51 pages • 1 hour read
Rodman PhilbrickWildfire
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 6: “Day Six”
Part 6, Chapter 34 Summary: “Burn, Baby, Burn”
Delphy wakes Sam. She tells him to be quiet because the bikers are right outside. They are chanting “from away, stay away” (146). Sam thinks they must hate people who are not from Maine coming to the area and building expensive places like the camp. The bikers are terrifying up close. Delphy and Sam know that they have to get out of the camp without being seen. The bikers set fire to the camp.
Sam wishes he could still bring the Jeep down the ramp, but he knows that the men will see them, so they stick to the logging road instead. Across the lake, they see that the main fire has caught up with them. The main camp building explodes, and Sam and Delphy take the opportunity to run toward the woods.
Part 6, Chapter 35 Summary: “The Rabbit and the Wolf”
Sam and Delphy almost make it without being seen, but Delphy falls, and Sam knows that the bikers have seen them. They get to the Jeep, and Sam turns on the engine just as the men discover the ramp that they made. Sam and Delphy can hear their bikes coming closer and closer, and Sam feels like “a rabbit with a pack of wolves bearing down” (151). Sam drives fast down the logging road. The air is thick with smoke. Suddenly, they hear the loud screams of the dirt-bike engines; the men have caught up with them.
Part 6, Chapter 36 Summary: “Road to Nowhere”
The bikers threaten Sam and Delphy as they drive alongside them, telling them to “stop the Jeep or die” (154). Delphy climbs into the back seat of the Jeep and uses her crutch to hit one of the bikers. He goes flying off of his bike. She tries to do the same to the other biker, but he dodges all of her swings. Finally, Delphy grabs a gallon jug of water and hits him over the head. His bike is destroyed as he falls. Sam and Delphy get away.
They outrun the smoke. They are both relieved to have escaped the bikers and reflect that people have likely died in the fire because of the two men. They keep driving, still not knowing where the logging road is leading them. Eventually, Sam realizes that the logging road has curved back into itself; they are driving east, back toward the fire.
Part 6, Chapter 37 Summary: “The End of the Trail”
Sam and Delphy panic, but the road gradually curves back west. Sam thinks about his father driving trucks on roads like this one. After a while, they come to a big, clear-cut section of the forest. Sam realizes that this is the end of the logging road.
Part 6, Chapter 38 Summary: “Because, Because, Because”
Sam despairs. They cannot go back down the logging road because the fire has consumed it, but they also cannot stay where they are because the fire is coming their way. Sam is afraid that they both might die and worries what will happen to his mom if he dies. Something catches Sam’s eye in the distance, and he and Delphy realize that it is a radio tower. Sam feels a surge of hope: If someone put a radio tower somewhere in the trees, there would need to be a road leading to it.
Part 6, Chapter 39 Summary: “No Going Back”
Sam and Delphy get back into the Jeep. There is no road leading to the tower, but Sam drives the Jeep very slowly “through the scraggly trees and bushes that cover the hillside” (166). Delphy guides them and, together, they make it to the top of the hill where the radio tower is. The air is thick with smoke. Sam drives slowly, looking for a road. Instead, they find Phat Freddy Bell’s radio station. Sam honks the horn of the Jeep.
Part 6, Chapter 40 Summary: “Ride of the Falconries”
Freddy Bell stumbles out of the building, relieved to be rescued. The fire is swiftly catching up to them as Freddy directs Sam toward the tower’s access road.
The road is bumpy and dangerous, but Sam keeps driving fast as fire pours over the hill. The fire is on both sides of the road, and Sam thinks about his dad and what happened to him in Afghanistan when his truck “rolled off the shoulder of the road, turning the rig upside down. How he was trapped in the cab as the gas poured out and then exploded” (172).
The Jeep reaches a paved road at the bottom of the access road, and Freddy tells Sam to turn left. Sam floors it and they drive at 50 miles per hour down the road. Delphy puts out burning cinders that land on Sam’s hair and urges him to keep driving as fast as he can. They keep going until they reach a village with a dock leading into the lake. Sam drives the Jeep straight into the lake; it is shallow enough that they do not drown, but far enough from the shore that the fire cannot hurt them as it burns down the entire lakeside village.
Part 6, Chapter 41 Summary: “This Is the End, My Friends”
Delphy tells Sam that, as he was driving down the hillside, he kept yelling, “Nobody dies! Nobody dies!” (176). He does not remember this; he only remembers the trees exploding.
Later, Sam learns that the fire they survived, the Great North Woods Fire, was the biggest forest fire ever to hit Maine. People call him a hero, but he thinks about the firefighters, a trucker who drove his truck through the fire for 10 miles to rescue his family, and many more people whose “stories were never heard” (177). He also thinks that the Jeep is a hero. The owner of the Jeep, Captain Aldrich Brown, who Sam noted earlier as a Korean War veteran, has a loving grandson who tows, restores, and presents the Jeep to Aldrich on his 90th birthday. Sam attends the birthday party, and Aldrich gives him the ownership papers to the Jeep.
Sam and Delphy keep in touch and see each other often. They are both relieved to learn that the two men who started the fire, brothers Charles and James Binney, were arrested. Sam’s mom promised herself that if Sam survived the fire, she would finish her time at the rehabilitation center. Sam is happy to report that she is doing much better. She loves working in her garden again. Sam reminds her that all they can do is take everything one day at a time.
Part 6 Analysis
Nature’s Simultaneous Power and Fragility nearly kill Sam, Delphy, and Freddy in these final chapters: They escape the fire by the narrowest of margins. Once again, the bikers are human actors whose behavior significantly threatens the natural world. Although there was no real Great North Woods Fire in Maine, the fire in Wildfire is not wholly fictional. It is based largely on the Great Fire of 1947, the 2017 and 2018 forest fires in California, and other forest fires across North America that have worsened in severity in recent years.
The fire is so powerful and so frightening that Sam compares it to a warzone. That comparison is partly because of his father, who died in Afghanistan during the war. Sam survives a fire, while his father died in one. Sam’s arc subverts his father’s, and he essentially conquers one of his biggest sources of fear and trauma. Until now, Sam could not confront how his father died; the thoughts were too painful. As he drives the Jeep down the access road, he finally considers what happened in more detail: The official report stated his father “perished in less than thirty seconds” when his rig caught fire and exploded (172). The connection between the two events is made explicit when Sam says, “[T]hirty seconds can be an eternity if you’re inside a fire. Believe me, I know” (172).
The parallels between war and wildfire also develop the theme about collaboration. While Sam and Delphy’s dynamic examines The Essentiality of Friendship and Connection, this parallel speaks to the importance of cooperation between states and communities, especially when facing natural disaster. It is also significant that both fires were started artificially rather than naturally. War is borne from human conflict, just like climate change and the act of ecoterrorism that sparked the wildfire. In linking these tragedies to a common origin—humanity—the narrative cautions against discord and division. A problem as vast and formidable as climate change can only be addressed through teamwork and cooperation.
Things seem dire in the last chapters of Wildfire, but once again, Survival and Resilience Through Crisis prevail. At some points in the book, Sam describes his father’s mantras for getting lost in the woods (i.e., make a plan and stick to it) or driving on a logging road (i.e., keep the wheels in the ruts). As he rockets toward the lake, Sam repeats a mantra of his own: Nobody dies. His determination, sense of self-preservation, and desire to keep his friends safe allow him to make a daring escape that most 12-year-olds would not be capable of. His survival skills and ability to do what is necessary finally pay off, and his mantra holds true. Nobody dies in the Jeep.
At several points in Wildfire, the difference between surviving and dying comes down to hope. Giving up can be tempting in the face of such overwhelming danger. In these final chapters, Sam and Delphy get close to giving up when the logging road runs out. By paying attention, thinking things through, and, perhaps most importantly, being willing to keep going, they manage to beat the odds. The book does not actually describe how or when Sam, Delphy, and Freddy are rescued. They drive the Jeep into the middle of a lake and wait out the fire for an indeterminate amount of time. That process of survival must have been a challenge in itself, but it is not part of the book’s main narrative. Instead, the steps taken by Sam and Delphy to reach circumstances that enable them to be rescued are the book’s main narrative.
Hope and skill are crucial to survival, but so are friendship and connection. Sam and Delphy would never abandon each other when things get hard. When they are running away from the camp and Delphy falls, she tells Sam to “go ahead…I’ll catch up” (150). Sam refuses to leave her. By contrast, when Delphy knocks the first of the bikers to the ground, Sam reflects that “you’d think the second biker would go back to help his fallen brother, but he doesn’t” (154). He keeps trying to hurt Sam and Delphy. The brothers’ lack of solidarity and care is part of what leads to their eventual downfall, which serves as a striking contrast to Sam and Delphy, who have grown to feel like siblings.
Freddy becomes another ally for the main characters: He gives them important information to get through the danger. Sam and Delphy are willing to help him escape the radio tower, just as he is willing to help them. At the very end of the book, it is Sam’s mother’s love for him and her desire to see him survive that helps her commit to recovery. The two of them rely on each other to make it through each day, even when things get difficult, and Sam and Delphy also maintain their connection in their regular lives.
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