The roar of aircraft passing overhead at low altitude drew me outside my little Airbnb pool house in the south of France. Until then it had been a quiet afternoon spent beavering away on the laptop sitting inside to escape the searing heat of the July sun. I didn’t see anything at first. Dazzled by the glare of the sun and the bright blue sky, I scanned the horizon, turning toward where I thought the blare of the engines was coming from. Surrounding rooftops restricted the view. The first thing I saw was brown smoke billowing skyward from the other side of the nearest ridge. But it seemed thin, more like a bonfire than some conflagration. There were no flames visible from where I stood.
A vivid yellow aircraft appeared above me. The sound of its engines working as it banked low on the horizon drowned out everything – the traffic on the nearby national road, distant sirens, cicadas, everything. Another one appeared. Then a third. And a fourth. They passed above the roof of the main house and over the road toward a distant ridge to the east. I stepped around the house to get a better view and saw the smoke for the first time. There was much more of it than what I had seen beyond the nearby ridge. This was a bigger fire. A dense brown column of smoke rolled along the top of the ridge. The sky in that direction was opaque, colorless.
The first firefighter released its load in a cascade that slammed into the earth, then climbed in a steep arc upward into the anemic sky. The others did the same. I watched the loose formation turn to the north and make their way back to their station to refill.
Despite the work of these big yellow firefighting aircraft and several other different airplanes and a few helicopters, I found myself oddly nonplussed. The bigger fire beyond the distant ridge seemed too far away to cause me any immediate concern. The neighborhood where I was didn’t seem to be disturbed by any of it. I saw no unusual activity. No sense of urgency charged the air. The fire burning on the other side of the closer ridge wasn’t pumping out the volume of smoke that would cause me to worry. The air was mostly still. I didn’t foresee a fire burning anywhere making big gains across the surrounding landscape. I didn’t feel in danger. But at the same time, I wondered if people who later lost their homes or their lives in a wildfire had felt much the same way.
The first aircraft of the formation of four firefighters reappeared. As it passed overhead, I had the sense that the pilots and the ground crew must be settling into the process. The direction of flight seemed more certain, more direct; the speed and attack appeared more confident. I watched. The sirens somewhere on the ground continued to wail. As the aircraft made their way back to the station, I felt a vague reassurance in the procedure I was witnessing. Whether it was true or not, the slow and deliberate efforts I observed convinced me that the fires would soon be extinguished. There was no chaos. No feeling that the situation was beyond the control of the firefighters, the feeling I would have had if the sky had been filled with every kind of aircraft, if the national road had been clogged with firetrucks, if police had appeared on the street. Anything that might have hinted at desperation, at throwing everything you’ve got at it. There was never a moment of alarm. The work of the firefighters visible to me signaled serene confidence. It was exactly how you would want to feel if you were alone in another country where you don’t speak the language and exposed to this.
With persistent and methodical care, the firefighting flights continued for the rest of the afternoon. Once the work was done on the distant ridge, they turned their focus to the fire nearer to me. The flight pattern changed. The distance from their station was less. Their cycles were shorter, faster. It took them less time to extinguish the fire. The flights ended; the sirens stopped. The sky was again an unblemished blue, erased clean.
By dinnertime, the stillness of a summer evening had descended. I went to sleep that night feeling oddly at peace with the day’s event (I would wake the next morning to the smell of wet burned wood). Despite an afternoon displaced by wildfires and the incessant roar of aircraft engines, the day ended with the reassuring feeling that while the ship had been threatened, it had never really been in danger; that the course remained unchanged, the threat neutralized by unflappable professionals.