Too Much Like Thirst

Fleeing the Worst Wildfires in Colorado History

There are three stages of terminal dehydration, three small steps the body tumbles down before slipping out of existence. The first stage is thirst. Lose just two percent of your body weight in water and you start the process of dying. It’s terrifically common. A sweaty day at the gym, an hour-long hike in the sun without water, this first stage is almost trivial. But even in thirst the body clings to water, sending less liquid to the bladder, reducing sweat, increasing body temperature, and thickening blood. You can be in the first stage of terminal dehydration and return to the land of the living with ease. Most of us have done it and will do it again. It’s so easy to begin the dying process, you probably wouldn’t even know you were dying.

Colorado was like that in 2020, thirsty, thick blooded, but none of us understood how closely death was looming. Twelve inches of rain fell in Colorado that year, six inches below average. It was the hottest August on record and the state entered its twentieth year of drought. The land had been thirsty for decades. 

All spring and summer I waited for rain in the Front Range. Some nights the air smelled suddenly of ozone, a scent like pungent bleach rising off the asphalt. Static electricity hummed in between the fibers of the air, weaving a promise of rain. From the front window, I watched the thin collections of gray clouds drift over Bummer’s Rock. A teasing flash of lightning, a grumbling of thunder could crane my neck skyward. Always though, the clouds dissolved into a perfectly clear night sky, stars glistening through the atmosphere. 

It wasn’t long before the fire bans came, then the red flag warnings. I could taste parched heat on my tongue. The earth around the house crumbled to dust. The mullein stalks which grew in great big swaths along the mountainside never bloomed. The creek slowed to a thick algal crawl. The trees hung limp. Our well was deep, but folks further up the mountain said they were running dry. I skimped on showers and gave the rest to my struggling garden. 

My eyes grew red and itchy. I couldn’t stop rubbing them which promptly led to an infection. Each eye crusted over like the Colorado landscape. I slathered them twice a day in thick antibiotic goo, waiting for relief. But the goo collected dust and the dust made me itchier and I scratched at my body until it bled wondering if the dehydrated earth wanted to scratch herself raw too.

I spent most of my summer dangling from a hammock parked on a craggy point overlooking Boulder Canyon, begging even a single cloud to roll in. I was a hot assortment of longing. Together, the landscape and I grew dryer and itchier until we were cracking open at the seams. By August, a single flicked cigarette butt could have lit the entire state ablaze.

And I was like that too in my own way, hanging onto my job, my livelihood, by the thinnest of threads after years of having my luscious liquid lifeforce sucked right out of my bones by a hot-headed executive director just one spark of conflict away from burning the entire organization to the ground. Either the rain was going to come or the fire was going to burn and every morning flipping my laptop open, it wasn’t clear which one it would be. 

I watched the landscape of Colorado and my career with trepidation, knowing there was very little water left to cling to, knowing something was about to ignite.

The second stage of terminal dehydration is fainting — less common than thirst and ultimately more dramatic. This part of dehydration occurs when a person loses four percent of their body weight in water. The body’s blood gets so thick and concentrated during this stage that skin shrivels, blood pressure drops, and fainting becomes unavoidable. You won’t have enough liquid to sweat, causing the body to further overheat. This stage is something of a theatrical affair.

By mid-August, the inevitable occurred: Colorado started burning and nearly didn’t stop. The catastrophe started with the Cameron Peak Fire, which over the course of four months devoured 208,663 acres and became the largest fire in Colorado’s history. It destroyed 42 homes, forced 20,000 people to evacuate and took more than 1,000 people to contain. 

Even at the beginning when the fire was just a few thousand acres, I could see the air filling with smoke. Meanwhile, the sky and my lungs filled with ash. My nostrils burned and my eyes itched even worse igniting red, puffy holes through my skull. But the fire was still many miles away. In my tiny rental on the first curve of Sugarloaf Road up Boulder Canyon, I was not going to burn. 

My therapist encouraged me not to quit my job, not to flee during discomfort. But what can a person reasonably say about a toxic cesspool of a workplace? Like most relationships, the end comes about not after one seemingly random egregious act, but after years of small moments, cascading tensions, and a general knowing deep in the gut that whispers, this will kill you if you stay.

I woke up one morning uncharacteristically calm and collected. My boss called early that day, 8am, to explain some new frustrations the executive director had with me, that we’d work through it, it would be okay, she wasn’t upset with me.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said very slowly and took a breath.

“Fuck,” she said in the long pause.

“Yeah,” I said without another moment of hesitation. She knew what was coming next. “I quit.” 

Together, Colorado and I spent the season watching the flames of destruction dance over our brittle bodies.

For most of August and all of September, I surveyed the way the morning light filtered in through the windows while searching for new jobs. If the shadows had an orange hue, I knew the air quality was bad enough not to leave the house and to spend the day writing cover letters. If the light looked clear and yellow, I knew I might have a handful of hours to escape and run the five-mile loop from my house around the nature preserve while the winds shifted the smoke onto someone else. I did not have air conditioning, or any sort of air filtration system, so during those months of stasis, my body grew slow and sluggish. Even my dreams smelled burnt.

I started applying for jobs in places like Oregon, Washington and Alaska, aching for cool, watery landscapes, desperate for an escape. I wanted to rinse this ugly job, the collapsing landscape, all of it from my hot and itchy skin. It was so easy to dream of being anywhere but where I was. It was so simple to fill out the applications and watch new opportunities trickle in. If I wanted to wake up to dark, wet days, all I had to do was get in my car and go. If every frazzled nerve in my body craved ease, we could just move to a place with more ease. It was surprisingly effortless to run away. 

As one catastrophe piled on top of another, I had the kind of burning within me that could only be cooled by fleeing. With haste, I yanked up my roots and detangled my relationships from Colorado’s sandy soil, bundled it all into my arms in a messy heap, and searched for my escape route. 

In the third stage of terminal dehydration, the body’s organs begin to fail. This occurs when the water lost is about seven percent of body weight. Blood pressure becomes very difficult to maintain. The body reduces blood supply to non vital organs, and those organs begin to die.

When an offer letter came in late September for a job in Bellingham, Washington paying $10,000 more than I had been making, I barely read through the contract before accepting. I knew nothing about the town except that two friends had moved there several years ago and seemed to like it alright. I accepted because that's what you do when your life is thin and your obligations are thinner. You reduce blood flow to everything nonvital. You lose track of what is essential and allow all sorts of important things to die. You put everything into boxes and start over again and again as an act of faith. 

A fifteen minute phone call ending with a job offer quickly ripped up the six years of foundation I had lain. If I really wanted to leave Colorado, I could be gone in a matter of weeks.

In early October, just a few weeks before the move, I felt the winds shift and lift the smoke out of Boulder like a curtain rising. The day was clear and it felt like the tide might finally be turning on the now two month continual burning of the Cameron Peak Fire. With this unknowable window opening, and only a little time left in town, I drove down the canyon with my bike, parked downtown, and pedaled out into what I hoped would be a long and winding goodbye ride through the foothills. 

Barely an hour into my ride, the weather changed. The smoke which had so readily lifted out of the town just a few hours earlier suddenly poured over the mountains like dark oil. Within minutes, the sun went from a sweet, decadent yellow to a sickly orange. Ash the size of dimes rained down from the sky and visibility dropped to just a few feet. I slipped a mask over my nose and mouth, but the smoke left me wheezing. Wind from the north blew in suddenly with such force that I couldn’t stay upright. I ran with my bike along the dirt trail, trying to find a way out to the highway.

With the smoke so thick and the air suddenly so hot, I thought it was possible that I had ridden directly into a new fire. I expected at any moment to see a line of flames consuming the horizon. I thought, with a choke, how easily I could be trapped out here if I didn’t figure out which way the fire was burning. 

I kept running with my bike, pushing it into the sideways wind, until I came to an unfamiliar fork in the trail. I veered right and stumbled into a nearly empty parking lot. I saw the red flash of brake lights as one lone car was pulling away. 

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey!” 

I threw down my bike and waved my arms frantically, trying to get the driver’s attention. When the car stopped, I ran up to the driver’s side window and begged for a ride back into town. The man, maybe in his 50s, looked curious but unafraid. “Of course,” he said. As soon as my bike was latched into his hitch-mounted bike rack and I was safely strapped into the front seat sucking down filtered air, I looked squarely into his face.

“What is going on?” I asked..

“I have no idea,” he said. “I’ve lived here for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like this.” 

Out on the highway, cars were driving 30 miles per hour on a 60 mile per hour road. I could barely see the tail lights of the car ahead of us. I kept looking in the side mirror expecting to get slammed by another car from behind. We crawled like this for 10 miles back to downtown Boulder while hunks of ash whipped around the car. I scanned the plains to the east and the mountains to the west for any sign of an active fire. I couldn’t see anything through the gray haze.

When I finally got back to my truck, I crawled up the canyon through single-lane traffic closures, refreshing my news feeds at every stop, cursing the lost signal as the rock walls engulfed me. 

Due to high winds, I later learned, a second fire aptly named the East Troublesome Fire which had been of low concern, had doubled in size and was swallowing Granby, blowing smoke across the entire Front Range. People and families were evacuating all over the state. In the next few weeks, the East Troublesome Fire would become the second-largest fire in state history, burning 193,812 acres. 

The next day another fire — the Lefthand Canyon Fire — broke out six miles from our house. Three fires raged around us. Our house was put on evacuation standby. 

Just a day later, the Lefthand Fire expanded further. Evacuation seemed likely. Our landlord who lived just a little ways up the mountain stopped by and told us to get our go-bags ready. Half our belongings were already packed for the move, the other half were strewn across the tiny apartment. We had two weeks before we had to leave for Bellingham and there were only two options: wait the fire out and cross our fingers an evacuation wouldn’t prevent us from collecting our belongings before the 1,400-mile move, or immediately move everything we owned to our friend’s garage further from the fire, then move it again into a U-haul two weeks later.

That night, I stood in the gravel driveway trying to make my decision. Out in the distance, the horizon glowed red. Friends in town texted and said they could see the fire burning on the mountainside, and were we okay? We were okay. And we also weren’t. From the rim of the canyon, I could only see a red flush in the air. 

After a sleepless night checking every few hours for evacuations, we packed up our little basement apartment and took a dozen trips to our friend’s garage in town. If we did get evacuated, nothing would get left behind. 

Within 24 hours, our space was empty. For two weeks, we continued to sleep on a climbing crash pad tossed on our bedroom floor waiting for the inevitable evacuation, but somehow, it never came. The Lefthand Fire was relatively small, just a few hundred acres. Despite burning so close to our house, it never made the jump to Boulder Canyon. A sudden decrease in wind speeds made the crisis especially manageable. The fire was contained just as we wiped down the last pantry shelf and set the keys on the kitchen counter, ready for the next tenant.

My final day in Boulder I sat in the Home Depot parking lot hungrily watching people go about their ordinary lives. One man pushed an orange cart filled with plywood. Then, a couple walked out together, arms filled with potted plants, laughing. I tucked two more flat-packed cardboard boxes into the bed of the truck feeling overwhelming grief. All around were the familiar murmurs of people creating foundations. Stability. Meanwhile, I was once again watching my sense of home shrink into nonexistence from the muted angle of a rearview mirror. 

That night, a cold front rolled in, dropping the first precipitation the town had seen in weeks. We should have had our arms raised in praise, but as my partner and I walked all of our earthly possessions from our friend’s garage to the U-Haul, freezing rain poured down on us. The driveway slicked into a sheet of ice. Snow dusted the tops of the trees. My bike rack froze and I had to use a blow torch to unclench the hinges — the irony palpable. It was like that in those final days. Breathless. Demanding. Relentless.

On the drive home, I listened to a long, slow story on NPR about Dutch painters. The academic professor and the reporter were discussing brush strokes and light. It seemed impossible that these two worlds could exist simultaneously — Colorado blistering under flames, and two soft-spoken men gingerly studying some long-dead artists. As my truck crunched over the frozen gravel in the driveway for the last time, and snowflakes mixed with ash, it was most comforting to imagine that neither world existed at all.  

The next morning when I drove out of Boulder, I waited for the tears to come. In the privacy of my own truck, I expected to be a blubbering mess. But I only teared up a little 10 hours later in Idaho when I bought a kombucha at a gas station and the woman behind the counter said, “Are you from Colorado? Only people from Colorado drink this shit.” 

On that 23-hour drive, the last of my energy was focused on keeping the truck on the highway and not letting the stack of boxes on the bench seat next to me topple into my lap while I drove. The endless hours of concentrated highway drone kept me tethered to the pavement when all I wanted was to float into the ether. 

I don’t remember much of the drive, or needing to stretch my legs, or feeling uncomfortable. I don’t remember feeling much of anything at all. I can recall a gorgeous canyon at the edge of the Utah border outside of Ogden, a drive-through McDonald’s chicken sandwich eaten over the steering wheel somewhere in Idaho, and a Starbucks barista in Oregon who asked if I was up to anything fun over the weekend. 

“Nothing much,” I told her, as I approached the last six hours of a drive meant to start my life over. The rest of the trip was a blur.

Death — unsurprisingly — is the final stage of terminal dehydration. When the water lost is 10 percent of the body’s weight, organs overheat. The liver will fail. The kidneys will fail. Blood will become so thick and unfiltered that it will be described as “toxic sludge.” It is difficult not to die once this has occurred. Simply drinking water at this stage is often not enough. An IV and serious medical attention might save you.

Even 1,400 miles away, the Colorado fires were inescapable. So was the life I had so hurriedly left behind. In the last hour of the drive to Bellingham, I heard on the radio that while the Cameron Peak Fire was diminishing thanks to the light snowfall, the East Troublesome Fire had exploded overnight, growing from 18,550 acres to 187,964 acres. 35,000 people were being evacuated from their towns and houses. Rocky Mountain National Park was burning. Hundreds of homes were already destroyed. Two people were reported dead. Officials feared that the Cameron Peak fire and East Troublesome fires would merge and no one knew exactly what would happen if they did. 

At the end of it all, the two fires missed each other only by a thin stretch of miles divided by the Big Thompson River. A winding IV running through the landscape. 

Dehydration can be used to speed up the process of dying. It is a method quite common in hospice situations when end of life is inevitable and growing increasingly painful. Despite the toxic sludge, many hospice workers describe terminal dehydration as a peaceful, nearly painless way to stop fighting against death. When you get past the thirst, they say, a feeling of euphoria sets in. A person pursuing this method of dying usually drifts out of consciousness in three days, then dies a few days after that. It takes about 10 days total to achieve death. It sounds like a not altogether unpleasant way to go. 

We arrived in Bellingham on a cloudy afternoon the day before Halloween. The ocean was slate gray. The sky was two tones lighter. The street was wet with rain and the big leaf maples hung onto a last few drippy leaves of autumn. It was the landscape I said I wanted. It was the life I said we should create. Colorado seemed very far away.

We ran up and down three flights of stairs 20 or 30 times to unload everything into our new apartment. We shoved houseplants and sloppily-taped cardboard boxes wherever they would fit. We tossed spices into a dusty drawer. We drank a beer at a restaurant down the street when the boxes were all placed inside. We looked at one another with wide, tired eyes, both seeking in the other confirmation that we made the right decision. Both fearing it was too easy to start over.

That night, in the empty, windowless bathroom, I filled the bathtub with scalding water while my partner collapsed on the unmade mattress tossed on the carpet in the other room. I was no longer fighting. I wanted to drift into unconsciousness. I lit a single candle, closed the door, and hid my sobs beneath the din of gushing water. I took those sandy Colorado roots and tucked them into the wet, Pacific Northwest loam, urging life to flow again. I searched the room for anything familiar, and seeing nothing but my wadded up bath towel, demanded that this wet, dark place become home.

A few nights later, on Halloween, I stood on the plywood porch in bare feet with a burning mullein stalk, dipped in beeswax that a friend had made for me in Colorado. It shot up a flame like a torch and emitted so much black smoke that the air under the overhang grew thick and heavy. Meanwhile, rain poured off the roof and splattered the banister. I shivered in the damp cold and set the mullein torch into a glass jar, resting it on the wide banister. It took only minutes before the foot-long stalk had burned down to a nub — the last of my life in Colorado now a blackened, ashy pile pelted by rain. I silently begged for the euphoria to set in.