The line of fire

TEN minutes ago the cicadas were deafening. Their silence now feels ominous, a feeling exacerbated by the cause of the sudden quietus: the thick blanket of smoke which has drifted into the valley behind our home.

Without the cicadas, it’s much easier to hear the drone of the helicopters. The water carriers we welcome, but the news crews set us on edge, zooming low over the house and setting neighbourhood dogs to howling. Yet those aerial shots are exactly what we want to see on the 24-hour news stream. Where is it now? Whose house is that? Sirens are also a mixed blessing: more trucks please, God bless the RFS – and God, more trucks?

Almost 200 people in our community lost their homes last week, as massive fires claim tens of thousands of hectares across the state. Like the cicadas, the fires have come early this year, a harbinger of a potentially horrific summer.

We have been flat out on the phone, on Facebook, on email and text, reassuring everyone that we’re out of harm’s way, but the truth is we are as safe as those in Winmalee were until the unexpected fire, sparked by an arcing wire, roared up the bush gully to consume their homes.

We are safe until the fire gets here. If the fire gets here.

Click on this image to see more photos by Kim Chappell and Michael Petey in our online gallery.

The duality of emotion is exhausting as hope and fear battle for the upper hand. Feeling calm because we’re so well prepared, feeling anxious because it’s so close now; feeling elated to hear friends are safe, feeling devastated to hear friends have lost everything. I’m the proverbial duck – a sitting duck? – gliding along propelled by desperate kicks.

Today the RFS deliberately joined two of the major fires burning in the Upper Mountains to try to counteract the possibility of a monstrous 'megafire'. The weather we're expecting tomorrow is predicted to be atrocious: howling winds, soaring temperatures. Hard to imagine on this eerily quiet afternoon.

More helicopters now, but the obsessive checking of the Rural Fire Service site reassures me the closest fire has not yet jumped containment lines.

As I step outside to check the sky, smoke stings my eyes. I call the dog back and ash falls on my tongue – a desecrated communion wafer. I stroll, don’t run, to the corner to chat with the officer policing the road closure, manage a smile, thank him for the news that most of the smoke is from the backburn, that the fire down the street is still moving slowly.

And I’m walking back to the house when the rain starts.

Tuesday, midnight: The mad dog is cowering under the kitchen table as thunder literally shakes the walls. It showers, then stops, then starts again – but all the while, the room is lit by incandescent flashes. There is more lightning than rain.

The cooler air is welcome but we still can’t open the windows. Smoke from the nearby backburn has been swirled about by the storm’s gusts but still hangs heavy in the gully. I worry that the lightning is touching ground, that the rain isn’t enough.

The fireys have been working like crazy to take food away from the monsters around us, but the rain must be making that harder for them. The ground is so dry the water is slipping off, and the air tomorrow will be so hot – what little moisture stays will be sucked away by mid-morning.

I should close the blinds, but instead I turn to face the window: smiling when squalls of raindrops batter the glass, flinching each time the sky lights up.

Frogs start to sing, and then the cicadas. Welcome back.

Wednesday, 9am: Before breakfast the wind is picking up already, gusting from 40 to 80 kilometres an hour says my new best friend ABC radio, and there’s precious little evidence of last night’s showers.

The cicada-heavy trees that surround the house are contorting in the flurries, and it bothers me that they’re so erratic. It’s not coming from a fixed direction, and embers could come from anywhere.

Social media and news interviews are buzzing with Clash-type debate: “Should I stay or should I go?”

We’re staying – for now – but we’re ready to go in a heartbeat. Bags packed and repacked, back-up bags prepped in case we need to leave on foot. We have leads for the dogs, but no carrier for the cats. Could we put them in zipper shopping bags? I want to, just for the pun value when we release them later. The chooks are on their own, sorry girls. We’ll leave the coop door open and hope they use the wings God gave them for a better purpose than flapping in my face when I bring them food.

Hoses are out, pumps attached, gutters cleared, leaves raked, branches trimmed and windows locked. And finally a chance to be thankful about spending such a huge chunk of the renovating budget on the fire-retardant cladding.

Time now for a coffee and another hit of radio reports – and a prayer or two as well.

Wednesday, 1pm: We're still at Watch and Act, not a level of urgency I ever thought I'd welcome but sweet music to all of us close to the Grose/Chapman end of Springwood's Linksview Rd fire.

Plenty of choppers still circling about and the occasional siren. Water bombers and spotters outnumber the news teams, many of which are grounded by the wind.

Deputy RFS Commissioner Rob Rogers says the Springwood and Mt Victoria fires have been "quiet" this morning. Quiet is also music our ears, especially in a wind-blown house surrounded by emergency crews and filled with bored kids and agitated pets.

There's wine and beer in the fridge now, looking forward to a celebratory drink when it's all over tonight.

Seven fire trucks just went barrelling down the road. And another four. In fireys we trust.

Wednesday, 2pm: Although we've tried to distract the kids with an encore screening of The Princess Bride the grown-ups don't get the luxury of switching off: inconceivable.

Just as we're swapping information on wind gust speeds and numbers of fire trucks heading toward the local front, we see RFS Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons handed a piece of paper mid-briefing on the live ABC news feed.

Springwood has just been upgraded again to Emergency.

Nothing on the RFS site yet, but text message through just now: immediate danger, seek shelter as fire approaches.

Wednesday, 6pm: Yesterday a friend posted on Facebook a photo taken at Leura on the same day a year ago. Her garden was dusted in snow. Yesterday ours was dusted with ash.

This evening though the wind is favouring us and the embers and ash are heading elsewhere. Someone else's yard, someone else's home.

Although still at Emergency status, we walk up the street to see the activity at the high school. Seven aircraft are water bombing behind the school, emerging from the smoke two or three at a time in swooping curves to reload and return. They've been there since the early afternoon.

The plumes billowing out of the bush are sluggish, bruise-coloured, obscene.

Roads are still closed and cars trickle out of the area slowly as we watch the live news cross. When we get home the same journalist is still on our television screen. The helicopters we see behind her are the ones we can hear overhead.

The absence of sirens makes me less anxious, but it might not be the quiet evening we had hoped for.

Wednesday, 9pm: Finally - all quiet on this Western front. No rotor blades cutting the air, no Doppler effect as sirens careen around the corner. TV blaring entertainment, not fire updates, kids asleep, small cicada which found its way into the kitchen bumping about. Wine o'clock.

Thursday, 3pm: A cool and relaxed start to the morning brought a short respite from living on the edge these past days - on the edge of our nerves, the edge of temperance, on the edge of the fires.

People who'd left started returning today, posting messages of relief to find their homes safe. Roadblocks were open and the streets were calm.

It was only a brief break though, as the cooler weather was pushed in by more gusting winds - and those winds picked up a few embers and dropped them in places they had no business being.

Thankfully the RFS haven't upgraded it back to Emergency, but the sirens and the helicopters and the helicopters and the sirens and the wind - always the wind - are a bit too much to take today.

This was supposed to be a day off.

And yet, as always, thankful for those endless emergency response sounds, because we know we're being looked after. We know it means firefighters from our street, our region, our state and across our country are working very, very hard to keep the beast at bay.

The car stays packed.

Thursday, 8pm: The situation has calmed, but relief is tainted by thoughts of the pilot who died today fighting fires down south.

It wasn't our fire, he wasn't our friend, but he stands for all the brave people who stand on the line of fire in our place, who put themselves at terrible risk to protect those they'll never meet. The tragedy is an allegory of our frailty.

As the adrenalin fades after days of vigilance, space is left for emotion - and plenty of it. He was not my friend, but I grieve his death keenly.

To his children: know that you have the heartfelt sorrow of a nation, that your father's life is marked in the minds of a generation.

The helicopters are back again, just now, and I wonder what the pilots are thinking as they fly over firefields in the dark night.

Sunday, 7pm: The kinetic energy generated by a community's massed torsion seems to be dissipating as the danger recedes.

Friends report sleeping soundly through siren-less nights only to wake exhausted, to be fatigued before midday without reason, as the collective tension from thousands of unwinding mental coils is released.

The fire moved from Emergency on Thursday to Watch and Act, and down to Advice - Advice! - on Saturday, then back up to Watch, and finally back to Advice where it has stayed for an entire day. Tomorrow we'll unpack the car.

The owners of a stately home around the corner threw open their gates this afternoon for a community picnic, where they collected notes of thanks and cash for the emergency crews. At the picnic, we're told by someone with a friend in the local RFS that the shattered fireys are being sent home. We spend a short time swapping stories about the week, comparing notes and photos, and a long time befriending puppies, playing frisbee, drinking wine and eating cake.

On Wednesday - the worst day - when I could do no more and listen no more I went for a walk around the garden, trying to tune out the constant sounds of trucks and helicopters. I fed the chooks, collected eggs, picked handfuls of sun-warmed mulberries, plucked flowers for the kitchen table and stopped by our old dog's grave.

I cried then, not for Gus but for what we could lose. Not the walls and windows, the couches and cushions, but the life our home has given us. I cried for the barefoot trip to the lemon tree, for the first sign of wisteria blossom, for the tadpole-catching expeditions, for the sunsets from the rock near the back gate. I cried in fear for our home, and in grief for those homes already lost.

With thousands of hectares and 200 homes gone here - 52,000ha burnt from Lithgow up the Bells Line - it is not merely luck no lives were lost in the Blue Mountains. It is a tribute to those who fought the behemoth, including friends caught literally on the wrong side of the road that first terrible Thursday, who picked up hoses to save strangers' houses - and their own lives.

A hand-painted sign near the highway calls the firefighters heroes: "going where angels fear to tread".

They are indeed heroes, and beside them stand other heroes, the countless donors: the locals who put out signs saying "clothes and food here, just knock"; the volunteers who cooked for the crews; the families overseas who sent cash; the friends who took in evacuees; the vets who treated injured animals; and always, always, the ashen angels on the firefront.

One chopper lingers - a spotter - circling around our valley, up to the point, over the high school, back across to Winmalee. One is enough, one is welcome.

A good night to all.

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