A Very Near Thing | JIM FURLONG

I am more than a little conflicted about writing about the horrible forest fires that happened in our province this summer. There is a kind of survivor’s guilt in it all. We were evacuated because of the fire near Three Island Pond but we never lost our home, and we were living out of a suitcase in a strange place for a month. Still, it was disruptive not destructive.

    We had been on alert in the Three Island Pond area. I had thrown some clothes in the back of our pickup before we left. I also took a computer and a couple of portable drives. Left behind were all my books and memorabilia from seventy odd years.

    It didn’t bother me because it was just “stuff”. A different view might have descended on me if we had lost our home and eight decades worth of “stuff” that included my baby shoes from 1946.

    We had been on alert for a couple of days and, while I was driving around the end of Three Island Pond, I noticed a fire truck and a fire crew at the edge of the woods. The fire hadn’t jumped the road yet but was getting close. Those woods were tinder dry. The pond was low and what had been some little nearby streams had slowed to a trickle.

    By the time I got back to the house my wife had called and told me the evacuation order had come. I was only a couple of minutes away from my house but by the time I got home a police car with siren blaring was already in our neighbour hood telling everyone to get out. There were several police cars in the general area, and I am guessing they were all put in place before the evacuation order was actually given. That evacuation went smoothly. At least most of it.

    One of my sons and his wife and new baby were evacuated. They live just down the road from me. Another son lived a few roads away and his neighbourhood was only on an “alert”. He went to live in his camper on the other side of St. John’s in the east end with his family. They actually turned over his home to us. Not only did we have a place to stay we had a house to ourselves in “the alert but not evacuated zone”.

    Left behind us in the woods was one cat. He had a bowl of food and a bowl water. He was an indoor/outdoor cat, and he had a forest full of mice to live on. When we returned home four days later, he was lying in the sun on our front deck. He raised his head but barely looked at us. Cats are like that. They look after themselves.

    Now that is just a cute little story that doesn’t touch on the loss and real hardship of so many people in the province and the major forest fires we had. Ou fire was on the edges of St. John’s and understandably a lot of resources were thrown at it. Fires aren’t fought on a first come first saved basis. It is more complicated than that. It does however fill me with fear.

    Newfoundland got lucky. We had to borrow some resources from other provinces, but they WERE available. What if they were in use elsewhere? Where would we be this summer? The other issue is the question of what happens now. This hotter than normal and drier than normal summer we had better get used to because this situation is not a “one of” event. There are indications that in the climate changing world in which we operate things are only going to get worse. Worse means hotter and significantly drier.

    I realized this year that I live in the middle of a forest. In the past 20 years we have been evacuated twice now. That isn’t the end of that story. It is a tale of climate change.

    Again, from me now that which is called survivor’s guilt. As of this writing in late August there are still evacuees from Conception Bay North sleeping on cots. A lot of people have lost their homes. There are serious upheavals with school year at the edge of our doorsteps. There are hundreds of questions yet to be answered.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]