![Embers and hallucinations: the spectre of eternal summer Embers and hallucinations: the spectre of eternal summer](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/RXMuw2JbrrS7ELSxSY9rkR/8089b560-63be-42cc-8103-4bf7ec4c6652.jpg/r0_1934_3500_5000_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Sunday, January 5, 6am (exactly six months ago)
I wake on the lounge room floor.
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I'm in yesterday's clothes; the ad hoc PPE ensemble I deemed fit for firefighting.
Long-sleeved over-the-head Bisley work shirt, still buttoned at the cuffs. My cow corner cable knit which normally doesn't get the call-up 'til Anzac Day. Expensive Rodd & Gunn moleskins, intended for a wedding, not an emergency. My swelling feet are bound in the lace-up steel-caps I bought to protect my ankle after stepping from the bottom rung of a ladder a couple of years back and going down with a grade-three tear. Black and blue up to my knee and a foreign, bulbous joint that now clicks and feels the rain coming.
I must have passed out around 4.30. Granted, my gut is spuming with a couple of midnight beers, but the shutdown seems to have been instigated from somewhere incorruptible; an assiduous IT manager overseeing a network upgrade when we rogue elements are safely offline.
My reboot is rapid and abrupt. A vivid reassembly. There were no flames. A corona just over the hill and embers; mostly spent, yes, but stinging and relentless.
As they tinked against my (ski) goggles, it occurred to me that without eye protection, I would've been (even more) useless, would have to have left the house to fate.
As the sky went dark, the red truck had charged up our street and then back. It stopped out the front and they looked down on me from high up in their cabin.
"Where is it?" I asked.
"Over there," one of them said, pointing to the loaded escarpment. It was from that direction the pyrocumulus had been fomenting all day, an evolving life form approaching self-awareness.
"About a kilometre, you should leave."
"I'm staying," I said, barely convincing myself, clutching my (excellent quality) garden hose, its brass nozzle a telegraph key transmitting an SOS from my knocking knees up the line.
The neighbours were out the front, too, as usual, more kitted-out and capable than anyone on this side of the fence.
We're staying, they said.
Me too.
Where's the family?
Gone. It's just me.
Good.
They checked on me throughout the ordeal. I was grateful.
Strange what fills your head when you think you might die.
It was the wind. We're used to being buffeted about, but 2019 had been different. It hadn't stopped. It had barely rained and when it did, the ravening westerly had been right behind to claim every drop.
I was jogging back down the road after checking on an elderly friend's evacuation progress as we officially topped out at 43, although it felt even hotter, with genuine menace. When I reached home, the power went out. That wind, now unhinged bellows to our cracking furnace, had brought down a tree between us and the transformer to our west, isolating our village, it seemed, from the rest of the planet, from reality.
Trying to bury the fear, I launched into the final stages of my (inadequate) plan, even hallucinating for good measure.
He walked beside me - blue tunic, shock of blond hair - as I commandeered kids' bikes (quite fun) and pushed wheelbarrows of gas bottles and firewood down the backyard.
Usually, he wanders an asteroid cleaning out volcanoes with a broom and I suppose he joined me that day because my own hostile world seemed to mirror his, but, to be honest, he wasn't much use in a crisis; overly contemplative and meek. In that particular inferno, I would've preferred Virgil by my side. At least he could have guided me through which friggin' fittings connected the hose and sprinklers to the firefighter pump.
MORE BY B. R. DOHERTY:
I'm certain The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery was never part of my childhood bedroom library (too much Wizard of Id for that), so I can only suppose my recurring visions of him should be attributed to the 1974 film directed by Singin' in the Rain's Stanley Donen.
I've been seeing him more frequently, ever since Gene Wilder (who played "The Fox" in the film) died and more recently after watching the Fosse/Verdon mini-series in which Sam Rockwell did a great job as Bob Fosse, who played "The Snake" in Donen's philosophical flop.
Fosse's jazz-hands and moonwalk (years before Wacko adopted it) in the Sahara might be a crime of cinematography but it's still replete with enough symbolism to make a lasting impact. His sibilant song and dance through the sand, urging the titular space traveller to take the easy way out ... One sting ... And you'll discover ... How relaxed you can be ... Posthumously ... has more than a little serpent in the Garden of Eden to it ...
Strange what fills your head when you think you might die.
I worked throughout the amber night, keeping gutters full, wetting down our ridiculously wooden house, flooding those sections I thought most prone with the limited water I had. I checked the radio obsessively, took a call from a friend - speculating, as Paul Simon might say, who had been damaged the most - drank those beers ... and here I am, on the floor, in my clothes.
I rush outside to check we didn't burn. We didn't. I check the app and panic all over again when it seems to indicate the whole escarpment went up. It didn't.
I drive the ute down the goat track to see if I can get a bead on the fire and find a neighbour at the lookout with the same idea. We can't see anything through the smoke, and we part ways knowing we're sitting on a time bomb, that, without rain, will go off.
What we don't know this Sunday morning is the rain will come (almost 500 millimetres over February and March but fairly piddling since then) and the fires will end. We don't know, by autumn, our sad forest of inanition will return to a facsimile of its old self, ferns and lyrebirds unfurling again.
We also don't know that in six months' time, Arctic Siberia ... Siberia ... will hit 38 ... thirty-eight.
What we do know, however, is the world keeps on spinning and summer always returns.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
- B. R. Doherty is a regular columnist.