A Monster Unleashed

This is an odd summer. Except for about three or four scattered days, we have had warm and sunny weather since the end of last month. These past few years we haven't had summery weather until a couple of weeks at the end of summer and scattered days in the middle. But, this year, the number of forest fires doesn't seem to be as high as other years, even with the sun and warm temperatures. And now, this is where I cross my fingers and knock on wood.

Yesterday afternoon was an exception. Some time after seven, we heard a helicopter fly overhead. There are four types of helicopters in our local skies. One is the medicalized ambulance helicopter, another is the hated Tráfico machine with the radar gun, a third is the police helicopter, and the fourth is the yellow or red helicopter that is used by firefighters. The one we heard yesterday was the yellow one. We went out the back, and we could see dark puffs of smoke punctuating the blue sky above the hill. It was drifting up from behind the hill, and it was not too far away. The helicopter we had heard flew in a circle above the hill, and then in a larger circle over us, close to the ground. Some meters away, in a cleared field, it touched ground and firefighters disgorged. They undid the red water basket and the helicopter flew away again, basket ready to draw water from the river not too far away. 

The firefighters then walked up the lane to its head a little way down the road from us. There, they waited, dressed in their yellow suits with flaps covering their necks and ears, holding rubber shovel-type instruments to beat out fires and some hoes. Neighbors from surrounding houses gathered, and I went down there, too. The brigade leader, a woman, was talking into a radio and the others were chatting, sweating already in the sun in their suits. The fire was heading the other way, toward the highway that crossed the other side of the hill, but they were there just in case the wind turned, to protect the houses and the village. 

The smoke disappeared as the fire ran down the other side of the hill, and was beaten into submission by two yellow helicopters raining their particular precipitation culled from the river. The neighbors chit-chatted, criticized other neighbors, criticized misspent federal money, wondered why the firefighters weren't stationed to protect the fields, and one even complained that the helicopter had stressed out his donkey by landing in the field next to where it was grazing. Eventually, the helicopter came back, the basket was folded and put away once more, and the firefighters disappeared into its belly to fly back to headquarters. We were lucky.

We weren't so lucky back in August of 2006. That year most of the Rías Baixas burned. From Fisterra down to A Guarda, satellite photos showed smoke hanging like clouds over the coast, wisping out to sea. The first half of the month was the worst. Day and night we were breathing smoke. Then the fires got close. From Boiro, the hills burned along Taragoña to Araño. And one afternoon, it struck above our village. 

My mother-in-law and I were coming from town and when we drove around the last corner before our house, we saw the woods above the village spewing black smoke, the strong wind carrying it over the fields, orange dancing at the epicenter of the black. I dropped my mother-in-law at the village and went back to our house. The road above had been blocked. My husband was home, and the smoke grew closer. We were separated from the woods by fields, but there was a drought, and the grass and bushes in some of the abandoned fields were dry kindling. I took our daughter, nine back then, to relatives' house in another parish. My father wouldn't go, and just shut himself in his house. 

On my way back, police were stopping drivers and making them turn around, helped by a neighbor. He recognized me and let me through. I went home, and my husband left to help some of the more besieged neighbors. As night fell, the fire neared. I had to throw some water on sparks that had landed in our field, but they were easily contained. I dragged the hose up through the house and out the window of my daughter's room, to wet the barn roof, which had wooden beams beneath the tiles. My husband came back and, when the fire reached a patch of woods and bushes next to our vineyard behind the barn, took a motorized spraying machine used to spray chemical products on the vineyards, filled it with the hundred liters of water it could carry, and went to spray the patch of woods. The neighbors and some firefighters were also beating the flaming underbrush, trying to keep the beast away from the houses. They could, and the wind roared the orange monster away, down both sides of the road, to besiege other houses and villages down the road. The neighbors' and firefighters' hard work paid off - no houses were lost.

The next morning, we contemplated the black and charred vista that had been a frondy green cave the morning before. Some trees had been burnt down to their roots, and plumes of white smoke wafted up from some of the holes left behind, the roots still smoldering underground. The smell of smoke we had been living with the past two weeks was all we could smell now. Birdsong came only from the patch of woods across the road from our house which had escaped the inferno. The rest was silent. It was heart-breaking. Now the green has grown again, but the dry summer so far makes us tremble, and dread that yesterday evening might happen again, but this time, closer to home. 

 
Image result for incendios bures rianxo 2006

 

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