Bog Myrtle & Peat

Wildfire, and the black stink of boiling sap. Smoke rose in a veil, but as we fought the flames and trod them down, they slipped away like soap and made off for the west, senseless and craven and searching for an “out”. Then fire found the forest, and that’s when our drama seemed small by comparison because the flames leaped fully forty feet into the air, and the trees burst and boomed and the sky swarmed with the ash of burning needles. I fought a big fire once before, and that memory came back to me; a battlefield sense of cinema and widescreen bigness; watching more fire engines come piling down the track from five miles distant; television crews and Incident Control in a trailer wagon as far again in the opposite direction.

It’s hard to resist the stunning majesty of work that runs across miles of big country, playing some small part in a vast engagement. Try knowing that as you sweat and battle the flames, help is coming from every station and available hand in Southern Scotland; it’s a sense of urgent convergence that is almost impossible to imagine in peacetime. So when your hands are raw and the skin slips off them, there are folk from Ayr and Kilmarnock to pick up the slack and push on. In a moment’s rest, I climbed to the highest point on the hill and watched the loops of fire rage away towards Gatehouse like a mess of red cables. Where the trees had begun to burn, smoke climbed in a yellow pall so dense and broad that the whole hill lay in shade for as far as the eye could see. And everywhere the tingle tang of sap and soot and the smell of land leaving.

But for all the grand enormities, an event like this is the sum total of a million little snapshots – slapping a palm across your well-stung face and realising that your eyebrows are crispy – looking down to the black, well-polished boots on the new arriving firemen – a moment’s take of a snake well roasted and white as a rib in the cinders – each coil of hose is heavy enough to feel like it’ll help, but we need more and where’s another pump?

And the helicopter came in a straight line from Glasgow, and it turned and the smoke span and the engine exhausts were sharp and lifty as we marked a landing pad with aerosol paints. Then grit in your face and a smell of aftershave from the air-conditioned pilot with a parting and a cleft chin as he jabbed a map and frowned. Somebody asked if they could come up and he never even bothered to say no, of course you can’t. The sun set across him scooping water in a bag and dumping it a ton a time on the hill in glittery streaks and the loch was plumbed and there was never an end to the hoses chunting in the burn, pushing and pulling water like hawsers on the black moss.

The fuel for this fire grew in long years of stillness and abandonment. Crackling grass piled high in bales and the trees rose like empty straws waiting for a spark to let them go. Our backs were turned, and there was something vast and humbling in that unexplained moment of release; far bigger than anything we could ever hope to contain, no matter how cleverly we swarmed around it and hatched our plans. Then in darkness, I parked almost twenty miles away and looked back to a red horizon and the glow of light in smoke, knowing that more and worse was coming.