Beyond the Flames

A SUMMER OF FIRE; A TIME OF TESTING

Just before midnight on July 5, 2000, Heather and Lynn Thomas received the phone call that every parent dreads, the call that tells them one of their own has come to harm. “Andrea has been burned,” their neighbor said. “She’s being brought to the hospital by ambulance.”

The Thomases rushed from their ranch via Idaho’s Highway 28 toward Salmon, twelve miles away, not knowing the extent of their daughter’s injuries and unaware they were beginning a journey which would leave them, their family, friends and community forever changed.

Heather Smith Thomas grew up on a cattle ranch near Salmon Idaho, and started writing about horses and cattle during her teens. She has raised and trained horses for 45 years, and has published more than 6000 stories and articles, plus 13 books focusing on livestock and horses. She and her husband raise beef cattle and horses on a ranch in the mountains of eastern Idaho.

Wildfires burned 7.4 million acres across the West that summer—equivalent to a 5-mile wide strip from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic. The timber destroyed could have built 100,000 new homes. Idaho and Montana were especially hard hit. The Clear Creek fire, sparked by a lightning strike in the wilderness near Salmon, Idaho, eventually blazed across more than 200,000 acres and was the largest fire in the continental U.S. that year.

Lynn Thomas recalls that, upon arriving at the hospital, the sight of ambulances idling at the emergency entrance became his first realization of the enormity of what had happened: they were poised to transport someone for airlift to a trauma center.

Inside the emergency room, their daughter lay unconscious, her face covered with an oxygen mask, her legs ravaged by burns. EMTs were too engrossed in life-saving tasks to detail the extent of Andrea’s injuries for her parents, but Lynn and Heather Thomas didn’t need medical terminology or statistics to tell them that their daughter’s life hung by the thinnest of threads.

Moments later, Andrea was transferred to the waiting ambulance and whisked off to meet the life-fight plane for transport to the Burn Trauma ICU at University Hospital in Salt Lake City.

The Clear Creek fires kept their valley immersed in thick smoke for most of the summer, almost a metaphor for the months the Thomas family and friends spent supporting Andrea’s fight to survive while still carrying on the arduous work to maintain their ranches. As the months passed, clarity replaced the fog, and Heather Thomas knew she must tell their story. As she says, “Adversity brings out the best in us. Fire can forge within us a stronger metal. We can take the trauma that tests us, and use it to create a stronger and more focused purpose, higher goals, and most of all, a recognition of our common humanity. It may seem strange to say that we are blessed by tragedy, but it is true. Many blessings do come out of calamity. And like Jacob wrestling with the angel, we shall not let this go until it blesses us. It already has--and that's what our story is about.”