Visiting the Precipice
Chris
Kleena Kleene, August 27–September 15
The weather became cooler and often dull; in our part of the world, the fire dragon had lost his sting. We could begin to relax. It would, however, be a while before life returned to normal.
The sprinkler crew had come while I had been in Williams Lake, and they had taken the hoses and bladder with them. A small runnel of mud close to the woodpile was the only indication that anything had been there. On the following Monday, August 28, we had our second mail delivery in two months. Our post person has a school-aged child and she helped carry the pile of parcels and letters to my van. Term was supposed to start on September 5, but Tatla Lake, where the school was situated, was still under evacuation alert and the schools would not open under those conditions. However, the alert was lifted as far as the school buildings on September 4.
I persuaded Jaden to accompany me down to Bella Coola to meet Katie and Dennis, and help me pick up my truck. I had been up and down the Hill several times that summer, but in my new-found freedom, it seemed as though I was looking at the road with fresh eyes. We stopped to look at views. We ran around the valley a bit enjoying the new feeling that we no longer had to rush, or sneak around, to get home.
I needed the pickup before I could go down to the Precipice—the road is too rough for my van—and that’s saying a lot as the van has been treated like a tank throughout much of its life with me. The logging road south of Anahim Lake is fine, but the tote road needs more clearance. The top of the tote road was emblazoned with flagging tape and a crude board bearing the legend: VA0778. Apparently this had been left to mark a place where crews needed to come in to block off the hose lays and fireguards.
The tote road is narrow and in previous times shrubs would have squealed against the paintwork on both sides of my little truck, but bulldozers had flattened all this and chewed up the edges. In one place a rare flat bit of ground had been bared to the earth, but roughly, like a badly ploughed field. This would have been a safe spot to store vehicles at night.
Fred has lived at the Precipice for only eight years, but he has made the tote road his own. Literally hundreds—maybe thousands—of balanced stone sculptures have been erected. Regular visitors like me look forward to the changes among this population of rock people. I have a hard enough time balancing a bit of wood on a chopping block to split it, and I am amazed at Fred’s ability to make these sculptures stand. Sadly a good many had succumbed to the heavy machinery, but a large fresh monument stood by the side of the road. Solidly built, it somehow did not have Fred’s delicacy of touch; sure enough, it bore a small sign: “to Fred from BX,” which was apparently the insignia of one of the fire crews.
The tote road was drowned in trees and, apart from the machinery marks, there was little sign of the fire along it. Just before the road made the final drop to the rancher’s hayfield, there was a view across the valley, and one could see pockets of burned forest. Beside the farm road that runs along the valley bottom, brown areas were evident, but they were kept cool and gentle so that the fire licked up the grass and twigs on the ground and did no extensive damage. Many of the standing trees were also killed, but this area should regenerate quickly. Aerial watering had been copious, and new green grass, not normally seen so late in the year, was growing abundantly.
From Fred and Monika’s house everything looked much the same as when I had last been down there. The fire had come so close—but all seemed green. From a distance, even the forest behind the greenhouse looked untouched. Smoke climbed from Telegraph Creek and the air was thickly hazy, but otherwise, very little of that devastating fire could be seen. In front of the house, Monika’s flowers were blooming and the market garden stood behind them, its long green rows of late produce ready for harvest. It was hard to realize that such a major drama had been played out around them.
The other residents of the valley, Lee and Pat Taylor, Jade, Ryan and the kids (Caleb was never a social animal) came down for lunch and we had a silly sort of celebration. Not much beyond pleasantries was said; none of us needed to elaborate. We were all feeling a little odd. It was almost as if we were suspended in a vacuum. Our enemy had been vanquished and we had nothing left to fight against anymore. Our minds and bodies could move freely, without restrictions, but we didn’t know where to go. It was an unexpected end to our ordeal. It is hard to know how to put this feeling into words.
Fred and Monika had received nothing like the hard frosts that had already razed my more sensitive plants to the ground, and I came away with an armload of greens and some fresh dairy as well.
Various flare-ups happened throughout September. The fires farther back from the highway were left to burn and we once had a spectacular sunset where all the smoke plumes billowing up from Mount Nogwon turned orange.
Jaden invited me on a hike with his friends up the Miner Lake road toward Perkins Peak. Part of the attraction was to go through some massively burned and still burning areas; I don’t doubt we should not have been there, but although we heard helicopters and heavy machinery constantly, we met no one along the way.
The fire devastation was horrific. Huge areas were blackened and smoking, through which one could now see lakes that had previously been hidden. One or two fires were still quite aggressive; where these were burning, small trees candled into flame, one by one. The country was an appalling mess. Fireguards had been punched through, some bare to the yellow dirt, but some a tangled jumble of smashed trees, all blackened when the fire had jumped them. The biggest mess was the result of one of the few misjudged back burns. That was when I had arrived the second time to water my garden and had to leave again in a hurry. Even the clear-cuts, on which very little but grass and stumps had remained, were totally black.
The others took the main road, which goes right to the treeline and beyond—there were once gold mines near the summit and the roads are favourite places for ATVers. Jaden, who knew the country well, recommended a different destination for me. I followed logging roads through older clear-cuts where young trees were already starting to grow. The fire had bypassed these, but the roads had been newly widened—this would be the route to Colwell Lake and I imagined Doug Schuk and company churning their way through there. In places, the machines had chewed up the roads, making it a bit tricky for my little truck, but I found the creek that Jaden had instructed me to look for, and parked.
I started up a steep slope and at once entered a totally different world. Not only was the forest still green, it had also never been logged. This is a very rare sight in my neighbourhood. Moreover, because it was at quite a high altitude, it was composed of incredibly twisted whitebark pines, the same tree that defined the forests around Nuk Tessli. I love this plant. It grows at upper elevations only, and has been very much a part of my mountain life.
The greatest attribute of this hike, however, was the complete lack of smoke. The wind was quite fresh and blowing in my face; the huge sprawl of smoke, flame and helicopter noise was at my back and it disappeared completely as I climbed over a ridge. The world in front of me was brilliant. It was as if I had finally wiped the dust and smears off my glasses and could now see the world without a film over the lenses. I had forgotten what a haze-free landscape looked like.
A short climb and I came into a wide-open space with low hills on either side. The top of Perkins Peak showed above the south ridge; it was already greyed with the year’s first snowfall. Only a few bonsai trees grew on this plateau; the rest was covered by scrub birch that was just on the point of turning colour. It was all so bright and fresh. My sinuses were unused to these great drafts of clean air. Small hills on either side would have given me wonderful views of the area around my home, but I didn’t bother to climb them. I knew all I would see in that direction was devastation and smoke. I would come back here again, when the fire was done.