At the end of July 2021, the second pandemic summer, Claire and I drove from Kaş to Akyaka, a beach town surrounded by fire. We’d been in Kaş for Masha’s fortieth birthday, and though the city was meltingly hot, we spent our time drinking wine on a boat and swimming in a pool with her Russian grandmother and taking night dips under the stars. Sweaty but spiritually satiated, we headed to Akyaka to connect with our friends Peter and Anna and continue the carefree car trip summers that got us through the plague days.
The mood in Akyaka was immediately off. Our Airbnb— really, a small hotel— tried to insist that we’d have to change rooms partway through our stay; when we refused, they threatened to kick us out and more or less dared us to complain to Airbnb. (Which we did.) After one night, we decided it wasn’t worth the stress and moved to Anna and Peter’s hotel.
It was also pushing 110°F, a dry and relentless heat that made the air itself feel dizzy and delirious.
And, the day we arrived, wildfires began to rage out of control in Marmaris and Muğla— roughly 30 km away from us. As the inferno ballooned into something terrifying and unusual, texts poured in from concerned friends in Istanbul: come home. You’re too close.
The first night in Akyaka, we pulled the car around a corner near our hotel and the headlights lit up the eyes of a giant wild boar, easily bigger than the car, looming off the side of the road like a bad omen.
Every time we went swimming, we could see belches of smoke in the air from the fires nearby. The heat hugged so hard that my brain started playing tricks on me— it almost felt like I was in the mouth of the conflagration, slow cooking in a steaming oven. The sunsets smeared across the sky as the light diffused through the ash. We drove to Muğla one night to meet a friend for dinner, after the fires there had been contained, and wondered if we were being outrageously foolish.
Our trip was supposed to continue on to Çeşme, but on our second to last morning in Akyaka, we had a summit at breakfast and unanimously agreed that the best choice was to go back to Istanbul. And so, we left the burning south, and went home.
I wrote about these wildfires, and their effect on the beekeepers of southern Turkey, for The Atlantic. You should read it!
No Comments