Ten Years On

Ten years ago Kristen was here, alone with our forty (back then) sled dogs and our pair of oddball cats, waking to a day that got right down to business with heavy smoke and a roaring, bone-dry northeast gale. By the end of the day wildfire had consumed our home, and in the mayhem of fleeing two big sled dogs had perished. A tired three-man fire crew and a skilled helicopter pilot had arrived by evening, our neighbors the Catling family had braved the bay in two small boats and were the first to appear and help, and I had finally, much too late, made it home from a remote camp up on the barrens, on what I hope will forever be the scariest flight of my life.

That night at one a.m. we stood on the deck of the workshop, stunned and safe. One of the young fire-fighters added a little comic relief to the night when I spotted him roasting a hot dog on the embers where the house had been, and the pilot told us about letting one of the panicked dogs sit inside the helicopter for a few minutes, until it was clear that all forty wanted to join him in there.

A new chapter in our lives began that night, and today we flip the page from a ten-year portion of the story.

Today, ten years on, it is raining, and I am standing in our “new” house, built between 2017 and 2020 using around 250 logs of fire-killed spruce. It is windy again, but today out of the west. Around 25 miles off to the west there has been a tall plume of smoke these past few days, rising from a lightning-strike fire south of Misty Lake. No threat there, I promise. My flight for the day to fetch some Norwegian canoers at Yellowknife and bring them out to the headwaters of the Hanbury River is on hold for now, what with the waves and rain.

Out the window I see green. Green in all directions, not tall green, and nothing like the big 200-year old spruces that burned ten years ago, but green. Last night, trying to bring a four-wheeler and trailer “the back way” over to what we call Blue Fox Bay, to fetch a drum of fuel, I was turned back in a stare-down with a big bull muskox, happily munching on all that rich green.

What to say? Nothing profound. There is a lot of glowing malarky written about how wonderful wildfires are, how healing and cleansing, and how much we should all love them. I suppose some of it is true. It has been amazing, yes, to watch ten years of change, to see jet black turn to summer green. The little spruces are now eight to eighteen inches tall, the birch and some of the alder clumps are topping eight feet. The fields of fire-flower will be psychedelic purple by late July.

I found these three passages copied into the back of my journal, all snippets lifted from Annie Proulx’s wandering historical novel, Barkskins. I was thinking of posting only one of them, the one about fire, and leaving this post today as just that one quotation. But when I dug them up they all three rang true, in different ways, and then I started rambling on. As I do.

— “It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

— “The fire had been the salient point of his life. He had an absolute knowledge that nothing — nothing — would ever be as it had been.” (from part VII, chapter 49. “stupendous conflagration.”

— “If business and enterprise is a fruit, we must understand risk is its inner kernel.”

So many people have lent a hand in this past decade. Our thanks to every one of you.

Onward, into the green, and the change. It’s really raining out there now. Yeah, baby!