She’d gone to the beach after Christmas to get away from all the smoke.
But the smoke found her anyway.
“We packed up all our stuff and headed south,” Susanne "Skye" Evans said. “If I’d had more experience with fire, I’d know that not on fire means not on fire yet.”
Evans grew up in Lincoln. She’s lived in Australia since 2002, raising five kids in a scenic tourist town called Katoomba, in Blue Mountains National Park — with nature outside her door on every side.
The 42-year-old is part of the gig economy. She teaches at the local Steiner preschool and manages holiday houses — the Australian version of VRBOs — and runs an organic fruit delivery service.
The Australian fires on the news around the world are part of her world.
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She shared her story with me Sunday night — Monday in Katoomba, in the eastern Australian state of New South Wales.
Evans was home again and happy to be there.
Things have calmed down in the mountains and a bit of rain had fallen. But fires still rage.
Bark and leaves fall from trees, creating acres and acres of kindling.
Australians are accustomed to fire, but not like this. Months of drought, high temperatures and fire-fueling winds have spawned hundreds of out-of-control blazes, destroying homes, displacing thousands of people and killing at least 15.
Millions of acres have burned — or are burning — and some estimate that as many as 500 million animals, including beloved koalas and kangaroos, have died.
“People are very concerned about the wildlife and about the biodiversity in those areas that are burning,” Evans said.
Fires had been flaring for about two months near Evans in the Blue Mountains, and some of those fires were creeping closer by late December.
“Part of the reason it’s quite frightening is there is only one highway to get in or out,” she said.
Like most of her neighbors, Evans has an app on her phone that tracks bush fires and alerts her to danger. The day they left, fires were as close as 9 miles to the north and 4 miles to the south.
“It just felt really unsafe to me.”
Since her teaching job had ended for the year — it’s summer down under — she loaded her youngest kids and the camping gear in her minivan and drove down the coast.
A friend and her two little boys joined them on a beach in Mystery Bay.
It was Dec. 30 when Evans checked her phone and noticed an alert for a fire in the area, predicted to move west, away from their camping site.
She woke up at 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve.
“Ash was snowing down on us, and the sky was red. It had come straight toward our camp in the night.”
She panicked, Evans said. Threw the sleeping bags and the kids in the van and headed north up the east coast toward Sydney, four hours away.
To the left, she could see a massive bush fire.
To the right, clear, blue light over the ocean.
The highway filled with cars and, after an hour of driving, slowed to a crawl. A stream of cars headed in the opposite direction, covered in ash, with drivers gesturing for them to turn around.
And they did.
Eventually, they came to a Red Cross evacuation center in the seaside town of Ulladulla. By then, her phone had lost reception. The power had gone out. They were without shoes or extra clothes and were running low on gasoline.
“People kept pouring in,” she said. “We were just stuck on vacation, and some of these people, their houses had burned.”
She’d been feeling quite sorry for herself, Evans said. But her perspective began to change when fellow evacuees began to gravitate toward a small noodle restaurant in a nearby mall, run by an Asian couple with a separate source of power for their stove.
A queue formed.
As darkness fell, the couple had trouble seeing to cook. Evans and her kids had a pair of head torches — lights on an elastic band to keep their hands free while walking or hiking in the dark.
They gave one to the cook.
“Somehow, it shifted the whole experience for us,” she said. “To OK, how can we share what we have instead of feeling like poor us?”
That night, they discovered a carnival set up beside the evacuation center — powered by generators. Evans had packed glow sticks for their planned beach New Year’s. Instead, she and the children went on a mission: “To give them all away.”
They took a selfie, grinning into the camera.
The next night, a firefighter and his family invited them into their home, along with Evans’ friend, her children and two more displaced families.
“The power was out, so we had to eat everything from the refrigerator before it went bad,” she said. “We had a cheese platter and a barbecue and some beers, and everything was all right.”
After a few nights in a vacant holiday home owned by her boss, Evans is home, keeping a close watch on the skies and the news.
Evans has been sending updates to her father, Doug Evans, in Lincoln and posting a few on his Facebook page, where the former school board member had been sharing stories about the far-away, but close-to-his-heart, fires.
“In case you think I’m posting too many stories about the fires in Australia that have my daughter and grandchildren camping out in their car while they’re running from the fires, I have to tell you I’m not even posting the ones that are so heartbreaking I can’t stand it,” he wrote last week.
Fires occur regularly during Australian summers, the daughter said, and periodic burning in the bush is regenerative.
But this has been far different.
Australia has a poor environmental record, Evans said, despite the efforts of grassroots groups in the country. And scientists point to climate change for exacerbating the frequency and intensity of the seasonal fires.
“The conservative government is kind of in the pocket of the mining companies, supporting industry over the environment.”
The government response to the fires was incredibly slow, she said, until citizens pressured Prime Minister Scott Morrison to take stronger action.
In the big picture, it feels like too little, Evans said. Too late.
But she's determined to do her part. Right now, she’s lining up concerts — she plays double bass and sings in a band — to raise money for the bush fire victims.
“I’d really like to emphasize that we were never in any great danger,” she said. “We never lost anything; it was more of being witness.”
Her biggest takeaway from the terrible fires has been the kindness. Patience in the petrol lines. Fellow Australians sharing what little they had to share.
“I’ve been really impressed by all of the cooperation I’ve seen,” she said. “There’s been very little of people being terrible to each other.”