It has been three weeks since Sandra Patterson Lester pulled into the parking lot of a Peace River, Alta., motel in her red pick-up truck with her tiny chihuahua Gypsy and the clothes on her back. Just about everything else she owns is gone.
“If I hadn’t got out the second I got out… My house was already on fire when I left,” she said.
“I came within in five minutes, maybe four or three of losing everything, my life included.”
Sitting on a park bench in Peace River, the sky is clogged with smoke from the wildfires that forced her and thousands of others from their homes in the Northwest Territories.
“I was zipping up my suitcase and then I heard a ‘woosh!’ and a door slammed from the fire sucking in the oxygen,” she said. “It was ferocious. We thought it was 60 kilometres away. It came with no warning.”
Patterson Lester didn’t even have time to properly slip on a shirt. She abandoned the suitcase and grabbed Gypsy and jumped into her truck and headed for the river bed, where her brother had already pulled up.
“I kept saying to my brother: ‘Are we going to die?'” she recalled.
The siblings spent the night watching from afar as everything in the community on the road bearing their last name burned to the ground.
“We watched and could hear every place on the property explode or burn up. It was pretty sad that day… We were in shock.”
The Pattersons lost five homes, vehicles, a saw mill their father first built decades ago, and a firewood-processing operation.
“Unfortunately my brother looked after about 75 per cent of fire in the south Slave area, including Yellowknife, so unfortunately we have no firewood. It’s going to be a real tragedy in Yellowknife,” said Patterson Lester.
It’s not the structures on the property she is mourning though, it’s the things that can’t be replaced.
“I lost everything from my great grandfather’s. He belonged to the Union Army. I had his discharge papers. I had all my fathers medals. I had all my great aunt linens. That’s what’s killing me now.”
“You can’t replace your memories. You just can’t.”
Fire crews in Hay River, N.W.T., have been waging a full-on assault for weeks now on stubborn wildfires threatening the town.
It reached a critical point on Labour Day long weekend. The fire reached half a kilometre from the community’s hospital, but crews were able to hold it back.
“It was a serious battle to defend town,” said N.W.T. fire information officer Mike Westwick.
He said the community finally got some much-needed rain.
“We’re digging in and working towards securing this place now with the time it bought us, but we are not out of the woods yet by any means,” said Westwick.
While there is so much heartbreak, Patterson Lester said the effort that has been given to protect the community she loves makes her heart truly swell.
“My town means the world to me,” she said, tearing up.
“They’ve held it back, held it back, held it back. My town is still intact as of today.”
And so far everyone is still safe. In a community that has gone through two fire evacuations this summer and a flood last year, they have proven their resilience time and time again.
“I know we lost our family enclave. As long as we have our community and the people in it, we haven’t lost anything,” said Patterson Lester.
She still has a tiny cabin on wheels and she hopes to stay in it until the snow flies and then she’ll hunker down in town and plans to rebuild.