My scariest non-Fortean ‘moment’ actually lasted a couple of days.
In 2009 I was living with the family in a very nice rural property north of Melbourne. 2009 had been a very dry year, a full on drought, in fact, and conditions early in February meant that severe bushfires were expected.
Well, the Kilmore East fire started just to the west of our place. You can read about the Black Saturday fires on Wikipedia. They call the Kilmore East fire ‘a bushfire that became the deadliest and most intense firestorm ever recorded in Australia.’
We lived in a property on a ridge with a nice view to the north over a valley. As soon as the fire started, a great plume of roiling black smoke started blowing across the hills opposite.
It was an amazing sight. This great churning black cloud shot through with little orange flames rolling over the landscape. The bit that really hit me was how embers were dropping from the cloud onto the dry forest beneath, and everywhere those embers hit, new fires would explode on the ground. The cloud was carpet bombing the landscape.
We did wonder if the fires might just miss us, but then the wind changed and it was headed our way. Right. Out with the hoses, fill the buckets, spray everything round the house.
The rest of the day was just completely surreal. When the fire front arrived we hid in the house. You do that because, in a nutshell, if you stay outside you die. The radiant heat is unbelievable. A couple of people in our area died because they tried to fight the fires as they arrived. After the fires I discovered a couple of bottles on the ground that had melted into vaguely bottle-shaped flat lumps. You can’t expose yourself to that kind of heat. The conventional wisdom is that it is safer to shelter even in a burning house than to face the fire front.
And after that, the rest of the day was spent running around putting out spot fires near the house. All through the forest we could hear trees crashing down as they burned, there was smoke everywhere, and we were throwing buckets of water at one another to cool down.
I was just emotionally numb. It was pure survival mode. At one point I remember a row of pine trees on the slope behind the house finally caught. They were close enough together that the flames from the first ignited the second, and so on up the line. Voomph, voomph, voomph.
I just watched, feeling nothing. Fifty yards from the house? Too far away to be an immediate threat. Fighting that was not a priority. Spot fires at the base of the walls of the house were a priority.
After nightfall we found an old battery radio – the power was out, of course, because the power poles had all burned down – and we listened to the news. Unbelievable. A whole town wiped off the map. Unknown numbers dead. (the final official count was 173.)
I tried to sleep but I kept waking up in a minor panic with visions of being surrounded by flames. That was almost convenient, in a way, because every time I did wake up I could do a ‘perimeter check’ as I called it, and put out a few more lingering spot fires.
Well, in the end, we survived, the house and dogs survived. We lost the cat, all the fences, and a couple of outhouses. A few days later I wondered why my good work boots were feeling strange to walk on. The soles had basically melted off from walking on hot ash.
That was my scariest day.
It occurs to me that I’ve also had one paradoxically scary Fortean event. I call it paradoxical because it really should not have scared me, but for some reason I reacted with pure panic. Anyway, that’s for another thread, I think.
