Various fire-themed songs might have emerged from my subconscious as the soundtrack for this week in the life of southern Berkshire County, but for whatever reason, I have had Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” running through my head. It starts: “The world was on fire and no one could save me but you.” It is an otherworldly tune that would have served as a good lead-in for “Stranger Things” or “The Twilight Zone.” It fit our moment, as well.
The Butternut Fire is an unfortunate choice of name, since it implies that my beloved Ski Butternut is itself on fire, which it blessedly is not, at least as of the time of this writing, 5 p.m. on Thursday, November 21. But Butternut Fire it is, and just as it works to winnow away the excess underbrush, it also quickly pared our cluttered lives down to the essentials. Our attention is drawn to the smoke world by day, the magnificent orange blaze world by night.
For the first time in my 52 years, my world, my home hills, the container of my life, the setting for my childhood and grown-up dreams, is actually—rather than metaphorically—on fire. Our pretty hillsides full of tree trunks and branches and root systems and leaf detritus are on fire, and my mind is on fire with them, lit sometime Monday night, on East Mountain. How and by whom no one yet knows. I can’t imagine a human hand creating this show fit for the gods, but fire, uncontained in a woodstove, fireplace, or firepit, is new to me. It is making me think in new ways. For instance, late Tuesday morning I stood holding a bag of groceries in the parking lot of the Berkshire Co-op, staring east in the direction of my sister’s nearby home, which lay unsuspecting like a sleeping doe, somewhere below but quite nearly within the space the smoke was creeping toward.
But then a loud, thumping savior approached! A black helicopter stopped and began to hover dangerously over the smoke. A valiant, inadequate savior. A mosquito hovering over a canyon. I watched as its cup of water spilled in, but I had the feeling that this would only annoy or amuse the flames, like puny arrow slings would a dragon. The smoke/ flame canyon/monster was, inexorably and patiently, on the move all day long, eating everything in its path. Inside the Co-op it had been just my everyday, Groundhog Day morning, same parking spot, same customary food items in my cart, same bespectacled fellow ringing me out, while just outside there was a zombie apocalypse movie playing on a mountainside screen with state-of-the-art special effects.
And so I stood in the parking lot, weighed down by cans and bottles, magnitudes less useful than the mosquito helicopter in the sky above. Even my genius phone, such a lifesaver in normal life, was no help at all. It was silent on the question of the smoke’s likely next moves, its origins, or motivations for its behavior. Giving up on the phone, I scanned my own extensive experience and knowledge Rolodex, which also typically does excellent service in all manner of crisis. But I came up with nothing there, either, to help interpret what I was seeing in the hills. I knew nothing. I could predict nothing. I could do nothing. I went up to check on my sister’s house, and as I turned onto her street, I would not have been surprised to find all the houses obliterated. Such a thing as an obliterated row of occupied houses in the “Best Small Town in America” went from unthinkable to thinkable within minutes.
A clear and dry Tuesday morning passed into a clear, dry Wednesday morning, and as I was driving south on Route 41 into town, tracking the smoke behind Butternut, I felt like it was 1998 again and I was driving along the deeply rutted Waghi Highway from Banz to Mount Hagen, Western Highlands, Papua New Guinea. That was the last time/place I lived through an extended dry season, and I remembered how, whizzing by in the back of the school truck, I saw the fires that desperate people had set all along the roadside bush in the belief that the rising smoke would stimulate the rain to fall. On Wednesday driving south on Route 41, I had the same impulse. It seemed a more productive plan than rain-dancing. I did not light a fire, of course, but I could understand in a way I did not understand back in 1998 why you would try anything to make the rain come.
Such wildly unaccustomed unpredictability. So many good and experienced people sacrificing their regular lives to take charge and do their best to fight an insatiable beast, but even they had no idea what this fire would do or could do. No one could step up to the media mikes to assure us that we could get back to worrying about things less essential than losing our houses.
What is our relationship to natural disaster in this corner of New England? We get only the outskirts of hurricanes. We get only the mildest tremors from earthquakes. Our hills are not substantial enough, I assume, to produce the sort of mudslide that blocked off Interstate 70 in Colorado when we were there in 2021. In Great Barrington we had one tornado, on May 29, 1995. It was small, terrifying, and brief. It was on the ground for 18 minutes. It threw a car carrying two students and a teacher from Eagleton 1,100 feet, and they were killed.
That event lived on after the fact, as far as my world goes, as the denuded mountainside of East Mountain, as seen from Route 7 along the south side of town. On every drive from my parents’ house in Egremont into town I had occasion in the years after that tornado to track the regrowth of the forest on that hillside. I know nothing about tornados apart from a twice-removed sense of their destructive power, and nothing at all about wildfires.
Why would I or any of us have reason to understand the distinction between structural fire fighters and wildfire fire fighters? No reason at all. What before would have caused me to consider where my sister’s neighbors who don’t have family nearby would go if they had to evacuate their houses? Nothing. In normal times the time between formulating a question and locating its answer is seconds. When did the song “Wicked Game” come out? 1989. What was the date of the 1995 Great Barrington tornado? May 29. When is it going to rain? Thursday, November 21. One hundred percent chance. But there is no answer to: “Can you please tell me if everything is going to be all right?”
