THAT NIGHT DORRIGO Evans flew to Melbourne, from there the next day he got the morning flight to Hobart; in the overwhelming drone of the 707’s engines and the strange oblivion they invited he found a restful limbo. His flight’s descent into Hobart was marred by violent winds and heavy smoke coming from bushfires in the island’s south; the plane dropped, pitched and tumbled like a pea in a violently boiling pot. They disembarked into the odour of ash and the slap of wind-gusted heat.
He was welcomed by old Freddy Seymour, a surgeon of disputed years who ran the Tasmanian chapter of the College of Surgeons, and who, somewhat eccentrically, drove an old green 1948 Ford Mercury, kept, like Freddy, in a state of immaculate grace in denial of its age. The College of Surgeons was hosting a luncheon in Dorrigo’s honour in a Hobart hotel that day. After that, Dorrigo was heading to Fern Tree—the village just out of Hobart, located in picturesque mountain forest, where Ella’s sister lived—and his family. He rang Ella from the airport’s public phone; her sister was gone till mid-afternoon with her car. In any case, it was too hot to do anything other than stay put with the kids. She said it was pleasantly cool in the shade of the vast eucalypts and she couldn’t think of a better place to be.
The lunch was a more pleasant affair than Dorrigo had expected; at least, it was a diversion for his mind from everything else that was crowding into it. But just as they had got to the sherry and cigars there came word that the fire situation had considerably worsened, and that towns to the immediate south, among them Fern Tree, were now threatened by a firestorm.
Dorrigo Evans found a hotel phone and tried calling Ella’s sister’s number, but the connection was down, and so too, said the operator, were almost all the lines to homes on the mountain. Dorrigo Evans turned to Freddy Seymour—who had just lit up and whose sunken coral-pink cheeks wobbled as he chuffed the smoke in with tiny, quick breaths—and asked if he might borrow his car keys.
I love you, Evans, said the old surgeon, exhaling his own smoke plume. Like a son. And, like a son, you shall return my car not as it was, and like a father I shall forgive.
Fern Tree was twenty minutes’ drive from the city. The winds by now were ferocious, the heat a gritty oppression. When he got into the Ford Mercury, he was startled to see his face in the rear-view mirror covered in smuts of the ash that was swirling outside in thick eddies, like black snow.
The Ford Mercury drove like a bucket with only a vague relationship to the road, but its V8 had a reassuring power. The mountain, copyrightly a majestic presence, was invisible, lost in a pall of smoke so thick that within minutes Dorrigo’s visibility was down to a few yards and he had his headlights on. Occasionally another car would appear out of the gloom, seeking to escape into the city with people inside looking as he had seen Syrian villagers once look as they sought to escape the war. Some of the cars were scorched; one, improbably, had no windscreen; another’s paintwork was raised in big, blackened blisters. He passed from the outer suburbs of Hobart into a thick, tall forest through which the road now cut a deep and sinuous trench.
Coming round a corner, he came upon a police roadblock stopping any car from going further. A solitary policeman put his head into the 1948 Ford Mercury and told Dorrigo he had to turn back.
It’s a death zone up there, mate, he said, jerking a thumb behind him in the direction of Fern Tree.
Dorrigo described Ella and his children and asked if they had passed through the roadblock. The young policeman, who said he had been there for two hours, hadn’t seen anyone like that. Perhaps they had fled earlier.
Dorrigo Evans calculated that there was perhaps an hour and a half from the time of his phone call when Ella and the children might have fled. But it was unlikely she would have left when the town was unthreatened, and, besides, she had no car. Dorrigo Evans hoped they had escaped, but reasoned that he had to act in the expectation that they hadn’t.
The fire’s coming up from the Huon, the policeman went on, and across from the east. I’m hearing crazy stories of it spot-lighting from embers in front of the main fire, up to twenty miles away. As he spoke, glowing embers fell onto the bonnet, as if in proof of the policeman’s argument.
You’d be crazy to go up there, he said finally.
My family is up there, Dorrigo Evans said, dropping the column shift down into first. I’d be crazy if I didn’t.