Helicopters

The three of us paused, looking up at the sky. Scanning around a little anxiously, searching with eyes and ears.

We’d been happily discussing the state of the tide, the temperature of the water and the southerly wind that ripples the sea surface and occasionally wafts in a few jellyfish, but the distant wop-wop-wop of an approaching helicopter is unmistakeable and always disturbing. If you’ve seen the Coppola film Apocalypse now you will surely remember the opening scene in which Captain Willard is slowly awakened from a drunken sleep by the insistent beating of blades on the stifling air of Vietnam. It turns out to be the ceiling fan but still drives him to smash a wall mirror with his bare fist.

In La Gomera we’re better behaved than that, but at the sound of a whirlybird we will usually fall silent and look up. What is it about helicopters? Why are they so menacing? Slow and wingless, crawling impossibly across the skies, they seem to presage disaster, something bad about to happen or already under way.

The helicópteros we see here come in several varieties. Least troubling are the dull green Army ’copters that occasionally head towards the military quarters on the high plain near San Sebastián. I’ve never yet heard one blaring out The ride of the Valkyries like Coppola’s mad general, which would be exciting but probably viewed as bad form these days.

Then there are the sleek blue and white machines of the police, perhaps searching the seas around the islands for migrant boats in difficulties, or for a yacht heading this way from Morocco or South America with a suspect cargo. On a different island altogether, the Italian island of Sardinia where in a youthful adventure we looked after a smart mansion on the Costa Smeralda – playground of the very rich – I was inspected at close range by an Italian police helicopter. It spotted me on the terrace overlooking the sea and whirled over to face me with its tail in the air, unmoving, probably taking photographs with a long lens. I stood my ground defiantly, nothing to hide except the glass of wine I shouldn’t have been drinking while painting madam’s windows.

So police helicopters here bring their own reminiscent frisson, but worse are the smart red machines of GES (Grupo de Emergencias y Salvamento), the Canary Islands emergency and rescue service. They spell trouble not for us but for someone who has got themselves lost on the footpaths, or twisted their ankle or tried to walk too far on a hot day with too little water. These aircraft are based around the various islands but can be summoned by Gomeran land-based rescue teams if someone needs to be lifted out by air. They may also be called upon in a medical emergency to fly a patient from our local hospital to the superb main hospital in Tenerife.

On the morning in question it was a familiar yellow machine that appeared over the headland and whirred across the bay. One of ours, as they used to say in wartime, with relief. It’s stationed here only in the summer months but remains close by all year on one of the other islands, a multi-purpose assistant to the emergency services that can perform search or rescue missions and is also employed to monitor outbreaks of fire.

If the helicopter has a large bucket swinging beneath it, the bucket is for water and a fire has already taken hold, probably in difficult terrain. That happened in La Gomera in 2012, when summer-dried vegetation and warm winds combined to create a fierce blaze that took two weeks to control and resisted complete extinction for three months. Anyone in potential danger was efficiently evacuated to safety and there was no loss of human life, but the fire ended up scorching nearly a fifth of the island’s surface including part of the ancient laurel forest, the Parque Nacional de Garajonay.

On that occasion the helicopter was joined by two others and six hidroaviones, specialised fixed-wing seaplanes capable of scooping water from the sea to dump over the flames. They passed over our house every few minutes to skim across the bay of San Sebastián in a truly astonishing display of skilled piloting. Watching them was both thrilling and terrifying, because the fire was close enough to sprinkle our terrace with ash and at night the hills were outlined by an orange glow in the sky.

So what prompted me to write about this now, so many years later? The yellow helicopter of course, but also the ash that settled overnight on our terrace and blew into the open windows. Not flakes of ash from burning vegetation but dark brown grains like fine sand. They came from the erupting volcano on La Palma, blasted several kilometres into the air to drift across and settle around us, a sobering reminder that this large ball we all live on has a vibrant life of its own.

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Fire remains the main potential risk but that of 2012 resulted in a considerable increase in government-funded resources to watch for any outbreaks and quickly quench them. In summer there are full-time teams employed on firewatch throughout the forest, along with ground and air-based firefighting equipment.

Fortunately we don’t need to worry too much about volcanic disasters as well because La Gomera is one of the older Canary Islands and hasn’t shown any significant activity for the last two million years. Its last major eruption was around four million years ago.