Wildfire: There Are Ashes and Then There Are Ashes

In the summer of 2013, my wife, Mary Kay, and I set out from Phoenix (AZ, USA) driving north into upland hills and forests that lead on to the vistas, the peaks and palisades, of Grand Canyon country.  A plume of smoke dominated the western horizon, a tell-tale sign we soon learned, of a wildfire unlike any other for the human drama playing out in its path at that very hour.  Drought and wind combined with the effects of dry lightning had two days earlier set the Yarnell Hill fire on its way with 400 firefighters eventually called into the fray, among them a local contingent called the Granite Mountain Hotshots.  Despite a lookout to keep watch and their two-way radios, despite a tanker aircraft above with fire retardant, a shift in the wind cut off the team’s only route of escape from the scorching fire front that bore down on them and took their lives.

At evening, we learned the cruel truth: beneath that plume of smoke, 19 hotshots had laid down their lives in the wilderness, a scale of loss seldom equaled in the annals of first responders.  But even as climate change exacts its toll in wildfires across the globe – in the likes of Canada, Siberia, Australia, the Amazon, the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and, heaven help us, the Hawaiian Islands – hardy souls, often with bare hands and shovels, are pressed into the battle in conditions of sauve qui peut.

 Such a fire came to find us in north Georgia (USA), too.  Mountains, once the homeland of the Cherokee, but now sought out as places of quiet refuge from sultry summers, turned deadly as crown fires leaping from treetop to treetop sent communities driving through walls of flame as they fled for their lives.  It resulted in one of the most poignant moments ever glimpsed on our evening news telecasts.  A woman gave testimony that she had rushed back to her home defying police orders.  As the flames licked at her back porch, she ran through the smoke into the parlor and snatched her dearest possession from the fireplace mantel.  She gave not a thought to her photographs and family mementos, her jewelry, wedding china or heirloom keepsakes.  A single piece of pottery in her clutches, she dashed back into her car and fled.  She held it tenderly as she spoke to the reporter who asked her about the significance of this otherwise ordinary piece of pottery.

She replied almost in a whisper, ‘These are the ashes of my dear mother.’  She had braved the maw of a wildfire, her hair singed by its heat, to snatch sacred ashes from the ashes of an insane inferno.

She gave no evidence of recognizing the koan-like quality of this extraordinary gesture.  Though some might hastily conclude the telling by adding a simple SMH, further thought might say it can only be described as an act of profound humanity.  That anthropologists have long-defined the ceremonial burial of the dead as one of the earliest signs of a consciousness that perceived some mystery abroad in the world.  There is a woman in the north Georgia hills, bless her, who is a descendant of such wakefulness to the mystery of human life and death.