The Narrow Road to the Deep North(123)

The lunch was a more pleasant affair than Dorrigo had expected; at least, it was a diversion for his mind from everything else that was crowding into it. But just as they had got to the sherry and cigars there came word that the fire situation had considerably worsened, and that towns to the immediate south, among them Fern Tree, were now threatened by a firestorm.

Dorrigo Evans found a hotel phone and tried calling Ella’s sister’s number, but the connection was down, and so too, said the operator, were almost all the lines to homes on the mountain. Dorrigo Evans turned to Freddy Seymour—who had just lit up and whose sunken coral-pink cheeks wobbled as he chuffed the smoke in with tiny, quick breaths—and asked if he might borrow his car keys.

I love you, Evans, said the old surgeon, exhaling his own smoke plume. Like a son. And, like a son, you shall return my car not as it was, and like a father I shall forgive.

Fern Tree was twenty minutes’ drive from the city. The winds by now were ferocious, the heat a gritty oppression. When he got into the Ford Mercury, he was startled to see his face in the rear-view mirror covered in smuts of the ash that was swirling outside in thick eddies, like black snow.

The Ford Mercury drove like a bucket with only a vague relationship to the road, but its V8 had a reassuring power. The mountain, copyrightly a majestic presence, was invisible, lost in a pall of smoke so thick that within minutes Dorrigo’s visibility was down to a few yards and he had his headlights on. Occasionally another car would appear out of the gloom, seeking to escape into the city with people inside looking as he had seen Syrian villagers once look as they sought to escape the war. Some of the cars were scorched; one, improbably, had no windscreen; another’s paintwork was raised in big, blackened blisters. He passed from the outer suburbs of Hobart into a thick, tall forest through which the road now cut a deep and sinuous trench.

Coming round a corner, he came upon a police roadblock stopping any car from going further. A solitary policeman put his head into the 1948 Ford Mercury and told Dorrigo he had to turn back.

It’s a death zone up there, mate, he said, jerking a thumb behind him in the direction of Fern Tree.

Dorrigo described Ella and his children and asked if they had passed through the roadblock. The young policeman, who said he had been there for two hours, hadn’t seen anyone like that. Perhaps they had fled earlier.

Dorrigo Evans calculated that there was perhaps an hour and a half from the time of his phone call when Ella and the children might have fled. But it was unlikely she would have left when the town was unthreatened, and, besides, she had no car. Dorrigo Evans hoped they had escaped, but reasoned that he had to act in the expectation that they hadn’t.

The fire’s coming up from the Huon, the policeman went on, and across from the east. I’m hearing crazy stories of it spot-lighting from embers in front of the main fire, up to twenty miles away. As he spoke, glowing embers fell onto the bonnet, as if in proof of the policeman’s argument.

You’d be crazy to go up there, he said finally.

My family is up there, Dorrigo Evans said, dropping the column shift down into first. I’d be crazy if I didn’t.

And with that he politely asked the policeman to step away. When the policeman refused, he dropped the clutch, smashed through the roadblock and mumbled the first of several apologies to Freddy Seymour.

Within half a mile flames surrounded him, but it did not seem ferocious enough to be the main fire front, though what a main fire front looked like Dorrigo Evans had no idea. He also had no idea where Ella’s sister lived, having never visited her before, and while he had an address, no street signs were visible. Nor, hardly, was the road which had become a confusion of burning branches, the occasional burning abandoned car, raining embers and thick smoke. He drove at little more than walking pace along the same road he had travelled near twenty years before in a Cascade brewery truck. Where he had once tried to divine love in a snowstorm, he was now desperately searching for his family in dense smoke, scanning driveways, road verges, shelters, beeping his horn constantly. But there was no one. He presumed everyone was gone or dead. There was no longer sky, only an occasional glimpse of wildly billowing blue-black clouds backlit by a hellish red light. He kept driving, concentrating on his search, keeping his ear close to the window and the window just enough down that he might hear someone, somebody, anything.

And then he thought he heard somebody, but with all the other noise he dismissed it as the whistling the vaporising sap was making as the trees exploded. Then the noise came again, fainter, but different. He stopped the car and got out.