Before the big burn…

By Jenni Knight

This was written before the Currowan Fire found its way to the coast. It was in response to a news story about a father and son who survived a wildfire in California. Little did I know…

Photo by me. Taken in Rosedale after prescribed back-burn in 2016

Yesterday it blocked their path. The fire spat and hissed, and the top of their car burned with fallen logs and leaves and they didn’t know it.

They drove forward, stopped.

A fallen tree, vermillion tongue rising, flickering at the air in front of them. Trapped.

Side by side in a heated core of tin and time gone warped.

And then they drove backwards, reversed all the way where they had come from, no record of that. we are done for…

But back they came across a dirt road nicked and sipped by flame and spark and ember to an oblivious lake, still carrying on licking the shore in languorous drift and a small boat dotted in the distance, watching it burn. Through smoke and hiss and crackle and dark ball of smoke the sky darkened above them.

this is what hell must look like…

As they came ashore and stood briefly, cracked lips, dry, parched, sweat soaked, iron and orange, slick, crusted, breathless and squinting, they waded in, schlocking and sucking their shoe covered feet. Popping behind them centuries old gums of resinous death traps and carbon sinks gone mad with what we have done.

An engine hummed and pitchshifted to an angry bee, the slap of fibreglass on water. Their heads popped above the surface, still charcoal stained and white eyed. Jim hauled them in.

And they remember looking up at the sky or what was left of it, a nuclear fallout leaf smattering of confetti, shuffled,

ash cloud above,

cinder falling.