By Jennie Englund
The Ashland Pond, a riparian area at the foot of Southern Oregon’s Cascade and Siskiyou mountains, was just waking up on the morning of September 8, 2020. Red-wing blackbirds’ throats warmed in the rust-colored wind, and a family of otters slid over the dry bank to find food. The creatures were oblivious to the Red Flag warning issued by the National Weather Service.
This article is first published in Wildfire Magazine – read the full edition.
High winds and heat, and low humidity prompted critical fire conditions. But should an extreme weather event occur, the local fire service couldn’t count on help to protect the pond — or anything in the two districts of 45,000 citizens. Already, 2,000 structural firefighters from 179 agencies were responding to five megafires and a dozen others around the state. No extra resources were available.
The day fell on a C-shift for Jackson County Fire District 5. My husband, Dave, an engineer, had moved up to the captain’s seat. Around 11 am, when a grass fire was called in near the pond, three blocks from our house, he was immediately concerned.
“This is gonna go big,” Dave told his crew as they drove toward the point of origin. He read the smoke column: gusts lay it down, pushing hard with the potential to move it fast and far.
While I knew Dave would prioritize safety, I also knew he’d give everything to saving the people and property he was called on to protect. This was his community, where our kids rode bikes and went to school, where our friends lived, where, for decades, he had immobilized broken femurs, defibrillated cardiac patients, treated diabetic complications, and started IVs. Dave knew every street, every address in the urban and rural areas of our agriculturally rich region. He was no stranger to swift water and ropes rescue, to motor vehicle incidents, to grass and structure fires.
For 33 hours, Dave worked the Almeda Fire. Sustained 40 mph winds fueled flames through nine miles of the Bear Creek corridor’s cottonweed, poplar, and blackberry bushes. More than 3000 structures burned. Three lives were lost.
Almeda became Oregon’s most destructive wildfire in recorded history.
When the big blazes were finally out, Dave came home – grit in the lines around his sad eyes, in his knuckles, under his nails.
“We all worked hard,” he half-answered my attempt to gauge how hard he’d worked, the extent of what he’d been through.
The bottoms of his feet were bruised, his shins splinted, he told me when I pressed, and he “pulled a lot of hose.” That meant he worked his tail off.
“I brought you a present.” Dave lined four perfect peaches on our kitchen table. Then, he went to bed.
He slept for a couple of hours. When he got up, he said things like “Colver Road.” And “Mobile Estates.”
Were these places that didn’t make it? I minimized my questions. The more I ask, I told myself, the less he’ll be able to process his own thoughts.
As the day went on, Dave was quieter, more withdrawn.
“What did you save?” I did ask, because the answer was a lot, and I wanted him to see it – the proof was right there on aerial footage on TV. But he didn’t see it; he saw what he didn’t save, what he held himself responsible for not saving.
Five heavy days later, the sky was orange, and Ashland’s air quality was 495 – hazardous – from the Labor Day weekend fires, Oregon’s historically deadliest and most devastating.
It was Dave’s 49th birthday; he’d taken off the shift during vacation-bidding rounds nearly a year before.
“Wanna go on a drive?” he asked. The offer was a trip to his station to wash Almeda from his turnouts.
I took it.
Colver Road. He wanted me to see it, I didn’t know why. Was it an exceptionally hard loss? Homes he had responded to? Citizens he knew?
On the way to the station, Dave was required to show his badge at checkpoints and roadblocks staffed by the National Guard and the Department of Transportation.
“It’s still a crime scene,” he told me. “It could’ve been arson. No one’s been arrested yet. They’re preventing looting, too.”
Police and sheriff vehicles wove through empty streets.
We drove past mounds of melted metal, rubble and soot. The fire ate up bike shops, auto repair, a Burger King; it swallowed half of one of the fire department’s stations. Custom homes, rentals, middle-class and working-class neighborhoods were flattened.
The sign sagged over the wreckage of an RV park that seemed to have never existed. “No Vacancy.”
Up the road, skeletal staircases climbed to nothing. A hunched man watered his fence. Just in case.
“Some people stayed here, they never left,” Dave sighed. “They’re still here.”
By the Minute Market, Urban Search and Rescue (USR) teams stood out in their white helmets, puffy suits against the gray wreckage around them.
“Body count,” Dave said.
I felt like telling him, ‘They don’t belong here,’ but I didn’t belong there either.
“Colver Road,” Dave repeated.
We couldn’t get in; the street was barricaded. I wouldn’t see what he wanted me to.
Along Highway 99, water was being restored. Utility crews pulled power lines from wreckage, re-strung them between poles in the haze.
“The bees made it!” Dave was uncharacteristically ecstatic about a Hymenoptera swarm. He took a picture – proof of life.
At the station, as Dave put in his laundry, I watched a relief crew from Portland hosed off their rigs.
“They came from the Obenchain Fire,” a District 5 captain explained. “You wash off where you came from; you leave that dirt behind.”
A half-eaten breakfast burrito wilted on the station counter. I sat at the kitchen table with the guys I’d known for almost 20 years – C-shift – Dave’s shift, back on duty. And yet, I didn’t know them anymore. The fire changed them.
One guy in particular looked really worked over. A weightlifter who coached his kids’ baseball teams, I’d never seen him like this – beat down.
“Have you slept?” I asked, and though he said yes, I could tell it wasn’t true. Adrenaline, nightmares, and physical pain would make sleep impossible for a while.
“This looks like actual food!” An engineer, giddy over a donated salad, grabbed a box and joined the crew at the table: another engineer, two captains, a few firefighters, and a seasonal hire who’d gotten more than he’d signed up for.
Help had finally come. Out-of-area strike teams helped mop up hot spots. A crew from the northern part of the state helped run District 5’s calls — to cardiac arrest, nosebleed. A visiting officer vacuumed. Another rolled up an American flag.
The table talk was of cats — some missing, others found. And then, talk of blisters. Bruises.
Not all a firefighter’s wounds, I reminded myself, are visible. Some of these lives wouldn’t seamlessly continue. Things could fall apart – marriages, knees, health, community, even the department itself. No one was immune to the trauma, displacement, and physical, emotional and financial stress. The what ifs – terror, regret, blame, and grief – could stack like the coolers around the station.
Those coolers crammed the kitchen, the patio, the barbecue area; they covered counters and floors, leaning against every wall, spilling out toward the bay. Folks had brought them, with cookies and cards, candies and baskets, bell peppers from their gardens – how, with the road closures?
The coolers had stayed behind — boxy, burdensome, empty. Lurking. Unsettlingly permanent.
“No resources . . .” The talk of blisters and bruises prompted more about the fire.
“That was nonstop!”
“Those blackberry bushes . . . ” “Colver Road . . . ”
“My feet hurt so bad!”
“How’d you get your boots to dry out?” “No resources . . . ”
“Where’s your family staying?” “The baby’s off his schedule.”
“Do you think you’ll move back when it’s rebuilt?”
Where’s Dave? I wondered. I should leave the station to the crew, let them grieve and heal together, I thought. The crew was finally able to eat fresh food, to get off their feet, and I was as out of place as the USR team – all white suit, moon boots.
Thankfully, Dave walked in. “On the drive here,” he told C-shift, he’d thought about the houses they’d saved in the past. “Once, we put out those house fires, now it’s all for nothing.”
Heads nodded in unison. “Well, let’s go,” Dave told me.
It was hard to know what I should say to the crew. I said the only thing I knew. “Look for the flowers. They’ll come back; I saw them last spring after Paradise.”
The crew knew Paradise, the site of the Camp Fire – California’s deadliest and most destructive wildfire. The blaze ignited less than two years before, only three and a half hours south.
The worked-over guy’s hope surprised me. “Really?” he asked. He wanted it to be true.
“Wild roses, hollyhock, poppies,” I promised.
A few months before Almeda kindled, I had stopped in Paradise on my way back to Oregon from Chico. I hoped to see recovery efforts and share them with the fire officer academy recruits I taught.
“Rebuilding the Ridge,” Paradise’s welcome sign pledged. An impeccable Taco Bell perched on perfect pavement beyond a patch of dirt. A few new frames dotted flattened neighborhoods. Family camps cropped up under skeletal pines. The town had a long way to go.
But the fire hadn’t stopped spring’s arrival. Pinks, purples, yellows, reds pushed through char. Peony, snap pea, lilac, butterfly bush – I tucked the blooms in my memory.
In the hours, days, weeks, months after Almeda, crews reviewed, debriefed, detoxed, wrote reports, restored vehicles and equipment; they were offered physical examinations, peer support, equine therapy, massage therapy, cryo-therapy, meals, thank-you notes.
The cumbersome coolers were returned one by one to their owners, and the station’s counters became clear again, the stacks on the patio and against walls shrinking little by little.
Spring was months away. But it would come. In an extraordinary occurrence, Willamette daisies – pink, purple, white – would ring the Ashland Pond.
Jennie Englund is an award-winning author and veteran teacher whose work has appeared in literary magazines and news outlets. A Harvard Global Studies scholar in climate and culture, Englund is a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and a Vashon Artist Resident alum. Englund’s memoir, Sap-Souled: A Personal History on Lake Tahoe, is forthcoming.
