People watch from downtown Kelowna, B.C., as the McDougall Creek wildfire burns on the evening of Aug. 17, 2023. The blaze, which measured at 1,100 hectares has resulted in thousands of evacuation alerts.Aaron Hemens/The Globe and Mail
Alix Hawley’s most recent novel is My Name is a Knife.
When I got home from work last Thursday, the neighbours were having a party. People stood on their deck, chatting and drinking. The day had been around 35 degrees again, and the evening air still had that trapped, oven-like August heat.
My kids asked what was for dinner. I poked through the fridge. Washing overripe tomatoes at the sink, I glanced back at the neighbours’ house. The partygoers were all leaning over the railings now, looking down Okanagan Lake. Across the water and about 10 kilometres south, a line of fire was creeping up the mountain, north of the bridge to West Kelowna. Wind ruffled the lake surface, and a field of smoke bloomed above. The guests watched, still chatting, silhouetted as if against a movie screen.
We’re used to fires now. We’d heard one was burning on the west side, but even now that we could see it, it seemed far enough away, with a lake between us. I made nachos. My son set up a time-lapse video of the fire while my daughter dug a Popsicle out of the freezer. She made us watch Scream. I made her fast-forward past the scariest parts. Eventually we went to bed.
Close to 11 p.m., the firefighter who lives across the street knocked on our door. He said small fires had caught at both ends of the neighbourhood. We should pack a bag and get out. I opened the blinds to a vicious red glow. I could see the fire moving in leaps across from us. Trees candled like sparklers on the highest ridges. Blackened pine needles and ash tapped at our windows. I saw a burning loop of what looked like black hair land on our deck.
We threw things into the car: backpacks, shoes, pictures. The wind outside was stifling. My son kept filming as we joined a slow train of vehicles leaving. My daughter cried; we’d had to leave our two budgies, their cage too big to move. Cars ahead of us kept pulling over, drivers angling for pictures of the flames. When we reached the main road, fire trucks shot past. They were from districts as far off as Hope, near Vancouver. Most local equipment had already been sent to help across the lake.
We headed for my parents’ place in Lake Country, just north of Kelowna, a 15-minute drive. The road is lined with skinny Ponderosa pines and drought-bleached grasses. None of us talked much, but we were all watching for sparks. We made it down my parents’ long dirt driveway and got out. Hot, stinking blasts came at us from the west.
We hurried inside and told my mum and dad what had happened in our neighbourhood. With a closer view of the lake, we all stared across at the fire for a while. I joked with the kids about fast-forwarding the scary parts. Eventually, we went to our makeshift beds.
Nobody slept much. At 7 a.m., the smell of smoke was pungent, almost animal. Through the stinging haze outside, we could just make out the orange flames consuming the old Lake Okanagan Resort, with its beachfront tiki bar, directly across the water. Then, another knock at the door: a man told us to get out immediately. The fire had jumped the lake again. Embers blown over the water had lit multiple sites, including one just above the driveway.
We hurried to get my 97-year-old grandmother up from her bed. She is physically frail, mentally sharp, and has lived in the area since she was sent over as a child evacuee during the Blitz. My mum and I manoeuvred her into their car. “Is it the fire?” she asked. Since the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park wildfires, she’s kept a packed bag in her bedroom just in case, but even she seemed bewildered that the blaze had actually arrived.
We were lucky to have somewhere to go, a relative’s empty apartment in downtown Kelowna, half an hour from Lake Country, which seemed safe enough, with the wind still blowing in the other direction. We all crammed in with our things and my grandmother’s unhappy cat and set ourselves up among the sparse furniture. There were offers of guest rooms and floor space from friends, but so many of them were on evacuation alert as well. Some were heading for the coast if they could get there, if the highways remained open.
Rumours came in chaotic fits. More spot fires. People having to jump into the water to escape their burning westside homes. The fires on our side growing. My dad, a radio lover, kept his ear to the CBC on an old transistor. On our phones, a Twitter/X user called “Okanagan Fire Scanner” seemed to have the most current updates. Their follower count ballooned by thousands. The replies were full of questions. Is Wilden evacuating? Is the airport still open? Is this 2003? Of course people thought of 2003, when almost 300 houses in the southern end of Kelowna burned. Its anniversary day had just passed, as commenters remarked darkly, looking for any pattern.
Downtown that Friday, the sky was so oddly, normally blue. My daughter and I decided to walk down Bernard Avenue to pick up supplies and keep busy. It was almost a typical summer-day scene, with people in sunglasses sitting outside cafés, tourists strolling in and out of shops. A group stood at the lakeside park where the Canada Day fireworks always happen, watching smoke billow and shift above the West Kelowna mountains, tiny embers glittering the same way the fireworks do.
The wind turned as we headed back up the street. A blast of dirt and ash hit our backs, and the light browned. We got to the apartment as the wind pitched higher and an artificial dark came down. Social media reported fire falling all over the city now. The landfill was burning. The University of British Columbia’s Okanagan campus was evacuating with almost no warning. The hospital was preparing for casualties. Main roads were closing, no way north. The air was a sick white; cars were showered in ash. Friends messaged to say they were leaving the city while they could. My mum and I whispered about how to move my grandmother again if we had to; she was still bruised from the car trip, her first in years. We decided to stay put, keep watching.
We tried for news every few minutes in the following days. The fire rose and sank and rose again. The Westbank First Nation asked the Great Creator for calmer winds. Firefighters saved a new water treatment plant in West Kelowna, although more houses were lost. The fire there moved 10 kilometres in five hours one night. More fire just north of the Okanagan devastated small communities in the beautiful Shuswap area. Evacuees were camped out in arenas, volunteers scrambling to bring food, blankets, anything.
On Monday, Emergency Social Services called to offer my family a hotel room, although we continued to shuttle between there and the apartment to help with my grandmother, and for comfort in numbers. Holed up in the apartment, it felt like 2003. There was no working WiFi or cable, just an old TV with a stack of DVDs. We watched Crocodile Dundee and Murder She Wrote. My grandmother kept asking what was on next.
It rained Tuesday night, and Wednesday morning was startling in its clarity and its wet-pavement scent. A trickle of streets was removed from the evacuation order. But nothing has felt easy or clear. The Okanagan remained surrounded by other fires, like a spreading bullseye. Several houses on this side of the lake were gone.
My parents found out their old wooden house is somehow intact despite a long swath of charred land within 15 feet of it. Across the water from there, all that remains of Lake Okanagan Resort is a concrete elevator shaft. Our firefighter neighbour was able to check our street, where our houses are standing, too, for now. The SPCA went in to rescue the kids’ budgies, which had me in tears. The birds, in the apartment with us now, are perplexed, nervy and hungry.
We’re all so hungry to know what’s happening, what’s going to happen, like everyone else in the province. Is this how it is now? Is this going to happen every summer? Are we in the scariest part, or is something else coming, some sequel with undreamed-of winds and heat? Whatever it is, we won’t be able to press fast-forward.