Deliverance

 

 Shown is an area of grassland scorched by wildfires around the Mannford and Lake Keystone areas.

We are again out here on Baker’s Branch confronted with the horror of potential wildfires. The story that follows is true and happened in August 2012.

"Conrad, we gotta' get out. The TV just said they're evacuating Mannford and all of Round Mountain down Coyote Trail down to Tower Road."

My son-in-law, Tyner Jordan, said that while I was sweeping family photographs off the walls and grabbing them out of the corners of the house, and that's when the lights went out. Tyner's friend, Jeremy Craddock of Prue, rushed by me into a darkened hallway with a load of guns from the safe headed for my truck.

That had been the plan Pam and I had worked out the previous evening when the alarm first went up about the building wildfire between Drumwright and the intersection of State Highways 33 and 48. Throw the family photos and jewelry into trash bags, scoop up the heirloom family guns, roll them into blankets thrown into the back of the truck, and get out. Let the fire have everything else and call it a good trade.

But that had been yesterday under clear, but smoke-scented, skies, with the far-off actual wildfire being somebody else's problem, not ours. Now the air all around our house was heavy, acrid, and unbreathable; hot, and yellow-tinted like skeet-shooting glasses. Ash white, burnt leaves were falling like giant snowflakes all around the house, and the wind, dry and infernal, was roaring through the treetops.

The sound of sirens from fire wagons and police vehicles was constant, and wailing in from all directions at once, never pausing or stopping. This was bad, and no longer just somebody else's problem. The problem couldn't be far from my own front door from the sound and smell of things.

Pam and our daughter, Sarah, had cleared out earlier with the first load of family photos and, wisely a change of clothes for themselves and the grandkids. They were not taking any chances. Tyner and I would stay as long as we could take it; maybe spray down the roof and logs of our log home with a garden hose. Foolish, but what would you do to save the biggest part of your life's production, nothing? We'd stay until we could see the flames coming down the hill, then we'd leave.

That's what my friend Leon Mears had done not an hour before, six miles west of my house. Leon's place is located exactly two miles due southwest of the intersection of Highways 48 and 51, what we now know was "Ground Zero" for an event people are going to be talking about for years along the Arkansas River valley. Leon called me from his cell phone in his daughter's living room in Sand Springs.

"There wasn't nothin' I could do, Conrad. It came up too fast. I was watchin' it 'bout half a mile off from my front yard. Looked like the wind was gonna' take it south of my place. Next thing I knew, it was half a section (320 acres wide) away, and the wind was howlin' right towards me. It hit that forty acres of grass next to me in not more than ten minutes from when I seen it, and in probably one minute, it was at my front door and all around me.

"I run and grabbed the garden hose and tried to soak the barn, but, that fast, it had the barn on fire and all the metal in the building burning like cardboard and melting like hot plastic right down on top of my boat and everything I had in that barn. Everything gone in about two heartbeats.

"I gave that up quick, and tried to save the house, but the worst thing about it was that fire was startin' other fires a hundred yards ahead of the main line, and in every direction. Everywhere you looked there was fires goin' up from the heat and the sparks. The house started burnin' behind me while I was hosin' the barn.

"I seen what was happenin' and ran to the yard gate to call my little dog so we could leave, but he wouldn't come. He was scared to death and did the worst thing he coulda' done: He ran right for a brush pile in the backyard with me hollerin' at him, and dove into it. I ran for the truck, or it woulda' got me. The flames was lickin' at my tires as I jumped in and left."

"What about your guns?" I asked, knowing Leon is as avid a hunter as I am.

"They're in that safe, bolted to the floor. It's supposed to be fireproof. I guess we'll find out."

Charlie Pearson, Chief of the Rock Volunteer Fire Department north of Sand Springs in Osage County is a longtime family friend, and one of the many local firemen that fought the raging inferno miles from their own home base. He had called Pam on her cell to check on us, knowing our proximity to the growing disaster. His comments about the fire's ability to start secondary fires, which then turned into their own huge blazes in the tinder dry countryside, paralleled exactly those of Mears.

"It's the worst fire I've ever fought in over twenty years of fighting fires, Pam. We'd be fightin' to save one house, and another one right behind us, or maybe right next to us, would catch and go up. There wasn't nothin' we could do in that wind."

My old friend, Dave Hladik, "Roadkill Dave," whose name and exploits have appeared in this space countless times over the years, built a brand-new house a mile east of the Highway 33-48 junction about a year ago. He, two or three neighbors, and his girlfriend, fought the fire with well water, garden hoses and generators to pump the water when the electricity went dead and the fire roared across Highway 33 and completely encircled his house. So well scalped is Dave's yard due to his near constant mowing and brush clearing, the fire by-passed his yard on three sides, barely missing a huge barn loaded with a lifetime of accumulated hunting and fishing gear, as well as a motorhome and several boats, and Lord only knows how many decoys, and burned to the ground a neighbor's house a hundred yards away.

Five miles to the south of Hladik's place, and a mile east of Highway 48, Billy Hutson, Sand Springs teacher and baseball coach, fought with neighbors to save his own two-story log home. Hutson's place, like so many in the area, is situated in a place chosen on purpose to harbor and encourage wildlife and outdoor activities. That means habitat. Habitat means brush, grass, and explosive fire conditions in a drought such as we are now experiencing.

The fire was so intense when it swarmed up around Hutson's bone-dry log walls that it caught the roof's metal guttering on fire, but, miraculously, Hutson and his champion friends and neighbors somehow saved a lead pipe cinch to burn, like my home, from burning.

Brent Sanders, longtime Sandite, now with the Tulsa Police Department and living west of Mannford with his son and daughter, lost everything, his entire home burnt into a pile of low, grey ash, only the chimney remaining standing, a lonely, awkward testimony to the fact that once a good family lived on this burnt spot of earth.

Sanders was away on a camping retreat with friends on the Illinois River when he was notified by the Highway Patrol and finally tracked down when his family could not reach him.

Just as his house began to go up in flames, his brother Steven, also a member of the TPD, roared into his driveway and rescued Brent's trained police dog, the one that sniffs out bombs all over the Tulsa area. You've probably seen that dog on the TV news. Now, you may again.

Tyner, Jeremy, and I left when the sirens got so loud their message was undeniably urgent. Somebody was going to die if they didn't move. We drove, slowly, a quarter mile and made another stand in the parking lot of the Coyote Corner convenience store at the junction of Coyote Trail and Highway 51. It's a good high spot giving an open view of large swaths of country in every direction except due north.

The fire was due south and headed straight for my neighborhood. Here, we would have a great view of the ending of a lifelong dream. All it would take to put that inferno in my living room was a short, thirty-foot hop over Coyote Trail, and that from a fire that had been hopping hundreds of yards at a time all day long.

The parking lot was a swarm of evacuees; people almost literally yanked away from dinner plates, and forced to load dogs, goats, cattle, horses, four-wheelers, travel trailers, boats and, I suppose, family pictures into whatever they could drive away in and, now, here we all were, about to become acquaintances, at least, if not actually friends. Who knew an hour ago?

I was sitting in the cab of my truck taking in the incredible scene, sirens, flashing lights, dozens of official vehicles, bumper to bumper traffic, women standing around with their hands to their faces looking to the south and what was headed right for us; men with worried lines etched in their faces, people literally fleeing for their lives, when my cell phone rang. It was Pam. She was crying. She, Sarah, and the grandkids had come to roost at the Loveland's place north of Sand Springs, far from the frantic, crazy, disaster.

Were we going to lose our house? Yes, I said, strangely calm. But not our family; not the pictures. We saved Grandpa's guns. Everything else could be replaced someday, somehow. I know, she said, I saved all the dead ones.

I laughed at this, and the way she phrased it. It was perfectly put. I knew exactly what she was talking about. There were pictures of people, people important in our lives that we would never see again on this earth. People so important, that their pictures were the first saved. Strange, the development of priorities, in an instant.

Then, a peculiar thing happened. While we talked, bolstering one another, and putting things in perspective, I imagined I saw a single raindrop on the windshield in front of my face. I stared hard at the glass. It was a raindrop, and not a small one. Then another, and another. Now it was really raining, raining hard, sluicing down in a near tropical torrent, raining hard enough to put the wipers on high to see around the parking lot.

It did that for almost four minutes by my watch, and then it stopped about as fast as it began. When I leaned out of my window to look around, I saw puddles on the ground, and felt a freshening breeze, hard, right out of the north.

Looking to the south, where lived the monster fire, what was a huge, billowing column of yellow and black smoke now was a light-grey fog, blowing back in the direction from which it had come. There, close to my truck, I saw two or three women hug one another. A couple of men were smiling, and one said something that made the other one laugh.

I got out of my truck to make sure the wind really had changed. It had. Right out of the north. Just like that.

Now, tell me what that was all about.

Copyright © 2012 Conrad M. Vollertsen