It is truly a frightening thing.
Where I grew up, in the northeastern US, summer means green, lush, humid days. It means flowers and cookouts and sprinklers. In Melbourne, summer means dry and hot. Anything that you have managed to grow for the short spring will die unless you have a water tank and recycled water to douse your plants. The grass, which is brown and dead, crunches and hurts your feet if you try to walk barefoot. My flower garden which I planted hopefully this past spring - all dead. We just don't have enough water from the shower every day to water it all. I am trying to keep the petunias in front of the house alive because I like the color and it makes it seem more than just a dead yard when you walk by. It says: someone lives here and cares.
In my whole life I have experienced maybe one or two days of temperatures over 100 degrees. Over the past 2 months there have been about 7 days that have broken 103 degrees. Today is another one. Today is a day of total fire ban - no fires, no welding or machinery that can produce sparks, no barbeques unless they are on a concrete patio and you have water nearby just in case.
Which brings us to the fires. The fires have been burning for weeks and the smoke blows over the city. When I wake in the morning I can smell it on the wind and I am transported quickly back to my childhood days of campfires at Fourth Lake. Then I remember where I am and I know that these fires are a very different thing.
On Black Saturday, the day it got to 117 degrees , the fires swept through an area to the Northeast of the city and killed over 200 people. They have no idea how much wildlife was lost that day - the estimate is in the millions. The koala population of Victoria only numbers on the thousands and they were not spared for virtue of being rare and cute. My husband and I decided that rather than donate to the human cause, we would donate money to the organizations doing animal rescue in the fire affected areas. Our reasoning is that they would be forgotten. We are attending other fundraisers so hopefully in the end it will all balance out.
Whole towns which had stood in beautiful mountain settings for decades were wiped out in one day. The coroner has bluntly stated that the fires were so hot that there are some bodies that will not be able to be recovered because no trace remains of them. And still, the fires burn. Water was moved from one fire threatened reservoir to another and the firefighters still struggle to hold containment lines so that the larger reservoir does not come under threat.
Every day, the fires creep closer to the small piece of land that I purchased in the Warburton Valley last July. My husband and I watch the maps closely and listen for every fire alert and warning. The land is vacant, but it is so beautiful, with huge old gum trees and kookabaras which perch on tree limbs and watch you with one eye. We have already had enough disaster for one year when we discovered that the oldest tree on the property was diseased and had to be taken down after half of it broke away and fell into our neighbor's yard. It was such a beautiful tree with a wombat hole at the base. Now it is just a huge trunk without a crown and the wood from the limbs radiates away from the base, most of the pieces so heavy that one strong man cannot even budge them. The company that did the work for us mulched and took away the leaves and cut the huge limbs into smaller pieces but we still have a lot of work to do and now the fires make us worry that we haven't done enough. If the fire comes through, the wood will catch and burn. Unfortunately, our neighbors live there year round, so having a fuel load on our property is not good for them. So we worry and watch and wait. We have been told to stay away from the area because of the smoke and because if the fire broke the line, we would have no shelter, nowhere to go. There has not been any significant rain for more than a month and everything is so dry, waiting for one blown ember to come through and catch.
The valley and town of Warburton is the one place that I have found in this new land that reminds me of home. When you turn onto the Warburton highway, you enter a lush green world of horse pastures and tall shady trees, gardens and water. The Yarra river snakes along next to the road and it is truly one of the most beautiful places in the state of Victoria. Huge Mountain Ash trees rise up on the hills that slope down to the banks of the river. They are the ghost cousins of the Redwood forests, glowing white in the dim light of the gloaming.
The village of Warburton is one strip of historic shops that backs onto the river. The area right next to the Yarra is one long park and the town proper is built mostly on the hill above the river. I am not describing it as well as I could or should, but I knew the first time we drove through that this was where I wanted to escape to on hot summer days. I wanted my own shady, lush, green piece of land to build a little house for the weekends when the city and concrete were too hot for life.
I didn't realize that the summer, the time when I needed that green escape the most, would be the months that I would have to stay away and worry. I didn't realize that this landscape was itself a fragile thing. I didn't realize it could all go up in flames and be destroyed in one day.
What were those first settlers thinking, making their home in a land like this? I think they were fooled, the same way I was. So now I wait on pins and needles. It's another 100+ degree day and the fires above Whitegum Drive burn an area of 250,000 hectares behind the shaky containment lines.
"Don't know whether to laugh or cry while the long hot summer just passed me by......"
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