The green leaf letters

One day early in February, at the beginning of our second summer, eucalypts began dropping their green leaves. Bright green sickles mosaiced the concrete steps to the fire tower where I work. I’d never seen this before. Normally the track is covered with dead brown leaves. Noticing the green ones was a bit different.

Two days later, I phoned my boss from the tower at the end of the day. ‘I’ve just spent the whole day with a sense of impending doom,’ I told her.

‘I don’t even go there,’ the fire officer said. ‘Every morning, the crews are organised, FDIs are finalised and then it’s like, whatever happens will happen.’

That day was the hottest ever I’ve spent on the tower. Most of the small schools in the south west shut down due to fire danger. I wish I’d taken a screenshot of the emergency site that day because looking at the school shutdowns made me think – this is the future. If this happens every year from now on, whose parents will be able to go on checkout at IGA? What happens to medical centres when doctors and nurses have to stay home?

The temperature readings in the tower blew out because I was sitting on granite, which warms faster than soil, meaning the little tower room turned into a hothouse. Sweat soaked my clothes. It was an act of endurance to stay there. I saw a smoke curdle into the sky behind Mount Lyndsey, mapped it and reported it in.

‘It’s kinda grey blue. I think it must be around the Hay River area. It’s a weird colour.’

Turns out the smoke came from silage that had spontaneously combusted in the heat, knocking out a whole season of feed for the dairy family who worked there for generations. The smoke’s colour was from all the plastics catching fire. Silage doesn’t normally self-combust, my farmer son told me. Silage is too wet. Normally.

‘How you going on the granite?’ Marty who also works on the tower was in contact throughout the day. ‘Do you have enough water? Use mine if you run out.’

There’s a code between us. We carry our own stuff up the mountain and we don’t share, especially water at one kilo a litre per trek up the hill. We may text each other when the clock battery needs replacing or maybe metho for the Trangia but never the water. Believe me. It’s a thing. We never share water.

‘I’m afraid I’ve already crossed that line,’ I messaged him back. By then I’d drunk four litres of water, poached two litres of Marty’s stash and not even had a wee.

‘Do you want me to bring some more?’ Marty replied and I thought, bless this man. The only person on Earth thinking of me today is the other fire tower guy.

Just like prior to a wind storm, the Eucalyptus trees dropped their green leaves in anticipation of the event a few days later. This time, it wasn't a wind storm but an extreme heat event. All of the trees knew this event was coming up. 

They knew what was about to happen.