No one ever expected wildfires in Duluth.
Lake Superior is, like, right there. My grampa used to tell me that when he was a kid, they used to camp on the beach every weekend. He said the hardest part was finding dry wood for a campfire. He said it was always damp and kind of cold, even in summer – he said the wet was what made you feel colder, that even if you got pretty far from the lake, it still felt wet in summer. I saw a picture of him once, wearing a hoodie on the beach for 4th of July fireworks. A hoodie, in July. It’s like, another universe, like Duluth from an alternate reality.
Obviously, we didn’t have fireworks this year. The fires started in June, and they said it was way too risky.
Man, I’d kill right now for some of that wet feeling my grampa talked about. It’s not supposed to rain at all this week, again, and it’s like there’s an invisible lid on all that water in the lake. You can feel the water when you jump in, of course, but it doesn’t go up into the air much past the beach. Our neighborhood’s air is totally dry. Here, breathing is easy.
Mac and I were talking last night outside our tent about how come we can have all kinds of crazy cool tech – drone shows instead of fireworks, self-driving cars, all that shit – but they can’t find a way to use the lake water to put out the fires?
“What if we, like, put a bunch of hoses together?” Mac asked, passing me a Pop-Tart. He had a bottle of Minnesota Emergency Services Water in the cup holder of his camp chair. I could see it sweating; he must have just gotten it from the big cooler at the main tent. Mine was already warm.
“Yeah, so what if we did?” I asked. “You wouldn’t have a way to push the water through ‘em, right?”
“Well, yeah,” he answered, leaning back. “But, like, that’s gotta be something MES can figure out, right? Like, a pump or something?”
“You want them to pump out Lake Superior and run hoses ?” my sister Emma asked, coming up the sand from the lake. “Dude, no wonder you failed physics last year.”
Our parents had filled our cars and driven us to a hotel when the fires hit Brewer Park, thinking we’d just be evacuated for a couple of days, but then it just never stopped. That was three weeks ago; the hotels filled up with emergency workers pretty fast and we ran out of money, so MES had let anyone who didn’t leave west Duluth camp on Park Point Beach. They even set up camp showers and electronics charging stations. It was hot, but it wasn’t hard to cool off in the water.
Mac and Emma and me were all supposed to be working at disc golf camp, but that got canceled, obviously. Our folks worked on Erie Pier and took the cars there every day. They’d come back at night with takeout or whatever, and the tents weren’t too bad. The sand was so soft we didn’t even need air mattresses. If I thought about it, it was a little surprising how fast a guy could get used to something this crazy.
Last night, Mac’s folks said they drove as close as they could to our neighborhood. “Still standing,” his dad said. “Pretty smoky, but all the houses look ok.”
“Could be able to go back there any day, really,” our mom said. “Emma, imagine it: a hot shower. Conditioner.”
Mac and I called them all soft. We’d always wanted to camp for a month straight. It was awesome.