My husband was one of the first firefighters at the Marshall Fire
This fire was a turning point for our family on how we’re thinking about and preparing for climate change
I’ve mourned the loss of my husband half a dozen times in as many years of marriage. He’s a firefighter with Mountain View Fire Protection District which serves parts of Boulder and Weld Counties on the Front Range in Colorado. Every time I see a column of smoke rise from the foothills, or a plume looming over our community, I begin to feel the increasingly familiar grip of terror that consumes my thoughts and binds my body. I imagine that this is the fire that gets him.
At 12:04 PM on Thursday December 30, I got two texts from my husband: “I love you. I’m safe.” You don’t send an “I’m safe” text when you’re actually completely safe. He filled me in: “Big wildland fire south of Boulder.” He and I have gotten better at emergencies over the past few years, so he checked in with me regularly throughout the rest of the day and throughout the night. It wasn’t until he came home around 9 AM on Friday morning that I started to realize the full extent of what he experienced. He walked in our house with eyes so bloodshot they were a dark reddish brown from lid to lid, corner to corner. As he told his story to me, I felt my chest tighten and the thin sense of calm I’d been clinging to for the prior 24 hours begin to dissipate.
The first thing to know about Lieutenant Micah Arnold is that he wants you - no, dares you - to underestimate him. As a Northern California kid with sleeve tattoos, a 1992 Harley Davidson FXR, and personal uniform of black Hanes t-shirts, loose fitting Levi’s, and some Reebok Classics, his mother will tell you he has always insisted on being his own man. He enjoys bucking society’s casual expectations. He’s a deep and intense thinker but without any of the stress and anxiety that most of us experience as we try to answer big questions, take on new challenges, or simply cope with daily life.
A couple years after we were married, we spent a week camping in Yellowstone National Park. I’d learned early on that the best way to get Micah talking is to get him moving. On our long hikes through the wilderness the conversation would ebb and flow. I’d spend the stretches of silence worried about whether I was liked at work, if I was actually fatter than I thought I was, if we would ever have kids. I asked Micah what he was thinking about and he replied, “Magic.” We spent the next half hour discussing and categorizing portrayals of magic in movies. Category: Witches, Harry Potter vs. Hocus Pocus. Category: Magicians, Now You See Me vs. The Prestige. Category: Creatures, Pan’s Labyrinth vs. The Dark Crystal.
Lieutenant Micah Arnold calms storms, brings his whole heart to every battle, knows who he is and doesn’t care if you don’t. He’d say he doesn’t worry too much because after two years in Baghdad, Iraq as a health services contractor for the US government, he’s accepted his own mortality. Well, let me be clear: I have not, in fact, accepted his mortality. I also don’t totally buy his cool cucumber demeanor. On the evening of March 21, 2021, the day that a gunman killed 10 people in a Boulder grocery store, he said to me, “This is why I do what I do. I have to know that I’m doing something in the face of tragedy.”
His story of the Marshall Fire, as I understand it, begins with a routine call to the open space south of Boulder where smoke had been spotted. They’d been out to this area several times over the past few shifts, all in response to smoke reports that ended up being dust. As always, they head out to calls as fully prepared as they can be with the information they have. His crew took the brush truck (standard procedure for wildland fires), a vehicle much smaller than an engine designed for rough terrain and agility in rapidly changing conditions.
They were the second unit on scene, following another crew from MVFPD’s Station 9. They saw the fire and quickly set up on the western edge prepared to put the blaze out like they do with any other grass fire they’re called to. However, as we know, this time was different. The 100 mph gusts of wind crashing down on the Front Range like atmospheric tsunamis meant that Micah and his crew would be chasing after this fire as it raged toward housing developments. They’d run, but the fire was running faster. It was only a matter of minutes before they decided to reposition on the eastern side of the flames.
This was just as futile. The open space south of the city of Boulder and west of the town of Superior has always felt to me more of an alien landscape than beloved wilderness. The foothills don’t gently roll like the pastures of New England; they crest like the waves of a stormy sea, like mythical monsters in repose following you with their eyes. When you drive along one of the loosely winding roads through this area, you feel like a passerby, a passenger on Epcot’s Spaceship Earth at Disney World observing a slowly, yet powerfully, unfolding geological melodrama.
And yet on Thursday, December 30, the melodrama did not unfold slowly. As Micah and his crew set up on the eastern side of the fire, the smoke overpowered them, flooding their field of vision. The wind picked up dirt and debris and flung it at them, making it impossible to truly assess the extent of the fire, its direction, its speed, and how to contain it. Again, after only a matter of minutes, he knew there wasn’t anything they could do. He and his crew ran to the nearby neighborhood and started knocking on doors, urging residents to evacuate. When they could, they left the doors and windows open so animals could escape.
And that’s how the day went. For all of them. All of the firefighters, all of the residents. At one point, Micah said he was talking with other crews, theorizing what it would take to stop this fire. One of them responded, “We don’t stop it until it reaches I-25,” referring to the only North/South interstate in Colorado that slices through Denver dozens of miles further to the east than Superior, Louisville, and Broomfield.
Micah’s day was characterized by watching homes burn and by dealing with misinformation as unconfirmed reports spluttered across the radios, “Costco is gone. Target is gone, Station 5 is gone.” All three are still standing today. Dozens of firefighters from his department - all departments- showed up to help. Every rig from every station from Mountain View Fire Protection District was out. Crews from mountain communities showed up to help with their wildland gear.
The thing is that when they deploy to wildland fires they’re in mostly remote, rural areas. They can usually take a moment to assess the conditions, determine where to cut a line, and make intentional decisions about where and when they’re going to stop a fire.
When they deploy to a house fire or structure fire, they have virtually limitless resources to douse the flames, soak the building, and prevent the fire from spreading. The Marshall Fire was neither a wildland fire nor a structure fire: it was 1,000 simultaneous house fires.
He spent the night parked on South Foothills Highway near where the fire originally started, watching burning hillsides and ensuring the flames didn’t jump. They were still in the brush truck and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. He’d been wearing ankle socks when they got the call and his boots were rubbing painfully on his lower legs. Someone finally brought them some spaghetti. Many crews were posted around the cities doing the same thing all night as the wind died down and temperatures cooled.
It wasn’t until around 10 PM Thursday evening that I started panicking. I’d been reassured all day that Micah was still alive and safe, but as darkness set in, our baby soundly asleep in bed and the chatter of text messages from friends and family dying down, I began to realize what kind of situation I might find myself in. The Middle Fork Fire had started on North Foothills Highway around the same time as the Marshall Fire, though it had been quickly contained. But in my rising terror that I could no longer keep at bay, I began imagining the wind picking back up and Middle Fork reigniting, jumping all the way across the city of Longmont where we live and forcing us to evacuate. It seemed unimaginable, but then so did a wildfire burning through Superior, Louisville, and Broomfield.
I began preparing to evacuate. I felt crazy, as I always do when I am afraid. I was in no real danger, but I had to do something to feel more in control of my fear. When I’m anxious, stressed out, or just plain afraid, I prep and I plan. More bags were getting stacked by the garage door as I remembered things like baby formula, the dog leash, or meds. I’d go to bed, only to get up minutes later to add something more to the pile. I was up all night rehearsing an evacuation scenario: baby in the car first, then if there’s time, the dog. Then if there’s still time, the stuff. Did I know how to open the garage door if the power was out? I’d recently gotten laser eye surgery and couldn’t drive at night - did I think I could get myself, the baby, and the dog to my sister’s apartment or Aunt Tammy’s down in Denver? I didn’t know.
I too was exhausted when Micah walked in the door Friday morning, but not exhausted like he was. He spent an hour on the couch letting his adrenaline drain, telling me the story of his night while our 17-month old watched Sesame Street. He tried to calm himself down so that he could eat again and eventually nap. After he woke up from a nap in the early afternoon, his body ached. He couldn’t move without feeling pain and soreness. He couldn’t tell if the tightness in his chest was muscle pain or something worse.
In the days since we’ve tried to process this together. I can’t say we were lucky the fire missed our house, we were never at risk as we live several miles north in Longmont. We were not directly affected in any way and yet I am still unable to sleep at night. Micah is still exhausted, and his department is figuring out how to file reports and support investigations into the cause of the fire. His buddies have been calling him and they swap their stories. Many of them lost their helmets that day in the wind, including Micah. I bet if you looked you’d find a bunch of firefighter helmets in the debris.
After 6 years of marriage I remain deeply in love with this man. I knew he was the one I was going to marry when I realized that whatever life we’d build together was going to be better than any life I’d lead alone. With that said, it’d be nice if he actually washed his protein shake bottles rather than simply rinsing them and setting them next to the sink to dry.
When he finished telling me his story from the fire, I wanted to beg him to go see a doctor. I wanted to know what their standard procedure was following an exposure of this magnitude. I wanted to find a way to know if he was okay. Knowing my husband, and knowing that a direct verbal assault was not the way to go, I tentatively asked, “How do you guys handle your own health after something like this? Do you go see a doctor for the department or something?”
The answer is not straightforward. He explained that rules and procedures around fires have gotten so much better at protecting firefighters from the long-term effects of exposure, like how they wash their gear. He also explained that they have mandatory cancer screenings starting at age 40, which doesn’t help ease my fear since he is 34. He also shared that Colorado has presumptive care legislation, which means that if any firefighter gets certain types of cancer it is automatically presumed to be caused by on-the-job risks. Again, not super reassuring, I’d like him to not get cancer in the first place.
In the aftermath of the Marshall Fire, I’m coming to realize three fundamental, life-altering facts about how climate change is affecting our family:
The odds are that if we ever have to evacuate our home, I will be doing it alone. Micah will likely be out there working. I need to be more prepared. We need a go-bag that we are checking and updating every few months. This is now part of our routine, part of regular life.
We (meaning me, my husband, and my daughter) are going to experience more climate disasters than most people simply because Micah will probably be at a lot of them. We may not lose our home, but Micah will be exposed to every fire and all the smoke and toxic chemicals they produce. It has been painful to contemplate the idea that likely won’t be one fire that finally gets him, but it will be the accumulation of ever-increasing frequency of major fires that ultimately takes its toll.
Our collective inaction on climate change means that instead of having one coordinated, global response to climate change, we are going to have 8 billion responses to climate change. Unlike depictions in films like The Day After Tomorrow or Waterworld, there isn’t going to be one single, global event that defines the before and after of our climate apocalypse. There will be 8 billion different turning points when people say, “Enough is enough. Today is the day I start to do what it takes to survive.”
For me, my husband, and our family, that day is today. The Marshall Fire wasn’t a wake up call to climate change; it was the point at which we began to truly accept that it’s already happening, and we, the human race, are no longer able to or willing to stop it. We will still keep adding money to our 401ks and to our daughter’s 529 plan, but we’re now coming to understand that investing in our family’s future is going to look a lot different than it did for our parents. Do we need a redundant power source for our home? A better air filtration system? How much should we expect to pay for water in a couple decades? Some people question whether it’s worth fighting to survive through climate change, and I don’t really have an answer.
Several weeks ago I felt like I was at a breaking point with the demands of parenting and working full time. I tearfully told my mom that I didn’t know how to have a toddler, a dog, and a firefighter and make it all work. When I think of whether it’s worth fighting through climate change, I think of my toddler, my dog, and my firefighter. Why would I ever agree to cut our time together short without a fight?