It was cold for early March and the brothers sat in folding lawn chairs, warmed by the roaring brush fire.
An inch of snow had fallen across the peninsula overnight — welcome precipitation during a dry winter that followed a dry summer — and the Alberta Clipper that had cleared the overcast was blowing into the region. With temperatures scheduled to fall to single digits, the two chuckled at the idea of global warming. Not in Maine. Not today. Jim pulled his collar close against the chill. A gust moved the open-field stubble and fanned the flames upward.
A clump of leaves, semi-frozen but flammable, rose and floated quietly to the treeline and settled into the crook of an ancient fir whose gnarled arms were laden with balls of pitch-infused Witch’s Broom.
Thirty minutes later, it was the deer that let Frank Simmons know something was amiss. Sure, he’d smelled wood smoke when he’d stepped outside with his morning coffee, but it was March, and it was cold. Eleven — he thought he counted them all but the herd was moving so fast it was hard to be sure — had burst out of the woods and dashed across the open field that led to the cove. They skirted the water and continued south. Then he heard it. A deep growl punctuated by pops and not-too-distant explosions. His generator kicked in. And, at the far end of the meadow, a 30-foot billow of flame surged over the rock wall.
“Kate, get the kids, we need to move!” he called.
Soon, the state route that delivered tourists’ happy faces in the summer was choked with the vehicles of desperate year-rounders fleeing south. The relentless north wind played tag with the blaze and abundant deadwood, fanning the heat to Bessemer-furnace intensity while it pushed a dense wall of orange smoke ahead.
The volunteer firefighting department was cut off from one of their stations and a third of their personnel. It didn’t matter. The wildfire was moving so quickly and across such a broad front that the remaining fifteen men and women were powerless. The fire chief placed his crew in strategic intersections and gave them strict orders to not wait until they could feel the heat. “By that time, it’ll be too late.” He contacted the fisherman’s co-op and begged Jennie McPartland to call out to any available fishermen and ask them to rendezvous at McColl’s Lobster Pound, where he hoped there was space for the two or three hundred cars that might arrive.
The media called it “The Maine Miracle” and “The Dunkirk Effect.”
Neighbors had called neighbors and the elderly had been roused to action. Lobstermen and day sailors had created an armada of anything seaworthy and pulled to safety the hundreds that gathered on private and public floats at the southern tip of the peninsula. The open space of the par-three golf course had combined with Taggart’s Berry Farm to give momentary pause to the advance of the fire-front. Because of the chief’s quick action and McPartland’s skill in handling the co-op’s radio, only seven lives were lost. The Coast Guard rescued and treated a number of people for hypothermia; they’d wrenched foam from stored summer float structures and had clung to the jagged blue blocks. The fire continued to rage for two days. The peninsula, the place that Frank Simmons’s clan had called home for eight generations, was then a charred, barren husk.
Maine’s coast is not immune to the sort of devastation that has visited Lahaina in Maui County, Hawaii. We have only to look to Acadia in 1947. Now is the time for us to assess our fire-readiness: should our woodlands be thinned of deadwood? Do we have an open barrier between our structures and trees? Do we have a plan of escape? Will we be ready — not if, but when the wildfire comes?
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