Smoke

In the past I’ve written about the sea, and so it is that I came to rest on the shores of an inlet. Past the zamia palms and bracken that crowds my cottage, I can walk along the shore to where a row of rough huts stand, stoic, facing out to The Cut. The Squatter Huts, they are called. When the rivers from inland fill the inlet, when the waves are driven by onshore winds to smash into the bush, the sand bar out at The Cut breaches. I came here for the inlet. The first time I’d seen it, glassed off at dusk, I wanted to live here. What I found is that the inlet, though it has a character of its own, took second place to living in the forest.

My home country is the open heath lands and coast hills of Albany, and this inlet where marri trees march straight down to the water’s edge is new country to me. Melaleucas twisting into beach sands are annually inundated by the marching waters. The canopies of the bloodwoods are crown shy of each other, never quite touching. Light is shafted, filtered. Oyster pale days, moon shadow, the year-round scent of fungi and the liquid shine of bloody resin running down the craggy marri bark. The thump of a limb falling to earth.

They put fire into the forest block beside my house recently. I passed them on the ten-kilometre track over several days while they hand-burned the edges, ‘cutting in’ like house painters. A bulldozer rolled the karri hazel over as a kind of fire break. When the burners were finished cutting in, helicopters dropped incendiaries into the centre of the block. At 2300 square hectares, it was a big burn. They seemed very pleased with its success, especially the boundary burn back from the huts. Neat as a pin. ‘Sorry about your house, Sarah,’ one of the burners joked but, living on the forest, I felt safer. Although visitors expressed their anxiety about the smoke on the track in to my place.

A friend rang about helicopters dropping fire into the block near her house. ‘I’m feeling a bit alarmed,’ she said. As I drove to her house, currawongs wheeled about in the smoke near the Deep River Bridge, looking confused and disoriented. It was difficult not to hit them and I can’t swerve on this road. At her house, perched on a steep hill and surrounded by majestic karri trees, she stared out over the fire field to the south. Cockatoos shrieked. We looked at a map and consulted the weather. It was blowing north west, even this late in the day. The fire would burn towards the sea and then back onto itself when the wind changed. I’d been working in the office that day, on the radios to the helicopter pilot and the spotter plane, so I knew what was going on. I realised then the power of information and knowledge when it comes to prescribed burns or bushfires.

I watch for smoke, 420 metres above sea level, at the top of a mountain. Plumes, columns, drifts, billows; smoke from the prescribed burns are not a noun but a verb, a doing thing. Smoke is running or stationary or blankety. Smoke will rise, lazy and blue from a fallen karri log the whole summer long. I call in their position and description to the office.

Last summer I watched one particular smoke every day. In the mornings it was a circle of columns, graduating to a drift when the wind came in from the coast. Blue, and then white as the heat and wind arced up. 58 degrees were my bearings for this smoke on the fire tower map, 31 kilometres away. I liked this smoke. No nasty surprises there. It waved to me every day from the north of the Soho Hills. When I discovered it was a peat fire, or an ‘organic substrate’ fire, my feelings towards the smoke curdled.