Smoke permeates my bedroom walls, seeps in through cracks around the windows—I know it’s there the minute I wake up. My family is noted for our good noses, sniffing the air at the faintest whiff of a strange odour—like hunting dogs. It’s a skill that has proven useful at detecting moldy apples forgotten in children’s backpacks or smoldering electrical wires melting before they spark into flame.

This has been a dry, dry summer: no rain for months and a fire ban too that has meant no hotdog roasts on the beach—a favourite local pasttime. Campbell River is now one of the only communities on Vancouver Island where it is possible to have a beach fire and watch the sunset.

But campfires and dry forests don’t mix. Hundreds of acres go up every summer.

With a wet and cool spring and a late start to summer, the fire ban came late too, and the wildfires—some burning out of control—have mainly been sparked by lightning, not humans.

I do a quick tour of the upper floor to make sure it’s nothing inside, then open a window. The sky is slightly hazy and yes, that is smoke.

I go downstairs and step outside, greeting the newspaper carrier as he arrives with the weekly edition. “Can you smell it?” 

“Nope—you must have a good nose.”

Later as I settle in to read my Twitter stream, filtered to catch the news of Campbell River, there it is, a small wildfire about 30 kilometres to the west. It’s burning close enough to forestry roads that crews should be able to get in to contain it.

When I was a child, autumn didn’t mean pumpkin spice and sweaters. Back in those days—the 1960s—autumn meant slash burning. My dad was the fire warden for MacMillan Bloedel, the province’s forestry giant. He’d go into the woods daily to small weather stations perched high on slopes to measure temperature, wind speed and direction, moisture and dew point. A complex formula allowed him to say if the woods needed to shut down—a spark from machinery, particularly chain saws, could easily start a fire—and, when it was safe to begin slash burning.

Imagine a logging practice so wasteful that piles of wood were set alight in the belief that it would improve yield in the years to come. Hillsides blazed, smoke poured down steep valleys into our town where it settled for days, and the sun took on a red glow. 

Now, in more enlightened times, smoke has come to be seen as dangerous to our health and the practice of slash burning has ceased, although in some areas of the province—often with grasslands—Indigenous Nations are reviving the knowledge of fire keepers and looking to fire as a regenerative force. 

Fall, to me, is smoke and blackberry picking, searching for tender juicy plump globes amid thorny branches. I revel in the warmth that seeps into my bones as summer comes to an end, bring in tomatoes—the only success in my vegetable patch this year—and make plans for Thanksgiving which falls in early October in Canada. I look forward to the return of nourishing meals of soups and stews, permission to slow down as the gathering dark brings us inside earlier and earlier, and give thanks for good books and writing projects.

Fall is a time of hunkering down, knowing that winter storms will soon release rafts of water and blustery blasts.

For now, I gather herbs to dry, set out some transplants of winter vegetables in the garden and listen for the flocks of migrating birds overhead.

In nearby rivers, the salmon have come home to spawn, bears patrol the river bank for rotting carcasses, and eagles swoop down to grab tasty morsels, carrying the bones into the forest where they will add nutrients to the soil. In this cycle of life, everything has a purpose and a reason, unlike the wasteful practice of slash burning that scorched the earth for years. 

About the Author:

Janis La Couvée (she/her) is a writer and poet with a love of wild green spaces, dedicated to conservation efforts in Campbell River, British Columbia, Canada—home since time immemorial to the Liǧʷiɫdax̌ʷ people. Words now or soon in Thema, Bulb Culture Co, Harpy Hybrid Review, Rochford Street Review, Litmora, Pure Slush, Counterflow 3 (Wordstorm Society of the Arts), Jake the Anti-Literary Magazine, Splendor of Wings (League of Canadian Poets chapbook), among others. Online at janislacouvee.com; @lacouvee on X, Mastodon and Bluesky, @janislacouveeonline on Instagram and Facebook.

*Featured image by Maksim Samuilionak on Unsplash