The Aloha Burn
The loss of property isn’t what keeps me from acknowledging myself as the point of origin. I could have dealt with that. The loss of life, though, that’s something different. My brain resists the compulsion to synthesize what I’m hearing and seeing with what I know I did, albeit in some other plane, some former life. It won’t reconcile. Being here now hasn’t made it any more real beyond what I academically know.
My apartment isn’t old, but it’s not new either. It’s indistinguishable from any other unit in any other multi-family building. I’ve lived here for five months. The edges of the rug are discolored; dust has collected along the nicked baseboards. There’s a potential mold situation in one of the corners, entrenched in the carpet pad. There’s a television, probably made the year before everyone started buying flat screens. It protrudes from the wall like a goiter. I rise from the sofa I’ve been sleeping on and check the fridge. I find a jar that once contained bread ‘n butter pickle slices. The pickles are gone, scummy-looking brine the sole remainder. The freezer yields a carton of freezer burned strawberry ice cream, the contents urchin-like, spines of ice and crystalline stalagmites.
I don’t want to impose on Abby beyond what she has already given me. I’ve done that enough, and really, what more could I expect? We spoke on the phone two days ago, just after it all happened. She didn’t say anything condemnatory when I started in, speaking concentrically around the overarching issue — I realized the weight of it by that point. She never pressed for exact details; she’s perceptive enough. I scratch the back of my head. There’s an infected follicle or something. I feel it when I lean back against the wall.
*
I spoke with my brother before leaving. He hassled me a little bit, asked if I was going on a spirit quest or what. Asked if I had read that Krakauer book. This wasn’t going to be Alaska, I assured him. California bears are only interested in your garbage. Maybe I did look at it a little like a spirit quest. Maybe it was just something to do before my severance dried up. The name of the destination was foreboding, but that was kind of the point. Desolation.
*
The TV says that while an investigation into the fire’s origin is ongoing, there are no concrete leads, though how could they not look into which cars were parked at the trailhead before and after — the receipts in the self-pay box? I’ve put the TV on mute for now. The charred shell of seventeen thousand acres keeps passing across the screen in silence, helicopter shots of white plumes peeling off the smoldering remnants of what was a forested flank of the Sierra Nevada, cut to frames of stoic firefighters hiking out of the wilderness, faces black with soot, like Welsh coal miners one hundred years later.
It’s night now. I lean back against the wall where I stand, my knees in a slow collapse, my body sinking to the carpet. The blinds are drawn; the only break in the outside dark drops from a streetlamp. The walls are bathed in the sterile white-blue gradient that emanates from the TV screen. I feel this sense of obligation to stay where I am, this kernel of dread or premonition that if I go lay in either of the two available beds I’d be tainting the apartment with residue of my guilt, that I would leave behind tokens of my deed. An accidental deed, sure, but I’m not doing much to rectify the situation. I’m not sure if I can, and in some recess of my mind or my heart lies the unacknowledged hope that they’ll find me out, that my comeuppance will arrive swift and quiet at my doorstep, the moment of surrender that could relieve the pressure built up behind my liver and my eyes. I can’t do it proactively, though. I don’t have it in me at the moment.
*
I invited two others to join me on my little expedition, but for whatever reason — scheduling conflicts, general employment — neither could pull the time together even if they had wanted. I felt secret liberation, freedom. There was this relief associated with a solo journey. No one else to consider, which, in my state of ennui or general malaise — the driving issue behind the trip to begin with — sounded OK so long as the scenery changed. People talk about that; a change in scenery — as though the old real estate adage applied to personal stagnation as well as business success. The excuse was convenient enough.
August had set in like a prison sentence; a sweating, inert pool of air specked with mosquitos lay turgid and ripe with West Nile over an otherwise lovely scene. Sundown came as an exhale, a breath of relief.
I hadn’t heard from Abby’s attorney in a while. Abby had the girls at her mother’s place down south, and I took it as a sign to get while I could. She doesn’t harangue me about much after almost a year. Her new boyfriend is an insult to my sense of self-esteem, but we’re cordial.
*
I packed my one-man tent, nylon hammock, Jet Boil, dry food, fishing pole, sleeping mat and the rest of it. Only what could be broken down and carried on my back. My phone was charged to 73%, but screw it. I left the charger in the wall. The bedliner is coming off my ’99 Toyota Taco in chips, veins of rust beginning to creep in at the margins. Beads of sweat appeared at my temples as I loaded the truck bed; ten in the AM. I rolled down both windows and pointed east, mounting the succession of dry white hills that well up from the valley floor like the rolling swells of an earthen sea. The twin stacks of a decommissioned nuclear power plant lurked beyond in the summer haze.
I was cognizant that this voyage smacked of some unnamable desperation, some flailing grasp at a personal transformation. Since the divorce, I had had my profession as an excuse to carry on, though I was hardly engaged in a noble work. Maybe none of us are, though, the perception of morality being the plastic thing that it is. The hum of tires joined the passing air as the radio slid into soft, round static, a symphony of white noise.
*
My truck and my fishing pole are the only things that returned with me. I wound up leaving most of my other possessions — tent, phone, etc. — at the final, fatal campsite, the fire’s driving expansion precluding any thought of rescuing personal property. It’s all cinder now.
The night is about to turn, the blue of the TV screen melding into that deep sea of pre-dawn visible though a creased aluminum slat in the drawn blinds. I turn a matchbook over in my fingers as I remain on the carpet, slumped against the wall. I skipped solid food yesterday, guided by the sort of entropic, downward momentum that envelops you when your half-assed attempt at finding yourself goes awry, leaving your list of possible solutions to the current depressing situation even shorter than it was before. Plus, there’s the whole forest fire thing that you started with your patently illegal attempt to cook a trout over an open flame and the fear/hope that you wind up paying for it with a multi-year turn in the clink. Maybe that would assuage your guilt. At least in prison I won’t have to worry that I can’t make rent and child support. I realize self-pity isn’t constructive, but it’s getting difficult to tune out.
*
The trailhead sits a few miles up an obscure county road. My plan was to walk in several miles, like, ten, and camp at an alpine lake which I’d been assured was scenic, and just far enough off the trail to remain quiet. As I walked I wondered whether Abby invited Dwayne (the boyfriend) along to her mother’s place with our girls, and whether they could really get up to much in the condo space there, but hey, there was always the potential hotel room because, well, the girls are getting older and taking up more space, and of course we don’t want to intrude, so why don’t the girls stay with you, mom, since it’s them you really wanted to see, and Dwayne and I can get a hotel room? I quietly swore.
A chipmunk or some other rodent scurried across the trail in front of me carrying something. I wondered whether it’s a host for the plague and whether a chipmunk is capable of moving in any way aside from a scurry. At some junction along the trail I could see a peak rise through a lacunae in the pines. It became my objective; a balding truncated dome of granite, a smattering of trees and lakes pocked around the circumference of its foot.
*
The morning has now broken in earnest. I’m still unmoved, slouched in my little solipsistic cocoon. I can taste my own breath.
The news of the bodies turned the whole thing from a nightmare scenario for which I might plausibly deny responsibility into something from which there was no escape, corporeal or otherwise. The TV says they were honeymooners going along the PCT. They were asleep when the fire came up; flame driven on the wind through the pines, dry as they ever were. I hope they were asleep, that maybe somehow smoke inhalation got them before the flame, that they escaped the moment when you realize you’re done and there’s nothing you can do, helpless as can possibly be, staring down death by fire, like a convicted witch, a fate that couldn’t possibly seem real. The deceased were found melded together in a chrysalis of cooled molten nylon, clung together in what I guess could be considered a romantic final embrace. It makes me sick to think of it; that I did that, that absent me, they would be making their way through Oregon by now. I feel nauseous, like no fate short of my own waxen tomb could be appropriate. Anything else would be too lenient. They had been from Kentucky, the TV said. I try to forget their names.
*
I had hoped, I think, that atop that first summit I would be overcome, that I would have some revelatory experience, that the topographical enormity of my physical location would leave me somehow changed, that through the act of one foot in front of the other my failings would dissolve into the ether, float away with the motes of dust playing in the dying rays of the sun. This didn’t happen, of course, and to think I in some way expected it embarrasses me.
A list of my personal failings would be long, like a wasp’s legs. The idea of them follows me, trailing along behind like diaphanous streamers, never too far away. I suspect this isn’t totally abnormal, and still, it’s an unnervingly insular feeling, like it is abnormal, like I’m abnormal. That anyone else would still be married, still be on good terms with their daughters; that worrying what their fourth or sixth grade teachers think of me, because, what might Abby have told them would be out of the question. That the constant, unsolicited autonomic comparing of myself to the new boyfriend wouldn’t be necessary because he wouldn’t exist. His actuality is evidence enough of my deficiencies as a man and a father and a husband, a kind of totem of my shortcomings. These are the things that floated through my head atop an unnamed dome of Sierra granite in the late summer’s evening, remaining unsolved, and worse, somehow magnified.
*
It’s approaching noon and I’ve not yet moved; still sitting dry-docked in the apartment. No one is looking for me, which, as I’ve alluded to earlier, is both blessing and curse. I don’t want to be imprisoned, and yet, I feel like I’m already there in a sense, so why not make it official? I crack the door, pocket the solitary key and make my way onto the second story cement walk that leads to identical stairwells at either end. The walkway is open air, and is separated from the void over the cement planter boxes by this antediluvian wrought iron railing that seems much lower than it should be, about hip height on me.
There is a grocery store less than a mile away, and I begin to have positive thoughts about the possibility of fresh peaches. The thoughts will exist in my head for a moment or two before the main issue kicks them unceremoniously off the mental stage. My shoes tread light on the stairs as I descend, little explosions of dust popping from the toes as they hit each step, last remnants of the ill-fated spirit quest. The delta breeze failed to come up river last night, leaving the air dead, tumid, hot, like something needs to move in an atmospheric sense or the entire valley might loose it amongst the mephitic scent of hot asphalt beneath the sealed-up foil tent of a sky. Palm trees stand like Moai along the sidewalk, their browning fronds rustling somehow in the calm. I walk off the cement to catch the temporary relief of their shadows.
The active burn has been contained for three days, but the scope of the destruction is still revealing itself.
The store is crisp, air-conditioned. I pick up a half gallon of milk, those peaches, which I feel guilty about enjoying, a baguette and a carton of eggs. In a spate of paranoia I begin to worry about using my credit card. I talk myself down, reasoning that someone would have to be looking for me before an electronic trail became an issue.
Two women are ahead of me in the checkout line. One has a bottle of wine laid at a jaunty angle in her basket while the other appears empty handed. They chatter about the fire, offering each other competing tales of how far down the highway they could perceive the smell of smoke, how far afield they had each been before their eyes stopped reacting to the toxic airborne cloud. I listen to them prattle and wonder if there’s some route out of all this, or if the time has come for acceptance and reconciliation. Time to straightforwardly address the things that failed to resolve themselves in Desolation Wilderness. The two women complete their purchase and I step up to the register wondering how my clothing smells. I’ve washed everything twice, but I swear I can still pick up notes of charred pine.
*
I descended from the summit in failing light, my headlamp firmly in place and turned on against the enfolding night. The trail existed only in the ten or fifteen foot halo of white beaming from my head, my focus squarely at my own feet, trying to avoid sprained ankles or twisted knees. Such myopic focus dumbs the senses, creates a tunnel vision that is not only of sight, but of sound also. There was no awareness of any of the thousands upon thousands of acres of uninhabited country that existed beyond the faint penumbra; only those immediate ten or fifteen feet and the inner workings of my mind.
As I tread along the thought came that setting camp in the dark was going to be sub-optimal as conditions go. Added was the knowledge that a suitable campsite is difficult to assess in ten-to-fifteen foot increments, and yet, that was what I was left with. A vision of being fourteen and in the Boy Scouts, earning my Wilderness Survival merit badge woke in my head, the creation of and night spent in my shelter, one made of found deadfall, pine needles, whatever.
The sky was clear beyond the heights of the conifers. I strung my hammock between two pines, thirty feet or so off the trail. I hoisted my pack up an adjacent tree, relieved myself in a bush and climbed into my little nylon habitat. I lay awake, some stars revealing themselves between the splayed reaches of the overhead boughs. There was no moon and the forest lay dark.
*
I’m gnawing on the corner of the baguette from the Safeway bakery. I walk back towards the apartment brushing perspiration with the back of my hand. I feel for the outline of the door key through the denim on my thigh, just to be sure it’s there. As I do this a weird crunch occurs in my mouth, contact within my bite that shouldn’t be there. I survey the scene of impact with my tongue and tease out a shard of molar, popped free along what I guess was the line of some pre-existing decay. Admittedly, dental hygiene has not been forefront on my mind the last few months, never mind the last few days.
My stomach drops as I wait for the hypersensitivity to come on, the center of the tooth now laid bare before realizing, with relief, that the molar in question had been root canaled several years before. It’s the first spontaneous, organic feeling of gratitude for anything in recent memory; this vague welling, coming up and out from that unnamed central part of you, somewhere between the diaphragm and the lungs. I stop in the ball of shade cast by one of the palms and fish the detritus from my mouth with my fingers. It’s nacreous, shiny, sharp. It could be a miniature arrowhead or something. I pocket the bit of tooth and continue on, chewing the bread on the left side of my mouth.
*
Static erupted as I stowed my sleeping bag and my hammock, causing my arm hairs to stand erect. I could feel that light quasi-spiderwebbish sensation across the backs of my hands as I zipped my backpack and moved in the direction of the trail. The second day of my spirit quest, or my attempt at self-discovery or desperate grasping at emotional straws, was spent moving north. The air that morning seemed brittle, breakable. No sense of cold, but still, there was this hardness, this overwhelming sense in the atmosphere that it might be shattered by a thrown pebble.
I imagined I would find the edge of an alpine lake, I would set up a more substantial camp in the daylight, I would cast for fish, I would observe an afternoon thunderstorm, I would do what had been done in the past here, in the Sierras, becoming one with the land, allowing it to provide for me; all worries associated with things happening below 5000 ft. would dissipate like smoke on the wind. Maybe I’d stay longer than initially planned. I continued N/NE, up and up into the granite slabs and sparse growth that exist in the high alpine.
*
Only Abby knows my situation in regards to what is now a named fire. The Aloha Burn is what people are calling it. Named, I gather, for a lake due east of where I had been encamped. It’s a funny thing, the incongruous nature of the term, aloha, coincidental, sure, and the aftermath of the eponymous fire, economic impact, destroyed forestland, and, of course, and the loss of human life. It’s a juxtaposition that pulls a reflexive laugh even in my current state of what could rightly be called situational depression. It’s a warranted and real diagnosis, I think.
I return to the apartment, fish the key out of my pocket, now clammy with leg sweat. The swamp cooler in the hall is running, the sound like an amplified vacuum cleaner. The sight of the refrigerator filled with something other than the vacated jar of pickle brine lifts my spirits a little. I decide not to turn on the TV. The blinds are still drawn against the light of early afternoon, and I retreat down the hall. The back bedroom is no cheerier than in the front of the place. I have left the window ajar behind yet another set of cheap plasticy blinds. Hot air wrenches itself through the crack until I shut it. The pulls on the blinds are tangled, the whole row of slats canted up at a 30º angle. Sunlight comes in between this building and the one next-door, doing this sort of bank shot off the adjacent stucco wall, beaming in, diminished. I lay back on the bed, sheets still intact. It hasn’t been used since I left it several days ago. It’s clean, but motel-stale.
I have an old phone that I plug into the wall jack. It’s not a rotary or anything quite that antiquated, but you’d not find it in many homes anymore. It has a corded handset, the sort with soft semi-translucent buttons embedded in it. The caller ID won’t show my name. I pick up the handset and receive a dial tone. I press the only sequence of numbers that my mind has retained since the advent of the integrated contact list. Abby’s voicemail comes on, the call undoubtedly screened, unknown number and all that. I hang up rather than undergo the double indignity of having called and having to leave some pleading, puling message asking her to — what? Call me back? Take me in? Tell me what to do? It all came at once, the absurdity of whatever I was going to attempt. I clapped the handset back into the cradle and exhaled.
*
The shores of the unnamed alpine lake appeared bit by bit, puzzled together through the trees. I knew there were several small bodies of water in the area, speckled about, cisterns of perfect transparent fluid settled into declivities in the granite. This particular little lake may have a name, but I don’t know what it is. The western shore was sheltered by a thick stand of conifers, through which I emerged. They thinned to almost nothing as the terrain transitioned to bare rock around the opposite shore, only a few hearty sprigs of greenery venturing though cracks in the granite, finding root where they could.
The lake was fed by snowmelt, and let out in the southwest corner by way of a small streambed, dry by that time in the season. Casual circumnavigation of the lake on foot took just over an hour. From an elevated point on the north end I could make out the silhouettes of some mountain trout, patrolling back and forth in the shade of the rocky overhang. Stocked at some point in the past, I guessed. Presence of fish confirmed, I made camp in amongst the trees on the western shore. A breeze coursed down from higher elevations, moving the tops of the pines, a whale’s spectral song.
I was settled in, casting my line on the opposite shore of the lake when the fire came up. The clouds had already gathered in earnest as I set out from camp an hour and a half earlier. I sat on a crop of rock near the water’s edge, the reel turning slow in between my fingers. I had prepared for the possibility of rain, the hood of my transparent poncho already pulled over my head, beading with atmosphere. Thunder sounded somewhere up the mountain followed by overwhelming, disorienting light, the exact location unknown. I thought of the small fire I had left burning. I had taken the usual precautions and had exactly zero expectation that it could get anywhere outside the secure perimeter I had constructed for it. The ionic activity in the atmosphere grew hectic then, a cataract of light and noise pouring out at once, much nearer than the first. I made a final cast back below the rocky outcrop where I had observed the fish. Another flash of light followed straight by an overwhelming din, immediately overhead.
I saw a little rivulet of smoke trickling skyward from my campsite, deliquescing into nothing. Another flash, the sound of sheet metal beaten with a nine iron. The wind was up, and I had concerns about the security of my property, the strength of the tent stakes, anything that might disperse. The image of the fire danger boards I had passed back before Placerville came to mind as I thought of my unattended ring.
Fire Danger: Extreme.
The little color-coded dial with a pointer all the way in the red, the mascot bear standing authoritative with shovel in hand. I had been careful, though. I reeled in the line, overcome with urgency. I broke into a run. The lakeshore grew interminable, stretched out and somehow willful, opposing my progress. I jogged with fishing pole still in hand, the lure on the end of the line flailing like a glinting kite. By the time I reached the streambed I could see that flame had reached into the trees above, the bark of one particular evergreen conducting fire top to bottom, pine needles turning to ash, driving on the heavy wind out of the northeast. I could see the back of my tent nosing above the line of some interceding shrubbery.
I stopped and watched, the helplessness of my situation crystalizing, my inner voice whispering denial, assuring me that this couldn’t really be happening. I pitched into the unavoidable questioning of my actions. Why leave the fire unattended? Why did I have to go to the opposite shore to fish? Why did I come here at all? Why were my wife and children gone, off with some other man? The wind scoured my face, blowing my hair, rippling the poncho. Debris and airborne cinder moved past me, apparent in the currents and eddies of air. Another gust preceded another flash and another clap. The flames that had been visible disappeared in the wind for a moment only to flare back with renewed vigor. Some of the lower scrub was now alight. I stopped short, unable to do anything but stare ahead, to watch.
