It smelled like barbecue. Mesquite or oak, probably, because we were in Texas. But though it reminded me of the beef cheeks and sausage we’d enjoyed the day before, it most certainly wasn’t either.
After enjoying a Czech Dark Lager and Underberg at Hold Out Brewing, we noticed flashing lights following about a quarter mile behind us. The fire engines blocking the left lane turned onto Spring Valley Road. Traffic condensed. Smoke billowed across the road. A pumper truck doused smoldering coals in the brush. Wildfire.
Over the past year I’d become intoxicated by wildfire. I’d read “Fire In Paradise: An American Tragedy” by Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano, a book about the catastrophic Camp Fire that destroyed the California town of Paradise and was the impetus behind Sierra Nevada’s Resilience. Then I read Lizzie Johnson’s “Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire.” Documentaries about the Camp Fire followed. “Fire Season: Field Notes From a Wilderness Lookout,” Philip Connors’s recollection of his time as a New Mexico fire watcher, helped expand my knowledge. Something about the descriptions of fleeing through walls of flame horrified and captivated me in a way that not much else has.
But spending my entire life in the Midwest, where the summer humidity is so great that a run on a hot day can leave you as drenched as on a rainy day, I had never actually witnessed a wildfire. It was a phenomenon that occurred elsewhere, a consequence of climate change, mismanagement, and the expansion of the urban wildlife interface. I’ve done my best to conserve water, not out of a feeling of impending danger from drought but with the assumption it might help elsewhere. But now, I was in that elsewhere.
Luckily this fire seemed contained, just a small spark that had burned less than an acre and posed little actual threat. Even so, as we drove east towards Jester King Brewery, we could still see thin clouds of black smoke rising above the hills. Yes, it smelled like barbecue, but we were the ones in the pit.
Words + Photoby Nick Yoder