home, v. to proceed or direct attention toward an objective. (Example: We’re homing in on a solution.)
The story that takes place after an acute disaster such as a fire or a flood is generally unglamorous, especially when compared with the adrenaline-charged heroics of fighting fires or rescuing people who are trapped or injured.
But sifting through all of the wreckage, putting things back in order where possible, salvaging what still has value—these tasks are no less important, and in some ways require even greater mettle.
Immediately after the Carlton Complex Fire burned through the town in the summer of 2014, the people of Pateros, Washington, began en masse cleaning up trash and debris.
There were yards full of ash and rubble to dig up; truckloads of melted and warped scrap metal to haul away; concrete foundations to be excavated or buried on-site; burned trees and brush to remove. It was like an archaeological dig in reverse. Could you take a major catastrophe and hide it, bury it, haul it away, so that people could move on with their lives?
Meanwhile, a stream of donations from around the country started piling up in the Pateros fire hall, the city hall, and the school, and someone had to decide what to do with all of it. Some things were useful—water, food, clothing in good condition. But many were not—broken appliances, old bird cages, tattered swimsuits, a rusted push mower. There were enough items to fill multiple warehouses. They required perpetual sorting and reorganizing.
Carlene Anders, the firefighter, threw all her energy into helping manage this messy recovery process. You could call it a karmic adjustment or a return of generosity. Twelve years previously, she’d given birth to a premature baby boy, twenty-four weeks’ gestation, one pound and ten ounces, and Carlene had never forgotten how many people from Pateros had stepped in—retired teachers who had run her daycare business while she spent 128 days in a hospital in Seattle, people who donated money and gas cards and phone cards. Her son had since grown into a healthy adolescent, and she felt she owed a debt to this community.
Disaster recovery is its own professional field—a mix of science and social work with a generous dollop of bureaucracy thrown in. Carlene had known nothing about it, then felt as if she was cramming an entire university course of study in the subject into just a few months—every day scouring websites, making phone calls to navigate the convoluted processes of applying for government aid and philanthropy, getting access to heavy equipment, dealing with cleanup of wastes both hazardous and benign, and addressing miscellaneous government requirements. It’s useful to have what’s called a “long-term recovery group,” a committee of people who know what’s going on, who can take in resources and donations and distribute them to the right people. Carlene helped set up the Pateros-Brewster Long Term Recovery Organization and worked without pay until she couldn’t any longer. In September, the group’s board cobbled together a salary for her, and she took the helm as its executive director. Just a few months later, she took charge of the organization leading the entire countywide effort, the Carlton Complex Long Term Recovery Group (funded initially by an anonymous donation from a local apple business).
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency eventually supplied money to rebuild public buildings and infrastructure in communities damaged by the Carlton Complex Fire, including the Pateros water towers, but refused any aid to private property owners, a decision that frustrated many in the valley, including Carlene. FEMA did, however, assist in another way: by calling in the legions of disaster volunteers. Many of the major Christian churches have disaster response wings, some of them vast and well organized. Such volunteers are not supposed to preach, only help. “Disaster chaplains,” clergy and some laypeople trained to support survivors of disasters, usually commit to a code of ethics that includes this fundamental rule: “Do not proselytize.” A FEMA employee began calling Carlene to ask if she wanted to invite various relief groups to town. By the fall of 2014, teams of volunteers from Christian Aid Ministries, Western Anabaptist Mission Services, and Mennonite Disaster Service had arrived.
Carlene’s new organization housed some of the volunteers at Alta Lake—a tiny resort area two miles south of downtown Pateros that had been ravaged by the fires. They stayed in a motel that had survived the disaster, but the keys, in a now-torched outbuilding that had served as a clubhouse, had all melted. So we had to crawl through windows and open the doors. Then the volunteers were dispatched all over the area—to help with cleaning up, clearing debris, and providing emotional support.
In Pateros and Brewster, disaster chaplains helped people sift through ash so they could try to recover lost belongings, valuable jewelry, ceramics. A group of retired veterans and firefighters made house calls and cleared debris. They were fast and furious, Carlene recalled. With Carlene’s mom, they buried the rubble from the family home, though she insisted they leave the foundation exposed.
It was a massive endeavor. Some locals set up entire new business ventures based on the cleanup effort. For instance, a Pateros mom of a teenager started a scrapping business at the behest of her son, to help pay to rebuild her own home.
Meanwhile, there was the question of where to house people who’d been displaced. A third of the firefighters in the Pateros fire department had lost their own homes while they were out trying to contain the Carlton Complex and save the homes of others. Some children in every grade of the school district were suddenly houseless. People camped around the city in tents and trailers. The Pateros mayor stepped down shortly after the fire because her house had burned down, along with her mother’s and uncle’s homes—and she needed time to support her family.
Carlene let two wildfire survivors stay at her late grandparents’ place in Brewster. Meanwhile, the Recovery Group brought in dozens of trailers, many donated, some acquired on Facebook, and asked people with vacation homes to house the displaced. In the fallow months of winter, a local orchard let wildfire survivors move into its farmworker housing.
The first person to rebuild was a retired teacher named Sue. She was one of the lucky few to make a successful insurance claim, and she hired contractors to put up a new house where her old one had been, near the golf course at Alta Lake. The volunteers still helped clear her yard. One photo of the community’s work on this house would become iconic: Carlene and other community members and volunteers raising Sue’s first wall with their hands. In the end, it was a modest house, tan and brown with an ample garage—done by Christmas. The symbol of things to come, Carlene hoped.
As the piles of ash and debris shrank and disappeared from the landscape, she and her collaborators—including a large team of philanthropists she’d assembled from around the area—decided they would build more houses for those who had little to no means to recover on their own. And there were many in this category. The people of Okanogan County—wherein sit Pateros, Twisp, Winthrop, parts of the Colville Reservation, and a scattering of other small communities in a landscape roughly the size of Connecticut—have one-third smaller household incomes on average than other people in Washington state as a whole and are nearly 70 percent more likely to live in poverty. People who had already been bearing this kind of strain had suddenly also lost residences, material possessions, and life savings in the fire.
First the Recovery Group tried buying manufactured homes for people—and in one case, experimented with a yurt. But eventually they decided they wanted to give people something better than that, real houses that might outlast the next disaster—with fire-resistant siding and metal roofs, which are not generally combustible and are unlikely to trap embers that could ignite other parts of the house. The Recovery Group borrowed house blueprints from Mennonite Disaster Service, but the designs were originally intended for developing world countries, mostly in warmer latitudes. They had to make revisions so the roofs could handle snow and the walls could contain a bigger load of insulation.
Anyone who got a house would have to meet certain criteria. They needed to own the land and agree to live there for five years (barring extraordinary circumstances). They had to learn fire-readiness, a series of strategies for preventing a house from catching fire and making it easier for firefighters to access the property if flames did arrive.
By the spring, the Recovery Group had chosen eleven households and begun raising the millions of dollars required. The first home would go to a Latinx family who had been in Pateros for twenty years. The husband worked at the school district, and the kids attended the high school. In April 2015, troops of volunteers laid the first four foundations. They started drywalling in the summer.
At this point, Carlene believed she was charting a path out of the previous summer’s devastation. It had been a once-in-a-lifetime disaster, she thought, but her community would survive and rebuild, even if it took years.
But the weather of 2015 was as strange as the previous year. The winter brought normal precipitation but too-warm temperatures—causing a “snow drought” in the mountains that starved the streams of meltwater in the spring. A heat wave hit the Pacific Northwest in June, and a few places clocked record, over-100-degree temperatures that month. Another dry summer followed.
In mid-August, thirteen months after the wildfire that assailed downtown Pateros, Carlene was attending an emergency response and recovery class led by FEMA on the west side of the Cascade Mountains, twenty miles outside Seattle. There were four dozen emergency managers in one room, and suddenly the air filled with the chirruping and buzzing of cell phones and pagers. A group of fires had lit and were spreading around Omak, a town about thirty miles north of Pateros. Another called the North Star had ignited on the Colville Reservation, and four blazes were burning in Chelan County, to the southwest of Okanogan County. The evacuations had already begun.
The class came to an abrupt halt, and its attendees hit the road.
Carlene returned home that afternoon. Over the next few days, she helped patrol the area in a small fire engine called a rescue rig, equipped with Jaws of Life for prying people out of cars. She was ready for any emergency that might come to the area. Pateros was spared this time, but up the valley, west of Twisp, a tree branch was tossed against a sagging power line by the wind, igniting another wildfire, called the Twisp River Fire.
Carlene had the emergency radio on, and in the afternoon, she heard a caller describing a dire situation in Twisp: a crew was entrapped in the fire, and someone needed to be helicoptered out. She panicked. Her daughter had been out in a fire engine in that part of the county. I couldn’t get ahold of my daughter. And that was her region, that area, Twisp River Road. And there were only two of them. And I thought, “Oh my God, that’s them!” Carlene drove out of town, still suited up in her firefighting gear but in her own SUV. Heading northwest, she passed a long line of cars—a parade of evacuees moving in the opposite direction. They were all going to Pateros. She called the disaster chaplains from the road. Please call everybody you can, she begged. We need help right now in Pateros!
Just before the tiny town of Carlton, she spotted the car of a local newspaper reporter, flagged her down, and asked her what had actually happened. A fire engine—not her daughter’s—had lost visibility in the blackness of the smoke and teetered off the road. Three firefighters perished, and Carlene knew one of the dead. He was twenty years old. She had taught him to ski when he was a little boy and had fought fires with his father.
The people of the Methow Valley would grieve this loss for years, but for now, there was an immediate crisis to manage. Five days after the Twisp River accident, news reports said the Okanogan Complex topped the size of the 2014 megafire and called it the largest single fire in the state’s history. (Officially, not all the blazes merged. One, called the Tunk Block Fire on the Colville Reservation, remained separate, which disqualified the complex of fires from breaking a new size record.) In the end, 120 more homes were lost.
The survivors and the emergency responders turned to Carlene and her group. I remember everybody looking at us and going, well, you’re going to take this on, right? And there was a point where I literally got physically sick and thought, can I do this? Can I live through this? And I thought, well, who else could actually do this? We have to take this on. So then I stopped panicking a little bit, and said, okay, how do we strategize to make this work? She and her community had learned a great deal over the past year. They’d figured out how to raise their town up from the wreckage, bit by bit. They had learned much about how to recover from disaster—and this was knowledge many others would need in this precarious era. They could teach them.
You could scratch a story of hope out of the ash. It existed in what could grow back and what could be learned—on the land and among the people.
The 2014 wildfire season shook Susan Prichard, the forest ecologist, to her core. It’s kind of unfair to compare it to a war-torn country, because none of us knows what that feels like. But there’s a similar trauma in living through these wildfires, she reflected later.
Still, she felt that there was a lesson in all of this fire—a way to live more safely that might be found on the landscape itself. Fire was part of this place, and in the twenty-first century, it would have stronger presence and forcefulness. To look after home here, Susan believed people would also have to take care of forests and sage lands—they would need to accept and attend to fire.
After the Carlton Complex struck, she kept her eyes on the new burn scars. One September day, a month after those fires had been fully contained, Susan led a tour with a group of fire scientists, some of her research collaborators, to Loup Loup Pass, up a highway that was blackened on both sides, down a Forest Service road, and over a ridgetop. The aftereffects of the fire there had been mixed. There were some places where trees were scorched and dead. Other parts of the forest had only a charred underbelly—especially where the underbrush and trees had been cleared either with heavy machinery or with prescribed burning. Her colleagues were a loquacious group—pointing and cracking the occasional joke. But when they rounded a corner, they caught a view over the edge of a canyon, and everyone went silent. We got out of the cars. It kind of startled me how quiet everyone became for so long, a good five minutes. And what you see is just ponderosa pine completely obliterated by fire. You look over this vast area, thousands and thousands of acres, really steep drainage. You’re seeing into this whole watershed, and there’s not a single tree living in it.
With its heavy, corky, vanilla-scented bark, ponderosa pine is more fire tolerant than many trees. Arguably, the tree deliberately courts a certain kind of fire, a strategy that it has evolved to live in dry places; it drops its needles in layers to create a place where flames can run. But the Carlton Complex had been especially hot and fast here, and the trees hadn’t survived. On top of this, the rains that had fallen after the area burned had also scoured out all of the topsoil. The landscape was almost nude. It would be a lifetime before this place regrew, and what would it become in a changing climate? Perhaps not another pine forest anytime soon—there were no trees, no cones, no source of new pine seeds nearby. It might reemerge as something else: some future state and perhaps some different ecosystem than what had been here before.
What was the lesson here? Would this be the fate of the pine forests of the inland Northwest? Or could the damage be lessened and tempered if people changed their relationship with fire?
To answer this, Susan and her colleagues had decided to develop a series of computer simulations of the 2006 Tripod Fire, her first up-close megafire. Because the Tripod had been confined mostly to forest and wilderness, it made for a simpler experiment than the Carlton Complex. They would create a series of “what-ifs,” as Susan called them—building alternative worlds in which fire was treated differently. Based on detailed maps of terrain, wind, climate conditions, and habitat, how would a fire like the Tripod have burned if people had allowed other flames into that ecosystem in the past seventy years, as Indigenous communities once had generations before them? What if people had allowed every lightning strike and natural fire start to take its own course? Alternatively, how would the Tripod have burned if firefighters had successfully put out every previous blaze over the same period of time? It would take a few years to develop this model, but Susan and her collaborators expected to see two patterns emerge in the simulations. One would be a collage forest in which the Tripod Fire never got enough fuel to damage the entire landscape but burned in little patches, some quieter and some more intense. The other would be a “boom and bust” pattern, in which a forest dense with trees and growth and thick understory fueled a fire so hot that it ripped across nearly the entire area.
This was not just hypothetical. You could also find small examples, like test cases.
When the 2015 fires burned—they lay on the other side of the county from Susan’s home—she hadn’t incorporated them into her research.
But there were other people across the mountains thinking similar thoughts about fire and how to live with it.
When the Okanogan Complex Fire first swept through the area, another scientist and practitioner watched a sort of small ad hoc experiment unfold next to his old house. Dale Swedberg worked thirty miles from Winthrop as the crow flies, or about ninety miles if driving over and beyond the mountain pass full of scorched ponderosas—at a place called the Sinlahekin Wildlife Area, a fourteen-thousand-acre strip of pine forest and lake and sagebrush.
Dale hadn’t thought much about fire when he first took a job overseeing the Sinlahekin nearly twenty years previously, in 1997. Fire had been a neglected subject when he got both of his degrees in wildlife biology. So when he moved with his family into a drafty farmhouse at the center of the wildlife area that served as the supervisor’s residence, he didn’t consider how much fire would be part of both his workplace and his home place.
Then in 2000, he drove out to see the aftermath of the Rocky Hull Fire, which had burned down more than thirty houses and scorched over nine thousand acres in an area about twenty-four miles northeast of the Sinlahekin. He hiked through part of the burn scar that ran through federal land, and at first glance, it seemed like just a scene of destruction. He noticed how the needles had been toasted in a horizontal direction by flame and wind. He came across the grisly sight of a buck deer that had burned to death and a bighorn sheep with badly scorched feet, and he could hear hordes of insects chewing on the dead trees. But he kept returning, watching what happened and what regrew. He observed how quickly the land greened back up. Even plants like bitterbrush—a favorite food of deer and, according to some common wisdom, a species that didn’t like fire—sprouted right back. To Dale, all of this was an eye-opener, and it led him to question the role of fire in the wildlife refuge he was then overseeing.
He began reading books about fire—smokejumping, firefighting, fire history. In one volume, he ran across an anecdote from an anthropologist who had driven through the Methow Valley with Indigenous elders from the region, the Methow people (who became one of the twelve bands of the Colville Reservation after their traditional lands were taken in the nineteenth century). “When we had gone through about half the valley, a woman started to cry,” the scholar recounted. “I thought it was because she was homesick, but, after a time, she sobbed, ‘When my people lived here, we took good care of all this land. We burned it over every fall to make it like a park. Now it’s a jungle.’”
I had come to the realization that I was managing a fire-dependent ecosystem, Dale reflected later. The longer he worked at the wildlife area, the more evidence he gathered, eventually collaborating with a local fire ecologist who knew how to find evidence of past fires by taking samples from the centers of living trees and from dead stumps and logs. This researcher studied the rings of wood in the Sinlahekin’s trees and the fire scars within them, and over the next several years, he and his team were able to reconstruct four centuries of fire history in the Sinlahekin Valley forests. This tree-ring exploration revealed that past fires were frequent here; any one spot might have burned roughly every five to fifteen years. The evidence corroborated Dale’s intuitive understanding. After years of gathering data, he and his collaborators inferred that humans set many of the fires, since lightning would probably not have come often enough to explain them.
At the same time that this research was unfolding, Dale decided he would start conducting prescribed burns inside the wildlife area. In 2005, he undertook the first. He had to leap over various bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles, especially those imposed by the state. It was a battle royale, he recalled later. But that fall the state provided a fire crew to burn an area near a lake. It was the first prescribed fire of many that were done under Dale’s watch.
Over the years that followed, prescribed burning in the Sinlahekin was an ongoing process of trial and error—some fires too smoky, some too hot. In 2010, Dale hired a “burn boss,” a longtime fire manager from the Methow Valley named Tom Leuschen, who knew fire like an art form.
Prescribed fire is sometimes called controlled fire, and a skilled burn boss knows how to both tame and manage flames and smoke. First, the burn crew draws a line around where the fire will run in order to confine the flames—either by wetting the ground or by digging down to mineral soil, often by hand with a tool called a Rhino, which resembles a curved hoe. Then they use another tool called a drip torch—which looks a bit like a gasoline can but with drops of pre-lit fuel emerging from its tip—to dribble bits of fire in a line across the landscape. The flames are lit in small strips, usually opposite from the direction that the fire would want to travel. In other words, if a crew is burning on a slope, they would terrace the fire down the hill, since fire likes to travel up. They would burn against and not with the wind. An expert burn boss would study the terrain, the fuel, and the weather, and be able to turn the flame lengths and the heat up and down by adjusting the size and orientation of the strips. The flames can even be directed, to some degree, to protect certain parts of the land, avoid an old standing tree snag that woodpeckers like, clear away parasitic mistletoe, and kill off weeds.
As Dale and Tom invited more fire back into this place, the land responded in miraculous ways. After fire, buckbrush—another favorite of deer, with glossy green leaves like wintergreen and puffy white flowers—sprouted in profusion. (Its seeds, Dale learned, could live underground for two hundred years and then resprout after a fire.) Elderberry trees, gangly and shrubby with clusters of bright oval leaves and dark purple berries, regrew with gusto. They get burned down to just nothing but a skeleton. And I recall one that was burned, I believe in April; I took a picture of it in May when there were just green sprouts around the base where the original tree was. And by October it was over ten feet tall! This alongside flowering currant bushes, cottonwoods, willow, a shrub with cloudlike flowers called ocean spray—all leafing out profusely after being scorched. Basin wild rye, a plant that germinates more heartily when exposed to woodsmoke, spread out, grew tall, and turned golden in the fall. Ponderosa pines so enjoyed a good fire that they developed stretch marks, as Dale called them—new growth splitting apart the old scorch marks and healthy bark appearing in between.
He called these fire effects, the stunning ecological responses that you could get only by allowing flames onto the land. Dale began to think of the land as thirsty for fire—a provocative if paradoxical metaphor. If fire were a kind of sustenance, then the land craved it, almost as much as it craved water in a drought. He thought of an uncontrolled fire—especially a wildfire that was so severe that it couldn’t be tamed by firefighters—as a feral fire, a fire gone rogue. By failing to set prescribed fires, people had allowed feral fires to take control across the West.
By the time of the Carlton Complex Fire, Dale and his wife had moved out of the wildlife refuge headquarters and into a house about twenty miles away in a little town called Tonasket, along the Okanogan River. He had been promoted to a new role; he still managed the Sinlahekin, and he added three other refuges to his docket: one near Winthrop called the Methow Wildlife Area; another just south of Sinlahekin, called Scotch Creek, where he was also running prescribed burns; and a third, Sherman Creek, just above the Columbia River. He had planned a prescribed burn for the Methow Wildlife Area also, but the Carlton Complex roasted the place before he could organize it.
Afterward, Dale visited the site and also drove the stretch of highway over Loup Loup Pass, near the place Susan had brought the scientists. He was pretty amazed by how hot the fire had burned, how it had killed a lot of the big trees. It was the first time that the impact of climate really came to roost with Dale. Climate was starting to drive the fires to make a megafire, and it was in the backyard, not just in the distance. But this only reinforced what Dale already felt. We need more prescribed fire.
The true test of his prescribed-burning efforts came the next year when part of the Okanogan Complex burned into the Sinlahekin.
He had driven out of town on the day when the Lime Belt Fire, one of the five that would merge into the complex, began. By the time he came back, fire was traveling across a nearby mountain, over the crest and back toward the Sinlahekin from the south.
He spent the next few days driving back and forth between the Scotch Creek and Sinlahekin Wildlife Areas, talking with firefighting crews and sometimes joining them in battling fire. Around Blue Lake, a foot-shaped body of water at the center of the refuge, he watched the fire make runs, embers spotting and tumbling down the dry, grassy slopes into the draws and woods, then lighting flames that ran back up in a sort of zigzag pattern. He watched an osprey glide smoothly through the smoke, seemingly unfazed.
He and Tom Leuschen had done a series of prescribed burns all around the bottom edges of this lake, and here was a sort of proving ground. The firefighting crews were trying to light what were called “back burns,” setting deliberate fires in the path of the advancing feral fire, so that the two would meet in the middle, eat up all the fuel, and hopefully peter out. When the fire came through it was really pushing hard. It was coming up over the slope, and they were trying to burn out the area that we had thinned and prescribed burned. And they couldn’t get a fire going in there for beans. Neither the feral fire nor the back burn had enough fuel to sustain themselves here. The old prescribed fires had already protected the forest around the lake.
Farther north, the crews made a fire line at the top of one ridge, digging down to the mineral soil with a bulldozer to create a spot where they could safely try to defend the area. They back-burned in strips from the top of the ridge down. A back burn is different from a prescribed fire in that it is sometimes less artful, less focused on ecological goals, and more concerned with the immediate aim of quelling an existing wildfire. In the end, they burned from the base of the ridge upward in one hot, fast whoosh of fire. Afterward, Dale was exasperated: they had worked so quickly that they had killed many of the trees.
Up the road was yet another area that had seen prescribed fire twice in the past decade—in 2005 and 2014. Dale knew where the edge of that burn was, a straight line the crew had dug in the ground by hand. And the Lime Belt Fire seemed also to know that a barrier lay here. It would burn up to the line and stop. Or it would cross the line, but then kind of meandered, skunked around, and really didn’t do anything. The side that had never seen prescribed fire turned black, completely, utterly black, burned really hot. And the other side looked as if it had barely been touched. Dale watched and took videos. I was getting pretty cocky at that point. I started calling it the I-Told-You-So Fire.
August 18, 2015, was Dale and his wife’s thirty-ninth anniversary, but he fought fire that day and stayed the night at a bunkhouse in the Scotch Creek Wildlife Area. The following day, Tonasket, the town where Dale and his wife were living, was evacuated and its residents sent to Brewster. But Dale stayed on and was up the next morning for more firefighting and eating smoke. In places, the flames were as tall as thirty feet. On August 19, Tom Leuschen joined Dale at the refuge to help, but he left in the afternoon after he heard that his wife had to evacuate their home because of threat of the Twisp River Fire. (Tom had also known one of the firefighters killed there since he was a baby, the same kid whom Carlene had taught how to ski. He had known the parents before they were married. That really had him shook up, Dale remembered.)
Eventually, a Boeing 737 “water bomber” plane, flown by the state’s firefighting division, passed overhead and dropped flame retardant on the refuge.
North of Blue Lake, Dale, four other people, and two fire engines beat back the fire and stopped it from advancing farther north. It had burned about seven thousand acres, nearly half of the Sinlahekin.
In a report issued after Dale’s 2016 retirement, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife would describe this fire as mixed, “with extreme fire behavior in some locations and slow creeping in others.” But the area recovered quickly. The land grew back green, and the grasses and wildflowers flourished, just as they had before. Prescribed burning had “aided in slowing the fire and in some cases stopping the fire completely,” the report went on.
But Dale and the crew’s efforts were, of course, not the end of the Okanogan Complex.
Outside the wildlife refuge, the fire was not an experiment but a terror.
People need to accept the fact that no fire is not an option. Period, Dale said afterward. But fear and loss can be hard to reason with.
The acceptance of disastrous fires and other such crises is hard, I think, for a society like ours that has such trouble relinquishing control.
The denial of climate change has always been partly fed by an unwillingness to let go: if you acknowledge that the atmosphere has limits, then you must also place limits on human desires. Similarly, if you acknowledge that fire cannot always be quenched, then you also have to accept there will be losses. Sometimes the things you hold dear may even burn down. Sometimes you will have to reconstruct who you are, what you want, how you imagine the future will play out. And however much you might want to believe that individualism and pluckiness will save a person from disaster, any recovery will always be a collective process. You can’t just resurrect a single house stranded in the center of a burned, drowned, or ruined town. You have to rebuild the community, or you will never have enough to sustain people in the long term.
On a couple of days in late October 2019 I got a small glimpse of what it means to recover when Carlene Anders invited me to a “donation for donation sale” that she and her colleagues had organized in Omak—a town of about five thousand people at the center of Okanogan County, south of Tonasket, east of Loup Loup Pass. Here in 2015, the Okanogan Complex (144,000 acres) and the Tunk Block (about 166,000 acres)—had surrounded the community, burning through both forest and sagebrush. Here Carlene’s group—which was renamed the Okanogan County Long Term Recovery Group to encompass the entire five-thousand-square-mile area—had jumped in again and helped people get back on their feet, especially those who had lost their homes in this second round of disasters. Four years later, the Recovery Group was offering up many of the unclaimed items that had been donated and asking for small monetary contributions in return, in any amount. It was like a combination pop-up thrift store, fundraiser, and giveaway. And the event gave me an excuse to explore the area.
Omak’s most famous landmark is the rodeo, an arena called the Stampede. Its grounds stand at the western edge of the Colville Reservation, a stretch of tribal land twice as large as the state of Rhode Island, made of mountain and range and pine forest.
And in every direction around Omak, the dry hills rise up. Forest alternates with a scrubby, shrubby landscape that some would call high or “cold” desert. But more precisely it is sagebrush-steppe—covered with tough but fragrant sage, along with bitterbrush, sumac that turns a deep red in the fall, and dry golden grass. Along the roadsides you can spot clusters of aspens with pendulous leaves that turn golden in autumn and, along the creek beds, lush elderberry, cottonwoods, alder, birch, and willow.
Omak was vividly sunny that weekend, as it often is, with a brisk wind huffing over the hills and through the streets. I wandered much of the place on foot, traipsing through the tiny downtown, past a movie theater with an old triangular marquee announcing FRESH POPCORN TO GO, a furniture gallery, a store that sold sewing machines, a tavern, an indoor nursery full of tropical plants, and a combined Mexican and Chinese restaurant. On Main Street, I noted that the natural foods store bore an image of the town’s founder on one pink stucco wall—a surveyor originally from Illinois, photographed in a cowboy hat and suspenders with his two children. It was almost Halloween, and when I walked the pathway around the rodeo grounds, a group of teenagers, outfitted as zombies with a combination of white and blood-colored makeup on their faces, asked amiably if they could eat my brain.
The donation sale was in an unassuming green shed on a street corner in a residential neighborhood. Inside were tables stacked with old pots and pans, fuzzy hand-crocheted blankets, piles of bakeware, decades-old cookbooks full of casserole recipes. Carlene was not in attendance, but two of her staff were there: Jessica and Renae, who were officially “disaster case managers” but seemed to do anything required—sorting boxes of donated goods, managing accounts, overseeing volunteers, lending a sympathetic ear, and more generally, helping those who had lost their homes to a wildfire get what they needed to reassemble their lives. Jessica told me that whenever she met a wildfire survivor, she would say, “I’m really sorry for your loss,” acknowledgment that to lose roots and a home and all of the artifacts of your life was not so different from losing a loved one. All grief could be disorienting and burdensome and tormenting in the same ways.
Meanwhile, Renae enthusiastically sorted piles of donated flatware and arrayed them across some of the blankets. She told me she had nearly lost her own place in 2014. She and her partner were then in their thirties but had lived off the grid in a solar-powered house in a neighborhood full of retirees. The woodpiles around her house had caught fire, and the chicken coop had burned down (though the chickens had escaped and managed to survive). But she and her partner had defended the place by wetting the perimeter with a sprinkler system—and with luck.
As locals trickled in, the two women introduced me to some of them. Many of those who had lost their homes lived in the hills above the town, the hills that had burned. One woman had lost her house of forty-some years and only just moved back to the property a year ago, after the Recovery Group helped her rebuild. A man told me he had seen the fire coming toward his house, smoke rolling in dark and thick, and had to flee far down a dirt road to escape. When he and his wife came back, nearly everything his family owned was gone—the house, their trucks, the trees that had shaded them.
But what I sensed from these conversations, even more than grief, was gratitude. “It was kind of hard to believe,” Rob Stafford said of the new house that the Recovery Group had built for him and his two sons.
He lived on the Colville Reservation, which had suffered damage in the 2015 Tunk Block Fire. A dozen houses burned on tribal land, several along a single road that sloped down from the highway. Rob’s was one.
Rob said he would be honored if I would visit his new place and hear his story. So the day after the donation sale, I drove out of Omak, past the rodeo grounds, and up a highway onto tribal land to visit Rob’s rebuilt house.
This new house was not on the same road as the old one, but on a turnoff into a neighborhood called Bigfoot, down a crooked drive that felt more like a walking path than a residential street, woodsy, tall-treed, unscorched by the last round of fires. After I found the place, Rob invited me to sit on his back porch overlooking the pine-filled woods and drink tea. He leaned back in the sun with his arms folded and gestured down the hill.
“I just put a sweat lodge down here. You can just see the ribs of it right there.” Under the trees below us, a series of cut red-osier dogwood branches were bent into a dome shape and tied together.
Rob was not a tribal member but a “descendant,” he told me—connected to one of the Colville bands on his mother’s and grandmother’s side. “I grew up here, and then I spent eighteen years over on the Spokane reservation.” His son and the son’s mom belonged to Colville, and the land we sat on was officially part of the tribe’s “trust land,” managed by Colville and held by the federal government.
“I was an outlaw for several years,” he volunteered. I sensed he had a longer story than the one I would get to hear on this visit. He mentioned that he had struggled with addiction but now was clean and worked at a local mental health treatment center. He had navigated more than one kind of recovery in his life.
“I was diagnosed with PTSD because of the loss” from the fire, he explained. “And it wasn’t the loss of material things. But it was the loss of seeing what my kids had to go through.” His sons, the two who lived with him, had been twenty-one and eight years old at the time of the Tunk Block Fire. “We had birthdays; we had Thanksgivings. And then my older daughter would come over. We had Christmases. We had sweathouses. And we had peyote meetings. And we had rock and roll jam sessions there, because I had a big studio, which I lost everything out of, too.
“And so for a long time, I had nightmares of the fire creeping over the hill.” The day before the fire burned his house down, Rob was staying in Omak with his fiancée, “and I was calling different people up here on how far the fire was going.” He drove up in a little white sedan to evacuate his pets and salvage a few belongings. But he hadn’t realized how close or fast the fire was approaching. “What I grabbed out of my freezer was two or three gallons of huckleberries. And then I grabbed a blanket, and I grabbed some other things that were sacred to me. I grabbed a bunch of beadwork and things like that. I thought, well, I’m just going to get this stuff, just in case. And then we start driving back down the hill. Once we got to the bottom, the flames were coming like fifty feet at us. It was basically a firestorm.” Rob had to drive more than three hours out of his way on tangled, twisting mountain roads to escape the path of the fire. Later that evening, one of his relatives sent a message on Facebook to say the old house was gone.
“What really laid heavy on me was, how do we tell Aydan?” The younger son had been away visiting his mother in Western Washington during the fire. Rob knew he had to tell the kid in person, and he wanted to organize a ceremony, based on many he’d been involved in over the years as a singer of Indigenous music. “His mother came over here, and we took a drive up. Everything was still smoldering.” His son saw that other houses along the road were gone. “And he would say, ‘Well, what about our house?’ And we still didn’t say anything. And when we’re coming down to our house, everything is visible. And the look on his face when he saw it was all black and gone was—it was something that I could never explain. It was amazingly sad.” But he hugged his son, and they all cried and sang a traditional song.
It was community that made it possible for Rob and his family to put their lives back together. Rob was astonished when the Recovery Group told him he would get a new house. “I kept coming up. And it was kind of hard to believe that it was even going on. And I would come up here and meet everyone that was doing the foundation. And then I’d come up and see the people that were doing the drywall.”
In mid-2019, it was done, and there was an official house dedication. A small group of Mennonite volunteers sang a hymn in robust harmony, and a Colville tribal member led a blessing with an eagle feather and cedar-smudging. Their new life in this house was a paring down of things. “Everything is wiped clean like that. There’s a gratitude. And we do the gratitude song because of the gratitude that you feel in your heart. You know even though you’ve lost everything you’ve still got family.”
I had never been through such a loss. I couldn’t imagine how I would cope. And yet I knew that many more people, myself included, would need to find this kind of gratitude, to live in a world that might wipe you clean, erase what was familiar to you, and move forward still.
Every house the Recovery Group had built also had to be ready for the next fire. I noticed there was a buffer of clear space around Rob’s house—where the sunlight broke through the trees and where a fire engine could maneuver if a burn came through here.
You could never keep fire out of a place like this, only hope to keep it in check. “The Indigenous worldview emphasizes the dual nature, creative and destructive, of all forces,” write Indigenous scientists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake. “Fire can be a force for good as it warms homes and stimulates grasses, but it can also be immensely destructive. The role of humans is not to control nature, but to maintain a balance between these opposing forces.”
Among the Colville bands, there were other long-standing traditions about fire and the land. Later when I spoke to Colville’s natural resources director, Cody Desautel, he felt that, even in the severest of fires, the reservation had not taken as terrible a hit as it could have—because of its careful land management practices. Like other western Indigenous communities, Colville’s knowledge of fire has deep roots through generations and centuries, and today the reservation has one of the most significant prescribed fire programs in the Northwest. His gaze was focused not just on the homes that had been lost but those that had been saved. “I think we saw the potential for a Paradise-type scenario,” he said, referring to the 2018 Camp Fire that had destroyed Paradise, California. But he feels prescribed fire helped insulate the community from worse losses. The reservation has treated nearly two hundred thousand acres of forest with some combination of prescribed fire, thinning, and forest restoration. The “old-timers,” Desautel said, always tell him to burn even more. More fire, more fire, to clean the land, to renew it. A remembrance that the wild land demands things of us and sometimes takes things away from us as well.
In the early spring of 2020, just after the pandemic began, Susan Prichard and her son, Travis, burned small patches around the ponderosa pines in their own yard. It was the moment when a ring of snow first melts around the base of the trees and then expands into small islands of thaw, a time when there’s little danger of the fire escaping. The pines had laid down a thick bed of needles, like kindling. What I could see from the ponderosa pine’s perspective, Susan said, because she sometimes tried to think like a tree, is that these trees hadn’t seen fire before. Still, the trees shook off the flames. Ponderosas have bark that can separate into flat, corky chunks, like puzzle pieces, and when flames run up the trunks, the tree drops bark in little curls and flakes. Susan and Travis watched the pines fling pieces of fire. It was a show—like a fire dancer. By the end, the flames had pruned the lower buds and branches, which would soon fall to the ground. A sort of fire-cleansing.
Several months later, on the west side of the mountains in midsummer, I hiked an area called Norse Peak, east of Mount Rainier and above a ski resort. It had burned furiously three years previously and was a graveyard of firs and hemlocks, blackened and bony but still upright, looking weirdly like coatracks or old broomsticks. But at the ground level was the most stunning, almost absurdly vivid and garish display of wildflowers I’d ever seen—a spilled paint box of purple lupines, nodding heads of red and yellow columbine, explosive spiky blooms of red paintbrush, fuchsia-petaled asters. These were the “fire effects” Dale Swedberg had talked about. And the scene left me dazzled with a sense of possibility, the promise of rebirth.
By then, most of the 2020 Pacific Northwest fire season (which used to run from June to September but now can reach into May and October) had passed without major incidents. In late August, the Palmer Fire scorched nearly eighteen thousand acres in Okanogan County, not technically a megafire but exacting its own harsh tolls. That fire threatened more than eighty homes and forced several rural communities to evacuate.
Still, as summer came to a close, I thought maybe the Northwest would make it through the season, and months of pandemic and upheaval, without also bearing the tragedy of fire on a grand scale. And that would be some bit of grace. The Seattle Times alluded to the same. “But so far this year, most of Oregon’s and Washington’s 2,611 wildland blazes have stayed small,” wrote reporter Hal Bernton on August 21. Washington had even sent fifteen fire engines and personnel from more than a dozen agencies to help California, where fires raged north and south of the San Francisco Bay Area.
I had long before made plans to drive south down the coast in early September (and meet with Doria Robinson) and was keeping an eye on the California fires, hoping some of them might be under control by the time I was supposed to leave. As Labor Day approached, a local television news website published a cheerful assessment: Puget Sound, the area around Seattle, would see “plenty of summer sunshine hanging around.” But “along with the heat comes some warning too,” a Red Flag Warning signaling serious fire risk. I felt a knot of anxiety in my stomach. Even on the west side (on a hike I had just done near Mount Rainier), I had noticed that the ground was so dry that it crackled underfoot.
But when Labor Day arrived, it was the wind that set the whole chain of events in motion. In many parts of the world, there are stories of “persistent malevolent winds,” as California writer Joan Didion described them, the Santa Anas in Southern California, the mistral in southern France, the khamsin in Israel. But no one in the Pacific Northwest had ever seen winds as wicked as those of Labor Day 2020. Vicious, dragon-breath, gale-force winds, they seemed to take nearly every little fire start, every candle-size flame on the landscape and transmute it into a monster that could potentially dash across thousands of miles.
In Okanogan County, a fire called the Cold Springs started up on Sunday night on the Colville Reservation just outside of Omak, not far from the rodeo grounds. By Monday, it had mushroomed to 150,000 acres. In fierce winds, embers can travel far, and the fire spotted across the Columbia River. Here it was renamed the Pearl Hill Fire. By Tuesday, the two fires together had burned more than 330,000 acres. A young couple who had been camping abandoned their truck near the Columbia River and tried to run from the flames with their one-year-old son in tow. The parents were ultimately rescued, but the child didn’t survive.
More than a hundred miles to the southeast, a 15,000-acre fire ate up and mostly destroyed a century-old railroad town called Malden and a neighboring burg named Pine City.
Simultaneously, the normally wet west side of the region also burned. On Tuesday, a fire in the Bonney Lake area, east of of Tacoma, destroyed four houses. The next day, another fire started beside a Target store in the same community, prompting evacuations. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” a local fire chief told a public radio news crew. By the evening, nearly 300,000 acres had burned in Washington state in a single twenty-four-hour period.
In Oregon, “firefighters fought at least thirty-five large blazes … with a collective footprint nearly twice the size of New York City,” reported Reuters. “Absolutely no area in the state is free from fire,” said the fire protection chief for the Oregon Forestry Department. A fire ignited along the Clackamas River in Oregon and grew from a small thing to 138,000 acres overnight, forcing residents of the Portland suburbs to evacuate.
On Monday night, the smoke also descended on Seattle. I knew it was coming and closed all the windows, though it was stuffy and warm indoors, and switched on a tiny air purifier that was never designed to clean my entire house. On the evening of Labor Day, I dreamed that I was trapped in a campground with fire on all sides. My husband ran into the grass to find a way out but never returned. I tried to drive out, but there was nowhere to go. I hunkered in a car, as flames rolled over it. Even in a dream state, I could feel heat. And then I woke, gasping.
The next day the sky was the color of cigarette stains, faintly luminous like a dying fluorescent bulb. I could taste it a little: the flavor of tobacco, dirty water from an old pipe, rancid crackers. It was poisonous: the air pollution gauges registered astronomical levels in Seattle and many other parts of the region. I sheltered indoors and ran a box fan with a furnace filter taped to it, a makeshift means of cleaning the air. It helped but didn’t entirely remove the feeling of slow asphyxiation, the stinging in my eyes and throat. My head was clogged with thoughts of burned towns, burned houses, burned lives. I watched the news. At night, as I tried to cook dinner, I burst into tears. All I could think about were the tens of thousands of people who were losing everything—and how onerous and terrifying it was.
By the middle of that week, half a million acres in Washington and more than 800,000 in Oregon were torched. The governor of Oregon reported that five towns had been “substantially destroyed.” At least a couple of the fire starts—including the small brushfire that launched the gigantic Almeda Fire, which burned down more than 2,600 homes in Oregon, and the Cold Springs Fire—were investigated as possible arson attempts. Rumors surged on social media that the fires were the work of radicals—either the Proud Boys or antifa, depending on which seemed like the more disturbing bogeymen to a particular audience. And 911 lines and sheriffs’ offices, which were already overwhelmed with the responses to actual disasters, became further clogged with reports based on such gossip. Though most of the fire starts were human and not lightning, neither conspiracy tale was true.
There were fires along the major highways—the interstates and the Pacific Coast Highway, which wends south along what is usually a quiet, drizzly terrain of coastal cliffs and dunes and seaside towns.
In California, the August Complex Fire—formed by the merging of more than thirty separate fires in the Coast Range Mountains, grew to become the largest in that state’s history, more than one million acres by the time it was over. Three other fires burning simultaneously would be among the state’s biggest on record. National Guard helicopters airlifted two hundred campers and hikers trapped in the center of another fire in the Sierra Nevada.
The fires burned through many square miles of forest and sagebrush-steppe (an ecosystem that, like forests, has been starved of regular fire), across rangeland and grassland, through towns, jumping roads and rivers. In some places, the flames were aided by cheatgrass, an invader grass from Eurasia that grows thick and burns hot. They were driven by dry winds and heat. They were driven by climate change. They couldn’t be suppressed. You could have called them the West Coast Complex—as if one epic conflagration had raged up the edge of the continent from south to north, stretching from mountains to coast. As a combined event, this was unprecedented in the recorded history of the American West.
The smoke rose into the atmosphere and drifted a thousand miles to the west, where it entangled itself in a Pacific cyclone, spiraling across satellite images.
It spread east to Manhattan and then to Northern Europe.
The whole world was breathing the residues of our fires, the ashes of burned towns and scorched land.
The stories that sprang up online after the 2020 wildfires seemed to dwell mainly in devastation, and, certainly, Susan Prichard told me, the events had been “jaw-dropping,” even to fire scientists and climate scientists. The future foreseen in climate models—the era of megafires—was arriving even faster than anyone had imagined. (A few years previously, two scientists had run numbers and estimated that climate change alone had doubled the amount of forest burned in wildfires in roughly the past three decades.)
But everyone I met who dealt with wildfire on a regular basis seemed to know despair yet be able to live in a practical strain of optimism. Not the same as hope—not anchored to expectations about the future. But the kind where you size up a catastrophic situation, decide what is available to you, and get to work, by whatever means are available.
There were two kinds of work. One was the work of renewing the world, the fire-dependent ecosystems that people lived beside. “People have lived with fire for millennia,” Susan said, her views on the subject undimmed. “If we stop being afraid of fire and allow fire to do its work around our communities and actually engage with fire, the next fire that comes will be much more benign.” She sent me images of her simulations of the Tripod Fire. They depicted a series of hypothetical scenarios, including landscapes that had known many past burns. The images of these looked a bit like pointillistic paintings, with patches and spots representing many different kinds of forest habitat. These were more resilient, she and her colleagues had written, more likely to support habitat for animals like lynx, even after a hot fire. They represented a better world—in which forest could be preserved by people who were willing to let some fire burn.
Then there was the work of recovery and rebuilding. The fires of 2020 had been frightening, Carlene Anders* told me. A few hundred evacuees, including farmworkers from the town of Bridgeport, had fled to Pateros and Brewster. She had driven through both downtowns and surveyed the scene just afterward, families sleeping in parked cars everywhere with dogs leashed to their side mirrors, clothing wedged in their windows to approximate privacy curtains. “I thought, how do we do this? How do we do it safely in a pandemic?” She had spent six years by then developing a strategy for getting food and shelter and help to people after a fire. “Now you’ve added another layer that makes it incredibly difficult.” Community leaders couldn’t make announcements at social gatherings, for instance. It was harder to temporarily house people and give them separate air to breathe. But quickly a plan came together. In the years since the Carlton and Okanogan Complex Fires, Carlene had become a sought-after expert on disaster. She had offered guidance to survivors of the fire in Paradise, California, and, after the 2020 fires, she began advising the town of Malden on how to set up a recovery group like the one she had helped put together and run.
There are stories of grief and horror from the 2020 fires that will never really vanish. But Cody Desautel from the Colville Reservation sent me photographs of two stands of trees, both full of ponderosas, both visited by a severe blaze that season. One had seen good fire in seasons past—Desautel had burned it himself two decades previously—and another had not. The untreated patch of forest was entirely blackened and all the pines dead. But the patch that had experienced prescribed fire twenty years ago looked almost unscathed by the 2020 blaze, except for a charred snag on the ground.
Eventually, I went alone that fall to visit the blackened shores of Omak Lake, an inland saltwater body on the Colville Reservation, full of cutthroat trout—down a road that wound out of the town of Omak, through a canyon and onto a ridge. Most of this landscape was sagebrush-steppe and a bit of farmland and orchard. Both sides of the road and much of the eighteen-mile lakeshore were black as tar. In some places, nearly every bush, every branch, nearly every pine was burned. Charred stems of bitterbrush and sage prickled across the hills like oversized thorns. I saw a mother doe and two fauns dash across the roadside, searching for something edible, finding it in a still-green irrigated field. The scene shocked me. But I tried to see it differently, knowing that some things would regrow.
If we are going to make it through this unruly era intact, I think we will need to keep remembering how to renew the world.
We will also need to change our relationship with other things that burn—the ancient forests that now exist as coal and petroleum, the fuels that are driving up the planet’s temperature. But that is a story for another chapter.