Fire Season (18 page)

Living in New York years later did much to soften my revulsion at cross-hatched landscapes. Few American places are so defined by a latticework pattern, and I made it my mission and found it my joy to trace as many lines of the circuit as I could. Naturally I found myself attracted to those places where the grid tilted weirdly or dissolved altogether, the derelict waterfronts for instance, but even where the grid was at its most rigid I found pockets of the human carnival so vivid they kept my vertigo at bay. I can’t count how many times I walked across the 59th Street Bridge and down the island of Manhattan, through the Lower East Side and around City Hall to the Financial District, ghostly cold in its nighttime emptiness, and then up through Battery Park and Tribeca and over to Chinatown and on to SoHo and the West Village and Chelsea, weaving amid the cross-dressing whores in the Meatpacking District and the homeboy queers drifting toward the piers. Certain streets always seduced me, Eighth Avenue in the 30s and 40s for instance, one of the last safe havens for squalor and vice in the Giuliani years, the bus station and the little hat shops, the porn stores and the odd bodega, the sleazy dive bars with shuttered windows where daylight was an uninvited guest; or Avenue B with its mix of hipster joints and old-school grime, the tapas places and the leather bars, Spanish lyrics wafting from the tenements. I walked with the metallic tang of loneliness in the back of my throat and the sense of seeking something, though knowing not what it was or where to find it. I snuck glimpses into lamplit rooms, saw men in winter sleeping over grates, all their worldly possessions contained in shopping carts. I heard laughter through open windows, saw women smoking cigarettes alone on fire escapes. Late night drew me to the sounds of jazz in those underground nests of urban cool, Small’s and the Vanguard. I nursed drinks in smoky bars with the company of a pen and paper—the Cedar, the Old Town, McHale’s, those dark-wood and pressed-tin interiors filled with the pleasant din of voices and the clink of ice and glass. All that love and loss on the surface of things: again and again the city broke my heart and mended it within the space of half a block, half an hour.

Once, on one of my long weekend walks, I glanced up in Chelsea and saw a strange strip of grass growing above a metal structure in the sky. Curious, I followed it—an elevated train track—several blocks north, looking for a way to scale it. I climbed a fence, scrambled up a mound of old car tires, hauled myself onto a roof, and shimmied up the iron buttresses onto the tracks. What I found floored me: a strip of meadow in the sky, a magic carpet of grasses and flowers stretching more than thirty blocks from 34th Street to Gansevoort in the Meatpacking District. Nature had reclaimed it out of view of the entire city except for a few lucky apartment dwellers adjacent to the tracks, one of whom had laid a plank from his kitchen window to allow him to step across and tend a little flower garden and a lone pine tree festooned with Christmas lights. Enchanted, I went back again and again, walking the length of the line, crawling under barricades meant to halt trespassers, always lingering in the spot where old factories and warehouses rose on either side, providing the shade for a glade of trees to flourish within site of graffitied brick. By becoming my favorite place in all of Manhattan, it showed me how badly I craved a little wildness, how starved of it I’d become. How could I sustain my attraction to the city when the thread of it I loved the most was the only place on the island abandoned by the human touch? (And not for much longer, as it turned out; in 2009 a chunk of it was tamed and turned into a scenic city park.) Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: “My needle … always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.”

I’ve always liked edges, places where one thing becomes another. The railroad tracks of my youth with their remnant native grasses in the right-of-way, the New York harborside, the demarcation line of this wilderness. Transition zones, boundaries, and borderlands. I like the mixing that happens, the juxtapositions, the collisions and connections. I like the way they help me see the world from a fresh angle. Maybe it was inevitable that I’d become a searcher, a wanderer, but I think the process was helped along when my original home in the world was destroyed by the logic of industrial agriculture. On the piece of earth where I grew up not much remains to mark our efforts. A lone silo and quonset hut stand gray and forlorn against the horizon just east of the old railroad spur town of Currie, in far southwestern Minnesota. The house and garage, the grove of trees, the chicken coop, the granary, the hayloft and corncrib and farrowing barn—all are gone, burned to ash and plowed into the earth for a few more acres of tillable land, planted now with corn heavily subsidized by the government to keep it cheap and plentiful.

Sometimes I’ll remember how my brother and I practiced farming in miniature from about the age of five. In a bare patch of earth next to the garage we dug little rows in the dirt, planted them with seeds snuck from the bags in the granary. Within days we had little corn plants poking toward the sunlight. For a month or so we sprayed our little field with water from the garden hose, imitating summer storms; with the toy tractors we were given at Christmas we tilled between the rows to keep the weeds at bay. I see us in our childhood naïveté, practicing for the agricultural artistry of adulthood, practicing for a future that, for reasons beyond our control, would not be ours. But before I get too carried away in sentimentality, I tell myself it was a piece of luck, our failure. It set me free to make a failure of myself in other, more interesting ways. Without that original failure perhaps I’d still be there, picking rocks in springtime, wheeling back and forth through the corn in a giant combine on a few hundred acres of someone else’s rented land in autumn, playing out the final chapter in the old dream as I imagined the ways I could spend my subsidy payment. In my current line of work my government check at least feels honestly earned.

And anyway, all of that was long ago and far away. Here and now, visible twenty-five miles northwest of me over the top of the Black Range, some combination of science and art is happening, and with them something older than either. The smoke off the Diamond and Meason fires billows softly into the sky, drifting northeast. It rides the prevailing wind over the top of the Black Range, pouring into the east-side canyons and fingering toward the Sierra Cuchillos—the knife mountains—beyond the forest boundary. Come morning the air will smell sweetly of burning grass and pine duff, and my tower will cast its silhouette against a hazy salmon sunrise. No one knows exactly how the fires will roam—how many acres will burn and with what intensity; so much depends on weather—and that’s a good deal of the fun. There is no formula for reclaiming fire. It may be more useful to think in terms of fire reclaiming us. Historian Stephen Pyne argues that in societies where we’ve locked away fire in factories and internal combustion engines, we’ve achieved its remystification; its uninvited appearance in nature frightens us. But if we fail to make our peace with it, fail to learn to live with it, the wildfires of the future will be like nothing we’ve ever seen.

T
hat wildfire could be fun was a fact known mainly by those who fought it. You slept outdoors. You felt a kinship with your crew members, brothers and sisters in a tough line of work. You hiked, parachuted, and rode helicopters over beautiful forests; you drove scenic roads, told dirty jokes under the stars, did your work in the wild. Though paramilitary in structure and outlook, the firefighting apparatus didn’t face an enemy that screamed or bled. It wasn’t quite a war; it was that slightly more benevolent thing, “the moral equivalent of war,” to borrow from William James. The common endeavor protected forests and watersheds. It saved trees and homes, it guarded the public good—so the thinking went—and it was almost always a serious adrenaline rush.

But there were failures. Many became the stuff of local and even national lore, especially when drenched in death. In the northern Rockies, the big blowup of 1910: seventy-nine dead. In Montana, Mann Gulch, 1949: thirteen dead. South Canyon, Colorado, 1994: fourteen dead. These were FEAR fires, an old firefighter acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Some who ran survived. Some did not. Suppressing fire involves a dangerous intimacy. Part of the thrill arose from the danger. That fire could be useful, even unavoidable, took far longer to appreciate.

For decades the fire of lore in this part of the world was the McKnight Fire. On the morning of June 22, 1951, a Forest Service bush plane circled the Gila on a reconnaissance flight. Despite severe drought conditions, the pilot and his spotter saw no sign of smoke, and fire lookouts reported situation normal. A couple of hours later, at 1:29 p.m., according to the
Silver City Enterprise
, “a great burst of smoke, not unlike the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb explosion, arose over the area of the McKnight Canyon.” Feeding on logging slash and thick brush, the fire burned an acre a minute for the first half hour. High winds from the southwest pushed it into standing timber. Steep canyons acted on it like a flue, and flame lengths reached 150 feet above tree line. The fire grew so fast smokejumpers were deemed useless to stop it. By daylight the next morning, 10,000 acres had gone up in smoke, and fire-line construction had barely begun.

The call went out for bodies, wherever they could be had. Men were pulled from area taverns and handed Pulaskis and shovels. Among Forest Service employees it was all hands on deck. Hopi and Navajo crews responded with numbers in the hundreds. Fort Bliss sent soldiers, and air corps students joined in from Western New Mexico University in Silver City. Volunteer ranch hands worked the fire’s east side on horseback. Bulldozers blazed lines on the south and west fronts. Airplanes dropped supplies by the ton to fire camps on the Black Range crest. In the fire’s second day, another 10,000 acres burned, and on the third day 10,000 more. Ash fell like snow on the town of Embree, ten miles southeast of the fire. The forest was so dry, firefighters lit back fires merely by dropping matches on the ground. One crew saw a bear running through the smoke, its fur burned off and its flesh half-charred. A reporter from the
Enterprise
captured the general mood (ellipses his): “All of New Mexico needs the one thing… the only thing… that can save the forest. It is rain. We have looked to the skies… now we must look to God.”

By the fourth day, the fire’s progress had slowed. Slop-overs spilled across lines here and there, but they were quickly attacked. Additional soldiers arrived from Fort Bliss, bringing their number to 700. Their commanders thought of it as a training mission, a chance to test them in battle. “It’s the closest to combat conditions they’ll find in this country,” forest supervisor Ed Tucker said. Movie crews from Warner Bros. and Twentieth Century Fox arrived to shoot stock footage of smoking stumps and men smeared with soot.

One week into the fight, just as the fire appeared to be under control, the wind shifted to the north ahead of storms. Three hundred men on the south lines fled as a long wall of flame blew up at their backs. The state game department pilot, flying over the fire at the time, reported that his plane flipped upside down at the moment of the blowup, his instruments rendered useless. His spotter told a local reporter, “It seemed as though the whole front broke loose at once and swept forward. It was a horrible sight.” The plume of smoke rose 18,000 feet in the air.

Soon a new fire broke out in the Gila Wilderness, a lightning strike on Little Creek. Four smokejumpers held it for a day, then high winds blew it over 5,000 acres in an afternoon. Hundreds of men left the cooling lines of the McKnight Fire, rested briefly, and joined the rush to Little Creek. The fire was eight miles from the nearest road and uphill all the way. Before it was done, it would burn 15,000 acres. It took rain and a thousand men to catch it, in that order of importance.

For the entire week the McKnight Fire burned, it shared front-page space with bulletins from the Korean War. To read those old clippings is to see just how profoundly the Cold War mentality had permeated the public attitude about fire. “Red Air Force Beaten for Fifth Time” neatly echoes the report a few days later: “Battle Against Big Forest Fire Succeeds.” On July 5 a headline reported, “U.S. Battle Casualties in Korea at 78,110.” A week later a similar tally appeared for the summer’s big fires: “Gila Forest Loses 55,000 Acres of Timber.” One reporter who obtained an aerial view of the McKnight Fire described it as a “holocaust” wreaked by “cancerous fingers of smoke.” “Even at a distance,” he wrote, “the thing looks menacing. It may be far-fetched, but somehow, I kept thinking of the pictures of the Bikini atom-bomb explosion and that big mushroom cloud.” Talk of a “Red menace”—a popular conceit amid the ascendance of Senator Joseph McCarthy—could apply just as well to forest fires as to Asian or Soviet communists. Each threatened American prosperity. After World War II, the national forests fueled the housing boom with cheap lumber. Losing them to flames remained unacceptable. Eventually, as the Korean War wound down and the military found itself overburdened with equipment, the Forest Service would inherit its surplus aircraft: helicopters, bombers, transport and patrol planes. The tools for the one war were interchangeable with the other. In both, containment was the operative word. The enemy must not be allowed to spread.

By midcentury, a seemingly noble theory of protecting the public good had calcified into rigid dogma. It would take two more decades for the Forest Service to finally admit that fighting every fire damaged rather than protected the national forests; that instead of putting out fires, we’d merely been putting them off. Sixty years on, the McKnight Fire even begins to look like a blessing. Without it we’d have been deprived of one of the biggest aspen stands in America and much of the wildlife that love it. Its multilevel, herbaceous understory offers foraging, nesting, and denning habitat for all sorts of mammals and birds. Elk and deer browse young aspen sprouts and songbirds nest in the softwood cavities of mature trees. Though aspen tend to colonize fire-disturbed areas at high elevation—they arise in shoots from a shared root colony in what are properly called not trees but ramets—once in place they’re largely burn-resistant, providing a natural barrier to fire’s spread into surrounding coniferous forest. Fond of fire but resistant to fire: how’s that for evolutionary genius?