My father and I drove through a world turned bronze by thick smoke, making a push to save a few more things from our summer cabin before the raging forest fire consumed it. The valley around us looked like an old photograph, discolored with age, the refraction of the sun’s rays draping a constant sunset over us. The firefighters sat atop their engines, misting the trees by the roadside and staring helplessly at the wildfire that had just crested the hill.
My aunt’s family was in town when the blaze started, and they evacuated with us. We loaded up every vehicle with necessities and joined the long convoy of locals inching their way out of the valley. The fire’s glow gave the night sky an ominous tint, and the burning crowns of blue spruces could be seen high up on the ridges. Trees were exploding, shooting up whips of ash and cinder like miniature solar flares.
By that time, the Missionary Ridge fire was several thousand acres in size. Lit by a smoldering cigarette thrown from the window of a car, it tore through the dense forest of southwest Colorado during the longest drought in the area’s history.
Once safely in town, my dad and I stayed with a friend, and waited until we would be let back into the valley to rescue a few more possessions from the cabin. The town was in a state of emergency, and ominous smoke hung in the air over Main Street. The rivers were flooding with ash. Some of the artwork inside our cabin would be painful to lose, and after a day or two, we got our chance to save some of it.
We drove on toward the towering cloud of smoke and our summer cabin where scrapbooks, pictures of my late mother, and even my father’s glasses-which he couldn’t find in the rush to leave-were all waiting to burn. At the roadblock, the county sheriff took pity on us and waved us through. Many of the paintings at the cabin had long been in the family; one was even painted by my great-grandmother. Perhaps it was macho and foolish of us, but we decided none of it would turn to ash on our watch.
The fire was making steady progress toward our cabin, crawling through a new valley each day, and we passed the aforementioned firefighters not five miles from our home. The fire would burn into our valley; it was only a matter of time. Some of the volunteer firefighters set up lawn chairs and sat, watching and waiting.
Once we reached the house, I asked my father what he wanted to load up. He perused all the things he had collected in the house over the years, with a helpless stare on his face, unsure where to begin. We gathered together the paintings that had been in the family the longest, some clothes and an extra bag of food for the cat. We left the refrigerator full, deliriously hoping we would return before the food spoiled. Driving out, we saw that the firefighters had sprung up out of their lawn chairs to fight a grassfire near the road.
Only hours after we got out, the fire raced five miles up the valley at 60 miles an hour, leaping from treetop to treetop, burning within a half mile of our cabin. Two weeks went by and the area remained sealed off. Eventually, my father and I made our way home to Phoenix and waited out the fire, watching its progress on the local newspaper’s website.
According to some reports, the Missionary Ridge fire should have easily been put out, but the Forest Service had failed to negotiate a price for slurry, the pink chemical fire retardant, during the winter. Instead, the fire bombers, a decrepit set of decommissioned military aircraft, were forced to drop water on the flames. It evaporated long before reaching the smoldering trees.
We watched the maps online, as the fire burned up both sides of the valley, surrounding our cabin. One day, the fire, which had created its own weather pattern, conjured up a tornado of flame that tore its way around the dry lakebed on the valley floor. It snapped groves of hundred-year-old trees in half, and destroyed every boat, car and trailer our neighbors had optimistically parked on the lakebed, thinking the fire wouldn’t burn there. Only luck kept the wind from blowing it up our street.
It was two months before we were allowed back into the area. The fire miraculously left our cabin untouched. Finally home, we emptied out our noxious refrigerator, and replaced each and every item that we took out of the house, one by one. Today, none of the more than 30,000 acres charred in the fire can be seen from the windows of our house.
