Grade 4 student Ryan Chouhan made a Mother’s Day card and wrote three paragraphs about why his mom is a special lady. He even planned to buy her a gift with his allowance.
That was before he was abruptly evacuated from the tinder-dry conditions and raging inferno at Fort McMurray with only a few changes of clothing and necessary papers.
“I guess I didn’t think it through. All I thought about was the fire. I didn’t think of anything else,” Ryan mutters with a slightly apologetic look cocked at his mother.
His mother Rachel purses her lips, gives him a wide smile and hugs him. The emotion-filled gesture speaks louder than words.
“We have no family in Canada. That’s why we need to stick together,” says husband Dan.
The trio registered their names on Thursday at Northland’s Expo Centre, a temporary retreat for evacuees fleeing for their lives.
The Chouhan house stands in Timberlea, so far a community that is minimally ravaged by fire. But at the moment, they have no news of what to expect when they return.
Their ordeal started Tuesday, when Rachel, an Alberta Health Service X-ray technician at Northern Lights Hospital received word that the hospital was evacuating.
At that moment, Dan, a process operator, who had lost his job a month ago, had just polished his resume and was at a job interview. Ryan was in class at St. Kateri Catholic School.
Due to road blockages, Rachel and a friend were forced to drive to Anzac for shelter.
“I actually cried in the car. I called my neighbour to pick up Ryan and I texted my husband,” Rachel said.
While driving to Anzac, the two co-workers encountered terrifying walls of fire.
“It was almost like a movie scene. We saw fire on both sides of the road and we didn’t know if we were going into a fire or leaving a fire.”
Once safely settled in Anzac, Rachel continued frantically calling and texting Dan. He was in the southern community of Gregoire attempting to return home to the northern community of Timberlea.
However, police blocked a main an intersection preventing him from collecting his son. After waiting patiently for three hours, Dan’s break arrived when the police officers temporarily left the barricade.
“After three hours of waiting, I had to make it to my son. I had no choice,” Dan said.
He raced home and waited believing that the fire was travelling in a different direction. It was only at the urgent texting of his wife, that he grabbed whatever was available, jumped into the family Honda Pilot SUV with Ryan and headed towards Anzac on Tuesday night at 11:30 p.m.
“The smoke was very bad. You would get a headache in an hour,” commented Dan.
Father and son arrived at Anzac Wednesday morning at 5 a.m. and waited three hours to fill up on gas.
“We had no TV. No one was saying what was going on,” said Rachel. That raised everyone’s anxiety level.
Although Anzac is only 50 km from Fort McMurray, a lake separates the two communities. Fire usually has difficulty jumping bodies of water and the Chouhans felt they were safe.
“While we were at Anzac, we thought we were OK. Then we started to see the smoke,” noted Ryan.
They decided to leave and drove nearly 250 km before arriving at Grasslands on Thursday morning at 2 a.m. After going 48 anxious hours without sleep, they finally dozed off for a couple of hours in the SUV while parked at the local gas station.
“This is a very different experience. You never think about it. You hear about fire and flood and other things on the news, but you never think it could come to you,” Rachel said.
That is the shocking reality facing every family registering at the Edmonton Expo Centre.
Shazia Anjun, a resident of Thickwood, one of the neighbourhoods most hit by fire, woke up on Tuesday with blue skies. Within hours the clouds had turned black. Police knocked on the door telling the family to pack their bags and leave the premises within 30 minutes.
Scrambling to collect her daughter Duha and son Hassan, Anjun joined up with her sister-in-law Gaurav Dhunna and her twins Shivani and Shaurya.
“We were driving through flames left and right and people were making U-turns trying to get out,” said Anjun.
Although the trip to Edmonton was grueling, and the aftermath of possibly going back to a charred home is a real possibly, the Anjuns and Dhunna families are determined to return.
As Dhunna eloquently said, “We want to go back. I miss Fort McMurray. What we have is not a house. It is a home.”
Interestingly enough, every evacuated mother the Gazette interviewed did not have Mother’s Day on her radar. Gifts and cards are nice they said, but they pale in significance to the recent catastrophe – something those of us not uprooted might do well to remember.
