What the Fire Burns: British Columbia, Canada

By Koreen Reece, Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth

In the burned house I am eating breakfast.

You understand: there is no house, there is no breakfast,

yet here I am.

-Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House

When I flew back to my hometown in British Columbia, Canada this summer, it was on fire.

A spot fire that had started in the dense, dry forests just a few kilometres from West Kelowna, a growing town in the heart of the Okanagan Valley, had quickly burned out of control. Strong winds blew in that afternoon, whipping up a firestorm that sent acrid smoke as high as 30,000 feet and entirely uprooted trees. The size of the fire exploded from 30 hectares to over 300 hectares overnight. Unthinkably, the wind seems to have carried embers clear across Okanagan Lake – a body of water over three kilometres wide at that point – not once, but up to six times, sparking off wildfires at the now densely-populated northern edges of the city of Kelowna. A state of emergency was declared, and over 30,000 people were put on evacuation order on both sides of the lake. The airport was closed and a travel ban issued for most of the southern interior of the province (Gibson 2023). I flew in, over darkened subdivisions laced with flickering firelight, roughly a week later.

The last time we had seen such a devastating fire in the Okanagan was twenty years prior, in 2003. I remembered standing in the park near my parents’ house, watching the forested peaks that had marked the horizons of my childhood burn. At night the sky was red with fire, which leaped from ridge to ridge with alarming speed – heading for town like it had eyes, some people said. Trees would explode suddenly into flame, and we learned the word ‘candling’. Then houses would explode suddenly into flame. There was no word for that. The fire licked through windows built for a view of the lake like the empty eye-sockets of so many skulls. Over 33,000 people were evacuated. Hundreds lost their homes – while their neighbours’ homes were left fully intact, or their woodsheds, or the plastic tent they’d pitched in the backyard. The destruction was arbitrary, whimsical. I flew out over the conflagration a week or so after the fires started.  

Incredibly, both fires had begun within a day of each other: Okanagan Mountain Park started to burn on August 16th, 2003, and McDougall Creek on August 15th, 2023. I flew out in the middle of the first fire on my way to Botswana, southern Africa, which would preoccupy me for much of the next twenty years: first as a development worker, later as an anthropologist of kinship, crisis, and humanitarian intervention (see Reece 2022). I flew home in the middle of the second fire on semester break from Germany, with a new project looking at the ways kinship has settled and unsettled Canada as a settler colonial nation. Wildfire has framed not only my comings and goings, the cycles of my personal and professional life, my relations to family, the land, and home – but how I see the entanglements of local and global histories, how I understand and undertake change, my understandings of the world and my place in it. As our fires get wilder, they not only enable but demand a rethinking of our histories, a reimagining of our futures, and a reassessment of our relations to one another and the ecosystems we inhabit.

When I first arrive home, it is too smoky to leave the house. I go for a walk along the lake, wearing a mask I had bought for pandemic purposes; after half an hour I am struggling to breathe and my eyes sting, so I turn back. I sleep deeply, but in a way that feels unnatural, like I’ve been drugged. There is a persistent sort of tension, a generalized anxiety; everyone is a little on edge. I think of the deer and bear that have been appearing in local subdivisions in greater numbers than usual and wonder what it must be like to smell the danger, but not know where it is coming from, or where it might be going. Only later do I realise I, too, know that feeling; we all do, here. I find an uncanny comfort in being present in that danger, that not-knowing, rather than experiencing it from the other side of the world. When home is on fire, it calls me to it, though there is nothing I can do but watch, and wait.

The Okanagan has always been a fire ecosystem. The hills here are thick with lodgepole and jackpine, which need fire to open their dense cones, and to provide the conditions for their germination. Ponderosa pine, which grow at their northernmost point here, have thick, puzzled bark to resist fire, and need frequent fires to open their cones. Fire is how they survive. In turn, they stabilize the land for the eventual return of fir and spruce. The Syilx First Nation, like others in the province, used fires to manage the forests for thousands of years. But in the early 1900s, the new province of British Columbia adopted a policy of suppressing and controlling all fires as a potential risk to logging revenues – a policy tied up, not incidentally, with marginalizing First Nation access to and rights over land, and more insidious projects of assimilation like Residential Schools (Copes-Gerbitz et al, 2022). Fire, once managed as a tool, began to be managed as a threat – even deployed as a weapon. And with ever more fuel, the Okanagan burned wilder, and wilder.

The story of fire, here, is also my family’s history on the land. I write this piece from a cabin that was once a mess hall in a logging camp my grandfather worked at; he dragged it down out of the hills when they were finished with it. Its floors show the markings of lumberjacks’ hobnailed boots. It sits on land, part farm and part bush, that my brother and I inherited from that grandfather, via our mother and aunt – land acquired partly from his father, one of the first local settlers, and partly from his service in World War II. His brother was a fire warden; indeed, the Okanagan Mountain Park fire of 2003 started with a lightning strike in a spot that would have been directly in the sightline of my great-uncle’s watchtower. His watch had helped ensure a proper fire had not burned through that forest in decades. Our land grows grapes for wine, now, and my brother raises his family on it; I have cleared an access to a place where I hope to build. It’s land we have shaped our belonging around, for generations. It sits on the edge of hundreds of square kilometres of forest that has not burned in years – like the forests behind West Kelowna, and on Okanagan Mountain. It’s a matter of time. What does it mean to build a house, or a life, in a forest that may – will – burn to ash?

We are settlers, after all, though we are slow to come to terms with that. Our belonging here has always been tenuous, and we work at it constantly, while seldom speaking or even thinking of it explicitly. We work on our stories and histories, on our homes and relations, but above all we have worked on the land: as farmers, as foresters. The land, this land to which we tether our sense of belonging, was stolen; it does not belong to us. It is all we have, but it refuses our ownership. It remakes itself violently under our very feet, as it always has, and demands we remake ourselves, too, over and over. It confronts us with the truths and failures of our history; it threatens us with our collective futures. When it burns, I feel the heat and death in my bones; like a bear or deer, I want to run. But it calls us to burn with it, to start again, to grow anew.

Even as I write, though, I find my contemplations and commitments unsettled. A new fire erupts, at the tail end of the season – this time only eight kilometres from where I sit, writing in a tinderbox. It grows from 10 to 450 hectares in a day and a half. The winds turn it eastwards, towards us; the planes and helicopters fly on endless circuits all day, and well into the night. We are put on evacuation alert: we consider what is necessary, what is valuable, what can be left behind. We pack and are ready to leave at a moment’s notice, not knowing if, or when, we may have to flee. We attempt to go about our day-to-day business, meanwhile: the kids go to school, we fetch groceries, we drink tea. We are standing in the lives we have built, wondering whether we will go on living them, or will have to leave them; not knowing the answer, but knowing the question will be asked again and again. 

References

Copes-Gerbitz, K., S.M. Hagerman and L.D. Daniels. 2022. Transforming Fire Governance in British Columbia, Canada: An Emerging Vision for Co-Existing with Fire. Regional Environmental Change 22(48): 1-15. 

Gibson, R. 2023. Anatomy of a Wildfire: Timeline of McDougall Creek wildfire as it grew from spot fire to monster. Accessed online 18th September 2023 at https://www.castanet.net/news/West-Kelowna/444270/Timeline-of-McDougall-Creek-wildfire-as-it-grew-from-spot-fire-to-monster.

Reece, K.M. 2022. Pandemic Kinship: Families, Intervention, and Social Change in Botswana’s Time of AIDS. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.