Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [76]
Falls Fire: 3,738 acres. Started July 12. Fire within ½ mile of South Entrance Road.
Fan Fire: 22,020 acres. Started June 25. Islands of unburned vegetation continue burning within perimeter. 70% contained by a fire line.
Hellroaring Fire: 33,000 acres. Started August 15. Outside the park, burning to the northeast.
Lava Fire: Started July 5. Contained but began smoking after high winds on August 21. A few fire fighters have gone in to cool it off.
Mink Creek Fire: 21,036 acres in Yellowstone. Started July 11 outside the park in Teton Wilderness. Burning to the northeast into the Shoshone National Forest.
North Fork Fire: 91,700 acres. Started July 22 by human. Now has two fronts: one north of Norris, the other along Canyon-Norris Road. Norris and Madison campgrounds closed and in use as fire camps.
Red-Shoshone Fire: 58,744 acres. Red Fire started July 1. Shoshone Fire started June 23. Joined August 10. High winds caused flare-ups around Grant Village and West Thumb that led to evacuation of Grant Village on August 21.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
September 3
What’s your crystal ball say now?” Clare asked Garrett through a mouthful of Fig Newton. On her first day off in two weeks, she’d stopped by Fire Command to look at the full-sized quadrangle maps used for daily press conferences. Since Black Saturday, over two hundred thousand acres had burned inside Yellowstone.
Garrett set down his coffee and slid a hip onto a metal desk. “The moisture content measured in large logs continued to drop through the month of August, now hovering in the seven-percent range. Grasses and small twigs are at two percent. You just look at this fuel wrong and it blows up in your face.”
The description made Clare think of Devon, whose eighteenth birthday was exactly one month away. It had been just that amount of time since the day she’d listened to the fire behavior experts’ obsolete predictions. Although trying to second-guess her daughter by long distance was as futile an effort, she wondered aloud, “Seriously, Garrett. It’s September now. When do you think this will break?”
He shrugged with the weariness of battle fatigue and looked out the south windows toward the nearest advance of the North Fork toward town. “Your nightmare is as good as mine.”
She hadn’t told him about Frank or her bad dreams. She didn’t plan to.
As she turned to leave, thinking of visiting the Smokejumpers, Garrett detained her. Rummaging on his desk, he produced a pink slip. “While you were out screwing off . . .” He chuckled.
The message was from last night. Jay had called.
She stared at it like it came from another planet. What could her ex want, unless something had happened to Devon? With a fluttery feeling in her chest, Clare dove for the nearest phone.
Jay answered the home number and she heard a football game in the background. No doubt, he was sitting in his expensive leather recliner in the game room with the surround sound theater.
Clare bit her lip. She’d never been into ostentation, it just seemed that the pleasure cocoon he’d built for him and Elyssa was one more symbol of rejection.
In response to Jay’s generic hello, she clipped, “What’s happened?”
Jay chuckled. “You worried about me?”
Clare’s nails curled into her palm. “I am worried about my daughter,” she enunciated. “I know you’d only call about her.”
“Our daughter.” Jay wasn’t laughing anymore. “I guess you’re feeling guilty by now, knowing you shouldn’t be out there.”
“What do you mean I shouldn’t be out here?” Her voice rose and she berated herself for not calling from someplace private. The woman dispatcher at the next desk had perked up and was staring through thick glasses.
“I can’t do a thing with Devon,” Jay whined, quite a trick for such a big guy. “She keeps saying she’s nearly eighteen, but she needs supervision. Elyssa thinks she’s seeing some guy on the sly, somebody too old for her.”
Devon’s talk of moving out without