Fire Season (2 page)
Authors: Philip Connors
Tags: #Nature, #Animals, #Wildlife, #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs, #Sports & Recreation, #Outdoor Skills
It would be difficult to exaggerate how radical an experiment those first “prescribed natural fires” were within the prevailing mind-set of the Forest Service. But their success caused others to take note. In 1978, based on early results from the Gila and the Selway-Bitterroot in the northern Rockies—the two national forests that pioneered the let-burn approach—the Forest Service officially rescinded the 10 a.m. policy.
What’s happened here is akin to species reintroduction. Think of fire as an endangered species, which, after its nearly century-long absence, we’re attempting to restore to a land that evolved with its imprimatur. The two wilderness areas at the heart of the Gila get hit by lightning, on average, 30,000 times per year, and they comprise less than a quarter of the forest’s total area of 3.3 million acres. In the United States, only the Gulf coast of Florida surpasses the Southwest in density of lightning strikes, and there it comes with far heavier rains. Combine the frequency of lightning with an arid climate and one begins to understand why this is the most fire-prone landscape in America. In my eight years on the peak the forest has averaged more than 200 wildfires per season—a low number by twentieth-century norms. Each year now, several lightning-caused fires on the Gila are allowed to burn for weeks or even months at a time, sometimes over tens of thousands of acres. Often they remain benign surface fires. They chew up the ground-level fuel that’s built up over the decades. Occasionally they torch in stands of mature forest, establishing a mosaic of open meadows. Even the hottest fires, with their apocalyptic visions of black smoke pluming thousands of feet in the air, have their place. As devastating as they appear, they constitute the birthday of aspen and oak, which seize their turn in the succession of forest types natural to this part of the world, a succession determined in large part by fire. It’s not as if anyone can say with certainty which fires should be put out and which allowed to burn. Firefighters still suppress more than 90 percent of all wildfire starts here. The experiment is ongoing, as much art as science, and I feel fortunate to have held a front-row seat for the show.
The lookout’s purpose has evolved along with our understanding of fire’s intrinsic value. No longer are we merely a first-alarm system alerting authorities to the presence of a disruptive force, whereupon men and women descend in parachutes and helicopters to quash it. Now, on some smokes, we work with fire managers and “fire-use modules,” keeping radio contact with crews on the ground as a fire does its ancient work, offering eyes in the sky as we monitor the course of a blaze that may, in the end, spread across dozens or even hundreds of square miles. In 2003, for instance, I watched a fire in the heart of the Gila Wilderness burn for two months over 98,000 acres, an area two and a half times that of the District of Columbia. Such fires, long presumed to be malignant intruders in a fragile landscape, are now welcomed, even encouraged—at least here. Fires on the edges of Salt Lake City and Boise, where deference to life and property remains paramount, are another matter.
None of these experiments with wildfire would have been possible if the landscape hadn’t been preserved in something approaching its primeval state. From my peak I have the good fortune to look out on a land of great significance in the history of American ecology: the Gila Wilderness, the first stretch of country in the world to be consciously protected from incursion by industrial machines. That designation was largely the work of one of the most important figures in early-twentieth-century America, the writer and conservationist Aldo Leopold. Many scholars have called
A Sand County Almanac
, his posthumous book of essays, the bible of American environmentalism; Leopold is often referred to as a prophet. Like most who attract such labels, he honed a late message that was both radical and difficult, even while expressed with an aphoristic beauty seldom matched in American writing on the natural world. To arrive at such a style, not to mention its moral depth, took Leopold a lifetime of close observation, deep thinking, and a willingness to change that thinking when his ideas proved an insufficient match for the land’s complexity. Though he’s often associated with Wisconsin, where he lived the last twenty years of his life, it was here in the Southwest—in the country stretching from the Rio Chama of northern New Mexico south to the Gila and west across Arizona to the Grand Canyon—that Leopold unlearned most of what he assumed and had been taught about man’s relationship with the earth. In this vast and arid terrain encompassing four of the six life zones, he developed an influential argument in favor of wilderness with profound effects on the American landscape, some of them felt most tangibly on the stretch of country outside my windows.
In 1924, as an assistant district forester in New Mexico and Arizona, Leopold drew a line on the map encompassing four mountain ranges and the headwaters of the Gila River, a line beyond which nothing motorized or mechanized would be allowed to travel. In 1980 another roadless area was preserved alongside it, this one named in honor of Leopold: more than 200,000 acres running along the crest of the Black Range and down its slopes to the east and west, into the foothills and mesas in its shadow. This would seem an appropriate homage to a man who not only conceived of and drew the boundaries of the world’s first wilderness, but founded the field of wildlife management, helped pioneer the study of tree rings for evidence of fire history, and articulated a philosophy—the “land ethic”—that inspired subsequent generations of environmental thinkers.
The Gila Wilderness served as a guiding example for that capstone of the American preservation movement, the 1964 Wilderness Act. By leaving a big stretch of country unroaded and unpopulated, it also removed the major obstacles to large-scale burns: the presence of private property and the existence of communities impacted by smoke. For we must acknowledge a simple fact: smoke and flames make people nervous, whether they’re watching from the front porch of a mountain cabin or from the back deck of a home in town. The two wilderness areas at the heart of the Gila give forest officials a buffer of safety between humans and fire. In many places throughout the West, no such buffer exists between wildlands and the “urban interface,” to use the jargon of our day. It is from those places where most Americans get their images of wildfire—the drama of the fight, the tragedy of the charred home. This book, I hope, will offer another view of fire and its place in nature, a view too little glimpsed on our television screens.
What follows, then, is more than just a personal drama—though living alone on a high mountain, in the company of abundant wild creatures, surrounded by a landscape prone to burn, does provide an impressive stage set for a drama of the self. I often think that if there’s such a thing as the oldest story on earth, it is a story of fire, the marriage of fuel and spark. Despite all the vitriol we’ve directed at it, despite all the technology we’ve deployed to fight it, wildfire still erupts in the union of earth and sky, in the form of a lightning strike to a tree, and there is nothing we can do to preempt it. The best we can do, in a place like the Gila, is have a human stationed in a high place to cry out the news. If this gets to sounding borderline mystical, as if I’ve joined the cult of the pyromaniacal, all I can say is: guilty as charged.
April
Oil the saws, sharpen axes,
Learn the names of all the peaks you see and which is highest—
there are hundreds—
Learn by heart the drainages between
Go find a shallow pool of snowmelt on a good day, bathe
in the lukewarm water.
—Gary Snyder,
“Things to Do Around a Lookout”
Into the Black Range
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thwarted by snow & saved by snow
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a view from on high
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unsettled by solitude, troubled by wind
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some walks with the dog & bears we have seen
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cutting wood the old-fashioned way
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the symbiosis of grass & fire
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a visit from the mule packers
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smoke in Thief Gulch
A
pproached from the valley of the Rio Grande, the Black Range is only modestly impressive, a low dark wall of irregular height seventy miles long, rising above tan foothills. All around are mountains more exposed in their geology, more yielding of their ancient secrets. The muted shapes and dark color of the Black Range give it an appearance of one-dimensionality, perhaps even unreality, as if it were a painted backdrop in a low-budget Western. These are not picture-postcard peaks, serrating the sky with shark-tooth shapes of bare rock. Instead they’re a doubtful chimera on the edge of the desert, a sky island seeming to shimmer in an April haze.
The Black Range was once a part of Apache country, one of the major reasons it was slow in coming under the domain of the American government. Geronimo was born to the west near the forks of the Gila River; his fellow chief Victorio, of the Warm Springs Apache, made his home just to the north, at Ojo Caliente, though he knew the Black Range intimately, having used it as a hunting ground and refuge from the summer heat. He and his Chihenne followers fought the U.S. cavalry here as late as 1880, and a number of Buffalo Soldiers and their Navajo scouts did not have the luck to leave the Black Range alive. Their graves can still be found if you know where to look.
For me, the first leg of the trip to the crest is simple and comfortable: a climate-controlled pickup truck, Satchmo on the stereo, my dog Alice on the seat beside me. We glide across the bed of an ancient inland sea, which locals call the flats. Beyond the little town of Gaylord the road curves to contour with Trout Creek, a stream with sources high in the mountains, denuded in the lower elevations by decades of overgrazing. At Embree, population three dozen, the road leaves the creek to begin its climb through the foothills. For fifteen miles there’s not a straightaway long enough to allow me to pass a slow vehicle. Locals, if they see me come up behind them, will pull into one of the gravel turnouts and offer a wave as I pass, but if I find myself behind tourists, I will dial down my speed and practice the virtues of charity and patience. It is a magnificent drive, and I can hardly fault them for taking it leisurely.
I can’t help but hurry, despite the sweeping views. Where I’m headed the views are a whole lot better, and besides I’ve been gone too long. Seven months of hustle in the world below provide more than sufficient acquaintance with the charms of my winter career. But that is behind me now—or rather, I should say, beneath me. Norman Maclean once wrote that “when you work outside of a town for a couple of months you get feeling a lot better than the town and very hostile toward it.” I felt hostile and superior before I even left. Tending bar will do that to a man, although it also allows him to leave on short notice, and in so doing hurt no one’s feelings but those of the regulars who’ve come to depend on his ear.
More than one winter has found me working in a Silver City dive that beckons to the thirsty with a classic neon sign of a cactus in the foreground and a horseman drifting alone into the distance. My most reliable customer was an Oklahoma hillbilly with a Santa Claus beard, whose wit and wisdom is best exemplified by a statement I’ve heard more than once from his beer-foamed lips: “Thing about them Aye-rabbs, they breed faster’n we can shoot ’em. Kinda like them Kennedys.” Weekend entertainment brought the biggest crowds and the best money, courtesy of heavy-metal bands with evocative names such as Dirtnap, Bowels Out, and New Mexican Erection. It all makes for an interesting counterpoint to summers spent alone far from town, but I’m tired of playing the role of enabler-priest in an unholy chapel.
At Wright’s Saddle my drive is over, though the real pleasures of the journey have just begun. In a supply shack cluttered with helicopter sling nets and cases of military-style MREs (Meals, Ready-to-Eat), I leave eight boxes to be packed in later by mule, each box marked with its weight, to help the packers balance their animals. The boxes contain books, dry and canned food, dog food, two cases of double-A batteries, a Frisbee, a mop head, a bow saw, an ax bit. I double-check my own pack for all the immediate necessities: maps, binoculars, handheld VHF radio, freeze-dried food, my typewriter, some magazines, some whisky. Certain I’ve left nothing vital behind, I begin the final stretch of what has to be one of the sweetest commutes enjoyed by any hardworking American anywhere. Alice leaps about, wagging her question-mark tail. She feels the same way I do.
Five and a half miles await me, five and a half miles of toil and sweat, nearly every inch of it uphill, with fifty pounds of supplies on my back. I can feel right off that winter has again made me soft. My gluteal muscles burn. My knees creak. The shoulder straps on my pack appear to want to reshape the curve of my collarbones. The dog shares none of my hardships. She races to and fro off the trail, sniffing the earth like a pig in search of truffles, while from the arches of my beleaguered feet to the bulging disk in my neck—an old dishwashing injury, the repetitive stress of bending forward with highball glasses by the hundred—I hurt. Not many people I know have to work this hard to get to work, yet I can honestly say I love the hike, every step of it. The pain is a toll I willingly pay on my way to the top, for here, amid these mountains, I restore myself and lose myself, knit together my ego and then surrender it, detach myself from the mass of humanity so I may learn to love them again, all while coexisting with creatures whose kind have lived here for millennia.