Flames ate the new bridge like kindling, stranding the five or six families who lived year-round on McCaffery Island, a small, wooded promontory in the middle of the widest turn in the river.
The riverbank was mucky and smooth, the undergrowth having burned, the saving rains having loosened mud clumps in the forested hills and sent them sliding down graveled gullies to the water. The river was lower than Danny had ever seen it.
A man wearing an orange DayGlo vest imprinted, on the back, with the faded words State of Oregon maneuvered a dented blue canoe onto the slippery shore and held it as still as he could while Danny and his father climbed inside. They both wore heavy surgical masks like Danny’s father wore when he went to work at the hospital in Salem. An hour ago, his father’s mask had been clean and white when he’d put it on; now, the ash floating in the air had turned it the gray of charcoal briquettes flaking with slow, glowing heat. Danny guessed his mask looked the same. Whenever he exhaled then took another breath, a stale smell, like some old vegetable—boiled, pale green, soft, and shredded—hit his nose, but it was better than the open air, packed with smoke, an eerie orange fog layered with “particulates,” his father said, “and God knows what else, from all the cars and trucks that have burned, and the houses… the insulation, the paint…”
The man in the vest, tottering shin-deep in mud, trying to steady the canoe, told Danny’s father the county had just completed major repairs to the McCaffery Bridge, bolstering its pylons, replacing rotted planks, when the wildfires raced down the hills, faster than anyone had ever encountered—“and some of these ol’ boys, you know, they been fighting fires for years”—engulfing small communities, gas stations, churches, grange halls, trailer homes, folks reeling already from the empty timber mills. Flames ate the new bridge like kindling, stranding the five or six families who lived year-round on McCaffery Island, a small, wooded promontory in the middle of the widest turn in the river. “Last 24 hours, after the rains, with neighbors helping neighbors, we got most everybody out of there in private boats—smoke’s too thick for choppers, our first thought—but the Grimson woman…” He shook his head.
“Why the hell didn’t they evacuate?” said Danny’s father.
“It ain’t supposed to happen here. You know? This is the wet side of the foothills.”
“Not in the last two years. Things aren’t the same.”
“You can’t convince people overnight, Bill. They’ve built a lifetime of habit.”
Danny’s father grunted.
The man in the vest heaved himself into the canoe behind Danny and his father, the mud from his boots spraying their jackets, pieces of it pocking the low, dark water. He adjusted a cloth mask on his face. A hawk sailed above them, erratically, emerging from a slow, drifting tendril of foul gray stuff—the first bird Danny had seen in days. The canoe’s rocking made him queasy (he’d had no breakfast) but the man in the vest straightened the vessel with his oar, finding an exposed granite slab to shove against. His motions, and those of Danny’s dad up front, plashed the currents, stirring blackened twigs and turgid yellow silt.
The men beached the canoe in a small inlet on the eastern side of the island. Saplings on shore had shriveled into nasty spikes of char. A young deer apparently unaware of their approach turned swift circles in a muddy clearing, marble-eyed, gasping, its rear hooves rucking up gravel. It jerked its head toward the sky as if attempting to suck moisture from the mist. It crashed into a big rock, its legs buckling for a moment. Then it continued to spin. Danny’s dad narrowed his dark eyes above the rim of his mask.
“You can’t convince people overnight, Bill. They’ve built a lifetime of habit.”
Danny knew he was wondering again if he should have brought his boy. His wife had argued against it. But Danny had pleaded: “Mom, I haven’t left the house in ten days.”
“Yes, but we’ve been cozy and calm, haven’t we? Haven’t we?”
Danny wouldn’t answer.
“Hey, I made you pepperoni pizza, right?”
For months, Covid restrictions had enforced home-isolation. Now the air quality from wildfire smoke had deteriorated to Extremely Hazardous. “My adolescence is passing me by.” He was only half-teasing. “Enough calm! I need some excitement!”
“You’re 12 years old!”
“Right. And by the time I’m fou14rteen, the planet will have melted. Cat Five hurricanes will be flooding…”
“Okay. Go! Go! Go!” She’d turned to Danny’s father. “You’re sure about the air?”
“Since the rains, it’s Very Unhealthy. A distinct improvement.”
He’d been concerned about taking Danny, too, but since he had to go anyway, and Danny’s restlessness was driving everybody crazy (the school’s distance-learning Zoom sessions rarely kept a firm connection), he’d agreed to bring the boy. He let Danny carry his bag.
Now, slogging across the island’s gentle slopes, through devastated holly groves and spongy wet ash, Danny remembered the stories he’d heard on the radio in the last ten days: of houses and family heirlooms lost, of people trapped in their cars, of a man living east of Eugene who’d gone into town to work one morning. When an emergency alert appeared on his phone, describing the outbreak of fire, he’d driven back along Highway 58 in the direction of his house. As the smoke barreled out of the hills, he’d come across a badly-burned woman crawling across the road, her clothes just scraps, her skin black, peeling, barely human. While she screamed, he lifted her gently into his back seat. He promised her he’d deliver her to a hospital as soon as he could but first he had to get home to see if his wife was okay. Groaning, the woman unstuck her lips, wisps of smoke curling from the flakes of her mouth. “I am your wife,” she croaked.
The man in the vest, trudging through shallow puddles beside Danny’s father, explained, “It was great when the rains came but the storms brought their own troubles.”
“I see that.”
“Besides the landslides here, the islanders had golf ball-sized hail, and a couple of lightning strikes. Those trees over there, the elms, survived the first fires, but then got hit just when the volunteers were getting control of things. I’m telling you, man, we couldn’t catch a break.”
They came to a dark log cabin, a small brass lamp flickering in its window. Its west wall was singed, the shingled eave hanging at a tilt, but the structure was intact. Beyond the cabin, the skeleton-frame of a blackened pick-up truck. A brown dachshund waddled from behind a charred wood pile, bravely barking. It slid into a sloppy gouge in the mud, tumbling up to its chin. Danny started to lift the dog to safety, but his father said, “Leave him. He might bite. Can’t afford any more wounds, okay? He’ll manage. Hand me my bag.” With his right shoulder he shoved open the cabin’s heavy pine door.
A prickly smell like a port-o-potty in one of the state parks: feces, piss, stinging cleanser. Just below that… venison? Jerky? A short, bearded man wearing gray overalls huddled in a corner, his eye-whites resembling spilled milk floating mysteriously in the blackness, shimmering drops hovering over a bible lying open on a table, pages wrinkled. Under each of his hands, his blunt fingers squeezing their shoulders, dirty children, a boy and a girl, sandy-haired, wearing plaid red shirts and jeans. None of them wore masks. The little girl wheezed.
“Christ almighty,” said the man in the vest. “I thought they’d already come for those kids.”
“Ain’t going nowhere ‘less May and me go with them. You tell them that.”
“All right, Charlie. All right. This here’s the doctor from Salem—Bill. Can we—?”
The man stepped away from the slat bed he’d stood against, dragging his children across the room with him. Grit scraped beneath their bare white toes.
“Bill?” The man in the vest motioned to Danny’s dad.
He didn’t know how long he worked next to his quiet, patient father—long enough not to be aware of the odor that nearly knocked him over when he’d first entered the cabin.
Danny’s dad bent over a black, still shape in the bed. Around his father’s shoulders Danny could only see matted blonde hair and an angry red patch of what must have been flesh. “May?” said Danny’s father. “May, in a moment, okay, I’d like to lift your arm here, if you’ll let me, so I can see—”
A low whimper.
“Where was she? Outside? Trapped in the house?”
“Doin’ the laundry,” Charlie said. He pointed to a melted washer. “Roof fell in on her. I couldn’t get inside till the wind shifted and moved the flames away from the cabin. I got to her quick as I could.”
“So she may have broken bones in addition to the burns… Is your water working?”
“No,” Charlie said.
Danny’s father reached into his bag for a plastic bottle of hand sanitizer. Then he produced fat white tubes of ointments, scissors, gauze. Danny couldn’t see what else. His father laid the supplies on the curled-up purple sleeping bag at the foot of the bed. “It would sure help if we could get a chopper in here and get her straight up to Portland,” he said.
“Shit. You see the visibility,” said the man slumped in his vest.
“But if—”
“Bill. Let’s stick to the plan, okay? Best we can do right now is get her stabilized and back across the river, drive into Beeville where we know we’ve got reception, right?”
“We’re sure about that?”
“I checked this morning, ‘fore we left. The towers are fine. We’ll phone Salem and make sure they’ve got that bed ready for her. Yes?”
Danny’s father nodded. “Danny? Clean your hands with that stuff, okay? Then I’ll need you to cut me about eight strips of gauze, each about ten inches long to start with. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” Danny said meekly. If he was home, he’d be trying to get online with his science teacher.
Right: things aren’t the same, he thought. The world is not what it was.
He still couldn’t see the woman in the bed, except for a wad of sweaty hair. He didn’t know how long he worked next to his quiet, patient father—long enough not to be aware of the odor that nearly knocked him over when he’d first entered the cabin.
At some point, the man in the vest helped Danny’s dad and Charlie lift the woman out of bed, carry her through the cabin doorway and down to the inlet. Danny stayed behind with the children. Neither of them spoke. He didn’t either. He saw spider webs torn between dead trees. The webs were so coated with ash they looked like knitted potholders. The dachshund had freed itself from the hole in the ground. It barked somewhere in the distance.
Once the men had settled the woman as comfortably as possible in the middle of the canoe, the man in the vest rowed the Grimsons across the river, promising Danny and his father he’d be back for them once he’d got the family into his station wagon, parked on the opposite shore.
Danny guessed the sun was close to setting by the time he and his father stepped into the stern for the trip across the water, but he couldn’t be sure. Smoke swarmed the island, more yellow than orange now. The sky’s light was so flat and indirect it might have been a giant watercolor instead of real life.
The world was calm. The world would always be calm. “You did good,” his father said, his voice tired, more easily muffled by the mask. “I’m glad you were here to help. You okay?”
“Yes,” Danny said, but it was the kind of swift answer you gave when you didn’t really know the answer. All he knew for certain was that the water was glass, the wind had died, and the world was calm. It would always be calm. That was the genius of fire. The wind could not agitate the trees’ stiff, scarred limbs, now, for a very long time.
Tracy Daugherty is the author of over 20 books, including, most recently, Snow and Straw: Three Novellas on the Life of Poetry, The Land and the Days, a memoir, and 148 Charles Street, a novel. His biography of Larry McMurtry is forthcoming.
Header photo by jplenio, courtesy Pixabay.
