazing job resprouting after fire,” mused Susan.
“Everything’s so dry,” I said.
“I know, everything’s pretty dry,” she echoed a little wistfully. “This summer, I felt like we were going to get a break because we had such a late spring and a lot of snowpack. But one of the things that people have been talking about is that now it’s not just about an early snow melt that kind of makes for a long fire season. It’s also these kind of punctuated hot, dry periods. We just had an exceptionally dry and hot series of days.”
We drove up the hill, where an abandoned plastic newspaper delivery box still hung from a tree. A local wildlife biologist had converted it into a birdhouse by mounting a wooden board to the front with a round hole drilled in the center.
Then we headed to the crest, where two brand-new houses stood, western and modern with siding roughly the same color as pine bark. Their wide, shining windows gazed out at the river and the leather-colored hills—and also at the burned snags of dead ponderosa pines jabbing into the sky.
The whole tableau before us fascinated Susan, she said. Perhaps this was the new aesthetic, the beauty of fire, an implied acceptance that one lived in a volatile sort of world. “These snags, you know, are going to get more beautiful over time,” she remarked, “because they’ll become silver and drop their fine branches. So there is a certain beauty to them if you can embrace it.”
Moreover, the burn scar would protect the residents. It was the same phenomenon Susan had studied after the Tripod Fire. Anything in the path of an old fire was less likely to burn again for a while.
But not everyone could afford to construct a fancy home like this. Not everyone could rebuild or recoup quickly. Not everyone could easily move past trauma.
“I came out the other side of these fires still feeling like one of the primary answers for our community is to embrace fire, not try to put a wall up and avoid all fires in the future. And that’s such a difficult message,” she told me. But the lessons of ecology told her that home and ecosystem would always be intertwined. Fire was as much part of this place as the houses and towns, the trees and sagebrush. To make a home and persevere in this warmer and unrulier era, people would need to make more space for flames.
But to do this would require unflinching realism and tremendous effort and creativity.
And there would be plot twists and, tragically, more disasters down the road.