Near the end of Gabriel García Márquez landmark novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Macondo, the village in which much of the story unfolds, is swept away in a storm, a whirlwind that erases time and place.

Last week, a firestorm threatened to eradicate Flin Flon, the mining town where I was born. As I write, the danger has not passed. The fire still nibbles at the edges of the town and all residents who live there and in surrounding communities have fled. People in nearby Denare Beach have watched the fire consume their homes in images from the security cameras they had installed on them. My sister’s home on a lake south of town, a gathering place for family, is still threatened.

Of the shifting winds and the plight of those forced to flee, one evacuee told the CBC,
"It's Mother Nature, what can you do?" But let’s not blame nature for what we have caused. When I was growing up in Flin Flon and for many years after, no fires threatened the town. Today they are almost an annual occurrence. Summertime temperatures rarely rose above the mid-20s C. The week the fire approached, they hovered around 30. The mines and smelter that fed the area’s prosperity for decades, though now mostly closed, contributed to the reckoning that has come upon the people who live there, and everywhere. It is a bitter irony.

Where we live is a repository of memories, and those that stay with me – the oddities and uniqueness of my hometown – are such that I have called it my Macondo. Flin Flon’s name alone suggests a strangeness that might only be conceived in fiction, and indeed it’s what happened. But there’s much more to it than that.

Someday, Flin Flon might be swept away, if not this time, then another, in a distant future, I hope. Meanwhile, for the next couple of weeks, let’s look back on how the town came to be.

NEXT WEEK: Flintabbatey Flonatin Finds Fishpole Lake