Chapter 8 #3
When we reached the main lodge, I could barely see the building, it was so erased by smoke.
I could make out only a faint outline, with pale windows, and the general roof shape.
On the lawn, a handful of guys were doing what they could to prepare for the tidal wave of fire about to crash on their heads. It didn’t look like much.
Two of them were wetting down the lodge with garden hoses, but the streams barely made it to the second level.
Another two were digging a trench in the lawn using hand trowels.
I didn’t understand how this could possibly help against the monstrous sound approaching, and for a moment, I considered heading back down the mountain and taking up a vigil at the gas station.
I could wait there while Sarah was rescued by professionals, I thought.
I imagined a helicopter churning the smoke into vortices, landing on the empty highway tarmac.
Brawny men carrying her, smiling, from the metal bubble.
A tearful embrace. Phil, somewhere off-site, waiting.
But then, before the fantasy could complete, the man in the mask reappeared and dashed my plan.
He handed over a paper mask and leaned in to yell, “The road’s blocked now!
I just heard on the radio! Looks like you’re stuck here for a while! ”
He turned and started to lope away. “We need to get water!” he said over his shoulder. “You coming?”
I followed. He was taking me ever farther from Sarah, but I didn’t feel like I had any choice. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t get down the mountain anymore, nor up the mountain. If I wanted to survive, I had to follow him. It was amazing how quickly a person adapted to hell.
I followed my guy along a dirt pathway, passing the sauna building, zigzagging by the eternity pools.
We crossed a pebble mandala on the river’s floodplain and came to the bank where the water was flowing in a gorgeous, liquid ribbon, pure antidote to the incoming flames.
I didn’t see how we were supposed to transport the water up to the lodge, however, as we didn’t have any vessels, and we needed to move it in great volume.
I didn’t have time to ask because already the guy was walking again.
He seemed to have an idea that involved striding across the footbridge to the other side of the river.
I followed and, midway across the span, looked up and tried catching a glimpse of the mountain’s peak.
It was usually visible from this point, but not today.
I followed the guy along a dirt track into the staff housing area, a collection of humble cabins decorated with prayer flags and potted plants.
He went to a large metal shed and opened the door, revealing a gleaming, miniature fire truck inside.
It had Japanese writing on the side, and little ladders, and a heavy-duty spool of canvas hose.
It was a cute, tiny fire truck, imported from Japan.
But when he went to start the engine, it wouldn’t catch.
“Fuck!” he said. He turned the key in the ignition again but got no action. The battery was dead.
“Unfuckingbelievable,” he said. “Who lets this happen?” He looked around, seeking any kind of solution.
I could hear my breath scraping in my mask.
I had nothing to offer by way of advice.
I could tell he was calculating the amount of space and time he had to work with, what might still be done given what we had.
“There’s another truck down the road!” he said. “Not as good, but we’ll have to get that one!”
We headed back onto the road, going deeper into the staff housing complex.
Already, the fire was infiltrating the neighborhood.
Firebrands were floating down from the sky, landing on the rooftops, setting cozy homes smoldering.
I could see the new calculation my guy was making.
These were cute homes, but rebuildable. The main lodge was not. That was the priority.
We came to another tin barn at the end of the road and rolled open the door and found a beat-up flatbed truck inside, with a big plastic tank on the back.
It seemed more like a farming rig, used for watering fields, but the keys were in the ignition and the engine started.
We pulled some canvas hoses from the wall and piled them alongside the tank, which, of course, was empty.
“We need to get water!” the guy said.
“How?!” I said.
“The river!” he said.
We got into the truck and backed out of the barn and bounced down the dirt road, ignoring the fires growing on either side of us.
For a moment, the shadow of a double-propeller helicopter appeared in the haze, but it disappeared as quickly as it came.
On a walkie-talkie, the voices of the other guys were filtering in, crackling and barking.
“Wind might be picking up from the east again!” “Lost power in the office!” “Roger that!” My guy didn’t respond to any of it.
He was too busy pressing onward, in search of good river access.
We couldn’t take the footbridge back because it was too small, so our goal became the trestle bridge a mile downriver.
By the time we got there, it was already on fire.
My guy didn’t hesitate at all. He barreled directly across, and then, once we were over, he immediately reversed and backed us down to the river’s edge and nestled the truck into a spot.
There, we plunged our one thick rubber hose into the water and let the suction engine do its work.
As the tank filled, we finally had a second to introduce ourselves.
The guy’s name was Gary, he said. He was from Montana.
He’d been working at the lodge as a groundskeeper for three years and loved the whole landscape and philosophy of the place.
It was a beautiful, spiritually important site, he believed, where the veil between worlds was thin.
He’d been asleep when the fire bell rang, and he hadn’t had a chance to put on his underwear, so his crotch was chafed from all the running and sweating, which was a little more than I needed to know.
“Have you ever fought a fire before?!” Gary said.
“No!” I said.
“First rule: always have an escape! Okay?!”
“Okay!” I said. “Any other rules?!”
“That’s the only one I know!” he said. “We’re kind of making this up as we go! The fire department bailed on us! It’s just a few staffers now! And you!”
When the tank was full we drove up to the lodge.
Gary knew the roads well and avoided the worst gulleys and potholes, and soon we emerged onto the main lawn where, only hours before, children and parents had been peaceably playing, and where the previous afternoon, Sarah had batted a beach ball with her fellow retreaters.
The memory of her turning toward me, shading her eyes, pierced my mind.
I let the image pass through me and disappear, knowing it would serve no purpose now.
I’d have to look at those pictures later.
Gary parked the truck sloppily on the lawn and we jumped out and pulled the hose from the flatbed and uncoiled it.
Gary attached one end to the tank, and I yanked the nozzle end all the way to the wall of the lodge.
I gave the twirling-hand-in-the-air sign that meant “send water into the hose,” and moments later felt the bulge of water coming.
Out it splashed, the hose becoming a giant, vomiting snake, spewing fluid.
We got a decent stream going, shooting all the way to the roof of the lodge, and a cheer went up among the volunteers.
I managed to douse the top of the roofline, guiding the water back and forth until a large segment of shingles was wet, but as soon as the good news came on, bad news came on stronger.
A floating firebrand had landed on the hose and the hose was on fire.
Gary ran over and stomped it out, but it didn’t bode well.
The wind was blasting us, sending heavy sprays of sparks ahead of the fire line.
We were still far from the main flames, but we were already in trouble.
When the tank ran dry Gary went back for a refill and my job became firefighter.
I was handed a shovel and a rake and told to put out anything I saw.
There were small fires everywhere, in the bushes, under the boughs.
I went from shrub to tree to grass, stomping embers, shoveling dirt, raking duff.
At some point, the propane tanks in the staff housing across the river started exploding, causing loud blasts every few minutes for an hour.
At another point, a guy got trapped in a ring of fire and we had to stop everything and cut a channel and drag him out.
He was practically unconscious from smoke inhalation, but he was back on the line within forty-five minutes.
Into the night, we labored. The sun set and we fought the fire in the dark.
Our express purpose was to preserve this magical compound anchoring the land where humans had gathered for millennia to collect huckleberries and soak in the mountain’s sacred waters, but all the while, digging trenches, chainsawing fallen trunks, I was thinking only about Sarah.
I kept a lookout for her at all times, hoping she’d appear from the woods.
I went to the trailhead every half an hour and tried to push my way up, but I was blocked by the fire every time.
As the night went on, the outbuildings burned.
The massage building burned. The guest cabins burned.
The yurts burned. We heard loud reports of shattering glass at random intervals and breathed caustic smoke from melting plastic and metal that made the woodsmoke seem almost pleasant.
Around midnight, I moved my car down the mountain to safer ground.
And through all of it, Sarah never appeared.