DRY LIGHTNING
NEVADA COUNTY · SIERRA FOOTHILLS
THE PARLOR ON BROAD STREET
She came up the road from Sacramento in the spring of 1854, a small dark-eyed Frenchwoman of perhaps twenty-five years, and within the week the miners of Nevada City understood that something new had arrived among them. Eleanor Dumont — Madame Dumont, she insisted, and got it — took rooms on Broad Street and opened a parlor for the playing of vingt-et-un, dealing the cards herself.
The town she had chosen sat at the very gates of the Sierra, a boomtown of plank and canvas stacked up the ravines where Deer Creek came down, loud with commerce and lit half the night. And commerce meant all of it: the assay offices and the dry-goods stores, the saloons, and along the lower streets the cribs and fandango houses where the women of the line plied the oldest trade in the diggings — women the town depended upon and pretended not to see, and whom the histories written for schoolchildren would go on not seeing for a century after. That was part of what made Dumont's parlor remarkable: she sold nothing but the cards and her company, and made the distinction stick. It stood in the last of the foothill country — oak and gray pine and the red-limbed manzanita — but ride five miles east up out of town and the mountains began in earnest: the air turning sharp with conifer, sugar pines standing over the ridgelines like masts, and below them the canyons where the Yuba ran cold out of the high country, already famous, already half torn apart for its gold. Nevada City was the threshold between the two worlds, the last civilized table before the big timber, and Madame Dumont had set up her parlor squarely upon it.
What she offered was not merely a game; the camps had games enough. What she offered was refinement, a thing so scarce in the diggings that men would pay for the mere proximity of it, and pay they did. There was to be no brawling at her tables, no profanity beyond what a hard-rock miner could not help; she poured champagne for winners and losers alike, and such was her graciousness in taking a man's dust that he would climb back down to the creek next morning almost cheerful about the losing of it, and resolve to dig up more so he might lose that too.
One imagines a summer evening there, the moon standing high over the gaslit crook of Broad Street, the resinous smell of mountain misery drifting down off the ridges on the cooling air, and through it the sounds of the town at its pleasures — a shout of glee from her doorway when some miner turned a natural, the click of chips, and behind it all the woman herself, unhurried, dealing on. And away to the west-southwest, out over the great hot valley below the gold-mining towns of the foothills, heat lightning stood and flickered along the horizon, silent at that distance, as if to remind them that gold was not the only thing that came up shining out of the lowlands on a summer night.
THE KILL BED
On our station there was no clear line between the gods and fire. By the summer of 1991 that same lightning carried a different meaning, and it was pondered not by miners but by the firefighters of the CDF station at Nevada City — the best station in the best unit of the whole damn state. It was a night Madame Dumont herself would have recognized across the gulf of years — hot, the air dead still, crickets sawing away off in the woods — though instead of a parlor full of gamblers it was a barracks full of men and women in their various states of dreaming and snoring. I was on a bed at the far west end of an open hall of dreamers, under old military-issue wool blankets, or rather over them, for the heat had made them useless except as mattress padding. Mine was the first bed inside the door — the kill bed, we called it, on the theory that if anyone came through on a rampage I would be the first to go, a distinction I had not sought and did not prize. The name was not entirely a joke, either. There was a story that made the rounds in those years — true or not, nobody could ever say — that a Vietnam vet had once walked into the Columbia Hill station — the one perched on the ridge north of Nevada City, east of the town of North San Juan and of Ananda, the back-to-the-earth community a disciple of Yogananda had planted on that same ridge in the sixties, so that the station kept watch over gold country and god country alike — walked in, that is, in the middle of the night, sat himself down in a chair in the dayroom, and simply started watching television, and that the crew had woken to find him there, a stranger sitting calm in the blue light as if he had every right. Nothing had happened. That was somehow the unsettling part — that nothing had happened — and the story lived on in every open-door barracks in the unit, and it was the reason the first bed inside the door had a name.
That night I came awake for no reason I could name. I lay there half asleep and half not, the way a shark is said to cruise the Pacific with one side of its brain still dreaming, when I noticed it: a flash of light beyond the doorway, where the door stood open to a box fan for ventilation. Then another.
My spider senses rose a notch. Lightning, I thought to myself — none had been called for, and why at midnight, of all hours? Over my head hung the station speaker, turned down low out of mercy for the sleepers but not so low that I couldn't follow everything the command center was dispatching to the other stations — including, just then, CALSTAR 3, the medflight helicopter, with its home perch down the slope at Auburn headquarters. As I began to drop back off I heard them sent for something or other down on the flats, and I was nearly under again when their radio traffic snagged my ear and held it. It was the pilot's narration back to the ECC, delivered in that flat aviator's calm that makes everything sound routine and therefore made this sound interesting:
WHEN THE SKY WORKS NIGHTS
The ordinary rule is simple enough: thunderstorms in the Sierra foothills are creatures of the afternoon. The valley heats, the air rises up the slope of the mountains, the clouds tower and burst and are spent by supper, and by midnight the valley air has gone still and stable — warm as ever, for a Central Valley summer midnight gives back very little of the day — and the sky has no business making fire.
A nocturnal thunderstorm defies all of that, and the defiance has a mechanism. It does not feed on the heated ground at all. It feeds aloft — on moisture and instability riding in at the mid-levels of the atmosphere, wheeling up out of the south around a weak low spinning off the California coast, passing over the warm stable air of the Central Valley the way a man might walk across the sleepers in a barracks without waking them. It needs no mountain to set it off, either — the same wave that carries the moisture in carries its own lift, the upper air diverging and drawing the moist layer upward from above, so that storms can light off in the dark over the flat valley floor itself, with the rising ground of the foothills lending a hand where the flow runs up against it — over country nobody is watching, with no afternoon crowd of cumulus to announce them. It is a rare thing, and among firefighters an unwelcome one, because dry summer air below the storm means the rain often evaporates before it reaches the ground, and what reaches the ground instead is lightning — striking timber that has been curing all summer, at an hour when every lookout tower is empty and every set of eyes in the unit is closed.
Northern California knows this species of storm well — the sieges of August 1987 and June 2008 were built of exactly this weather, thousands of dry strikes in the dark hours. The case study behind this diagram, a night of thunderstorm redevelopment over the northern Sacramento Valley and the mountains above Oroville, lives in the NWS Western Region technical attachment.
FIVE SECONDS TO THE MILE
As I drifted in and out, the lightning came closer, and I began counting the seconds between light and sound, five to the mile, watching the miles come down. Somewhere in the counting I acquired the uneasy certainty that my sleep was over in all but fact — that the quick call was coming. The quick call was a bell, or something in the family of a bell; it is hard to describe to anyone raised on electronic tones, but it went off in your chest as much as your ears, and it was designed by someone who understood that a sleeping firefighter is a deep-rooted thing that must be pulled up all at once.
I must have dozed, because at 0300 it did indeed ignite. I was closest to the lights on my end of the barracks, and it was habit by then — my hand found the switch before my mind found the room. Then the speaker, wide awake now and speaking to us alone:
This was long before the high-tech AI cameras that now stand watch on the hilltops; in 1991 a fire at three in the morning got reported the way fires had been reported since Dumont's day, which is to say somebody was awake when they shouldn't have been, saw a glow on a ridge where no glow belonged, and cranked a telephone.
CLOSING SHOP
Around one in the morning Madame Dumont would have been in high spirits, the night now fully hers. By that hour her gamblers had sorted themselves — the ones who stayed, and the ones who drifted back to camps down along Deer Creek, or faced the long night ride out to the Yuba. By three, in her century, she would have been closing shop — the last table cleared, a final sip of sarsaparilla, then sleep until well past midday. Her calendar for the afternoon, one imagines, was the ordinary commerce of a boomtown: the local leather-crafter at noon, to mend the felted table on which she practiced her particular magic; then a call on a miner named Joe, who had just lost his wife-to-be on Donner Pass — a wheel gone sideways, a tumble down a slope, a death so common in those times it barely made the papers, which is not the same as saying it barely made a mark. The camps were full of men like Joe, and part of what a woman like Dumont sold, though it appeared on no ledger, was the willingness to sit with them.
CODE 3, SILENT
We rolled out of the station still half in dream mode, and the night finished the job of waking us. We rode a Model 1, I believe, the kind built to carry its crew seated behind the cab rather than clinging to a step. Serge rode in back with me — a fellow slinger of water and hose, and something more than that to me: he was the one who had carried me through my rookie season the summer before, not by any speech or ceremony but by the simple daily fact of standing next to me while I found my feet, treating me as though I already knew what I was doing until, one day, I did. There are men and women who teach you the job and those who give you the nerve for it, and Serge had done both without ever appearing to do either.
The cool air poured in thick to our noses in the open air, rich with ions; you could smell the storm the way you can smell rain on asphalt before rain falls. Serge was no more talkative than I was, both of us thinking on what kind of fire this was. The air itself felt charged, primed, spring-loaded — had Mr. Tesla been riding with us he would have been talking shop, delighted, taking notes on the potential difference between heaven and the Sierra foothills.
Engine 2375 took the highway west and dropped down toward Penn Valley — Captain Mike Carr at the wheel, Steve Hawks up front as nozzleman, Serge working the brass, and me as the hose humper. The night had come fully alive by then, a symphony of lightning and virga: the strikes standing white along the ridgelines, and beneath them the veils of rain that fell partway to earth and gave up, evaporating in the dry air before they ever touched the ground — which is the whole magic of a night like that one, a storm giving the entire performance of rain without ever letting a drop of it land, sky enough to start a handful of fires and not water enough to wet a single one, and beautiful past any telling of it to a man who was not there. I knew even then, riding down into it, that this was one of the magical moments a person is handed a few times in a life and carries the rest of it. The highways lay in their quiet mode, a car here, a motorcycle there, ordinary people going ordinary places. We ran Code 3 against all that stillness — but silent, no siren, only the old red spinning light turning on the cab, throwing its slow wax-red sweep across the roadcuts and the manzanita, the way they lit an emergency in the days before strobes.
LEFT FLANK
We pulled off Mooney Flat Road toward the glow — a slow-moving fire feeding on grass mostly, with brush mixed in where the ground allowed it, the kind of fire that looks almost gentle until you remember what it is doing and how fast the wind can change its mind. The Smartsville engine had beaten us there; Glen Ford as their captain, I believe, though the years have worn at that particular certainty and I will not swear to it. Then came the familiar gasp and hiss of the air brakes, and Hawks swung back to Serge and me with the orders: hose lay, left flank. And on those three words we went to work.
There is a thing that happens to a trained crew in that moment which is hard to explain to anyone who has not felt it. You do not decide to do the work; the work simply begins to come out of you, the way the drive home from the grocery store happens without your quite remembering the turns — the body knowing the route so well the mind is freed to be elsewhere, or nowhere. Hawks took the nozzle out front. Serge worked in close behind him, minding the brass and the cotton, keeping the line married and the water true. I came last with two hundred feet of inch-and-a-half stacked on my back in a hose pack, and the three of us moved down the left flank as a single jointed animal, Smartsville's crew working the right, the fire pinched slowly between us. It was only work, but it moved the way grace is said to move, and like grace it had taken many a training drill to come by easily.
And over the whole of it — the chess game of hose and water and flame, advance and pinch and mop — the lightning went on cracking directly above our heads, so close the handhelds on our chests protested in bursts of static, as if the storm resented being narrated. The whole scene was charged, the air and the firefighters and the sky all running at the same high pitch. And with every flash of lightning mixed with the orange glow of the fire I could see the silhouettes of my fellow yellow-Nomexed beings, all of us together in a wormhole of time that seemed to reach its event horizon and hold there, where time stood still. At that moment I was no longer in reality as it is ordinarily issued but in a flow state of effortless motion — nature had taken over the autopilot, and the hands did the work while whatever usually supervises them stood aside and watched. Mother Nature was in that state too, above us, playing the same game we were and playing it for higher stakes, and neither side, that night, willing to give ground.
TIED IN
We met the Smartsville team at the head of the fire, in a little saddle where the two flanks came together and there was nothing left burning between us. Hawks keyed his radio back to Captain Carr, who had been orchestrating the pump all the while, holding it steady around seventy-five pounds:
And that was that. The whole play of the thing — the ride, the lay, the pinch — came to rest in four words.
I sat down where I stood and watched the sky go on with its arc-light show overhead, and I did the only arithmetic left worth doing at that hour, which was to wonder how many more of these we would be chasing come the afternoon. There had been little rain out of all that spectacle — that was the strange mercy and the strange menace of it both — but the next day's tally would come in lighter than we feared. Cloud-to-cloud had won the count, it seemed; the storm had spent most of its violence talking to itself, high up, and let the ground alone.
CALM NOISE
As Madame Dumont blew out her lantern and closed her weary eyes, she took subtle notice of Deer Creek running down through the town and on past it into the dark. It was a summer creek by then, low and quiet, the kind of water where a trout hangs in whatever cool pool it can find and waits for the evening to bring it something to eat. What the creek sounded like in her day is a thing I can only guess at — this was near a century before Scotts Flat threw its dam across the upper canyon and began parceling the water out, and there was no telling from where I stand how much of it still ran past Broad Street on an August night in 1854, or whether it had thinned to a thread over the stones. But some of it ran; enough to be heard. That was her “calm noise,” as she might have called it, the sound she let herself down into sleep on. She fell asleep alone as the moon rose over the Sierras. The creek did not care either way. It went on down the canyon in the dark, low and patient, the same water the miners had torn the hills apart to reach, running now for no one.
COMMITTED TO THE NEW DAY
We threw a little dirt and water on the smoking edges, and then the Smartsville crew told us we could return to quarters — they would finish the mop-up. It was a small fire, an acre, maybe a bit more, the kind that never makes a name for itself and is forgotten by everyone but the crew who caught it. We started the engine back up the hill toward Nevada City, and as we climbed, the whole horizon ahead of us filled with light as the long overture to a summer dawn came on. I could see the storms in silhouette now, black shapes flickering from within, already breaking up and drifting off to the northeast, away over North San Juan and beyond, taking their fire and their noise to some other set of ridges and some other crew's night.
Serge and I both craved some morning chow, but we were hours yet from the morning report, and there was no earning it early. The engine had to be made whole again — hose replaced, tank topped, fuel filled, everything set right and ready for the next bell, whenever it chose to ring. Sleep, even the hour of it we might have stolen, was out of the question now. We were committed to the new day, the two of us, and to whatever it decided to bring — the same way a woman a hundred and thirty-seven years gone had been committed to hers, closing her shop as we were opening ours, the wheel of the foothills turning night into work and work into morning, over and over, gold or fire, and the creek running down through all of it just the same.
WAITING FOR THE STRIKE
At the end of it all, I would remember that night of light and fire. I do not know if my fellow travelers remember it the way I do — how for a few hours we were bound to the earth beneath us and to the sky above it, and how the lightning stitched the two together without a drop of rain to soften the seam.
I feel loneliness now, in my older years. Not only for those I loved on that hillside, but for the moments themselves — the magic such a night carried and then took with it when it went. Like looking into Jessie's eyes for the first time after we first kissed. Like watching my children being born. Those moments do not leave you all at once. They fade the way thunder fades, rolling farther and farther down the canyon until you cannot say for certain whether you still hear it or only remember hearing it.
But on summer evenings when the air goes dry and the clouds build high and hollow over the ridges, I go out and watch for the first flicker on the horizon, and I wait for the strike.