Smoke

Already too hot in the morning after the strange fog lifted. It’s smoky too, from yesterday’s burn to the north. Paper wasps hover on the veranda, searching for nest potentials. A ground frog whooped like an owl and the sun hit the sand bar out in the inlet, gleaming white.

‘We’re holding fast,’ someone wrote on twitter, ‘It’s stay and defend now. Fire trucks everywhere.' Someone else tweeted that the pharmacy was bringing them asthma inhalers by boat, up the river. At least there is still a river left and not a fire break of hot, dead sand.

The dog with the orange eyebrows crawls under my bed to get away from the flies. It’s like every bug in the world has hatched out today. Tiny black beetles crawl over my bare skin. Insecticide and smoking mosquito coils seem to attract them. Birds call alarm.

I wonder how, when the first thing to go down here during an emergency are the phone lines and internet, people still seem to post and read twitter updates. Perhaps over east, their towers are powered by something more sophisticated than the grid.

My car is covered in fine ash from the northern burn. By lunch, it’s thirty-four degrees and we’re all twitchy with it. I’m on standby in case they need help with radio comms. Snakes cross the track, thin rivers of hot, black oil. An ecologist posts about the country where he’s tracked dingos, foxes, quolls. ‘The creek used to have little endemic crayfish in it …#bushfire’

‘Have you tried turning Australia off and then on again?’

A kookaburra catches a tiny snake, maybe a baby tiger and returns to its roost in the peppermint tree out of sight. I can hear it bashing the snake on the tree branch. Still, drowsy air.

The Moby Dick account: ‘A sage ejaculation.’ Someone posts about the smoke lying over Sydney for weeks now. ‘Fog horns for the ferries on Sydney Harbour.’ Others debate the correct kinds of face mask to wear. Now is not the time to talk about climate change, we are told by our leaders. Our man in Madrid is standing tight with Brazil to maintain our current emissions, stalling the world climate talks. The prime minister goes on holiday to Hawaii and there’s a flurry of tweets to Hawaiian journalists to find him. Seven hundred and forty houses destroyed … so far. Three people dead, but ‘They were probably Greens voters.’ Fire fighters crowd fund for supplies.

Last week the fires began in earnest in the west and some of our ground crew were sent to help out. They worked for days out east, came home and then headed straight for the blaze north of Perth. I ran over a snake at the beginning of August when it should have been underground. ‘We’re okay,’ the twitter hold-faster posted. ‘I just want to curl up and have a good cry now.’ Prayer emojis.

The Moby Dick account: ‘Thou canst consume, but I can then be ashes.’