Chapter Forty
FORTY
An hour later, the sky is bloodred, and the blowing wind carries visible particles of ash.
The smoke-filtered light makes the heart of the afternoon feel like dusk.
Most alarming, though, is the sound, which has gone from a distant hum to a slowly encroaching growl.
You’ve been paddling the creek for an hour with Diana in your boat, but every half mile or so the water level dips too low, and you have to get out and lift the canoe over a hill of sand or past one of a seemingly infinite number of abandoned beaver dams. Everyone is coughing.
Everyone is on the verge of tears. But out of all of you, Troy is taking it the worst.
Ever since the first glimpse of that smoke, he has been rattling off climate change facts nonstop for an hour.
At this point, you are all trying to tune him out, but nobody has the heart to stop him. It’s possible this monologue coming direct from his anxiety brain is the only thing keeping him from a complete meltdown.
“… and because the fires are way bigger, it’s tougher for these forests to regenerate, which contributes even more to climate change because they can’t store carbon…”
When you turn around, he’s not looking at any of you.
He’s just kind of blinking into the murky bog surrounding you.
You look past him this time and try to figure out where exactly the smoke is coming from.
Fran thinks it’s the southwest, which is good because you’re headed north, but you swear sometimes that it’s coming from another direction entirely.
Before Troy started in on his lecture, he told you that depending on weather conditions, these things can change direction and burn fast (“fourteen frickin’ miles an hour in an open space, guys!
”). The uncertainty is making everything even more terrifying.
Without any information, all you can do is try to move in the right direction as fast as possible.
“You okay back there?” asks Diana. “Still conscious?”
“Mm-hmm,” you say, which is the most you’ve said in a while.
You were surprised when Diana asked to be in your boat, but ever since she saw your infected cut, she’s been watching you closely, visible concern on her face.
You wonder if it’s because she thinks you’re just going to drop dead in front of her.
No matter where things stand with the two of you right now, she probably doesn’t want to lose anyone else.
You’re glad she’s close, though. Even if the two of you have been mostly silent since you started paddling.
You want to talk to her. You want to ask about all the things Fran told you, to see if they’re true, but now that you’re two feet away from her, you can’t quite bring yourself to speak.
It seems ridiculous, somehow, that you’re likely being chased down by a fire and you still want to know what really happened between you.
Will that itchy feeling ever go away? Is it with you for life?
Another problem: The smoke is burning your throat.
Hers too. You can tell by the pained sound of her cough.
She’s running low on water, but eventually she just dips her bottle in the river and drinks.
There’s no time to stop and boil water at the pace you’re going, so she gulps it down.
Then she dips it again and passes it back to you.
You look at the river around you. There’s not a lot of algae or mud in the water, so when she presses the wet bottle into your hand, you drink deeply, and the water is so cold and clean tasting that it hurts your teeth.
And with this one drink comes a rare moment of calm.
For an instant, you’re able to stop thinking about your past mistakes and the uncertainty of the future.
You just close your eyes and you can almost feel your cells absorbing the water.
Even your headache feels better for a second or two.
And with this calm, everything suddenly seems so simple:
The world is on fire. Offer water when you can.
You hand the bottle back to Diana.
“Thank you,” you say.
Your red eyes are watering, and you’re pretty sure it’s from the smoke.
But you’re also thinking about how long it’s been since you experienced uninterrupted tranquility.
You’ve spent so much of the past year, and a good portion of your life before that, terrified and ashamed.
But there are times, even in the midst of chaos, where you catch a glimpse of how simple it can be to exist in a moment.
“And God help our sorry asses,” shouts Troy, “if the arctic permafrost starts to melt! Just stick a fork in the planet if that happens! There was a fire there, like, fifteen years ago that let off two million metric tons of carbon!”
And just like that, the moment is gone. At Troy’s last word, the hull of the boat scrapes bottom again, and you stand on uncertain legs to heft it.
There aren’t any low-hanging trees this time, but the air quality is so bad that you can’t see too far in front of you.
Big rocks pop up out of the blue, along with trees knocked down by the wind.
Will trips and scrapes his shin on an uprooted pine.
Instead of swearing, he just releases a primal scream.
Troy doesn’t even stop his lecture at the noise.
He’s still going on about the Paris Climate Accord, and you wait for Will to full-on throttle him.
Will is not the most patient among you as it is, and listening to a live audiobook of the apocalypse while his shin is throbbing has got to be past his threshold.
But he doesn’t tackle Troy. Instead, he leaves the canoe with Fran for a moment and calmly walks back to him.
When he gets to Troy, he grabs Troy’s canoe and helps him scrabble up some rocks and down to the deeper water of the creek again.
Troy is still saying something you can’t quite hear about average surface temperature when Will puts his hands on Troy’s shoulders.
Surprisingly, Troy goes quiet, like a radio that’s been switched off.
“Troy, my guy,” says Will. “Can I ask you a question?”
Troy says nothing. But he doesn’t say no.
“Do you want to see Turbo again?”
Troy blinks and coughs into his hands. Life seems to return, however temporarily, to his eyes.
“Yes,” he says, his voice shaky.
“Tell me. What’s it going to be like when you see him?”
Troy doesn’t hesitate at all.
“Beautiful,” he says. “It’s going to be beautiful.”
A tear runs down his ash-stained cheek.
“Right,” says Will. “Okay. Good. So here’s the deal, bro. Nobody thinks you’re wrong about all this climate stuff. We know how messed up it is. But also: That’s the world, right?”
“What do you mean?” asks Fran.
Will keeps looking at Troy.
“It’s full of terrible stuff. But it’s also full of beautiful stuff. Like you and the pure love you have for that wiener dog. It’s the same world, you know? Fires and wiener dogs. But that’s a super hard thing to hold in your head, I think. That it can be both.”
Troy is crying. He nods.
“Look, all I’m saying is if you want to see Turbo again, and take him to the dog park and watch him run on his pathetic, tiny wiener legs, then we have to keep going. And we have to stay positive. Just for now. When we get home, we can solve climate change. Right now, we need to live.”
Troy is coughing while crying, and Will stares at him without speaking. Then, apropos of nothing, Troy just takes his shirt off. Everyone watches, unsure what he’s doing. But then he doesn’t toss it in his boat; he dunks it in the creek. Then he wrings it out.
“I saw this in a movie about firefighters once,” he says.
Before anyone can ask a follow-up question, Troy starts wrapping the shirt around his face so that he’s breathing through the wet fabric.
“Any better?” Diana asks.
Troy nods, takes a deep breath.
“A little, I think.”
Everyone, including you, opens their packs and finds an old T-shirt.
You soak the fabric in the river and, one by one, you too wrap shirts around your faces.
The cold water against your skin feels better already, and when you pull in a breath, the moisture helps with the smoke.
Who knows how long it will last, but for the first few breaths, it makes a noticeable difference.
You’re almost past the shallow spot, so you all move your boats back into the creek.
Fran takes a moment to look at the map. Then she looks behind you.
Aside from the growing sound of the fire itself, the air is eerily silent.
And you realize it’s because there’s no birdsong.
All those birds you saw, and so many others, have left.
They’re gone. And if you could fly, you would be gone too.
“Six miles to the Loop,” Fran says. “Give or take.”
Another powerful gust of smoky wind blows, and you’re all thinking the same thing: Whether or not you make it there is going to have more to do with the weather than you.
You have been trying to work with nature since Silas left you.
Trying to learn its rules. How to find food, and navigate, and work in harmony with it.
You’ve been trying to meet nature halfway.
But now you know the truth: There’s no reasoning with it.
It’s either going to eat you or it isn’t.
“What if no one’s there?” asks Diana. “What if we get there and everyone’s evacuated because of the fire?”
“Possible,” Fran says. “But what’s our alternative? Go back the way we came?”
She points back toward the mushroom cloud. It looks like a nuclear-testing site. And the coming fire, which isn’t yet visible, sounds like a million hungry cicadas.
“Forward!” shouts Will. “There’s no other way. When you’re down a break, you can’t give up, guys! You gotta break back!”
“I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” says Troy.
“Tennis, Troy!” says Will. “I’m talking about tennis. But I’m also using metaphors, bro. Now why don’t you take the lead position this time.”
“Me?” he says, his shirt-wrap muffling his speech.
“Yeah,” he says. “You! You helped us with that shirt thing. Now paddle like you want to see your dog again. We’ll follow.”
Troy takes a hesitant step forward. Then he quickens his pace and gets in Will’s canoe in front of Fran. He’s quiet and there’s something like resolve in his eyes. Will takes Troy’s canoe.
And with that, you and Diana are back in your boat.
The water looks deeper ahead of you, at least as far as you can see, and that’s a good thing.
Less canoe lifting. The creek is surrounded by grass and topped by a sky so orange it looks like you’re paddling through Mars.
You close your eyes, and for a second, you’re not sure if they’re going to open again.
But they do, somehow. And what you see when they open is Diana looking directly at you.
“Hey, Case,” she says. “Are you with me?”
“I think so,” you say.
“Good. Because there’s just one more thing I have to know.”
“Okay…,” you say.
Your head is spinning, but you grab your paddle and get your hands in position.
“Was it guilt?” asks Diana.
She doesn’t break eye contact.
“Was what guilt?”
“Is that why you never picked up the phone?”
“You mean…”
“When I called. All those times after the funeral? Was it just guilt, or did you really never want to speak to me again?”
In your head, you’re answering her. But you’re aware that in life, nothing is actually coming out of your mouth. Not even a breath.
“Case?” she says. “Are you there?”
And then, of course, you are.