The Field He Watches From His Sink

The Smell Before the Sirens

I was pulling a sheet cake out of the oven for the 4-H bake sale when I smelled it, and I knew before I ever looked out the window.

Smoke has a tone to it, the same way a voice does. Burning leaves is one thing.

This was the other kind, low and oily, the smell of something that was not supposed to burn.

It was coming from the wrong direction too.

Our burn barrel sits east of the house, and this was riding in on a south wind, which meant it was coming off the high ground.

I set the cake on top of the stove and went out to the back porch in my apron and looked across the fence line toward Len’s place.

The whole south end of my grandpa’s pine was orange.

Not a campfire. Not a brush pile smoldering down.

A wall of it, taller than the trees, moving the way fire moves when it finds forty years of dry needle duff and decides to run.

I stood there one full second with my hand on the porch rail, and then I went back in and called 911 and gave them the road and the mile marker.

The dispatcher was a woman I half knew from church, and she stayed calm, and that helped.

She told me the trucks were rolling out of Mountain View and asked was anybody in the timber.

I said no, just trees. And then I heard my own words and almost laughed, because just trees was the biggest lie I had ever told a telephone.

I grabbed the keys and drove the quarter mile of lane down to the gate, and by the time I got there the heat was coming across the fence in waves I could feel on my face through the windshield.

There was nothing one woman with a garden hose was going to do about ten acres of pine, and I knew it, so I just stood at the gate and watched it go and waited for the sirens.

The volunteer trucks came in about eighteen minutes, which is good time for a county this size, and I will be grateful to those men the rest of my life.

They are farmers and the propane man and a boy who bags groceries, and they came off their day jobs and fought my grandpa’s fire with a brush truck and a pumper and a dozer that belonged to the road district.

They cut a line with the dozer along the creek and backfired it and held it there, and if they had been ten minutes slower it would have jumped the creek and taken the hay ground too.

I handed out bottles of water from the cooler I keep in the truck and I tried not to be in the way, and I watched the orange eat the dark green and turn it to black.