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.
