The smoke came into Troy east along highway 7, where the traffic gets backed up on weekday afternoons. The weird thing about it, beyond the orange moon the night before, was that it was Canada’s smoke. We knew it had come a long way, and was someone else’s.
I knew the smell from growing up in Canberra/Kamberri country, which is known unironically as the “Bush capital” (ha ha) and is insulated with corridors of dry and snappy bushland. Up on the hill a few streets behind our house, there was The Bush, which just means grassy fields and gum trees and scrub and fire trails to walk in or run along or build a cubby within. ACT fire services did regular backburning to prevent bushfires from reaching the houses that backed onto the reserve, and sometimes you didn’t know whether a fire was a problem or just backburning, since the smell was the same.
I was home alone one afternoon at about age 15 or 16 when my brother called the house phone.
“You know there is a fire on Gossan?” he asked/said.
I said yeah I had noticed.
“Are you protecting the house?” he asked. A LUDICROUS question for me, a complete idiot at 15.
“Uh, what should I do?” I asked him. I don’t think he had a good answer, but I was the one who was home and needed to be on top of it if the fire got worse. So I hung up, and it’s still funny to me the way I circled the house like a mad cat then. The gutters! I thought, running outside to check if they had leaf litter in them—yes, of course they did, we lived under a bunch of gum trees, but how was I going to reach them? I jogged toward where a ladder might be then turned around thinking I can’t clear all the gutters! What about the hose! Should I spray the house with water? Do hoses lose water pressure in a fire? What what what. Then did a circle and thought about what to save: the photo albums! But you have to remember this was the ‘90s, and the photo albums were massive three-ring binders that weighed 5 kilos a piece. How would I choose between ‘92-April ‘93 and 1991? Between “the James’ New Orleans night” and “Indonesia”? Some of the albums had precious family photos and others were, like, my dad’s work trips to Boston. What would I drag out with me?
So then I had the bright idea to run up to nearer the backtrack for recon, see whether everyone was dragging their pianos out into the driveway and onto their trailers or what. I jogged up the street to where all the emergency vehicles were, deep in the smoke. There, people were milling around, not leaving nor panicking, just watching. Their houses would burn before ours, I thought. I walked back down the hill feeling like it wasn’t immediately my problem. I went home and probably made myself some nachos, waiting for an adult to get back.
This idiotic memory is important when you’re considering how a future of firestorms will look. The desperate tales of people leaping into the ocean or hiding in backyard pools under towels make the news stories, but you also have all the hopeless or absurd choices people make in these situations. The people who flee in their cars and later wonder why they brought their CD folders, Big Lebowski mousepad, and Jason Priestley poster, but not the baby clothes or the letter hidden in the bottom of the thing they’ll remember way too late. If it had really come down to it that day in the ‘90s, I can see myself escaping with a family portrait (not the bad one), my complete collection of TV Hits song lyrics, and my hockey stick. Where is the recognition of the humiliation that comes with incinerating ourselves, I want to know.
A neighbor’s house burned down in high school (her brother playing with matches) and the one outfit she had on was her school uniform—everything else burned or was infused forever with the terrible stench of chemicals igniting. She came over to my house in her smelly blazer, and the pong of her house, erased to an outline, followed her like a cloud. It gestured at the power of a fire moving over hills like a thresher. Certainly, we saw more bushfires than we ever did house fires, but it seems there is less difference between the two now than before. Whether you hold trees and wildlife dear or your walk-in pantry of decanted snacks in polymer containers, the fires will consume it all. This First Nations man in B.C. lost everything recently in the massive fires up there, but specifically his comic book collection, and it’s that detail and the way he tells it that kills me.
When half of Australia seemed to be burning a couple of summers ago, it felt like my fire, my smoke. The animals, the people working to save towns … I wanted to be close enough to understand that nasty smell and colour of sky with everyone else, not watching it from helicopter footage.
All summer this year, it has felt like drifts of other people’s fires coming by. That’s not really right though, is it. The pandemic masks came back out for trips to the playground. Don’t breathe it in, we told the kids. Yucky smoke.
Related:
Some years back, Stef Willen had a column with McSweeney’s about her work as an insurance appraiser after home fires. It was called “Total Loss,” and it’s really fantastic.
I prob don’t need to tell you to read Sarah Miller’s classic piece on selling Florida.
David Wallace Wells on the urban inferno.
The detail of my painting at top (it’s not amazing but hey) shows some of the burned snowgums near Guthega in Oz’s Snowy Mountains—it’s pretty gutting to see them turned ghost white in a fire, as they have ribbons of colour running across them when they’re alive that are pretty special. They do not recover well from fire.
New thing
Japhs has been going to bed with some costume construction goggles on? He says they’re his “good dream goggles,” which is all well and good but the first time I went to check on him at 11 p.m. I did not know that and was like What the HELL?
Also Japhy right now when he feels like swearing: OH MY SHUT.
Us: Buddy you can not say that.
Goodies
I like my novels like I like a good conspiracy theory—tenuously pulling otherwise unrelated threads into something that really gets the wheels turning—
—and that’s definitely what Teju Cole does in Tremor, which somehow ties together humanity blasting time capsules into space and Brahms and Lagos and a hedge.
I saw
got hands on an Elizabeth Beaumont from her I CAME LOOKING FOR BIRDS AND I FOUND THEM exhibition, and man do I want one too:In poddies, Hamish Blake’s “How Other Dads Dad” is back for season 2 and Bluey creator Joe Brumm is the first guest. Worth it just to get to the Bum Fish game halfway through.
RICH. Anna Silman’s profile of Merve Emre, whom no one seems to deny is very smart.
GREAT article and love the painting.
FIRE is scary!
I need a pair of those great dream goggles.
My friend and I both have kids with Down Syndrome in our family so I spent a few months, few years ago trying to help her get this app called FireGuide off the ground as a "going concern". We failed. But the app is pretty good https://www.kidfiresafety.co