Nadezhda and Tom rounded the last turn in the trail to Tom’s place, following several people and a three-wheeled all-terrain vehicle piled with equipment. They caught sight of the fire. “Ach,” Nadezhda said. The ravine-scored hillside east of Tom’s cottage was black, and lightly smoking, and the irregular line that separated this new black from the ordinary olive gray hillside was an oily orange flickering, ranging from solid red to a transparent shimmering. White smoke poured up from this line of fire, obscuring the sun and filling the air downwind, filtering the light in an odd, ominous way. Occasionally fire leaped out of the burn line and jumped up the hill toward Tom’s place, licks of flame rolling like tumbleweed, trees and shrubs going off suddenly, bang, bang, bang, like hundreds of individual cases of spontaneous combustion. It was loud, the noise an insistent, crackling roar.
Tom stood rigidly on the trail before Nadezhda, staring through the strange muted light, assessing the danger. “Damn,” he said. Then: “The bees.”
Hank ran by with some others. “Come on,” he said, “can’t fight a fire from a distance.”
Kevin appeared shovel in hand, his face and arms streaked with black ash and brown dirt. “We got the beehives onto a cart and out of here. I don’t know how many were smoked inside. Got the chickens out too. We’ve been watering your roof and they’re cutting a break down this ridge, but I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it or not, this wind is so fucked. You’d better get what you want out—” and he was off. Tom jogged up the trail to the cabin, and Nadezhda followed. The air was hot, thick with smoke and ash. It smelled of oils and burnt sage. Unburnt twigs and even branches blew by overhead. Just east of the cabin a big crowd of people worked with picks, shovels, axes, and wheelbarrows, widening an ancient overgrown firebreak. The cabin stood in a wide spot in this old break, and so theoretically it was well-placed, but the ridge was narrow, the terrain on both sides steep and rough, and Nadezhda saw immediately that the workers were having a hard time of it. A higher ridge immediately to the west offered a better chance, and in fact there were people up there too, and pick-up trucks.
Overhead a chopping sound blanketed the insistent whoosh and crackle of the fire, and four helicopters swept over the skyline onto them. Gabriela was shouting into a walkie-talkie, apparently directing the pilots. They clattered by in slow, low runs, dropping great trailing quantities of a white powder. One dropped water. Billows of smoke coursed up and out, were shredded in the wind. The helicopters hovered, turned, made another run. They disappeared over the skyline and the roar of the fire filled their ears again. In the ravine below them the fire appeared subdued, but on their side of the ravine shrubs and trees were still exploding, whooshing torchlike into flame as if part of a magician’s act, adding deep booms to the roar.
On the break line almost everyone Nadezhda had met in El Modena was hacking away at the brush, dragging it down the ridge to the west. Axe blades flashed in the eerie light, looking dangerous. Two women aimed hoses, but there was little water pressure, and they couldn’t spray far. They cast white fans of water over everything within reach, firefighters, the new dirt of the break, the brush being pulled away. Down below the house Kevin was at work with a pick, hacking at the base of a sage bush with great chopping swings, working right next to Alfredo, who was doing the same; they fell into a rhythm as if they had been a team for years, and struck as if burying the picks in each other’s hearts. The sage bush rolled away, they ran to another one and began again.
Nadezhda shook herself, followed Tom to the cabin. Ramona was inside with all the other Sanchezes, her arms filled with clothing. “Tom, hey, get what you want right now!” It was stifling, and out the kitchen window Nadezhda saw a burning ember float by. Solar panels beyond the emptied beehives were buckling and drooping.
“Forget the clothes!” Tom said, and then shouted: “Photo albums!” He ran into a small room beside the bedroom.
“Get out of there!” someone outside the house shouted, voice amplified. “Time’s up!” The megaphone made it a voice out of a dream, metallic and slow. “Everyone get out of the house and off the break! NOW!”
They had to pull Tom from the house, and he was yelling at them. A huge airy rumble filled the air, punctuated by innumerable small explosions. The whole hillside between ravine and ridge was catching fire. Hills in the distance appeared to float and then drop, tumbling in the superheated air. People streamed down the firebreak they had just made, and those who had been in the house joined them. Tom stumbled along looking at the ground, a photo album clutched to his chest. Alfredo and Kevin argued over a map, Kevin stabbing at it with a bloody finger, “That’s a real firebreak right up there,” pointing to the west. “It’s the only thing this side of Peter’s Canyon that’ll do! Let’s get everyone there and widen it, clear the backside, get the choppers to drop in front. We should be able to make a stand!”
“Maybe,” Alfredo said, and shrugged. “Okay, let’s do it.” He shouted instructions as they hurried down the trail, and Gabriela stopped to talk into her walkie-talkie. White smoke diffused through the air made it hard to breathe, and the light was dim, colors filtered and grayish.
At the gouged trail’s first drop-off there was a crush of people. They looked back, saw Tom’s cabin sitting among flames, looking untouched and impervious; but the solar panels beyond had melted like syrup, and were oozing dense black smoke. All the weeds in the yard were aflame, and the grandfather clocks burned like men at the stake. As they watched the shingles on one corner of the roof caught fire, all at once as if a magician had snapped his fingers. Poof! One whole wall gone up like newspaper in the fireplace. Nadezhda held Tom by the arm, but he shrugged her off, staring back at the sight, clutching the album still. His wrinkled face was smeared with ash, his eyes red-rimmed with the smoke, his fringe of hair flying wildly, singed to curls in one spot by a passing ember. His mouth was in a tight disdainful knot. “It’s only things,” he said to Nadezhda hoarsely, angrily. “Only things.” But then they passed a small knot of smoked bees lying on the dirt, and he hissed, looking anguished.
He insisted on helping at the firebreak to the west, and Nadezhda went along, packed into the back of a pick-up truck with a crowd of smoky, sweaty Modeños. She got the feeling they would have been joking and cursing with great vitality if it weren’t for Tom among them. At the firebreak they leaped out and joined a big crowd already working there. This firebreak was on a long, level, broad ridge, and it had been recently cleared. They worked like madmen widening it, and all the while the line of rising smoke with the terrible orange base approached. The black behind the line seemed to extend all the way to the horizon, as if all the world had been burnt. Voices were cracked, hoarse, furious. Hills, ravines, canyons, all disappeared in the smoke. No colors but gray and brown and black left, except for that line of whitish orange.
Helicopters poured overhead in a regular parade, first civilian craft, then immense Marine and Coast Guard machines. When these arrived everyone cheered. Popping over the horizon like dragons out of a nightmare, fast as jets and only meters off the treetops, they bombed the fire relentlessly, great sheets of white powder trailing behind them. The powder must be heavy, Nadezhda thought at one point, not to be lofted like the ash and embers. She had a burn on her cheek, she didn’t know where it had come from. She ran a wheelbarrow from workers to pick-up trucks, feeling a strange, stark happiness, pushing herself till she choked on the gritty air. Once she was drenched by the spray from a helicopter’s water drop. Little bulldozers arrived, looking like Moscow snowplows. They widened the firebreak quickly, until it was an angry reddish strip nearly thirty meters wide, extending along the ridge for a few kilometers. It looked good, but with the wind gusting it was hard to tell if it would hold the fire or not. Everything depended on the wind. If it slacked they would be okay. If it grew stronger, Peter’s Canyon was in trouble. If it stayed constant… they couldn’t be sure. They could only work harder. An hour or two passed as they tore frantically at the vegetation, and watched the fire’s inexorable final approach, and cheered or at least nodded in approval at every pass of the helicopters.