After the Fire

After the fire, the forest floor was black and the sky was open. This was the part they didn't show in the news footage. The news showed the fire: orange, violent, eating trees like they owed it money. Then the news moved on, because fire was an event and aftermath was a process, and processes didn't rate. Emma walked the burn zone six weeks after the fire went through. She was a restoration ecologist, which was a profession that sounded hopeful and mostly involved staring at damaged land and making plans that took longer than careers. The fire had been big. Three thousand hectares of eucalypt forest in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Started by lightning, which was nobody's fault, and fed by drought, which was everybody's. The trees were black poles. No canopy, no understorey, nothing but charcoal and ash and the grey-white skeletons of ferns that had been alive six weeks ago. Her colleague Dave walked beside her, taking soil samples. Dave approached fieldwork the way some people approach dentist appointments — with acceptance and a mild, private dread. He was a soil scientist. He liked being in a lab. The field was where the soil came from, which was a necessary evil, like visiting the factory floor when you'd rather be in the office. "pH is high," he said, testing a sample with a kit. "The ash is alkaline." "Expected." "Still high." "Dave." "I'm just saying. The soil is basically soap right now." Emma knelt. The ground was warm. Six weeks after the fire, and the ground was still warm, holding heat the way a body holds a fever. She pushed her fingers into the ash and found, beneath it, soil. Actual soil. Dark and crumbly and smelling of earth, which should not have been surprising but was, because the surface looked like the end of everything and two centimetres down, it wasn't. "Seed bank's intact," she said. "You hope." "I know. Look." She pointed at something Dave couldn't see until she brushed the ash away: a tiny green shoot, no bigger than a matchstick, pushing up through the black. An epicormic shoot, growing from a bud hidden beneath the bark of a eucalypt that looked dead and was, at the cellular level, rethinking its position. "Six weeks," Dave said. "They can sprout in three." "In this?" "Because of this. The fire triggered it. The heat opens the seed cases. The ash fertilizes. The light —" she gestured at the open sky, the canopy gone, sunlight reaching the floor for the first time in decades. "The light is the invitation." Dave wrote this down. He wrote everything down. His field notebooks were legendary in the department — meticulous, humourless, and so densely annotated that reading them felt like being lectured by someone who resented having to explain. They walked farther. More shoots. Emma counted them. In a ten-by-ten-metre quadrat, she found forty-three. Eucalypt, acacia, banksia. The banksia cones had opened in the fire, releasing seeds they had been holding for years, waiting for exactly this: the heat, the ash, the empty ground. The banksia's entire reproductive strategy was based on catastrophe. It planned for fire the way accountants plan for tax season — not hoping for it, but ready. A lyrebird called from somewhere beyond the burn zone. The sound was absurd — a cascade of other birds' songs, mixed and remixed, a DJ working the forest. Lyrebirds survived fires by running. They were fast. They were also stubborn. They would be back in this area within a year, scratching through the regrowth for insects, performing their strange, elaborate dances on stages they cleared themselves in the leaf litter. Emma made notes. She photographed the shoots. She collected samples for analysis. The work was slow. Recovery work always was. You measured in months and years, not in the days and hours that fire ran on. A fire could cross a ridge in an afternoon. Regrowth took a decade. This was not fair, but ecology was not interested in fairness. Ecology was interested in what happened next. They drove back to the research station as the sun dropped behind the mountains. The sky was enormous without the trees. More sky than Emma was used to. It felt exposed, the way a room feels after you remove all the furniture — too large, too bright, full of potential that was also, for the moment, emptiness. "Give it two years," she said, more to herself than to Dave. "The canopy?" "The understorey. The canopy will take longer. Ten years. Fifteen. But the understorey—" She looked back at the burn zone, black and grey and, if you knew where to look, green. "The understorey is already happening." Dave closed his notebook. He started the car. The headlights swept across the burned trees, which stood in rows like an audience that had been asked to remain standing. "I prefer the lab," Dave said. "I know." "The lab doesn't catch fire." "Not with that attitude." He almost smiled. They drove home through the dark, past the black trees and the open sky and the forty-three shoots that were, at that moment, in the silence after the car had passed, still growing.