Page 75 of Stuck With the Smokejumper

It takes twenty minutes to get an answer. It's worse than either of us expected.

The fire's grown substantially since Ivy's text. Weather turned against the suppression effort. More resources were pulled in. And Timber Creek is now directly threatened.

Residents are being evacuated.

I hear the word and something in me goes cold and very still.

“Evacuated doesn't mean Ivy's out,” I say, working through it out loud. “She's Blackpine crew. She could still be working somewhere in that whole mess.”

Reid doesn't answer. He's reached the same conclusion. Knowing residents are safely leaving town tells us nothing about where Ivy is.

We learn more, piece by piece. Communications around Timber Creek have degraded badly. Power's out in parts of the district. Cell infrastructure out there was never robust to begin with, and now it's overloaded on top of already being limited, everyone trying to reach everyone else at once while evacuation traffic and fire operations complicate everything further. Official channels are still functioning. Incident command knows where its resources are.

I am not incident command. I don't know where Ivy is.

Reid tries Russ again. Straight to nothing.

“He's supervising a wildfire threatening his own district,” I say, before Reid can say it himself. “He's not answering personal calls right now.”

“I know that.”

“I know you know.”

He doesn't respond, just stares at his phone like willpower alone might make it ring. I watch something in him I don't think I've ever seen before. Reid's the most even-keeled person I know when it comes to fire. He trusts training. He trusts the system. He's spent years watching me and everyone else on our crew disappear into this kind of situation without falling apart about it.

This is different. This is Ivy.

“She's with Russ,” he says, after a minute, like he's reciting something. “She knows what she's doing.”

“She does.”

“If they need to move her, they'll move her.”

“They will.”

He's not really talking to me. I understand this halfway through, watching him list the facts like saying them out loud might make them feel more certain than they are. I let him get through it, because I'm doing the same thing in my own head. But it’s not helping much.

Every instinct I have says go. There's a wildfire threatening the town where Ivy is, and I fight wildfires for a living. Every trained reflex in my body wants to move toward her instead of staying here.

I can't. We're assigned to an active incident. People here are relying on us. Even if somebody released us this second, we're hours from Timber Creek by any road that exists, with no aircraft available for a personal errand and no operational reason for anyone to send us there instead of where we are.

“Any chance they send us that way?” Reid asks, mirroring my own thoughts.

It's a fair question. If Timber Creek's escalating and requesting more resources, could our unit get reassigned there?

We ask.

Not right now, comes the answer. Our current incident still needs the personnel it has. If resource orders shift, we'll be told.

Stay here. Do the job.

I've spent my whole career on the other side of this feeling. I've been the one who disappears into terrain without service for days at a time, trusting that the people waiting back home understand there are a dozen simple, rational reasons for silence. I never fully understood what that truly costs someone until right now, standing here with a silent phone and nothing to do but wait.

When you're working a fire, you have a tool. A task. A crew. A radio. Something to point yourself at. Waiting gives you none of that. Just the space to imagine every possible version of what might be happening, none of which you can confirm or rule out.

Ivy's done this with Reid for years. Every fire season, every assignment, every stretch of silence that could mean nothing or could mean something. She's trusted trained people she couldn't see. She's told herself no news wasn't bad news, over and over, and kept working anyway, kept living her life. The alternative was letting the fear consume every hour she wasn't hearing from him.

There's something cruel about the symmetry. Ivy worried about me leaving for a fire. Now I'm standing at one fire, surrounded by everything I'm trained to use against this kind of threat, and none of it does a single thing to help her.