Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It doesn’t matter how many times you have been through it, the sound of rocks smashing the side of the rig still makes the hair stand up on your arms. Donny is still too new to know any better, pressing his soft face against the plastic widows trying to see who was throwing them. It was a rare opportunity for them to see the face of the target of their rage. It was rewarded with a well-aimed bottle. The original windows of the crew rig had been destroyed long before any of its current occupants had boarded. Now replaced with the almost opaque poly-something or other plastic, rocks and bottles were more a reminder than actual threat. The crew members that weren’t already asleep shared a quiet laugh at Donny’s introduction to the natives.

The bewildered look plastered across the kid’s face is just one more reason to hate him. A fleeting urge to throw something at Donny is quickly replaced with self directed anger. What is it about the kid that makes me so angry? It isnt as though he fucked up more than most. No, it's something else. Maybe it's the length of time the look of bewilderment lingers on his face, as though he was actually surprised by the rocks being thrown. It’s a little late to be naive about what we are to these people. I’m not as delusional as him and can recognize that a small part of this feeling is due to the fact that I too had pressed my face against the sweaty, UV damaged shield and tried to see why they hated us so much. It didn’t take long to find out why. There was a time when things were different, the hands empty of rocks and bottles. Our presence here would have been seen as a sign of hope, not now, not anymore. On the fire maps this community is nothing more than a nameless gray shaded area surrounded by red and orange. Gray is used to denote the presence of a non natural terrain feature, a blimp in the rolling sea of flammable shit. For us gray areas mean natural fire breaks in the form of roads. The people that have been hanging on here have already done a lot of the work for us, removing brush and fuel away from the homes and roads. Trying to stave off a day like today. Our role in all of this is simple, stay ahead of the fire and put as many hurdles in its way as we can. Cutting fire lines is punishing work, every inch of life has to be scraped from the earth for fear it might sustain the insatiable appetite of wildfires. The natives watched as we spent the last two days cutting our fire lines around their homes, leaving them between our lines and the fire still burning over the next hill. Some of them knew what was happening but then they also knew what living in the gray areas meant. The slower ones watched as we stopped working and sat waiting near our vehicles. They, waiting for some sign of what was going to happen, us knowing what’s about to happen but waiting for the winds to change direction or die down. I stand watching them as the wind plays across my face. I can’t understand why people are still trying to cling onto places like this. The familiar feeling of acid burning in my stomach accompanies thoughts like this one. The alternative wasn’t much better but pretending hope still existed for any of the hundreds of gray areas still out there, just makes it all worse. Despite them being too far away I can feel their eyes searching for hope. They’re looking in the wrong direction, as I feel the wind pressing against my back, “load up!”. Normally I would have waited for the guard unit but we might not get another break in the wind for a while, why make them wait any longer. As the crew climbs aboard our rigs I hang off the back of the last one, holding myself low, letting the drip torch hover a few inches above the ground, catching the dry grass, watching as the winds push the spreading flames towards the gray area.

If you listen to the talking heads on the screen the problem started with the Greenwood Fire back in 2030 and like all things fed to you through a screen there’s some truth to it but it’s not as simple as that. Hell,some even say it’s the Europeans' fault because they came up with the forest management ideas that would prioritize production over regeneration long before we were even a country. To what extent there is any truth in that it doesn't really matter. We shit the bed so many times that it would be childish to think that anything started with just that one fire. There aren’t many left that argue a century of suppressing every wildfire did us any favors but then there has always been niche audiences for certain brands of stupidity. By the time the droughts started the land was already primed for fire and just like so much of our history we were finding ways to make it an even bigger blaze. The kindling was gathered in the summer of 2022 when the state of Florida sued to stop one of the only two private issuers of homeowner issuance from leaving the state. It's complicated like most things but at the root of it was rampant fraud. It worked like this, the state was one of the lease regulated insurance markets in the country but somewhere along the way to the governor’s mansion a politician promised to make issuers pay to replace storm damaged roofs. It sounded good to voters and like most nice things people found ways to fuck it up for everyone. A knock on your door, “Did you know that some of your roof shingles look loose?'' That was usually how it started quickly followed by the neat little flier outlining your right to a new roof on account of the last hurricane that came through, even if it didn’t come within two hundred miles of your home. Not convinced yet? How about if the roofing contractor throws in a little something for the inconvenience of getting you a new roof? The losses to the insurance companies were staggering when compared to the normally grossly profitable home insurance market. In the spring of 2022 some executive got a hair up his ass at the thought of not being able to afford an even bigger house in Vail and decided enough was enough, nobody fucks with his bonus. Notice was given to the state of the company’s intention to disenroll the remaining policy holders unless significant alterations to the insurance laws were made. The then Governor resented the fact that he was being asked to enact unpopular changes in the middle of his ramp up for his presidential run, after all he wasn’t even in office when the original law had been passed. Why the fuck should he have to ruin his chances at the white house over someone else’s mistake? The state decided  after much careful consideration to punt the problem into someone else's administration and filed suit against the company. In what many called a remarkable short amount of time the case had landed four years later in front of the supreme court where a decidedly conservative court wanted to know what right a state had in forcing a company to lose money over a problem the state clearly created? This was how Dymor, once the second largest insurance provider in the state of Florida, was allowed to cut and run. While they congratulated themselves on avoiding being marginally less profitable, others were watching too.

  The National Guard unit finally arrived to clear the road. The Natives aren’t stupid, they know what happens if they keep it up much longer. The Guardsmen are only marginally better regarded then the men hiding in the fire service vehicles. Just last month a Guard Unit opened fire on a community down south of them. It made local news but the bigger media outlets lost interest in covering the ugliness of it all a long time ago. I close my eyes and try to guess which rock will be the last. There’s always one last futile thud as they give into their new reality. By this time tomorrow whatever wasn’t destroyed in our back burn, the approaching wildfire will finish off. Whatever bit of  community was still hanging on here and whatever hope they had of saving it was now driving slowly past them in beat to shit vehicles once designed for the streets of Baghdad. It was Greenwood all over again.

June 27th 2028 the call went out for a CalFire hotshot crew. Smoke was reported just outside the old mining town of Joe Walker Town. It was the 5636th wildland fire in California that year. A fire patrol aircraft confirmed it was an active brush fire burning near the western foothills that separated Joe Walker Town from the much more inhabited Bakersfield. The plan was for the Hotshot crew of 19 wildland firefighters to helicopter close enough to the fire to start cutting protective fire lines and hopefully slow its spread until more resources could be brought in if needed. Most of the fires the Hotshots had already fought that year were small ones like this one and with quick action on their part were fairly easy to contain. Cutting fire lines is physically demanding work especially in the heat of a Southern California summer. The crew had to remove all combustible material along the line to stop the fire from moving past it. The width of the line could be anywhere from one to three feet for a hand crew or even bigger if heavy equipment is brought in. It was clear the moment that the crew touched down on the small ridge running east to west that this wasn’t going to be like the other fires they had seen that year. The fire was closing in on the eastern slope that framed the lowland area the former town laid in. Fire hadn’t burned in this area for decades and the result was a steady buildup of combustible fuels. The droughts had killed off large portions of the scrub pines that dotted the area while seasonal growth of small vegetation choked those that remained. On the ridge the crew was able to navigate with ease but the dried out brush made moving along the slope challenging. The crew boss immediately radioed in the conditions and called for more resources. The problem as always was committing a limited amount of resources meant coming ever closer to having an empty cupboard. Up north was a real fire burning in the thousands of acres. As the crew boss looked down towards the still unnamed fire he could see how dangerous the situation was. The fire so far was contained in the low area at the base of the low hills and was being kept in check by the lack of wind which was unusual for the time of year. A westward change would drive the fire towards the east slopes and give it a launch pad into the more rugged heavily fueled hills. His crew was on the wrong ridge to do anything about it. He radioed for a second crew to cover the north south line. As he walked his crew toward the higher ground near them they marched past one of the dozen or so abandoned mines that once made Joe Walker a town. Nailed to one of the timbers over the open hole tunneled into the hillside was a hand painted sign. Word came over the radio that the Three Rivers fire was threatening to break containment and CalFire was committing the last available crews to stop it. As the crew boss stood listening to this news a breeze kicked up the dust around them temporarily obscuring the sign he was still staring at, “Tell em I’m establishing Pay Day command and declaring condition 5.”

What followed this singular moment in time would be a first for CalFire. The declaration of Condition 5 was no small matter and was only used when the conditions on the ground represented the highest danger for explosive fire growth. This would be the first time the most proficient fire agency in the world couldn’t answer the call. Within twenty four hours of the radio call the Pay Day fire had already burned over twenty thousand acres. Gusting winds common to the area combined with a lack of humidity change over night helped to spread the fire well beyond where it first started. Almost overnight a new fear emerged as the fire was now threatening the many oil fields that populate the outskirts of Bakersfield. Kerns River oil field being the most densely developed oil field in the state happened to also be the fifth largest producing field in the US. The Pay Day fire had become not just a threat to homes and scrub land but the US economy. Everyone could see it happening in real time and quietly discussions were occurring. Crews were pulled from every place they could be found including many of the large fires burning in the state. Small town fire departments all over the country sent volunteers and fire rigs to help. Images flooded the nightly news of people lining the highways in Oregon as crews from there and Washington State drove south, silently waving. The whole country watched as social media filled up with videos of oil wells erupting into towering infernos sending flaming oil a hundred feet into the air. It looked like something not seen since the first Gulf War. It is immensely hard to put out an oil well fire as the pressure of the well continually feeds the fire. Each well ablaze had to be capped which could take days or even weeks of incredibly dangerous work. The National Guard was already activated to assist with the fires and equipped with heavy equipment tried desperately to contain as many of the fires as possible. Even when they were successful the well heads were destroyed leading to many leaking, forming massive pools of crude sitting on the surface waiting for the ground to absorb it. The embers rained down from the burning hills and ignited these pools causing the air to become so thick with toxic black smoke that even aircraft couldn’t operate. These burning pools of oil revealed the decades of decay that had been allowed to occur as many older wells had been abandoned and left to rot. Slowly leaking oil into the surrounding ground a new phenomenon was born as the fire reached deep into the earth. These deep oil fires still burn decades later. The crews coming from around the country had never seen anything like it and as they tried to wrap their heads around the hellscape they were seeing word came from back home of new wildfires emerging in their states and in some cases their own backyards.

2028 would go down as the most destructive fire season ever. In total area burned the Pay Day fire ranked 4127th in the country at just under 50,000 total acres burned. The cost of protecting the oil fields and the city of Bakersfield made Payday one of the most expensive fires ever fought, but the real damage was done by the thousands of other fires, many much smaller. Every crew pulled to fight the Pay Day fire meant another fire running loose. The crews pulled from other states meant already stretched rural fire departments were even more understaffed. In California alone over ten thousand homes were lost to fires that season. No one knows the real cost of that fire season because it’s not as simple as just counting the number of acres burned. As the last oil well fire was put out a group of people met around a boardroom table and discussed their options.