“Pinecone”
There are some things you never forget. One of them is the smell of smoke in rain. You watch the clouds roll over a blood red sun through watery eyes and breathe in the particles of blackened forests and children’s blankets, wondering whether the smoking coals left over are the dancing ghosts of burned lives about to be smothered by fat raindrops falling like thunder. It feels like a dream, sitting here on the tailgate of Uncle Jamie’s red Ford next to woodchips and rogue pieces of straw 2 weeks after the last firetruck's exhaust plumed into the air. It might be more like a nightmare as I look again at the scorched black that was once my town. It doesn’t look like much of anything anymore– just angry, empty land hissing as the first drops of rain wash soot from melted shingles.
They told us we were out of the fire’s path when it started 22 kilometres East down the valley on July 12th. Evacuation was more of a suggestion, and Mum thought it’d just blow over. Who wants to sit in traffic for 6 hours to get out of town when the Westerlies will just send the fire away? Then the wind changed and suddenly, there were no more suggestions.
I was scrolling on my phone trying to forget the dread gnawing holes in my stomach when an evacuation alert began shrieking. It was 1:44 AM on Tuesday, July 16th; I remember because I checked the time while running to wake up my parents. Logan, my little brother, woke up screaming as if he knew something was wrong before he was even conscious.
I pull my knees to my chest as thunder cracks the sky in two and lightning whizzes down to kiss the metal rod I know is on the roof of the big hotel. I can’t see it through the smoke, and I don’t want to. It’ll just be a hollowed out shell with ash on its walls instead of paintings of my mountains. I turn my eyes back to the clouds and fill my lungs with the storm’s ozone and Julia’s bike tyres and Dad’s favourite cheese board. I breathe in the posters on Miss Sakokoto’s wall and Heather’s stack of unread books and the big lodgepole pine in the schoolyard worn smooth by kids’ hands. It makes me cough.
Uncle Jamie looks at me from the corner of his eye as he drags on his eighth cigarette of the night. Why he feels the need to breathe more smoke when the air is like this, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is every time I see him take out his lighter, see the red on the end of the rolled tobacco, I flinch. How can he even look at something like that after some careless fool dropped a smoking cigarette butt and burned down a town? The clouds draw my eyes again and I feel the first droplet of rain splat onto my forehead as Uncle Jamie kills his cigarette. I don’t want to watch him snuff it out on the bottom of his boot– the sparks make my skin crawl– but I do it for the sake of safety. He drops it to the asphalt and grinds it under his toe for 3 seconds, then makes his way to the driver’s side door and gets into the car.
It’s late. The sun set while we were driving out here, but we didn’t leave until Logan was in bed so he couldn’t ask to come with. Watching his 9-year-old smile die when he realized we weren’t on an adventure to go find the stuffies we left at home would have killed me. I’m glad Mum and Dad didn’t want to come. They have enough to worry about without knowing how lost, hopeless, terrified I am to the point that I avoid using the microwave for fear that it could start a fire and burn down another home. Uncle Jamie has this sixth sense for knowing when to leave me alone. Sitting in a thunderstorm and watching the last coals of my town sizzle and die, I want to be alone.
I sit out there until my bones feel the chill and my only pair of converse are soaked through. I can’t see the stars and the moon is a red haze above me. The rain stops at some point and Uncle Jamie wraps me in a blanket. I still shiver. Time seems to bend around me, sitting on the tailgate of his truck in my soggy clothes breathing in the only home I’ve ever known. I slip in and out of sleep.
A light breaks over my mountains and wakes me from my doze. I can’t feel my toes as I wiggle them and at some point I ended up laying down into the truck bed. I blink slowly a few times, disoriented, before I remember where I am. I curl inwards under the damp blanket and try to hold back the sudden swelling of tears in my eyes, but they get loose anyhow and drip down my cheeks like raindrops down windows. Outside the blanket, the light grows.
Eventually, I run out of tears and poke my head outside my refuge to see the peaks of my mountains painted pink and orange with the sunrise. All the smoke came down in the storm and my clothes smell like old campfire, but I can see the blue of the sky beyond the watercolour clouds. I hate that it’s beautiful. The wreckage of my town catches my eye and drags my bitter wonder to the black skeletons left over after the rain, no more smoldering, no more curls of smoke slithering up to paint the sun red, no more plants, no more life.
The driver’s side door opens and Uncle Jamie steps out, stretching his stiff knees before coming around the truck.
“Isn’t it poetic?” He says, taking a seat next to me on the tailgate.
I don’t respond.
“Sunrises have a kind of freshness to them, don’t you agree?” He continues.
“Uncle Jamie, I don’t have a home anymore.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve got a warm bed in my home, your heart, your head, and a fresh start. Like a sunrise.”
“Why do you smoke when that’s what burned down my town?” I ask, knowing I sound rude.
“Because I’m an old fool. You, however, are young, and now you have nothing to lose.” He says, looking at me with a soft smile. “I’ve never heard of anyone who didn’t make a change with that combo.”
He stands up, making the truck groan, and goes back to the driver’s side door, gesturing for me to get into the passenger seat. I sit for a moment longer, watching the pinks and oranges wash over the blackened remains of my home, then I get into the passenger seat and let him drive us away.
We don’t go home, instead turning off the highway onto a gravel road after only a few minutes and driving through a charcoal graveyard that used to be forest. I almost ask him where we’re headed, but decide to humor him. We stop at the sign for a day use area and get out, wet ash sticking to my shoes.
“This is where the fire started from,” Uncle Jamie says, hands on his hips. I spit. He walks to the edge of the gravel road, then crouches down and points to the earth, “This tiny green shoot is called fireweed. It grows after a wildfire because of all the nutrients in the ash. In a couple weeks this whole valley will be full of pink flowers up to my waist. That burned tree there? It was a lodgepole pine. They reseed themselves after forest fires to give their saplings a better chance at growing, so their cones only open with the heat from a fire.” He looks at me intently.
I say nothing, but I crouch down and touch the fireweed softly. At the base of the stem is the soggy remains of a cigarette butt with white roots speared through it.
We drive home in silence. I’m thinking about the lodgepole pine from the schoolyard, how it was so old and worn from the years of kids playing on it. Maybe it was happy to finally get a chance to let its seeds grow. Maybe this is a kind of fresh start– one where I get to make some kind of a difference so fewer kids lose their homes.
I think I love the smell of smoke in rain like the lodgepole pine loves fire. Maybe I’m the seed and this will finally let me grow.