One Helluva Close Call

“The flames that neared Tuscarora were part of the Dunphy Complex of fires that scorched roughly 163,00 acres.”  Elko Daily Free Press October 5, 2011

This is another of my pieces, like “I’ve Had Better Days,” that originated as a journal entry.

Tuscarora, October 5, 2015.  Four years ago today,  Tuscarora almost burned to the ground.  Because today is a perfect fall day, it’s difficult to remember how unseasonably  hot September and October were that year. I do remember the sequence of events. 

     Daughter Kate and I had agreed to meet in Boise for a weekend of college football and catching up. For University of Nevada football fans, the game was a big deal. The year before, quarterback Colin Kaepernick led the team to a 34–31 overtime victory over the undefeated Boise State Broncos, ruining  Boise State's 24-game winning streak.  Kaepernick had gone on to play for the San Francisco 49ers, but the Wolfpack was having a rematch with the BSU Broncos on their turf in Boise.  We are both UNR graduates.  Katie’s the football fan.  I’m always up for an opportunity for us to get together.

    The game was a rout.   Boise defeated the Nevada Wolf Pack 30–10. I was trying to be a good sport, but it did not seem like football season.  The temperature was in the high eighties.  The stadium seats were unshaded tiers of poured concrete. We were sitting on the BSU side, surrounded by cheering Broncos in orange and blue.  A nice couple offered me a cushion.  It didn’t help.  

    Kate and I left the stadium just as the whooping and hollering began. I dropped her off at the airport and headed  home.  

        At some point south of Owyhee, but before Wildhorse Reservoir,  I noticed smoke in the distance and tried to place the fire.  Maybe it’s in the Tuscarora Mountains.  No, it seems more towards Carlin.  No, it’s further away.  It’s hard for me–probably most people– to judge distances in basin and range country.

      I pulled into my driveway after sundown.  I could see my neighbor Milt’s outline.  He was standing on his porch looking west toward an unnaturally dark part of the  sky.  “Where’s the fire?” I called. 

      “ Midas area.  Friday night, dry lightning everywhere,” he said as he turned back into his double-wide trailer.

     When I woke up on Monday morning, my lower back was killing me.  The heat, concrete seats, long drive.  I got up to take a couple of Advil and went back to bed.  I didn’t bother to open the bedroom curtains.  

     When the landline rang, I was shocked to find it was noon.  Julie, our postmistress, said “Nancy, you might want to pack some things.  There's some speculation we might be asked to evacuate.”  That snapped me to attention. 

      The tempo changed.  I forgot about my aching back,  put some clothes on and went outside.  A  dark shadow of smoke filled the sky to the west, somewhere beyond...where?   I couldn’t say.  

     “Grab your binoculars,” my neighbor Sidne shouted as she and her partner Mike walked into the yard.    Both are retired firefighters. Sidne did dispatch in Nevada and Alaska. Mike was a smoke jumper all over the West. I did what she said and we walked around the Glory Hole to high ground to get a better look at what had coalesced into a gigantic black smokestack in the sky.   

     Mike was trying to judge our distance from the fire, when Sidne pointed up. “Look! A borate bomber.”  She named the model.  “They’re fast.  They can be here from Battle Mountain in twelve minutes.”  Suddenly, everything was fast.  Trucks hauling equipment   streaming up the road to Tuscarora. The town swarming with fire fighters.

     I was barely back inside my house when an official in yellow firefighting gear knocked on my door.  He told me,  politely,  we weren’t officially being requested to evacuate, but we were being encouraged to leave.  As he spoke, two young firefighters began hosing the deck and the woodpile. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a third clearing brush on the northeast corner of my property.  “The fire is at the Rhoads ranch,” one of them told me.  I didn’t need Sidne or Mike to tell me that in unchecked wildfire time, seven miles was way too close.

     Less than an hour after that preliminary warning,  a sheriff’s deputy was at my door.  “Everyone is being asked to leave.”  His tone told me “asked” meant “now.”   I gathered my laptop, my favorite turquoise jewelry, and an overnight bag, as if I were spending a couple of nights at the Marriott in Elko.   Which was exactly what I did.

     After putting my bags in the car.  I told the two young guys dragging hoses around the house, “The door’s unlocked.”

     “That’s the right thing to do,” one of them said.  “If they needed to get in, they’d break it down.”

     “I put out coffee and mugs in the shop, ” I continued, as if they were guests.   “There's a bathroom out there.”  As an afterthought I said, “If it looks like I’m going to lose my little house, there’s a bottle of Jim Beam under the kitchen sink.”  Sort of a dumb thing to say, but  they smiled. 

      I started my car and headed down the road, away from the fire.  As soon as I was in cell phone range, I left a message for my husband in California.   “I’m headed to Elko.  Tuscarora has  been evacuated.”

     I registered at the Marriott in Elko about eight o’clock. There was nothing I could do.   I  fixed myself a couple of drinks.  I left the Beam for the firefighters but took the Makers Mark. The bourbon helped my aching back. I finally fell asleep with the tv on.   It didn’t seem real.  Isn’t that what they always say? 

     Two days later I went back to Tuscarora, saw black hillsides and burned sagebrush.  The town was intact.  Because Mike and our friend Ron Arthaud are two thirds of the Tuscarora Volunteer Fire Department, they were permitted to stay.  Hearing Mike and Ron talk about that first night reinforced how close the town came to being destroyed.  They told me crews were all over town cutting brush, hosing down the sides of houses, dozing a firebreak and lighting backfires that burned to the top of Mt. Blitzen.   

     Once home, my first phone call was to my friend Linda who ranches on the flat, halfway between Taylor Canyon and Tuscarora. I was praising the manpower, equipment, and efficiency—including the Army helicopters taking buckets of water from the Glory Hole and putting out fires in the canyons all day Tuesday.  “It was one helluva close call,” I said to my friend.

     “They should’ve let the town burn!” she interrupted.  Linda launched into a tirade against Nevada Forestry and the BLM for letting the fire get so out of control and destroy so much rangeland and wildlife habitat. 

      She told me about the chaos at the Rhoads ranch, how ranchers and cowhands from the north end of the valley showed up, unloading their horse trailers, riding to open gates and to move cattle out of danger. “The fire,” she said, “was spitting distance from their house.”     She told me about the loss of nine prized horses.  She didn’t know how many cows.   Most of all, it was the irreparable loss of grazing land.

     I let her vent her anger and frustration.  She talked about how these rangeland holocausts never used to happen until they started to restrict the grazing;  how the BLM and environmental groups will use rangeland fires to justify reduction of grazing allotments and to reinforce endangered species claims.  I knew what she was saying.   There was the insinuation that in saving Tuscarora, the interests of the ranchers were sacrificed.  It wasn’t true. Later, she apologized for her outburst.  “I didn’t mean the people,” she said.

     What is true is that the folks who live here pride themselves on their endurance and their ability to pull together when needed. However, ranchers here and throughout the West  see a greater threat in human forces at work:  in urban sensibilities that mythologize a noble, untamed wilderness;  federal government agencies with obstructive and unnecessary regulations; and certain environmental groups antagonistic toward the use of public land for grazing cattle and, even more basic, to beef as a food source.  

     Some predict that within thirty years range cattle will be gone from the Great Basin. Open range cattle ranching will be a memory.   It’s hard to say.  This year, the price of cattle is good.  It was a wet spring and summer. The range has made a remarkable comeback.  

     Up the hill in Tuscarora, life goes on.  The pottery school is holding workshops.  The Tuscarora Ladies Club is meeting regularly in Society Hall, our community center.  The 4-H meets there, too.  The best way to find out what’s going on in town or down in the valley is to linger at the post office or wander over to Society Hall.  You never know who you might run into.

      So far, so good. I take nothing for granted after a helluva close call.  

Society Hall