Smoke Season

CHAPTER 2

The sudden rain was already letting up when Melissa Bishop closed the automatic vehicle-bay door of Carbon Rural Fire District 1 and made her way into the break room, Mother Nature saving her the task of the customary post-shift vehicle hose-down.

“Looks like you’re gonna have to wash that rig after all, Chief.” Rookie volunteer Deklan Jones smirked over the rim of his Diet Coke can as what had been furious pounding just moments ago gave way to a light patter.

“Yeah? Think fast.” Mel tossed the keys, which Deklan caught on instinct, in midair. “Guess you’ve got the job now, newbie.”

“Wait ... what the ...?!” Deklan’s face flushed practically the color of his ginger hair in indignation. He threw a cursory glance around the room, as if in hope that someone outranking Mel would come to his rescue. Dave Lewis, captain of their station? Not likely, Mel thought. He stared at his phone with a disgruntled frown, obsessed with some game his teenage kid had told him he’d never beat. The big boss, Fire Chief Gabe Hernandez, was still stuck in the city of Outlaw for the day, at one of the interminable meetings that made him curse his position at the top of the station ladder, and Doug White, Mel’s assistant chief, was mercifully already in the process of clocking out, which meant that he’d decided to take a night off from questioning her overtime hours for a change. As a single mom—even if the title still felt unnatural less than one full year into her separation—and the primary breadwinner in her family, she’d take what she could, thank you very much, and she’d save any apologies for her daughters, eight-year-old Astor and five-year-old Annie.

The thought of her kids brought the usual double punch of guilt for being here and guilt for wishing herself anywhere else, and she was glad to turn her focus to young Deklan.

“Eighteen years old and totally clueless. I keep telling you, kid, you gotta learn some respect for your superiors.” She flicked a fry Deklan’s way for good measure before scooping up the remaining wrappers from her crew’s takeout order and disposing of them in the garbage can at the end of the galley kitchen.

“For my elders , more like,” Deklan grumbled. “What are you, like, forty?” He said this like he meant seventy.

“Thirty-eight, for the record,” Mel told him cheerfully, already headed toward the door. “I know, I know, that sounds ancient to a kid fresh out of Carbon High. And speaking of kids ... I’m ready to see mine.” With any luck, she just might escape the station with time to catch up with their father before the customary kid handoff. Her feelings for Sam Bishop were every bit as conflicted as her feelings for her work, but she did owe him a drink at the bar and grill they still owned together. He’d bought the last round, and lord knew they had plenty to talk about. She waved a farewell, mentally halfway to the River Eddy.

Naturally, the fire gods couldn’t let that happen. The phone buzzed on the wall, catching Mel up short in the doorway, like a woman snagged abruptly on a line. A low curse escaped her lips. A call on the landline, instead of across their comms network, could only mean one thing: an interagency request. She listened as Deklan answered—anything to get out of washing the truck, Mel figured—while reluctantly fishing her cell phone out of her pocket. She didn’t relish having to call Sam to let him know she’d be late for pickup. Again. It would trigger their usual argument, or at least one of their top ten, and they were already tangoing to a one-step-forward, two-steps-back beat.

She’d just hung up when Deklan called out to Lewis. “Hey, BM? It’s a Red Book request for us.”

This got Lewis’s attention—the request, not the nickname, which Deklan swore, in all innocence, stood for Big Man, despite Lew ranking below Mel’s battalion-chief standing. He looked up from his phone screen with a groan.

“Red Book?” he confirmed, while Mel bade a silent goodbye to any evening at all at home, let alone an early one. The girls would be disappointed. Or at least Annie would be. Astor might turn one of her newly discovered, post-parent-separation surly looks in Mel’s direction.

Deklan nodded. “Outlaw National Forest Service has a blaze sighted on Flatiron.”

The operating manual commonly referred to as the Red Book outlined the policy of cooperation between municipal fire stations like Carbon Rural and wildland stations run by the United States Forest Service and Oregon Wildfire Response and Recovery, promising first response from whoever stood closest to any fire. In this day and age of brittle-dry forests, deadly pine-beetle infestations, climate change, and increased urban development, teamwork and swift action proved any community’s best defense. And Flatiron was close—damned close—to Carbon, where Mel’s kids called home. Where Sam still tried to eke out a profit at the River Eddy. As Lewis listened on the old landline, Mel stood in the doorway, her head craned upward toward the distinct topography of Flatiron Peak. Its oddly flattened top had been formed by volcanic action some ten thousand years ago. Mel had heard the spiel of its geological history just last month, when Astor had brought a collection of lava rocks home from her second-grade field trip, lightweight enough to float in the bathtub like a misshapen Navy fleet. She’d shown Mel her science trick in an increasingly rare moment of childhood levity. Was it the looming divorce that seemed to be robbing Mel’s eldest daughter of her childhood, or had that ball been rolling since her baby sister’s birth? No I’m a Big Sister T-shirt should come with a life-threatening heart condition for the younger sibling attached, but here they all were.

She squinted into the haze lingering after the electric storm, scanning the sea of evergreen carpeting the slope of the mountain, but couldn’t pick out the start of a fire.

“Uh-huh,” she heard Lewis say into the phone as some Forest Service interagency supervisor got him up to speed. “Eight miles south of here? Gimme the coordinates.”

Lewis waved his thumb and forefinger in the air toward Deklan, indicating his need for a pen, then wrote the GPS coordinates given to him onto the legal pad that hung by the door. “Yep. Sure.”

While Lewis’s attention remained on the call, Mel continued to scan the mountain, searching, searching, and then there! She saw it ... a fine but distinct plume of smoke, almost but not quite blending into the sky still thick gray with rain clouds. Below it, the telltale blur of orange glowed, fuzzy and ill-defined as a smudge on one of the heat maps she’d studied back in her first days as a novice, ground-pounding in Colorado. “Hey, Lew?” she called, leaning back toward the hallway. “I’ve got eyes on it.”

Mel instructed Deklan to make the initial callouts to the rest of the Carbon Rural volunteer crew—“What am I, a secretary?”—while White, Mel’s superior only in title, as Sam had been known to say, trudged back in to ready the rest of the team, his face set in stony resignation. For once, Mel couldn’t fault him for his mood. Like her, he’d had one foot out the door.

Most of their skeleton crew of paid firefighters were still chilling in the break room after a call to the Carbon Happy Daze trailer park for some sort of electrical short. “So listen up,” White told them. “We’re on monitor status.”

“Wait ... we don’t even get to do anything?” Deklan said, listening in instead of making his calls.

“We’re ordered to stand by and assess only,” White barked, so Mel threw the kid a bone.

“But we’re the first responders, so we’ll still have to yellow up.”

This earned her a grunt of satisfaction; even a newbie like Deklan knew that donning the mustard-yellow wildland-issue fire-retardant wear meant action could be required, even if his captain and chief couldn’t promise anything. Carbon Rural’s lieutenant, Janet Stillwater, got everyone up and off the couches, her straight ebony hair sashaying in its long ponytail as she opened lockers to make sure every team member had the required wear.

“Carbon Rural is closest,” she added, “so Carbon Rural goes.”

This assignment might not be as sexy as Deklan would like, but protocol was protocol, with their station situated so close to the wildland-urban interface. Even if it did keep them all from their families, Mel tried to dispel the resentment that could fester if she let it.

Back out in the vehicle bay, driver engineer José Juarez had already fired up the tactical engine, easing his ample girth behind the wheel. The vehicle rumbled reliably as Mel climbed back into her truck, its dirt now streaked with rainwater, and turned over the engine. Janet hopped in beside her, along with Deklan and his rookie partner, Ryan Sloan, fresh from his day job at Carbon Grocery. Lewis and White followed in Lew’s assistant-chief vehicle.

Ten minutes from the time of the phone call, they rolled out as a team of twenty: eight staff and twelve volunteers ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-two. The three trucks and two chief vehicles eased down Main Street toward the state highway that led to the network of Forest Service roads crisscrossing Flatiron. Despite her reluctance to load up this evening, the rush of adrenaline that was probably responsible for Mel getting into this profession in the first place made itself known. She leaned forward in her seat, letting it carry her forward, away from her family, away from Carbon. It wasn’t until they’d turned up FS 7312, Mel’s Dodge Ram bouncing through the ruts like a raft over rapids, that she realized she’d forgotten to update Sam with her new ETA. Not that she knew one.

“Sam knows this comes with the territory,” Janet reminded her, her trademark practicality always a welcome contribution to the team. “He’ll assume he’s on call until further updated.”

She was right, of course, but Janet, mom of four, should understand: working mothers had to go the extra mile, which meant that, by very definition, you never fully caught up. Mel had already missed Astor’s end-of-year school picnic and Annie’s five-year-old doctor checkup, which had been more extensive than her sister’s. Mel’s inner critic gnawed at her relentlessly, grating at the back of her mind like the serrated edge of her standard-issue pilot knife. You’ll never do enough for Annie, it told her, no matter how many medical articles you read. You’ll never set the perfect example for Astor, no matter how high up the ranks you climb .

She exhaled hard, refocusing her concentration on the road as they eased their way up the switchbacks of Flatiron, sticking to the main FS 7312. While the Ram trucks and the smaller of the engines could have detoured to take a more direct route up a lesser-used, more deeply rutted logging road, they were only collectively as strong as their weakest—or, in this case, largest-axled—link.

They got as close as they could, Janet consulting Mel’s handheld GPS units as they drove, then pulled up short when the grade of the road finally got too iffy. They piled out of the vehicles, making their way up the rest of the slope on foot. Ryan and the older volunteers all hiked silently, but Deklan talked a mile a minute, mostly about the boots he’d neglected to break in.

“Such a rookie,” José muttered under his breath with a chuckle. “Should have swapped those brand-new kicks out for those Sasquatch slippers I bequeathed him. He’d be better off.” Mel and Janet both laughed; José was infamous for his practical jokes, most of which were directed toward Deklan these days, who appreciated them most.

Only Janet exhibited some mercy. “Hey, kid!” she called. “Find me later for moleskin.”

At the tree line, they finally got their first unobstructed view of the fire. They all paused, a hush settling around them despite the persistent presence of the wind, even Deklan falling mercifully silent. As expected, the blaze wasn’t large, not by wildland standards, but Mel didn’t care if a forest fire burned a quarter acre or five thousand, ten thousand, even a hundred thousand acres ... This undulating, licking, living thing deserved their respect. The fire danced far above them on the ridge, one moment like a flag waving lightly in the wind, the next like a ship rocking gently on a sea, mesmerizing to watch. A few tall pines burned like torches, adding to the dramatic flair. They were responsible for most of the smoke that now billowed in a mushroom cloud that migrated west, but the vast majority of the blaze was, in a word, underwhelming. It consumed the dry undergrowth in a slow, meticulous crawl, fanning out in thin spots to lap at the denser stands of trees that proved more formidable foes. It was what Mel had been taught to call a “shallow” blaze, just skimming the surface of the forest ... a trickle rather than a rushing river.

“Hell,” Deklan said, his voice flat with defeat, “it’s about as tame as a campfire.”

“All we’re missing are the s’mores,” Ryan agreed.

Mel smiled, pausing to secure her long hair in an elastic band she found in her pocket. It felt good to get it off the back of her neck. Sweat already beaded on her skin, and it was only going to get hotter. In this post–Smokey the Bear era, forestry professionals realized the folly of putting out every fire in the American West, which meant this one would burn, unless specialized wildland crews decided otherwise. “Our job as Carbon Rural?” she reminded the rookies. “Containment.” As frustrating as that was when her kids needed her. While Sam waited to debrief with her.

Deklan mumbled something about signing up to be a fire fighter , not a fire babysitter, which sent Mel’s thoughts back to her girls.

“No one expects you to win mother of the year,” her best friend, True, pointed out once, when Mel’s Wonder Woman act had shown signs of wear. She had winced, trying not to let that sting. As far as Mel was concerned, she’d been out of the running for that particular distinction since the moment Annie was born with a heart defect she’d been powerless to fix.

But thinking of True would only cause Mel to worry further, her thoughts splintering in yet another unwelcome direction, so she refocused on the conversation at hand.

“Don’t worry,” Lewis reassured Deklan and Ryan now. “You’ll still be putting some calluses on those pretty hands of yours tomorrow, carving out firebreaks with the Forest Service. In the meantime,” he added, much to Deklan’s delight, “stomp out any hot spots to your heart’s content.”

Mel joined them, but her heart wasn’t in it. It had snagged on the word tomorrow . Lewis was right. Tonight, her crew would need to stage indefinitely, monitoring the fire from the safety of the lower tree line until the wildland ground crew could get on scene. Which meant that though she’d now find time for a quick call, she wouldn’t be heading back to Carbon and her girls anytime soon.