Chapter 9
We stood in front of the lodge, swaying in the giant heel of black ground, unsure what to think.
The earth around us tinkled with the sounds of embers dying.
The remaining trees were haggard and shocked.
Word came in on the radio that the wind had indeed turned, and the fire line was indeed tacking strongly south and east, which meant we were now inside an eye, or in the clear, we didn’t know yet.
As dawn drew closer, the wind started blowing even more forcefully south, bringing more hope.
We kept pumping river water onto the roof of the lodge and stomping out all the orphan fires scattered around the grounds.
A few guys tried to sleep, figuring if another wave was coming, this was their window.
It was also the window I’d been waiting for, the window in which I could possibly climb the Mountain View trail and find Sarah.
I had no idea how far I’d be able to go, but I could at least abandon the other guys in good conscience for a while and take a walk in the fire’s charred fingers.
“It’s not a good idea,” Gary said, when I told him my plan. We were sitting on the deck of the lodge eating half-thawed microwave curry bowls from the dead freezer, possibly the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted.
“I have to try,” I said. “If I can’t make it, I’ll come back.”
Gary gave me a long look. We’d been through lifetimes together in the past few hours. He leaned over and gave me a hug with his hand on the back of my head and wished me good luck.
I strapped on a headlamp and filled a bottle of water.
I found a fresh mask in the supply case and put another one in my pocket for Sarah.
Then I walked from the lodge, through the torched remains of the guest cabins, alongside the edge of the parking area, where the carriages of two melted cars wheezed liquid magma.
I kept going until I came to the trailhead, where my lamp still barely sent a beam of illumination onto the ground.
Somewhere, up above, the wind was blowing, but down here, the smoke was still thick and opaque.
I edged onto the trail and took a few more steps into the darkness, testing the ground.
The first handful of steps seemed all right.
There might be stretches of fire ahead, but for the moment, as far as I could see, the way seemed passable.
I told myself I’d climb as high as I could and make sure at every point I didn’t get stranded. Always, I’d have a way out.
I started moving, unsure exactly what I was traveling through.
At my feet, orange galaxies of embers seethed on the mossy ground, but otherwise, the world was all smoke.
My strained breathing and crunching footfalls were the only sounds I heard, which I took as a good sign.
It meant the fire was far away, busy devouring some new territory.
Through the haze, shadows of trees emerged, sometimes smoldering, sometimes untouched.
The fire was fickle in that way, destroying one thing, leaving its neighbor unscathed.
I took that as a good sign, too. It meant Sarah might have avoided the worst. Maybe she’d found some furrow of ground between the flames.
The poor trees. Only now did the scale of the destruction hit me.
It was unimaginable how many millions of these creatures had been incinerated.
It’d taken hundreds of years for them to grow, and in a matter of hours, they’d been eradicated.
Over their lives, they’d experienced sun and snow and rain and drought.
They’d been hit by lightning and clawed by bears.
They’d sprouted children and watched their friends and family wither and die around them.
And now they’d been smote. I could almost hear the survivors keening in pain.
But I put the trees out of my mind and kept going, concentrated on Sarah.
I was exhausted, and having a hard time moving, let alone marshaling any thoughts, but I tried to get the prayers going again.
I prayed in a practical manner now, asking for simple favors.
Let me find her easily, I prayed. Let the trail be unblocked.
I prayed to avoid any problems or delays.
Don’t let there be fire in the way, I prayed.
Don’t let the smoke obscure my visibility.
I’ve come this far, I prayed, just let me go a little bit farther.
What thought directed toward the future isn’t a prayer?
What thought, period, isn’t? Please let me keep going, I thought.
Let me keep going and I’ll do the rest. Let me find her at the end of this trail.
After a few bends and switchbacks, I started gaining more confidence.
I was passing trees still on fire, the crowns burning high in the air, but nothing that looked imminently threatening.
I had the feeling I understood the fire now, and that we’d come to some kind of agreement.
I passed a patch of largely unburned foliage and climbed a steep slope to an exposed ridge.
For a moment, the air cleared, and the sky appeared, dead gray, only the faintest daylight visible, not yet lavender.
For a moment, I felt like an astronaut floating into space, the thin oxygen line unraveling behind me.
The sky closed again. The smoke returned.
I kept climbing and it wasn’t long before I’d reached a fork in the trail.
I’d been on the trail before and I knew that the right fork went to a spring-fed mountain stream with a little Zendo overlooking the bank.
It was a beautiful spot, and a beautiful building, constructed by a Japanese master craftsman.
In my memory, it was a simple tongue-and-groove box, with flaring eaves and a veranda that floated a few feet off the ground.
The whole structure was held aloft on hefty river rocks.
People often went there for their private meditation sessions, enjoying the elegance of the sliding wooden doors and smooth tatami mats.
I suspected it was where Sarah had been headed.
I took a brief rest and sipped some water, but I didn’t wait long.
I had a bead on my goal now and kept moving, pushing through a stand of juniper and a grove of smoldering oaks.
Soon I could hear the stream up ahead. The landscape was still only partially visible in the smokey dawn, but I could tell it was a disaster.
Shriveled branches lay on the ground exhaling smoke.
The ground itself was a blackened waste.
I knew I was getting close to the Zendo now, but for a long time I couldn’t seem to find it.
I paced around, back and forth, until eventually I realized it was gone.
The building was only a blackened sketch of its former self.
“Sarah!” I called out. But there was no answer.
I called her name a few more times, my voice already hoarse from the smoke, but nothing came back.
I went over to the remains of the house and looked at the crumbled pile of charcoal.
Sarah wasn’t there in any form. There was no body, no semblance of a body, no body-shaped pile of ashes.
She had to be somewhere nearby, I thought, but where?
I walked out in a spiral from the former Zendo, making larger revolutions with each pass.
Every revolution, I called her name. I looped the burned structure three times but I found nothing, heard nothing.
There were no sounds out there at all—no bird sounds, no animals.
Only my footsteps on the blackened earth and the sound of rushing water, muffled by the heavy blanket of smoke.
When I came to the creek’s bank I paused and watched the messed-up water gurgling downstream.
It was marbled with ash and gunk, swirling in snotty whorls.
It occurred to me that Sarah would have gone to the water when the fire landed.
It would’ve been a primal response, to go to the water.
It was a terrible thought, imagining her panic in that moment, surrounded by flames, but I put that out of my mind.
I wouldn’t think about that yet. I would only think about her now, her living, breathing body completely intact. Of course, the water was her refuge.
I started walking downstream, calling her name every few steps. I walked a quarter mile but didn’t find anything, so I turned around and walked back, yo-yoing another quarter mile beyond where I’d started. Still, I didn’t see a single trace.
I crossed the stream and walked the opposite bank, pushing through scrabbly bushes and climbing over fallen snags, keeping as close to the water’s edge as possible.
The forest on that side was still crackling and sighing from the fire’s assault, burning in the undergrowth, and although the smoke continued to brighten with the rising sun, the visibility didn’t get much better.
I kept calling Sarah’s name, partly to make myself feel less alone.
I came to a beachhead backed by a low cliff.
It was just a shallow strip of pebbles, scattered with a few bigger rocks, the cliff face rising about twenty feet.
The soft dirt had been carved by years of spring flooding so that it almost overhung the narrow spit of beach.
The ledge was topped with what looked like poplars or cottonwoods, judging by the trunks.
It was hard to be sure as the upper parts of the trees were lost in the jaundiced fog.