Smoke Season

CHAPTER 1

Kristina Truitt doubted anyone in Carbon, Oregon, would forget where they had been and what they’d been doing at a quarter after five the evening of July 10, 2018. True herself had just pulled onto the sand at Fern Creek after a full day on the Outlaw River, urging her river-rafting clients, a mother-and-child duo from Marin County, California, to pitch their tent quick. A hot summer rain would be upon them in minutes; if she looked to the east, it already approached in a solid wall.

“Don’t forget the rainfly!” True called after them, her voice drowned out by the first crack of thunder. They scurried like sand crabs up the embankment to the tree line, Vivian Wu clutching their shiny new Big Agnes tent under one arm like a football and young Emmett Wu looking wildly upward at the darkening sky as he chased after his mom.

“And avoid widow-makers, like we talked about!” she added. It was only day one of five they would spend together, after all, and fifteen years of river-guide experience told True the wind she’d rowed against for the last five miles would only intensify with the rain. Any standing dead trees posed a high risk of toppling onto the unsuspecting ER nurse from San Rafael and her kid.

True wrestled with the heavy-duty polypropylene straps securing their gear to the oar raft, her fingers feeling thick from the oppressive humidity of the afternoon. A flash of light lit up the overcast sky—the bow of the oar raft momentarily glowed bright red—and then another crack of thunder sounded, this one so close True could have sworn she felt the rumble’s reverberation in the metal clasps of the straps.

Shit, they’d gotten off the water just in time. At least no rain was falling yet, she thought as she freed the Wus’ dry bags of clothing and her two largest metal ammo boxes. She’d picked up the military-issued boxes years ago at the Army Navy store after discovering their usefulness for storing first-aid supplies, her repair kit, her sat phone, and their five-day supply of TP.

She hauled all of it out onto the sand and climbed back into the boat for one more box, a smaller, even more banged-up container she eyed warily before carting it up with the rest, tucking it amid her personal duffel and waterproof Paco Pad. Like it or not, it was best to keep this particular cargo close.

Next, she freed her own dry bag and tent, the camp table, and her stove. She debated getting out the canvas tarpaulin she used for shade but decided this wind would whip it down the Outlaw like an oversize kite faster than she could count thunderclaps. She left it behind, along with the gargantuan Yeti cooler containing dinner. They’d need to wait out this storm before getting the grill going.

“True? Can I help?” Emmett called from halfway up the sandy bank.

He jumped as another bolt of lightning lit up the sky but made a noticeable effort not to cower at the angry answer of thunder. True threw him a grateful smile as she held up his family’s dry bags for him to retrieve. “Thanks!”

She appreciated how willing he was to give this camping and rafting thing a go, knowing the trip had been his mom’s idea. “Emmett’s pronouns are he , him , and his ,” Vivian Wu had informed True before booking. “I won’t raft with anyone who won’t respect that.” She’d paused. “It’s why I felt most comfortable booking with an LGBTQ-owned guide company.”

Company of one, but still, True had felt honored. Her sympathy was acute for young Emmett, who’d apparently had a hell of a school year after finally finding the courage, just shy of his twelfth birthday, to whisper to his mom that he was not, and never had been, the she he had been known as for the first eleven years of life. Clearly, True decided as she tied up the raft and followed Emmett up the embankment, Vivian Wu had done her research.

She made her way up the bank loaded down with steel boxes and bags, staggering for a step or two when her feet sank hard into the sand. The Wus had celebrated snagging such a beachy campsite all to themselves, though True knew this had more to do with rafting-company pecking order than any stroke of river luck.

Her solo operation always departed a day or two after the big weekend groups with their gear boats and kayaks trailing behind, and though she never minded the quieter water, she sometimes missed having an extra pair of hands. So when Emmett offered to unburden her of a sleeping bag and duffel at the top, she accepted, dropping the rest in one unceremonious heap where the sand flattened up. Once this crazy weather subsided, this would serve as their camp-kitchen headquarters for the night.

“Take your mom’s bag to her,” she told Emmett while trying to secure her hair—at least the long, sun-bleached side; the other side she’d shorn close to the skull—up under her Patagonia cap. “And dig out your rain jacket!”

Emmett decided to obey this second order first, and so was still standing there, clawing through his bag, when the next lightning strike— the lightning strike, the one to start it all—cut through the air, this time so close the fine hair on True’s arms stood on end. She glanced up in time to see the bolt shoot straight down toward the tree line on Flatiron Peak, at her ten o’clock to the northeast.

Directly toward the base of the mountain and the town of Carbon.

As True watched, the long, crooked finger of electricity made contact, setting the tip of the tallest tree on the peak’s plateaued flattop aflame as effortlessly as a Bic igniting the wick of a birthday candle.

It was so beautiful, she actually gasped.

Emmett cried out. He pointed at the distant trees, gesticulating crazily, like maybe True hadn’t seen the strike. “What do we do? True!” He yanked on her arm. “What do we do ?”

“Nothing,” she assured him, though the word left her lungs in a somewhat shaky exhale. A forest fire, no matter how inconsequential, was the last thing she needed on this trip. Emmett’s mother had already complicated it for True enough, bursting into her warehouse in Carbon for their pre-trip debriefing yesterday in a blaze of mama-bear glory. True’s precise type of kryptonite. True turned to lay her hands on Emmett’s shoulders, still warm from the sun that had shone fiercely all day, right up until the clouds had rolled in, and told them both what they needed to hear. “It’s okay. Emmett. It’ll be fine.”

“But! I mean ...” He pointed again, speechless, and True nodded, watching the flame grow with him, just a tiny orange dot against the ridge of Flatiron, smoke beginning to billow in one thin upward coil like vapor from a cigar in a cartoon.

“Happens all the time,” True assured him, even while eyeing the location with more scrutiny than she’d care to admit, calculating the distance between the strike and town. As the crow flies, what? Five miles? Ten? She thought first of her best friends, Sam and Melissa Bishop—Sam residing in Carbon with their kids, Melissa undoubtedly called to this blaze as Carbon Rural’s battalion chief—and then of her own place, tucked off the grid just a few miles upstream.

Her acreage on this very river was carpeted with sage, its branches the color of barrel-aged bourbon, and poison oak that turned fiery under the summer sun and blackberry bushes that bit back if you tried to squeeze between branches to pluck their fruit. A feisty place, her Outsider, as True had christened the land and yurt she’d ordered and erected from Outside Enterprises in Bozeman. Feisty as well as thirsty, these days. It might be only July, but Carbon had already recorded its tenth hundred-degree day.

“You know the insurance will be through the roof, Truitt,” Paul Jackson, Carbon’s poor excuse for a State Farm agent, had said after she’d bought the property last year, pushing the paperwork back toward her across his desk.

“We can’t choose our neighbors, Paul,” she’d countered. Last she’d checked, she wasn’t responsible for the grow site next door, even if it was considered to be on the shady side.

Which was precisely why she needed the Outsider insured to the rafters. That and the fact that Mother Nature seemed to have a fiery temper these days.

“That’s why we have fire lookouts,” she told Emmett now, setting her jaw as she deliberately looked away from the smoke now spiraling lazily upward from the mountain. “Remember the one I pointed out this morning?”

They’d checked it out from the shore after a midmorning snack on the bank of the Outlaw just a stone’s throw from the Outsider, the Wus peering upward at the stilted watchtower, built back in the Civilian Conservation Corps days, on the top of the nearest mountainside. True had used the opportunity to take care of a little errand of her own, liberating the same small ammo box she now carried from its hiding spot behind a thick patch of blackberry bushes straddling the property line by the river. She hadn’t had any trouble, though she hadn’t been able to resist a glance behind her to ensure the Wus were still engrossed in CCC history, stepping directly into the berry patch in the process. No matter: the scrapes True received from the blackberry thorns always felt like a fair tradeoff for the relief that flooded her each time the box was still there, week after week, waiting for her.

At least the end was in sight. The river gods willing, this trip would mark the last time she jumped like a jackrabbit at the sight of her own shadow whenever she handled the thing.

Looking back at her young charge, she reminded Emmett of the height of the lookout they’d seen this morning, the expansive views its steward must be afforded from its glass walls, and he nodded, though he didn’t look entirely convinced. “But who will put out the fire, after they spot it?”

Melissa, most likely. The thought brought with it another quick kick of worry, even as True laid what she hoped was a comforting hand on the crown of Emmett’s precisely shorn head, a recent haircut she knew he took pride in. But then she smiled, turning her palms upward to catch the first of the smattering of drops to hit their skin. Finally, the rain was upon them. An ironic sign of clear skies ahead? “Mother Nature will.”

Emmett glanced up, an experimental smile on his face. “Oh hey, yeah! Good.”

True glanced back to where Vivian Wu had managed to erect their tent. “It’s gonna pour, kid. Go give your mom her coat.”

Emmett ran off, his gait lighter somehow than it had been all trip, the careful posture True had observed in his body giving way to a loosening of limbs as he loped up the slope. True hoped Vivian saw the unwinding within him that she did.

She dug her own rain jacket out of her bag and pulled her hood up over her hat as she went about putting up the table and her own tent and fly. The heavy, hot drops felt good on her bare thighs as she worked. They ran off the bill of her hat to splash onto her cheeks, soaked her board shorts, and ran down her legs to cause her feet to squish in her Chacos. By the time she had the table set up, the rain was coming down hard enough to leave sudden puddles in the divots of the sand.

But before she could move to higher ground, it stopped almost as quickly as it had come on. Emmett popped back out of his tent, followed by his mother, who sported an Arc’teryx rain shell that True knew for a fact cost more than her entire wardrobe of river wear. Emmett’s was identical to his mother’s, though his petite build swam in a men’s extra small. Instead of seeming over-the-top, however, the detail struck True as touching. The care Vivian had taken to follow the packing list to the letter, buying only the best, served to remind True how important this trip was to her.

“It didn’t rain for long!” Vivian called over now.

No, it hadn’t. It hadn’t rained nearly long enough. True glanced back toward the ridgeline of Flatiron Peak. Through the haze of the moisture still clinging to the air, she felt pretty sure she could still make out the glow of the blaze taking shape, its smoke now a cloud, dense against the damp sky.