Reporting From the Front Lines of the Heat Wave

aka, My life as a pseudo-spasatel

My account of the controlled cahos of evacuating children from a Russian summer camp in advance of a forest fire, and living on the front lines of Global Warming.

None of the warning signs, not the day in Voronezh when the sky oranged and carried the scent of roast marshmallows, and not the time I spent staringly curiously at the six-wheeled fire-fighting behemoth in the camp parking lot, forced me to consider the possibility of evacuating from camp in advance of a forest fire. Even at quarter to twelve on Thursday, my molasses thick mind was more concerned with distracting the kids from the not-so distant white smoke billowing from the horizon. Within half-an-hour though, I had gathered all of campers at the riverside, and ten hours later, I sat down for an unexpextedly late lunch and tea back in Voronezh.


The one foto I snapped of the smoke, before I grabbed my bag and took off. (More fotos coming soon).

The fire-stoked winds spun the boats on the river like tea cups in Disneyland. Several boats got caught in the current downstream. One of my campers remarked to me, all smiles at her own wit, that the situation was like the Titanic, as there were not enough boats for everyone. It was a day for strange comments. I later found myself saying, in Russian, "Should I stay here with the women and children, or go back with you?" All we were missing was a band playing ragtime and waltzes on the deck of the sinking ship.

At first, I assigned myself the task of launching the small boats from the near-bank, and herding children and luggage in a somewhat orderly manner. It was a day for being flexible, however. Only a few seconds after I launched one boat it began to sink, and the elderly couple on board did not seem up to bailing it out. I jumped in and helped pull the boat across the river, verily lifting the old man out of the flooded rear, addressing him in kindly Russian 'Grandfather.' No sooner than we had bailed out the boat, than I took it back across the river, finding it easier to lasso the slime-green chain across my chest than to fight the wind. After several more runs, all the children and luggage were across the river, and my fellow Russian camp counselors Max and Anton called me back to grab fresh water for the kids, not knowing how long it would be before we could grab some more.

As we walked back to the camp, we could see the black smoke churning over heads. Anton, who with his long hair looked like Boromir's Slavic cousin, suggested that the smoke beyond was in fact evidence of the approaching Armies of Mordor. (I countered in a basso profundo that it was more like when Saurman's black magic that stopped the Fellowship at Caradhras pass). At the center of the camp, near the primary-colored bird cage, a bronze-haired octogenarian with a dark blue night gown begged us to save her parakeets. I later saw her sitting on the far shore later with two birdcages.

At our former residences there were gold-tooth Russian firemen, their grey hair betraying them as second-line forces, milling about in a frustrating effort to protect the camp with nothing but garden hoses. My friends and I however, ran from house to house gathering up the last drops of fresh water from the 20L cans, and tea biscuits for good measure. With a boyish energy we overburdened ourselves and returned to the riverbank.

By the time we got back to the shore the children has already started to move off the beach and through the fields, towards a road bordering a nearby camp. I help carry the last group and baby stroller acrouss the river, and returned the boat for any remainging people. I shoved my glasses in my bathing suit, and swam across the river one last time.

With the kids down the road, we were faced with a mixed assortment of oversized luggage and boxes of camp supplies. I strapped a pink duffle to my back, and wrapped my arms around a cream Samsonite, and headed barefoot and bare-chested down the beach. When we rounded the first bend in the river we could see a burning stump and charred grass still smoking on our side of the river. The high winds were flattening the heads of the wild wheat against the ground, while a light hale of branches snapped and fell on the path ahead. I put on shoes from my bag, and we headed on, keeping the black smoke to our backs. Walking the 3.5kms to the camp, I made the prerequisite jokes about our refugee status, and my friend added his suprise at the lack of Luftwaffe dive bombers in the air.

When we entered Camp Rainbow, we had to carry the assorted guitars, suitcases, and other paraphenalia through the rusted yellow amusement park gates. All of the kids were there, moving about in different stages of undress. In the Russian style, the other evacuees were busy depleting the local cafe's supplies of ice cream, beer, and tea. My first hint of the outside world came when the saleswoman admonished me for trying to open the 'fridge to get some water, tersely indicating that the power was off. I bought a bottle of tepid water and carried it over to the kids, who were already lunching on the animal crackers and candies their parents had packed for them. As soon as the cars started arriving, we produced a camp manifest, and packed the smallest children, clown-car stlye, into the back of the sedans. After as black Audi pulled away with nine kids in it, I grabbed hold my firend as she broke into gasping sobs, bereft of the opportunity of having said goodbye to her campers.

I caught the penultimate ride to Ramon in a four-wheeled Suzuki, with a woman in full-on Mama Bear mode. She drove with the skill matched by rally-car drivers in the Paris-Dakar Rally, navigativing the sandy path between pines at speed while working to locate her daughter with her iPhone 3G. We listened in silence to the Verve's Bittersweet Symphony, and watched the crowds of hitchhikers trudge through the woods.

At the rallying point at Ramon, on the River Voronezh, I found my male campers sitting with their shirts wrapped around their faces, Taliban style. They informed that the grey source of smoke in the distance was our camp burning. We took souvenir photos with the black smoke behind us, ate Anton's whole bag of Turkish delights, and watched the sun dissappear behind the pall of smoke. By seven pm, two mini-buses had arrived, and we loaded up once more, headed for Voronezh. On the bus back, Nikita, the nine-year old with boundless energy, pointed out all of the seperate fires that he could see on the horizon.

Now, four days later, I know that all the kids are safe, and most of my important posessions have been returned, including the digital camera I had left behind. I don't think that many have appreciated the scale of these fires, but I can attest to hearing the Russian fire bombers taking off several times every hour, and still smelling smoke in the air. Although the Russophile in me wants to draw strained parallels to the millions of Russian refugees that trudged across the countryside in the last century, without any certain future waiting on the other side, I think the more appropriate parallel, however, is with the current facts of global climate change. On paper, what happened is the linguistically muted subtraction of a Voronezh's biome losings its compound distiction, going from forsted-steppe, to simply steppe. Whitnessing it, I can say, was a bit more dramatic.

Although a few degrees centigrade doesn't seem like much, it is enough to dry a powder keg of kindling, raise grain prices, and sow the seeds for so many personal, regional, and national catastrophes. While reflecting on the twentieth century's memories of total war, I came to wonder if the stragglers with suitcases I saw trudging across the field with the smoke rising behind us, was perhaps a more prophetic vision of twenty-first century ecological disaster. I make no claim of expertise, and provide little evidence. All the same, I feel that even in small part, I've been whitness to a hinge-moment in modern history, also whitnessed by those many survivors of the California fires, those observing the death of virgin forests in the Pacific Northwest, and, yes, those watching glaciers dissappear. And if this a sample of the things to come, we might well remember that reacting to these impending crises as national, instead of global emergencies, would mean leaving our heads stuck in the smoke of the nineteenth century.

I'd appreciate your comments...More photos to come soon.