By G.D. Maxwell
The sense of destruction can’t really be measured. Well, actually, it can. And it is. The total, growing every day, sits somewhere in the neighbourhood of 19,000 scorched hectares, 99 sheds and barns, 39 houses, 26 trailer homes, three towns, one sawmill, 200 jobs up in smoke, a devastated 50-year-old whose careless cigarette started it all... and the third finger on my right hand.
Those are preliminary estimates of the damage caused by the McLure-Barriere fire. The totals are sure to swell even assuming the fire, now more or less under control, doesn’t rise up Phoenix-like and start the dance of destruction all over again. The swelling in my finger presumably will subside but you never know. Blood poisoning could set in. On the other hand – not the only one I have that fully works but the other allegorical hand – it could have been a lot worse.
What, I hear you ask, does a swollen, black ’n’ blue, unbending, sausage sticking out of the middle of my right hand have to do with the biggest damn fire in B.C.’s history? Glad you asked.
It’s Stan’s fault. Stan, my fix anything, know everything, one man sustainability show of a neighbour, has lived in these parts for nearly 30 years. He was here before the road could really be called a road. He was here before the local fire department could really be called a fire department. Truth be told, it still can’t be called a fire department. At least not in the sense there’s much likelihood they’d ever get to a house fire in time to put it out before the house burned to the ground.
Which is why Stan dragged his old fire pump out of its hiding place. "Safety first," he said. The idea being if fire threatened either Stan’s log home or Smilin’ Dog B&B, we’d – as in Stan and I – stick a big hose into the emerald green waters of Sulphuric Lake, hook it up to the pump, run two hundred feet of fire hose up the hill and squirt the fire out.
"Does it work?" I like asking Stan inane questions.
"Well, no. It doesn’t. But I’m going to fix it," he replied.
In the meantime, he’d borrowed a fire pump from someone nearby who was obviously taking a more devil-may-care attitude about the dangers of fire, so we practised with it. We wrestled intake hose into the lake, wrestled squirtin’ hose up the hill, wrestled the airlock out of the intake hose and finally sprayed water all over the place. I figured in the time it took us to get everything working Stan’s house burned down. But I also figured we saved mine, which is a lot closer to the lake, so we rolled the hoses back up and stood our virtually homeless neighbours to cocktails.
"Is that how you hurt your finger?" I hear you ask again.
No, it isn’t. I’m coming to that.
Sitting there, drinking consoling cocktails, watching the mushroom cloud of smoke from the Barriere fire rising in the southeastern sky, we started playing the Cariboo equivalent of What Would You Do If You Won The Lottery? The game – What Would You Take If You Had To Get The Hell Our of Here Before The Fire Burned You Up? – has been popular the past few weeks.
Being a fatalist, I hadn’t given it much thought. Living in fool’s paradise and believing nothing more dramatic than a really swollen finger could happen to me, I hadn’t actually given it any thought at all. But everyone else had.
"I’m ready," Thelma – Mrs. Stan – announced.
And indeed she was. There was important stuff loaded in the van, boxes stacked neatly by the door and an overall sense of readiness at their cabin. By comparison to this heightened state of preparation, my own planning hadn’t advanced much beyond piling newspapers and oily rags somewhere where I wouldn’t trip over them if I had to leave quickly.
Not that I hadn’t given the matter some thought. That is to say, not that my Perfect Partner hadn’t given it some thought. "What would you take?" she’d asked me several times.
"The insurance policy," I’d answered. After that, I wasn’t sure. Should I try to stuff everything I’d paid 10 years of storage on into Mello Yello and hope its puny, four-cylinder engine could beat the flames?
"What about the dog?" she said.
"Yeah. Good idea. We’ll take the dog." She’s a lot better when it comes to planning things.
Of course, when I learned most of what Thelma had packed was homemade wine – which I learned as cocktail hours passed and we had to break into the emergency rations – it put emergency preparedness in a whole new light.
By the time the new piston for Stan’s pump arrived, the tide, firewise, was turning. Still, with the diligence of a true pioneer, Stan quickly assembled what looked to me like a pile of junky old engine pieces into a, hopefully, working pump.
We packed it down to the lake, sunk the intake hose, uncoiled the fire hose, siphoned gas from the other pump’s tank into its tank and gave each other one of those Moment of Truth looks. Stan pulled the starter cord. Normally, when you pull the starter cord on a small engine, the widget engages the framitz and turns the engine over. When the widget fails to engage the framitz, the mighty tug you give the cord is met with no resistance and you go backwards, ass over teakettle.
Regaining his dignity, Stan dutifully took the starter thing apart and put it back together the right way. It was starting to rain.
"You pull it," he said.
I’d forgotten he’d warned me about this engine’s nasty habit of kicking back. Something about advanced timing or two-timing or something.
Giving the cord a mighty pull, the widget engaged, the engine turned, misfired, kicked back and ripped the starter cord handle out of my hand with enough force to bend my third finger back to the elbow.
"*#%!!!!," I hollered, assuming the Injured Guy posture of hand thrust in crotch.
"*#%!!!!," I repeated for good measure.
Regaining my composure, I tried to ignore the increasing size and rapidly changing colour of my digit. I was too focused on the fact it wouldn’t bend without assistance from the fingers around it to worry about its size and colour.
Unimpeded by my injury, Stan got the engine running. By this time it was pouring rain and both houses had been saved by nature. Regardless, we now have two working fire pumps, nine working fingers and peace of mind has returned to the Cariboo.
But I’m still not sure what to pack, just in case.
