I first notice the aspen in the summer of 2019. Hundreds of tiny shoots, each one with its tip sheared off by the tractor cutting the field. The irony catches in my throat — it’s the beginning of fire season, and we’ve just mowed down a potential firebreak.
When I bought the land in 1988, summers were hot but never scary. No one talked about “fire season,” and “flying embers” wasn’t a term in anyone’s vocabulary. The neighbouring fields were green and well-tended. Mine was planted in alfalfa and managed by my neighbour Rick, a gentle, soft-spoken man who surprised me that first summer with a cheque for ninety dollars for my share of the crop.
“You’ve done all the work,” I said. “Why pay me?”
He grinned as he handed me the cheque. “You own the land.”
After Rick died in 2004, I stopped cutting that field, assuming the vegetation would compost down and improve the soil. I didn’t know uncut grass takes ages to decompose. By the summer of 2015, the field was a thick mass of dried-out grass and weeds, the perfect tinder for a flying ember, a term in everyone’s vocabulary now with wildfires burning all around us – 200 hectares at Lynch Creek to the north, 4,400 hectares near Rock Creek to the west, and the massive Stickpin Fire just over the border in Washington State, an out-of-control inferno that would eventually grow to almost 31,000 hectares.
The field was never a natural grassland.
The fear in our small community of Grand Forks is palpable, and when fiery embers blow across the Washington border, fear turns to anger at the unkempt fields: “What the hell is wrong with people?” “Those overgrown fields are a bloody fire hazard!” “People are such idiots.”
My stomach clenches. I’m one of those idiots. My two acres of dry grass and weeds is less than ten kilometres from the Lynch Creek fire, a short distance for a flying ember. Embarrassed by my negligence, I post a note on our neighbourhood watch page: “If anyone is available to cut my two acres of dead grass, please pm me. It needs to be cut, baled and hauled away . . . and yes, why am I only thinking of this now is a good question.”
No one replies. Of course not, it’s too risky to pull a swather in a dry, overgrown field in the middle of summer. One strike on a stone and the whole field could ignite. There is nothing to do but wait. Wait and hope for rain.
By the end of August, the Lynch Creek Fire reaches 1,700 hectares. Several of us move our emergency bags to the door and pack family treasures in our vehicles. We huddle together in groups of three or four, feeling vulnerable and helpless as we watch the billowing plumes of smoke rise in the distance. Some days, smoke smothers the entire valley, grounding helicopters and leaving fire crews without air support as they battle the flames and build fire guards.
Eventually, the hot, dry days of summer give way to fall. The fire guards hold, the rains come and the flames are gradually extinguished. The air smells fresh again and, as temperatures cool, morning dew bathes the land. It’s as if the earth remembers to breathe and so do we, exhaling in relief that we made it through the 2015 summer of fire.