Fire Season (19 page)

A
ll past folly recedes, at least momentarily, beneath the roiling smokes of June. Day after day the burned acreage mounts. By the fourth of June the Meason Fire has spread across 800 acres, the Diamond Fire close to 3,000. Neither burns very hot. Each creeps through grass and duff, mostly sparing the forest overstory. Each follows the classic pattern of major Black Range fires, burning eastward up the west-facing slopes with a push from a southwest breeze.

Then, on the fifth, the wind picks up. Humidity plummets into the low teens and high single digits. By late morning both fires show increased activity, with isolated torching in the timber on their eastern fronts. The observer plane lifts off from Grant County Airport to have a look from above. The spotter recommends air support for both fires: a helicopter dropping water, a tanker dropping slurry. The fires, it is agreed, need to be slowed down.

In the early years of prescribed natural fire, the approach was to stand back and watch while a fire did its thing. It ended when it ran out of fuel or the rain put it out. If a prescribed natural fire at any point threatened lives or property, it was no longer considered a prescribed natural fire. The strategy switched to total suppression, and all necessary resources were mustered to halt it on every front. Needless to say, this either/or approach hampered the ability of crews to make a fire do what they wanted it to do. It failed to take into account that a burn might be harmless on one flank while threatening, say, private cabins on another—that a mix of approaches may be needed on any one fire.

The 1988 fires in and around Yellowstone National Park, which burned more than one million acres and cost fourteen times the park’s annual operating budget to contain, were the most visible manifestation of natural burn policies that had been in place for twenty years. Though the fires may have been ecologically beneficial, even unavoidable—if not that year, some other year—the TV footage was a public-relations disaster for the Park Service. For years afterward, “prescribed natural fire” was severely curtailed in the parks and national forests, until more cogent plans could be written to prevent something on the scale of Yellowstone from happening again. The TV pictures were just too traumatic for the public to stomach, and the government land agencies had failed abysmally in educating generations of Americans raised on the propaganda of Smokey Bear.

More recently, in a program piloted on the Gila and five other national forests, fire personnel have been given greater leeway to shape burns to their liking. The Meason Fire proves a prime example of the revised approach. Prevailing wind and upslope terrain conspire to push the majority of the fire’s growth to the northeast. Six miles in that direction lies sensitive trout habitat. Forest officials want to keep the Meason Fire from hitting that creek with a full head of steam, incinerating streamside vegetation and dumping ash into the water. Using the North Star Road as a fuel break, they want to check the fire on its eastern flank and force it to back slowly to the west, downslope and into the wind.

Until now, the fire has cooperated with the plan. But the sudden increase in wind speeds has flung burning embers across the road. Once they land in the grass on the far side, they start new spot fires unconnected with the main fire. These spot fires threaten to run away in precisely the manner feared. Under the old let-burn approach, fire managers would face a choice: let the fire do what it wants to do, trout stream be damned, or suppress it everywhere, halting its progress on all sides. Under the new protocol, however, they have a third option: suppress it on the east where it threatens to burn toward the trout, and let it continue on the west where no such considerations prevail. This is the option they choose.

The bureaucracy has coined a phrase for this strategy that obscures as much as it reveals. Any time a lightning fire is not immediately suppressed, it becomes, in the terms of the trade, a Wildland Fire–Use Fire Managed for Resource Benefit. In other words, where the fire is doing good, we will let it burn; where it threatens to do ill, we will check its spread.

For two days the wind threatens to whip the Meason and Diamond fires into a gallop—I measure gusts up to fifty-seven miles per hour, which means winds at twenty-five to thirty in the lowlands—and for two days the observer plane recommends fighting back with an “air show,” flyboy language for helicopter bucket drops and slurry tanker runs. The forest aviation officer, who sits shotgun as the spotter on the observer plane, even goes so far as to call it “my air show,” unabashed by the possessive and theatrical character of the phrase. He comes on the scene like a god from above, able to tell ground personnel what their fire looks like over thousands of acres in a matter of minutes, just by spinning a couple of donuts around it. Pretty neat trick, and useful too. For these reasons, among others, his suggestions usually hold. More often than not, his recommendation is to invite aerial company along for the ride. The bias is understandable. One would be surprised were it otherwise: imagine an air force pilot admitting army infantry were always and everywhere sufficient to the task at hand.

For all I know, every gallon of that slurry sloshed across the forest is necessary to prevent a catastrophic fire and save threatened trout. I don’t get the details up here—the briefings, the maps—which is fine by me. I am both of the bureaucracy and above the bureaucracy. What I do know I piece together from static-filled radio transmissions and the occasional update given by fire personnel to the dispatcher: acreage burned, general fire behavior. Mostly, I sit and look at smoke.

So many competing interests are involved that it’s always easiest to err on the side of overwhelming force and smaller, more manageable fires. There is owl and fish habitat to think about, road access to preserve, private land to protect, downwind smoke pollution to consider; there are archaeological sites to worry about, weather and bureaucratic mandates to dance with, public relations to massage. I’m glad the headaches aren’t mine. Nonetheless, from my throne above the fray, I tend to think those in charge are too prone to traduce wilderness values on fires that don’t threaten a thing: too quick to approve chain saw use, too quick to approve slurry drops, too quick to approve helicopter landings, complete with chain saws cutting neatly manicured landing zones—too quick at every turn to give themselves the right to do in the wilderness things the rest of us are barred from doing by law. I’ve seen it repeatedly over the years. The hypocrisy is glaring, though few in the firefighting establishment seem to question it. Those who fly the choppers, drop the slurry, and run the chain saws would no doubt tell you they are protecting wilderness, not violating it—that if they carve up a few pieces of the landscape with motorized tools, it’s a small price to pay for protecting Gila trout, which not too long ago were an endangered species close to extinction.

If I’ve learned anything in my eight seasons here, it’s that there are no easy answers when it comes to fire—no blanket prescriptions, no ironclad laws. Having ruthlessly suppressed every fire for seventy-five years, we created not just overgrown forests but a firefighting apparatus addicted to the big money to be made off an emergency budget line. Someday it will have to be told that the funds are not unlimited. (Do what needs to be done and send the bill later for guaranteed payment: we know how that turns out.) Just as smothering every fire the moment it’s detected is no longer the answer, neither is standing back and letting every fire burn under conditions no one could construe as entirely natural. It took most of a century to create the problems we’re faced with now. It will take that long or longer to burn our way out of them, and it won’t always be pretty. All throughout the West fire officials, biologists, private property owners, and communities large and small are going to have to put their heads together and get creative with fire use, prescribed fire, mechanical thinning—a potpourri of approaches to the fire problem, varying from place to place and year to year as conditions dictate. Global warming won’t make the task any easier, but it does make the effort necessary: we can either allow the land to burn on our terms and hope the resulting mosaic stays healthy despite rising temperatures (a big hope) or we can watch as it’s reduced to blackened stumps and sterilized soil over millions of acres, the evolutionary work of millennia gone in the blink of an eye.

As much as I may quibble with specific tactics on specific fires, it’s also true that no forest in America has worked harder than the Gila to bring fire back to the landscape. Statistics bear this out. In my first full season as a lookout, 260,000 acres of Forest Service lands saw fire use nationwide. Nearly three-quarters of that was on the Gila. During that summer, the Boiler Fire burned 58,000 acres beyond the northern boundary of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, making it the largest fire-use fire ever to burn outside a wilderness area. Two years later, 290,000 acres of Forest Service lands saw fire-use fire nationwide—107,000 acres of that on the Gila. Just about any way you look at it, this forest is on the cutting edge of the effort to restore fire-adapted ecosystems. The Gila can justifiably call itself the epicenter of American wildfire.

After two days of checking the Meason Fire’s northeast flank with aerial drops of water and slurry, the fire manager calls a halt. If the fire wants so badly to burn across the road and on toward South Diamond Creek, so be it. The winds have calmed somewhat, and the forecast calls for cooler, wetter weather in the days ahead. Fire honchos will sit down with maps and plot a series of what are called trigger points—plans of what to do and when to do it as the fire reaches certain predetermined landmarks. This may mean lighting a backfire to rob the main fire of continuous fuels and slow its rate of spread; it may mean employing further water drops by helicopter. It may mean calling in state Game and Fish employees to remove Gila trout for safekeeping in hatchery tanks, until the fire runs its course and the fish can be repatriated. It may even mean doing nothing at all if the fire looks good. Everything will depend on weather and fire behavior.

By the evening of June 8, the Diamond Fire covers more than 7,000 acres, the Meason Fire nearly 3,000. The mountains to my north are mantled in a haze of drift smoke stretching sixty miles. On June 9, a cold front approaches from the northeast, bringing showers and touching off lightning. Even as existing fires calm somewhat amid the higher humidity, several new ones appear, scattered across the forest and beyond it. On the morning of the tenth, John spots three fresh smokes from Cherry Mountain, two of them near Lone Mountain in the Arenas Valley. The first he calls Lonesome, the second he calls Dove, and I laugh to myself when dispatch approves his nomenclature.

In the afternoon, the fish evacuation team goes to work in South Diamond Creek—stunning Gila trout with an electric shocker, scooping them up in nets, ferrying them by helicopter to the hatchery. How their work goes I will have to learn later from the newspapers. My boss has borrowed Mark, the relief lookout from Cherry Mountain, to spell me for a few days. Although by this point in the season I’m deeply in tune with the rhythms of solitude, the play of light on mountain landforms, the watching, the thinking, the sheer lazy lying around doing nothing, it’s also true that day after day of sitting in my tower has aroused a desire to be on the ground and on the move, soaking up the particulars of all the little niches on the landscape. If I’m going to pass the torch for a few days, I may as well make an adventure of it. The Meason and Diamond fires will still be there when I return. My maps have called forth an itch it’s time to scratch. The dog and I are going camping.

A
lice is the only living being I know who will take a forty-mile walk in the woods without any need for cajoling, planning, or consulting a calendar. We just go. If there’s a trail on the ground she leads; if not, I make her heel while I blaze one. She carries her own food in a mini-pannier draped across her back. We find water at springs and creeks, though not all of them run in June. Only a half dozen streams can be considered perennial, and only in their headwaters, on the east side of the Black Range, and many of the springs are intermittent at best—the scarcity of water a goodly part of what makes this place so little traveled. The water I drink must first be pumped through a filter to rid it of
giardia lamblia
, a protozoan parasite found in many Western streams; it causes severe intestinal problems, or what we used to call where I grew up the green-apple quickstep.

I get a kick out of Alice on these hikes, burdened by her pack but still feeling frisky, darting off the trail to hunt small game, her attention focused on one goal, scaring up movement to then give chase. I let her lead for half an hour, let her work up a little lather. Then I remove her collar, command her to heel. With her jingling silenced and her roaming curtailed, we just might meet a bear, an elk, a deer, a bobcat, some turkeys, who knows.

As in Frisbee golf, so in hiking: the movements of my limbs help my mind move too, out of its loops and grooves and onto a plane of equipoise. I have been followed all my life, in the chaos of my thoughts, by a string of words: song lyrics, nonsense phrases, snatches of remembered conversation, their repetition a kind of manic incantation, a logorrhea in the mind, and all of them intermingled with sermons and soliloquies—the spontaneous talker weaving his repetitive spell. At other times, tired of the words themselves but intrigued by their internal mechanics, I find myself unconsciously counting syllables in sentences, marking each one by squeezing the toes on first my right foot, then my left, back and forth in order to discern whether the final tally is an even or an odd number. (Eighty. Even.) If I weren’t a walker I suppose I’d be a television addict, a dope fiend, a social butterfly. Instead I note fluctuations on a landscape scale for hours on end each day, powerless to alter a thing out there in the world, utterly above it all, and when I slip into fevered solipsism I walk my way back to the place beyond words.