Bushfire
Created: 2025-03-09 (07:00:00) — Modified: 2025-07-09 (18:31:22)Status: completed
2025-01-13: “living in California, it’s hard not to be thinking about fire right now. Think about a moment you’ve had with fire or explore how fire can be beautiful, dangerous, natural, harmonious, destructive, growth-inducing, tragic, etcetera.”
The fires had already been burning for weeks, but far off, in remote montane rainforests we hadn’t even thought could burn until this summer. The ash and smoke clouds were hovering beyond the edge of the city as we set off, my greenblue corolla loaded up with all our bags. There were still windows of blue, early summer sky as we travelled north.
We reached the broad lakebed which would have been dry this time of year anyway, even if we were not in drought, and skirting it turned east towards the open plains, towards the great dividing range, towards the coast.
An eerie yellowness descended on us. The fields and hills on either side of the highway were so dessicated they had turned bonewhite. The land and sky blurred together into a dirty grey. We wound up the windows to keep the heat and reek out. I tuned the radio to the local broadcaster, 666 AM. We were driving across the surface of venus.
The first town we stopped at, all the stores still open also had the radio playing. The broadcast was evasive. It played bucolic summertime programs from out of the city, making way every half-hour for a terse update on the progress of the fires. There were now so many firefronts burning, converging on the city and its satellites, they had to keep it terse.
We went through the motions of a coastward visit. We ate Australia’s Best Pies at the same bakery as always, looked in at the op shop, at the lamp shop, sat briefly on the steps of the church built 1892. Mostly we wanted to just move on as quickly as we could. So we set out east again. Further out across venus.
Outside of town the way got twistier, began to undulate a little. The great dividing range rose up on both sides. We passed cottages on open hills surrounded by bushland. The highway dipped and turned sometimes back on itself to cross named creeks and their unnamed tributaries.
I still have the expectation, a residue from overexcited childhood coast trips, that clyde mountain rises steeply out of the plains like a pinnacle then descends just as steeply down the other side to the ocean. Not so. This stretch of the great dividing range is an escarpment. the highway does climb a little, but once it enters the thick rainforest it is all one long descent, switchback turns into switchback turns, with every couple hundred metres rough dirt tracks leading away upward and out of sight for runaway trucks.
Another overexcited childhood memory, possibly fabricated, of descending clyde mountain in a thick, reddish fog, so thick we could see only a little of the road ahead, rivulets threading from one side to the other, the marshy semiliquid-looking embankment held in place by steel rods and wire netting, and the dripping eucalyptus and fernery overhead.
Descending this time was a little like that, only the fog wasn’t fog. It was ash flowing down from somewhere further up the mountain. It was cinders and not water pattering across the windshield of the corolla. I drove slower. We expected at each switchback turn to see flames licking against or creeping out onto the road to block our way. They did, a day later. The clyde pass was shut for weeks after they finally blew through. The overhanging eucalyptus and fernery will never come back.
For us, though, we made it past. The highway gradually levelled out. The smoke developed something of a salt smell, though we still did not unwind the windows until we were past the clyde river.
The first town on the coast was quiet. We washed up in the parking lot by the esplanade feeling like escapees, like we had attempted and unexpectedly succeeded at a border crossing we may yet come to regret. But we could see the ocean. Even the smoke was not enough for this town’s rottenfish tang. We reminded ourselves for the first time since setting out that this was our summer vacation.
We turned south and the blue, early summer sky reappeared. I took the wrong exit and we ended up on the scenic route, passing through a small town known for its zoo but beloved by me for its fudge shop. Then it was into shoreline wilderness, crossing a rivermouth over a wooden bridge built early in the previous century, though a narrow highway cut through the rainforest, too narrow and cresting to dare travelling at the signposted speed unless you travelled it every day and knew its every turn and hump.
The scenic route took longer. We moved out of broadcast range so put music on instead. I lost track of time. No one said much. We reached our destination late in the afternoon, exhausted, relieved, smelling of smoke, ready to pretend for a few days that where we had left was not imminently about to burn down. Whichever way we were returning, though, we knew it wouldn’t be the way we had come.
Endmatter
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