Northern California
This story originally appeared in Humana Obscura in September 2020.
We entered Plumas County surrounded by the charred remains of trees that had perished in the Camp Fire two years earlier. They flanked the road, gnarled and anguished, preserved in their death-pose like the victims of Pompei. That ancient disaster had been a case of civilization coming under attack from nature; everywhere I looked — in the city we’d come from, in the road we drove, in these charred trees — I was reminded of the payback campaign we’d been waging ever since, and the resulting collateral damage we’d sustained. Every few miles, we passed the hulking infrastructure of the energy company whose old equipment had ignited the fire, sending smoke up and down the state, choking cities and towns for hundreds of miles.
It was late July; the temperature had maintained a steady climb as we approached our campsite, and had hit a hundred by the time we arrived. Looming over us as Anna pitched our tent and I got dinner ready was the specter of Paradise: the town, just a few miles over some hills to the West, that had been all but destroyed in that historic blaze.
That night, with the screeching din of crickets all around us, with the inevitable tree root and rock digging into me from under my sleeping pad, with nothing but a millimeter of tent fabric separating us from wildlife and the howling wind, I sat up, awake and unsettled, and peered out through the mesh window of the tent.
An orange light was flashing out in the blackness. Through the dark and the haze of exhaustion, I couldn’t discern if the flashes were the identical repetitions of a blinking light, or the unique flickers of a nascent, writhing flame. It was the witching hour, and I couldn’t imagine anyone still sitting out and maintaining a bonfire. A truck lumbered down the road, and I squinted as it passed, hoping its headlights would illuminate the area where the light flickered and afford a clearer look; inconclusive. Anna stirred in her sleeping bag, and I lay back down. The light wasn’t spreading; it probably wasn’t a fire; it was probably fine.
Indeed, it was. I awoke in full daylight, peered out of the tent, and saw it had been nothing but a flashing bulb next to a road sign: sparks and heat contained in fortified glass that protected the tinder stretching for miles all around from its threatening inflammatory potential.
We packed up in the dry, oppressive heat and drove up the road. A local had tipped us off to a swimming hole at the end of a semi-overgrown trail up that way where we could cool off. We parked in a lot next to an outhouse and followed her directions to the trailhead. After a mile of bushwhacking, of ducking under low-hanging branches and navigating angled rocks underfoot, we could hear the rush of a waterfall. Then the swimming hole opened up before us. The waterfall rose ten yards overhead; the water shimmered in the sun as it careened over the top and into the pool, giving off a cooling mist. We stripped and jumped in. For an hour, we rejoiced in this Eden, sunning on a boulder in the middle of the pool, leaning our heads into the frigid cascade and shrieking in playful agony.
In the shallower areas, flakes of gold — fool’s gold, surely — peppered the sand at the bottom, and danced in the water when we kicked it up. I thought of prospectors squatting here over a century ago, sifting through the sand with their pans, scrutinizing the flakes, stoically registering its deceptive worthlessness. I thought of the empires they’d gone on to build over the subsequent decades. I looked at the toads and fish and butterflies around us, who’d been there all along, observing it all.
Refreshed and elated, we started back down toward the car. But our elation gave way to dread when, nearing the end of the trail, we saw smoke rising above the trees ahead of us. We ran down to the parking lot, where a handful of men were huddled around a patch of burning brush, kicking at it, smothering it with aluminum trash lids, dousing it with water fetched from the river in buckets. Anna leaped into the car and headed down the road to alert the fire department. I joined the others in trying to contain the blaze. We’d douse a patch, then walk over its red-hot, smoking ash to the far reaches of the fire, which was threatening to spread to the dry brush nearby. My eyes watered as the smoke entered my lungs; looking down, I could see the rubber of my sneakers softening.
I’d bail out when things got too intense, and dive back in after a few breaths of clear air. Things continued that way until, after a while, the group conquered the flames. We retired, weary, to a neighboring picnic bench, monitoring the smoking remnants. One or two at a time, the men began to leave. Soon, the only ones left were me, waiting for Anna, and a county maintenance worker, waiting for the fire department. He’d been fixing a piece of equipment at the rest site, and a spark from his drill was all it took to ignite the blaze.
Finally, Anna arrived, with a fire truck following closely behind her. Three firefighters hopped out and sprayed the smoking remains with a white, foamy flame retardant. Plumas County would live to see another day.
The maintenance worker began briefing the firefighters; with that, we felt satisfied our work was done. After exchanging thanks with the responders, we got in the car and pulled out of the lot. As we passed our campsite and began the journey back to the city, I had the sheepish feeling of being shown the door. I was a prospector, the fire and the blackened trees had told me. We were all prospectors here, and our welcome was wearing thinner every day.