They drove east for twenty minutes until they came to a village still with power. They’d left their phones behind; Archie stopped and ran into an all-night gas station, grabbing the attendant’s phone, and calling 911, reporting the fire to the dispatcher, warning her of the fire’s path. She immediately contacted the Fire Service and Police. Minutes later, crews were out starting evacuations due east of the fire. Then he called Charlie White at home, letting him know what had happened. Charlie was shocked and quickly opened Google Maps on his laptop, finding a route for Archie to drive south, then west, back to the Hickoryvale hospital. Archie jotted down the instructions on a scrap of paper.
The General Pt. 02 by TiltKilt,TiltKilt
The three of them were suffering various burns all over their bodies. Charlie White was waiting for them when they pulled into the parking lot adjacent to the hospital’s ER entry.
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June 2020
Two weeks had passed since the fire.
Archie had once again moved into the Forest Inn, this time with Roxanne beside him in the comfortable queen-sized bed. They’d remained in the hospital for three days, being treated for their injuries. The most serious were second-degree burns to the soles of their feet from running over burning brands and wind-blown material covering their driveway. The heat from the fire in the brush alongside their parking area had caused first and second-degree burns on their exposed skin. They looked like they had terrible sunburns on their faces — now peeling, leaving ugly brown, red, and pink patches that Charlie assured them would eventually disappear. Patches of their hair had burned, resulting in a mottled appearance that would eventually grow out. Archie had a small patch of third-degree burn on the sole of one foot — another on his back — this would take many weeks to heal, although Charlie didn’t think he’d need skin grafts. He’d put them on pure oxygen as soon as they arrived and they remained on it for forty-eight hours as their lungs were evaluated for smoke damage. It turned out not to be serious.
Charlie had insisted they treat Bud that night, right there in the ER along with his owners. The dog was fitted with a make-shift oxygen mask and didn’t fuss about the straps and tape around his muzzle. He seemed to understand this was all for his own good. The next morning Charlie took him to the local vet, carrying Bud into the clinic and laying him in a recovery cage. Bud probably looked worse than he was, with patches of fur burned away and white gauze dressings here and there. His feet were wrapped in gauze boots, to give his feet a chance to recover from the burns to his pads.
There was no fire damage in town thanks to the storm blowing eastward from Hickoryvale. The fire was still out of control, moving east, burning hundreds of properties and structures unfortunate enough to be located in its path. Nessy Carmichael’s old house and property had all been destroyed, although she had signed the paperwork a week earlier, transferring ownership to the new buyers. They’d planned to tear her old house down and build a new one, so the fire had taken care of the demolition for them.
The only good news came the following day when the local fire chief stopped to visit Archie and Roxanne in their private recovery room. While pretty much their entire property had burned, the house had been spared. Archie had sheathed the house and reroofed it with fire-proof materials. The soffits were aluminum and all the walks and decks around the outside of the house were fire-proof or concrete. He’d cleared a one hundred foot area around the house and planted lawn, starving the fire of fuel in that critical area. The fire chief told Archie his aluminum gutters had partially melted on the west side and their curtains had been scorched through the double-pane windows. If they had been open, the fire would have had a path in. They had come very close to losing it.
All their outbuildings including Archie’s woodshop and Roxanne’s clinic were gone. Roxanne was saddest about her bees. They’d counted on her to provide a safe place to build their hives and grow their colonies, and she felt she’d let them down. There were fifty-eight colonies before the fire with approximately fifty-thousand bees in each. She simply couldn’t get her mind around the scope of this loss.
The Chief opened his Ipad and showed Archie and Roxanne some footage taken with the Fire Department’s investigative drone. Their operator had flown it west from their house and found where the fire had started. There was nothing left of ‘The General’ but a smoking pit in the ground where its massive root system had once supported the gigantic tree. There were some charred remains of the sections of the tree that had still been alive. All of the dead parts were burned to ash.
The day they left the hospital, Charlie White drove them in his car, down the country lane to their property, and pulled into the drive. Roxanne had silently cried and Archie felt his own eyes watery. They could see a quarter mile further than usual, with all the forest burned away. For the first time, Archie got a sense of the size of the property, now that he could see much more of it. There were fallen tree trunks, still smoldering with columns of smoke drifting upward from the ash.
There were piles of burned lumber and unidentifiable equipment where his shop and Roxanne’s clinic had been. Their tractor stood a hundred yards away sitting on its rims, the large rubber tires and steering wheel burned away. Roxanne’s Camry was an unidentifiable rust-colored shell, its tires and windows gone, pools of once molten aluminum on the ground around it. The house looked strange, sitting by itself in the middle of this devastation. The metal roof still looked like cedar shakes, and the siding was dirty with smoke and soot from the fire. But it would all be salvageable, once the electric company ran new lines and the power restored.
Charlie turned around and headed back to town, dropping them at the veterinary clinic where they planned to visit Bud. Bud had now saved Archie’s life once and Roxanne’s twice, considering the rattlesnake’s bite might have killed her and their house may have caught fire with the door and window open
From the vet’s, they would catch a ride back to the Forest Inn. The people in town all knew what had happened to Archie and Roxanne — they’d been arriving with boxes of donated goods. There were gardening tools, woodworking hand tools, and lumber, to get them restarted. There were hundreds of greeting cards with promises of whatever else they needed. One of Roxanne’s patients had parked a ten-year-old Ford pick-up truck by their room, saying they could use it as long as they needed it. Archie’s truck had suffered engine, body, and tire damage from their wild ride, the night of the fire.
As soon as she was recovered, Charlie White started making arrangements for Roxanne to return to the little medical clinic in Hickoryvale. The doctor who’d taken over after she’d opened her home clinic, was desperate for some time off, a couple of months if possible, so the timing worked well. A week later, she and Maggie Stockland were back to work as busy as ever.