We've been luckier than some this year: the Trident Fire burned only 5000 acres of our range this summer.
A few years ago, it was a lot worse: excerpt from Sharing Fencelines
Tuesday morning, August 3, hot and quiet, heavy summer.
It is breathless, sultry at ranch headquarters. Time holds its breath, waiting for something.
At 2:30 pm, lightning strikes near the road to our summer sheep camp and at Deep Creek, high on the ridge.
The fire is a wicked red smile at the base of the half-circle of volcanic hills we call the Horseshoe. The Denio fire truck is there when we arrive. Someone calls the BLM. “We can't tell you not to fight it, the dispatch lady says, “but we have no resources available right now.” There have been thirty-two lightning strikes right around town.
We're on our own.
The fire swirls a small circle in a fickle wind, only a few acres across. It moves east toward the canyon, then north. Denio Dan takes the fire truck, loads up cowboys and shovels, and drives to the other end of the fire; it is still several hundred yards north of the road, and burning parallel to it in basalt boulders and sagebrush. Hard to get to in the little truck. Not big, not yet.
The road’s ungraded shoulders are full of dry weeds, but the firetruck wets them down. It will probably stop the flames. The wind changes again, the fire backing south and west. Smoke rolls dirty, opaque.
We move the vehicles. Sam and I find a pipe wrench and drive to the windmill a quarter mile away downwind. We lift the heavy iron pipe and force it, the metal shrieking, into the rusty connection that will bring water to the two big round troughs. The fire truck only holds 250 gallons of water. It can refill here.
The sheep camp road turns south below the windmill and runs for several miles before turning west at the hot springs and connecting to the highway that divides our valley. Pickups gather below the windmill, their drivers watching. Curious humans, fascinated by fire. A stinkbug crawls across the gravel. I watch him for a minute, then pick him up and toss him into the back of the truck. Cows and calves gather in the corner of the crested wheat field, nervous at the smell of smoke.
The fire eats a fencepost, crosses into the seeding, into the main chute of the valley. Here, convection currents make invisible ferris wheels, cycling hot summer air high up into the atmosphere, bringing cool air down; dust devils dance along the meeting line of the convection cells. On any late summer afternoon, this valley is a wind furnace. Tim has decided to open the gates, just in case. He bumps off west across the field.
We watch, mesmerized: in the wind tunnel of valley air circulation, the fire grows, in a moment, into a flame-cored whirlwind sixty feet tall. It sucks the smaller flames into itself, black smoke towering and turning in a slower column around it. It is a live thing, beautiful, terrible.
Antonio leans on his shovel at the bend in the road, one elbow on the old wooden sign that points the way to Lovely Valley. He is silhouetted by smoke--and then suddenly, by flame. The whirlwind roars, blowing the heat south. The tongue of fire that has run west across the fenceline into the seeding turns, full on us.
The pickups easily outdistance the flames, but the big vehicles, the water truck and the grader, are slower. I drive south with my thirteen-year-old niece, Magen. She has come with her dad, now piloting the water truck. The red whirlwind paces us, cutting southwest across the flat. This is when I get nervous, and I tromp the accelerator of the quirky old truck that doesn't always start, and sometime dies on you. It will be good to be out of the way of this thing, I think.
Jackrabbits dash back and forth in front of us. The dust is bad; we roll the windows up. The sky darkens. We cannot see the sun.
The gravel road turns west across the fire's path to reach the highway. We beat the fire there, but not by much, and turn north. It is then I see the cattle, close to the highway, running before a wall of flame, coming fast. We drive, against the wind. Two small parcels of land where horse people have moved in crouch in the fire's path: doublewides, new barns, corrals, trucks. One man is driving out with his horses loaded, two vans following, full of stuff.
We pass a woman on a three-wheeler with a shovel, looking at us over her shoulder. A man with a little Bobcat loader is making tiny circles around the power poles in the path of the wall of fire. Several carloads of tourists, looking startled. Cows and calves, running down the shoulder of the road, all backed by the red tower of smoke and flame. It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz. We are all displaced; the rules are all different inside a twister.
When it seems like we are behind the fireline, I pull over to the shoulder of the highway. As soon as I stop, Tim's brother Hank is at the door, grabbing the radio.
"Antonio, Antonio," he shouts into the mike.
"Antonio, did you get through?" No answer.
"Antonio, where is Dan?"
Nothing. Black smoke has rolled across the road. Some of the vehicles in the racing caravan must have turned the other way. We can't see them, and the fire has jumped the highway. It has split into four fires, burning in all directions, unstoppable, it seems, until the wind dies.
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Seven hours later, the red glow lights the night sky. As we crest Denio Summit, we drive into the gates of hell. Fire burns through 180 degrees of vision, all across the valley, up into the foothills on both mountainsides. The highway is clogged with stopped traffic at the Harness Place hill. Travelers stand on the darkened roadway in baggy shorts and Tevas, watching; they let their dogs out to pee; children sleep in back seats.
We sit on the shoulder of the road for a long time, watching the fire move north. It eats one power pole after another. Cows and calves are bawling for each other in the brush somewhere. There's not much we can do till daylight now.
Dan roars up in the grader. The north seeding fence runs five miles across draws and sagebrush hills; it's still north of the fire, but the flames are getting closer. Its eastern edge climbs the foothills into the high country where our two herders are, each with their band of sheep. I wonder if they are watching, from up there.
The fire is in the sagebrush draws, coming slower, then faster. Tim sends Denny and Sam in behind Dan to cut the fences. We watch the grader lights get smaller and smaller, bobbing in and out of sight as he crawls across the valley. For a while there is only the sound of the fire crackling, cattle bellowing, the low growl of the grader disappearing, and the wind.
A kid in a Burns, Oregon fire engine shows up at 10:30 pm, and we listen to BLM dispatch traffic on his radio. The fire on the south end is burning all across the valley, west to Big Creek, east into our foothill lambing grounds. The kid calls in his location, and dispatch replies, "Thank you, but please don't call in any more fires now. We have nothing to send you. I'm sorry." Someone gives me a cold beer, and when I drink it, it makes me dizzy. I remember it's been a long time since I ate.
Headlights flash as the cowboys turn around at the far fence corner. We watch the lights come slowly closer. Sam tells me later they cut the fence in four places, but there were still cattle running toward the flames, away into the dark, running everywhere.
Tim thinks we had better get the three horses that are still at the buckaroo camp at Wilder; we'll need them at first light to gather the animals. It is 11:00 pm. When we pull into the yard a half hour later, we see the hired man's truck parked with headlights pointing into the moonless wrangle pasture. The dark is total, except for the fires. I see another glow in Long Hollow, twenty miles north of us, toward Steens Mountain.
Finally, a flashlight beam bobs across the field, shining on legs of men and horses. Quietly swishing through the grass, clacking a stone, the men bring the geldings into the barn. The bay has gotten into a fence. The flashlight plays across darker stripes in his muscled chest and front legs where the wire has ripped him. We load him up. Tim stays the night on the hill; the rest of us drive home to try to sleep.
The thirty-mile drive down through the valley is silent, tense. Flames burn to the pavement on both sides of the road. The red line of fire outlines our neighbors' houses; a big tractor growls along in the dark, churning firebreaks around dry pastures. The neighbors save each other, this first day and night. There are fires everywhere, and all we know is that BLM will try to fly this fire tomorrow to assess the damage.
Back in the house, too exhausted to sleep, I shower, wander around, get coffee ready for 3:30 breakfast. Even the house smells like burnt brush.
I wake well before the alarm, pull on my smoky jeans. Make coffee, bacon, sausage, eggs. Nobody really ate yesterday, and probably nobody will eat today.
Somehow men and horses converge at the hill where Tim is at first light. It is an endless iteration this day: drive here, get horses, come back, meet the trailer, catch more horses, drive out, drop off cowboys, come back. The morning ripens as we begin the gather that would normally take the best part of a month. The wind starts early.
This day the worst smoke is in the canyons and on the foothills below the west seeding. It's been little used, and there's a lot of dry feed in there. In the hour and a half that it takes to bring the cattle up across this field the fire has blown up. Long red lines stretch south across the foothills on both sides of the valley, making a V that meets at the Harness Place hill.
The cowboys are our teenage children and our neighbors. They push the cattle down the highway easement, to the seeding that burned yesterday, and trust that they'll head for home.
"Don't hurry," Tim tells the kids. "Keep 'em mothered up." I hear Hank yelling to his kids,
"If you're still ok when you get these through the lower fence, try to get 'em out of that side." He waves at the unburned fields on the east side of the highway that will probably go today. The kids nod, keep the bunch together.
Traffic is heavy, tourists, people with motor homes. The state highway people pilot them through the burning valley every so often. No fire help, except the kid from Burns, and two engines from the Sheldon Refuge. The fire crews have no idea where anything is, structures or fences or water. There's no one to tell them.
I watch through binoculars in the wavery heat men gathering the other seeding in front of the fireline, five miles long, sweeping the big field like a red broom. Fire whirlwinds are dancing again. Little bunches of cows keep boiling up out of the deep wash in the middle, where we can't see if a rider is driving them, or the fire, or both.
The fire jumps the highway behind the herd on the Harness Place hill, even with two fire engines foaming and spraying water. It is midafternoon, and the wind blasts like a furnace over the summit. Tim and Sam have gone up the wash ahead of the fire, which has once more cut us off from each other. Several men are up there, ahead of the smoke, moving cows back to the north. The highway is closed.
A state trooper shakes his head, "No, you can't take that horse trailer up there, not now."
The cowboys have changed horses on the side of the road, and Magen and her mom Ginny are holding four or five sweat-soaked mounts apiece on the highway shoulder, waiting for a ride to the ranch headquarters. The horse guy who lives in the middle of the flat brings his trailer, and we finally load the two trailers, drive south. I look back at the pillars of smoke rising from the fireline, where my husband and my son have gone.
It is never a gentle country, and I am a bad churchgoer. Nothing in my safe childhood prepared me for this place. It is elemental: fire, flood, freezing cold, plagues of insects, young people and animals dying for no reason. I have prayed for things before, and it hasn't worked out. I make a picture of my boys in my head, and draw the circle of white light around my loved ones, and their horses. I call my mother on the cell phone after the horses are put away, and I tell her what is happening. She'll be praying too, she says, pass it around the prayer chain. "Let us know what happens." This is not jolt-of-adrenalin fear, but the heavy dread of watching the apocalypse unfold.
Absurdly, the road is choked with gawkers. Lots of people from outside are here, with video cameras, king cab pickups full of kids, dogs, grandmas, beer coolers, all stopped on the highway, catching up on news, trading stories. It's not their fire. Someone says there'll be four hundred firefighters here tomorrow. I wonder what will be left to burn by then. There's not a fence left in the entire valley. No one has heard from Buster, waiting up there at Sheep Camp for the canyons to clear; he has started out twice, and radioed to say, no, he can't make it out yet.
I stand for hours on the highway with everyone else, forever, all afternoon. And then, there they are, Tim and Sam and Bob and Clint and Josh, faces black with soot, horses wet, everything filthy. Safe. A north breeze lifts the hair plastered to my forehead. The smoke is clearing, a little. The state trooper lets a line of cars go through.
The north breeze holds steady in the flat light. Fires are still burning in the Steens and all around the country, but it's looking better here. I don't remember getting home.
By the next morning there are indeed 400 firefighters on the scene, tankers of Jet A, hotshot crews from Utah and the Arizona Strip, New Mexico, Wyoming. Choppers, portapotties, a mobile kitchen that will serve salisbury steak the first night, chicken fried the next. A mushroom forest of little pop-up dome tents grows at the maintenance station. The choppers fly, the hotshot crews head for the smoke, up high now, and we turn to mopping up.
Cattle are everywhere. Miraculously, and because Tim sent those boys in to cut fences that were in the fire’s path, we didn’t lose a single animal to the fire itself. Still, a black and white pair have been hit on the road in the night, and someone has had to shoot them. Five more calves will fall victim to traffic in the fenceless wasteland in the next few days.
For the next week we drop off crews of cowboys all over the blackened valley to gather the animals, bring them home, sort them out. They’re easy to drive, attention not distracted by anything at all to eat for twenty-five miles down the valley. Some are resting still, in the burn, calves exhausted from the days before. Windmills and water troughs scorched, the power poles that drive the pumps are heaps of charcoal. Although the power company crew was out there in the burning night replacing poles even as they were still smoking, those weakened by the blaze, burned part way through, will tip over, cutting power to one part of the valley or another. Their trailer full of long poles and the crane creep up and down the valley, metallic praying mantis weaving wires back together so the cell phone repeaters can work and the pumps can still pump water.
All the cattle will come to the home ranch, to the river meadows we usually save for fall. The pump has been on at the upper end for ten days, and I remember that I was going to tell Tim, before this all started, that there wasn’t any water in the river channel that day; that seems like a month ago.
Tim tosses and turns that night in bed. He worries that the cattle will crowd the one full trough and knock away the pipes that bring the water in. Finally, he gets up. “I have to go check the water.”
I can’t sleep either, so I get dressed too, and we drive out to the trough with the vault of summer stars bright in the clear night sky. The trough is full.
By Tuesday after the fire, the balers are running again, hay is being cut. The firefighters’ dome tents disappear. Maybe there will be some money for a seeding, maybe some more to buy pipe to replace the wooden fence corners. We sort cattle, put them away for now in fall and winter pastures. People are starting to call, looking to buy hay. I wash windows, mow the grass, get back into some kind of routine. For days, when the wind is from the north, it’s full of soot. Every time I sit down, I fall asleep.
Over the course of that week in August, 1999, 90,000 acres in our valley burned, much of it on our range.
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