Wildfire thoughts

Until last Wednesday, I'd never seen with my own eyes a landscape ravaged by forest fire. It's really quite something, the black ash covering the earth, smoulding spots of heat and smoke, charred matchsticks where an ancient forest had once stood.

Before the 1,100 firefighters subdued this fire, it engulfed 85,000 acres of wilderness, taking 140 homes and cabins with it. Oddly enough, it didn't even make the national news. To the world, it didn't exist. To us, this was "the big one," feared by residents and cabin owners on Minnesota's Gunflint Trail, which runs along the border between Minnesota and Canada. Several years earlier, we experienced what everyone in this area calls The Blowdown, incredible straight-line winds that toppled thousands of trees, most of which still layed on the forest floor like kindling, waiting for a spark to ignite them.

Steve and I saw its first plumes of smoke when were walking our 120-pound Malamute, Tundra, on a county road near our cabin. We knew immediately it was a forest fire, but had no way of knowing that the very spot where we were standing would be incinerated by a 200-foot wall of flame just a few days later.

We hopped in the car and drove to the nearby Gunflint Lodge, a fabulous, historic resort built in 1928 by Justine Kerfoot, a young woman who was determined to make a life for herself and her mother in the wilderness. We stood on the lodge's dock and watched the planes dipping onto the lake's surface, filling up their holding tanks and soaring away to douse the flames with water. Then we headed for home, 120 miles away.

Over the next few days, we held our breath and listened to the fire reports via an Internet stream from the town's tiny local radio station (three employees strong), hoping the blaze wouldn't turn toward our cabin.

I should say a few words about this cabin, here. We searched for five years before finally buying the property on Iron Lake. Steve has been painstakingly building the cabin's interior by hand, making the cabinets himself, pounding every nail in the tongue-and-groove pine siding, gathering stones for the fireplace exterior. He built a magnificent tile shower and even put in a jaccuzzi for me. Quite a labor of love, that.

It's a place of solitude and socialness. I love bringing a gaggle of friends up for a weekend of playing in the water and the woods in the summer or skiing on the pristine trails through the wilderness in winter. But just as much, I love sitting by myself, reading or writing, as Steve putzes around doing little projects. I get some of my best writing done there.

The idea of losing our retreat to fire was devastating to us.

So we held our breath and hoped. For the first few days of the fire, we were safe. It was headed away from our cabin. The whole area had been evacuated, so we were on edge, knowing the winds could change at any moment and turn that fire toward us. On Thursday night, it happened. The fire beat a path through the woods directly to our door. As we were listening to the report that morning, we heard the information officer say: "The fire has consumed the campground on Iron Lake." We both went cold. The campground is a half mile away from our cabin.

Then we got word that all of the cabins on our road were saved by the Herculean efforts of teams of firefighters, who stood there with hoses as the wall of flame approached. Unbelievable.

A few days passed, they lifted the evacuation order and we drove up there in a hurry to see what was what. We had no idea how close we came to losing it all. We had fire on our property, above and below the cabin. Trees were on fire, the flames licking dangerously close to the house itself.

Now, the danger has passed, but the devastation remains.Instead of traveling through a pristine forest to get to our cabin, now we must drive through a charred landscape of cinders and ash. It will serve as a longlasting reminder of how close we came to losing it all and how lucky we are to have been spared.

This weekend we'll sit on our deck and toast our good fortune, never again taking for granted a moment in this lovely place.