Jay walked ahead, carrying the fire extinguisher. A white breasted robin skipped ahead of her through the karri hazel. “She’s leading us away from her nest, you know Luke. Hey! You can make soap from this stuff,” she said, stroking the furry leaf of an emerald understory tree. “And stun fish. Chuck it in the river and pick up a mullet with your bare hands.” We rounded the corner on the trail up the mountain. She stopped for a breather, putting down the extinguisher with a clang and walking forward a quiet, few steps. We stood beside a towering monolith of mossy granite. I followed the grey stone skywards with my gaze but she was looking down into the gutter, searching. “Every bloody day,” she muttered.
“What?”
She pointed to the russet leaf litter.
“Lounging around every morning. Coiled in the afternoon. She comes here to power up. Can’t you see her?”
I couldn’t see anything but leaves and moss and granite. It was my training day. Everything was new to me but fish stunners and soap leaf were not in the job description and nor were cryptic solar panels.
“Look.”
The tiger snake was watching me when our eyes finally met. Her skin shone like black oil trickling through the leaves.
“This is your job Luke,” Jay was pretty much wagging her finger at me in front of the snake. “Your job is to notice things. Notice things and make peace with the noise inside your head. That is your job.” She picked up the fire extinguisher and started walking again, a plastic water bottle swinging on a carabine from her backpack.
Jay was in her sixties and trying to retire when she trained me up for the fire tower. By then she’d achieved legendary status as an eagle eye who’d been spotting bushfires from her eyrie for over thirty years. Her short hair was so blonde, it was white and she had a kind of lanky, gentle gait in the bush. Me? I’d traversed my preferred manosphere of Kerouac, Bukowski and Hunter S Thompson and wanted to write, just like Kerouac did on Desolation Peak. With only a coffee cup hooked in my thumb and to ‘leisurely take the wind and speed direction,’ I took on the impossibly romantic job as fire tower officer in a purely Gonzo capacity.
In the tower, Jay showed me how to spot a fire using the gun sight, how to map a fire’s location by knowing the landmark hills and phone towers, how to describe smoke, what smoke looks like depending on what is burning. “If the smoke is black, it’s probably pine.” She put her finger on the map that showed a pine plantation 50 kilometres from the tower. Her hands were like an artists’: strong fingers used to making cordage. “So that is where it is. But it could also be someone’s tractor going up in flames.” She shrugged. “Happens all the time.”
She wasn’t always so stern. We’d swap chatty text messages about the weather and write each other handover notes for what was going on in the tower between shifts. At the beginning of my second season, Jay wrote in the foolscap book, “Something is happening to the trees.”
‘The karris are marching down into the swamp,’ she said on the phone later. Karri trees are boisterous, smooth skinned trees that grow to around sixty metres. She’d noticed that karri ‘islands’ around her place where she’s lived for decades were starting to reconsider their elevation to deal with the changing water table. Karri younglings were sprouting where she’d never seen them before. She sounded stressed out that day. It hadn’t rained since August.
One day early in February, bright green sickle leaves mosaiced the concrete steps to the fire tower. Normally the track is covered with dead brown leaves. I took a photo and messaged Jay. “Green leaves on track?”
“They are getting ready for something,” she sent back.
Two days later, all the small primary schools in the south west shut down. The Fire and Emergency Services map showed little red crosses everywhere and stated that the closures were due to extreme fire weather. My wind speed and temperature recordings were now not so leisurely now as my gadget recorded forty degrees and nor’westerlies gusting to thirty-five kph. Fire weather. I spent the day in a funk of impending doom as the granite downloaded the heat and flung it back at me, turning the little tower into a hot box.
“How are you going on the granite?” Jay texted me. “Do you need more water? Use mine if you like.” Jay’s gesture felt profoundly generous as drinking the water of another tower attendant was a big no no. Not after lugging kilos of it all the way up the mountain.
“I’ve already crossed that line, sorry,” I replied. I drank four litres of water that day and didn’t piss once. That’s why those trees dropped their leaves, I thought. They knew today would be like this. They got ready, just like Jay said.
In the early afternoon a plume of bluish smoke curled up from behind Mount Lindsay. I set about plotting it on the map but the distance was tricky because I couldn’t see how far beyond the mountain it was. “It’s a weird colour,” I said on the radio to the office. “No idea what it is burning, so it’s tricky to plot on the map.”
The duty officer phoned me. “It’s silage at the Johnson dairy,” she said. “Just self-combusted in the heat. That weird colour is burning plastic.”
This summer had officially become the hottest and driest since records began. The word ‘unprecedented’ was bandied about a lot. We’d officially arrived at the dire predictions of what happens when we go 1.5 degrees above average. Food insecurity, school closures and disasters unnatural. It was way too stressful to be a romantic Gonzo writer in a fire tower. Idiots lighting campfires and then driving away. Lightning strikes. Spontaneous combustion. Spontaneous combustion.
First the karris growing around the granites began to suffer. They developed red vertical streaks in their trunks and the rest of their bark went from pale cream to ginger. “It’s called ginger bark syndrome,” Jay told me. “They are basically having embolisms in their phloem.” I think that sounds painful. Trees feel pain, don’t they? Looking around with the binoculars, I could see every granite outcrop was ringed with the bright orange leaves, a monk’s tonsure of dying trees.
Driving through the bush on my way to the tower, I was seeing dying sheoaks, nowhere near the granites but in deep sand. I spent my days with a weird anxiety tumbling in my stomach. In no head space to write, I began mapping dying tree colonies using the same skills as getting the exact coordinates for a smoke report.
Jay was mapping too. “It’s all we can do,” she said on the phone one night. I think she was drinking wine as she rambled a bit. “Just keep on mapping, Luke. We’re in a pretty cool position to do that, watching the country all day. Some scientists are coming down next week. They’ll prolly want to talk to us. We’re the only ones who really know what’s going on. Don’t need drones to watch the country or even spot fires. Don’t need drones, just us. We know what we are doing, Luke.” She paused and I heard her glass clink against a table top. “Bloody hell. What a season. Never seen anything like it.”
“Unprecedented,” I said and she laughed.
The first rains arrived in June. It was too late for most of the suffering trees and now the forest canopies had grey, gnarled antlers woven throughout them. Some karris survived using epicormic growth: furry, emerald leaves sprouting straight from their vertical reddened wounds. Often a tree right next to them would be fine, its creamy, smooth trunk soaring into the sky.
Jay has officially retired now. I never did get to write those Desolation Peak ruminations, Kerouac style. Somehow, now when I read Lonesome Traveller, I can’t find his commitment to the place he was watching, noticing (or supposed to be noticing). There is so much interiority. It is something to watch out for, being alone on a mountain. They don’t call us Freaks on Peaks for nothing. But I do notice and Jay taught me that. On my last day of the fire season, I stopped and had a chat with the tiger queen. She was neatly coiled on her throne of leaves, noticing me right back.
