Wildfire

The situation gets more dire in these chapters as Sam and Delphy realize that no rescue is coming. They will need to rely on their own sense of Survival and Resilience Through Crisis until they can get out of the woods. Although both of them continue to demonstrate their resourcefulness, they still make some mistakes in these chapters. Delphy calls out to the bikers, who are now out to get them. She also rushes into the woods when she hears the plane; Sam follows her against his better judgment.

They make mistakes, but they also make clever choices, as they are still resourceful and intelligent kids. Delphy comes up with an ingenious plan to push the Jeep back onto the road, but she has not yet had the chance to implement it. Sam uses his sense of direction and his knowledge of trailblazing to set them on a course that he hopes will bring them back to the Jeep, though his attempts are also unsuccessful. Both Sam and Delphy rely on things that they have learned from their family members, drawing on their previous experiences to survive their current predicament. Additionally, they help balance and motivate each other, as it is easier to make decisions as a team.

The friendship and connection between Delphy and Sam grows stronger on their second day together, even as they face new and perhaps greater challenges. Delphy learns how Sam’s dad died, but she does not yet know the details. Sam learns how Delphy got lost in the woods. Although they have now crashed the Jeep and gotten lost, they are both careful not to blame each other and instead focus on solutions.

Their connection deepens when they talk openly with each other, but Sam sometimes withholds information. He does not talk much about his father because it is painful. He also keeps his fear of bears to himself, deciding that telling Delphy that bears are a threat will scare her. He also chooses not to tell her that “Jason Dean” is a pseudonym, hoping to spare her feelings after what was already undoubtedly an embarrassing experience.

The fire remains the primary antagonist in the novel: It poses the greatest immediate danger. However, these chapters introduce the dirt bikers as an underlying antagonistic force as the ones who started the forest fires. Though their motivations are not yet clear to Sam or Delphy, they set the fires to discourage outsiders from buying land and settling in Maine. This tactic is akin to ecoterrorism, or the destruction of the environment to further a political cause. Most forest fires are indeed started by people, though usually not intentionally. The bikers set these fires deliberately, exploiting Nature’s Simultaneous Power and Fragility. Even when Sam and Delphy get many miles away from the fire, the dirt bikers start a new blaze, which turns into a new threat. But they cannot control what they start; hot, dry conditions mean the fire spreads very quickly, making it more severe and difficult to escape.

There is irony in the fact that they start the fires to assert control, only to lose control almost immediately. This speaks to age-old conflict between humanity and nature, a conflict nature tends to win. Indeed, the fire illustrates the folly of toying with natural forces. It can even be read as an allegory for broader climate change, both in its widespread devastation and in the drought conditions that turned the forest into a tinderbox—both preventable situations, and both attributable to human effects on the environment.

Sam and Delphy experience an unexpected challenge from the natural world when they nearly hit a moose. Driving through the forest can come with many potential dangers beyond the immediate concern of the fire. Hitting a moose with a car can be extremely dangerous. Moose are very large, and they can crush cars and passengers if they fall onto vehicles. Though Sam avoids hitting the moose directly, he still crashes the Jeep in his efforts to stop the car. Sam has not yet explained in detail how his father died, but the collision he experiences in these chapters is reminiscent of that accident. Unlike Sam’s father, Sam and Delphy are lucky enough to be thrown free of the car and given a soft landing. This mirrored experience of a car accident keeps Sam’s father fresh in his mind, both as a guide and a missing part of life. These chapters also demonstrate how much of emergency survival is predicated on good luck rather than skill or good judgment, as the characters encounter both good and bad luck but ultimately persevere because of strokes of good luck, like finding the car and each other in the first place.