Fire Season (28 page)

I
n the oral traditions of Native Americans, fire often comes to us as a gift from the nonhuman world. The Nez Perce tell of the time a beaver hid below a riverbank near a stand of pines. Alone among all living beings in having access to the power of fire, the pines warmed themselves around it as they met in council. A single ember from their bonfire rolled down the bank and was captured by the beaver, who held it to his breast and ran. For a hundred miles he was chased by the trees but he couldn’t be caught, and along his journey he gave fire to the willows and birches and many other trees. Ever after, any human in need of fire obtained it by rubbing together the wood of the trees where the fire was stored.

In the stories of the Cherokee, fire came to earth when lightning struck a sycamore tree on an island. All the animals could see the smoke across the water; they met to plan a way to get the fire off the island. Raven volunteered to fly across and bring the fire back; when he landed on the tree his wings were scorched, and ever after he was black. The screech owl tried next, but a blast of heat and smoke nearly burned out her eyes when she looked down into the tree, and ever after her eyes were red. Many others tried unsuccessfully, until the water spider came up with a plan: she would skitter over to the island, spin her thread into a bowl, place an ember in the bowl on her back, and recross to the mainland. When she returned, she shared fire with all the animals and humans.

In similar stories from other cultures, teamwork is often required among the animals. They take fire from its original owner, a species of tree or animal or even a band of humans that previously held a monopoly on its use. An arduous journey is usually required, as are cunning and stealth. Sometimes the animals pass fire one to the other as if in a relay race; they conspire to spread fire far and wide among their fellows, littering the land with it as they fly and run. Often the ultimate beneficiary is humankind, for whom the acquisition of fire represents a great leap forward. In many myths, humans only become fully human once they possess fire.

In modern times, our culture’s most powerful fire myth is printed in bold letters beneath the picture of a friendly-looking bear, and the motifs are neatly inverted. Instead of fire coming to humans as a gift from the plant and animal worlds, fire comes to plants and animals as a scourge, and only the intervention of humans can prevent catastrophe.

Smokey Bear first appeared in the 1940s, a creation of the Wartime Advertising Council. After a Japanese submarine shelled an oil field on the California coast in 1942, not far from the Los Padres National Forest, the government feared that incendiary weapons could touch off fires in the woods along the Pacific. With the number of wildland firefighters depleted by the war effort, the Forest Service sought to involve the civilian public in a campaign to prevent wildfires. The Ad Council coined several slogans—“Forest Fires Aid the Enemy”; “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon”—and early posters in the campaign showed an image of Bambi. But Walt Disney authorized use of the fawn for only one year, and when the license was up, the Ad Council and the Forest Service invented Smokey Bear.

In 1950, the agency found a real-life mascot. While fighting the Capitan Gap Fire in New Mexico’s Lincoln National Forest, a group of firefighters retreated from a blowup and took shelter on a rock slide, covering their faces with wet handkerchiefs to avoid being burned. When the smoke cleared, the only living thing in sight aside from themselves was a bear cub clinging to a charred tree, its paws and hind legs singed by flames. The firefighters rescued the bear, its burns were treated, and afterward it was sent to live out its life in the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. The little cub was an instant media sensation, a living emblem of the pernicious evil of wildfire and the benevolent hand of man. Smokey’s admonition—“Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires”—would become one of the most recognizable slogans in the history of advertising, his friendly mug inseparable from the idea that fire had no place in a healthy forest. Schoolchildren were urged to write letters to Smokey after hearing his message in speeches and videos, and they responded in such numbers that Smokey was assigned his own zip code. His presence nowadays is more muted, his message updated with modern lingo: “Get Your Smokey On.” Were he given the space needed to articulate it, his more honest assessment might read something like: “Remember—Only YOU Can Prevent Your Cigarette or Campfire from Starting a Wildfire We Are Forced By Long-standing Protocol to Suppress with Every Available Resource so as Not to Encourage Promiscuous Pyromaniacs; On the Other Hand Some Fires Started by Lightning Ought to Be Allowed to Run Their Course, for Reasons of Forest Health and Ecological Renewal—Fires We Call Wildland Fire-Use Fires Managed for Resource Benefit… ”

The area encompassing the McKnight Fire, for instance, considered at the time a catastrophe beyond all others in the annals of Southwestern wildfire, now represents some of the finest bear habitat in the Black Range. I see evidence of their presence all over—tracks in the pond muck, scat on the ground, overturned rocks where they’ve scraped for worms and grubs, trees they’ve rubbed against leaving telltale hairs behind, some of them brown, some of them red, some of them almost blonde. Acorns and raspberries—their abundance a result of fire opening the conifer canopy and exposing the earth to sunlight—entice them in the late summer.

One evening I return from a hike with Alice and sit with her in the meadow, scratching her belly and whispering nonsense in her ear. On the edge of my vision I see something small and black and fuzzy moving. I heed my instinct to hustle Alice into the cabin. I step back outside and tiptoe toward the bonfire ring, moving in the direction I saw the bear—a cub, it turns out, maybe sixty pounds, about the size of Alice. It ambles along the tree line on the peak’s east slope, nosing along, briefly unaware that someone’s watching. I pause and remember mama must be near. The cub’s furry little head appears around the edge of a rock outcropping; it lifts its snout in my direction. Maybe it smelled me. Maybe it saw the blur of my movement. Alerted to potential danger, it turns and trundles downhill,
Ursus americanus
, king of these woods and cohabitant with fire.

W
e too were once cohabitants with open flame. We let it loose on the land to reshape vegetation to our liking, preparing the land for agriculture. We used it to make our food more palatable. It lit our camps at night and held the mysterious dark at bay. Now, of course, it is unwelcome in the places where most of us live. An urban people, we are ever more removed from its workings. We do the vast majority of our burning now in secret. The flame has been hidden in internal combustion. We burn fossilized vegetation that did not burn however many million years ago; we suck it from the seabeds and drill it from the plains and mountains, we refine it, we burn it, and mostly we don’t even see the smoke. The by-products of this burning linger in our atmosphere and seem likely—by warming the average temperature of the surface of the earth—to exacerbate the drying of the planet’s flora, increasing the occurrence of catastrophic wildfires. When fire makes an appearance in our cities nowadays, the word we often use for it is
terror
.

Ironically, after all my years as a lookout, the one big fire I’ve seen up close—so close I inhaled its visible particulates—was a fire of the kind that exploded our invisible burning into a horrific tableau. One bright morning in September 2001 I received a call from a friend in New York who knew I lived without a television. She told me, in a voice wracked with panic, that the World Trade Center towers had been hit by airplanes. I put on my suit jacket, left my apartment, and ran to take a subway to my job at the
Wall Street Journal
. I was on journalistic autopilot: the biggest story in the world was happening right across the street from my workplace, and therefore I had a professional obligation to get there, even if I usually copyedited pieces about theater and books. I strongly suspected my superiors would find a better use for me that day.

Partway to the office, my train stalled and didn’t move for an hour and a half. Since we were stuck underground, we had no way of knowing the severity of the situation downtown, and when at last we were discharged from the train at Union Square, I continued the journey to the office on foot. In Chinatown, the police had cordoned off the streets. No one was allowed any farther. The towers, in the distance, were swathed in a cloud of black smoke; still stuck in a news vacuum, my mind couldn’t comprehend that they were no longer standing. I did know that if I was intent on getting to the office, I had but one choice. I would have to reenter the subway system and walk through the tunnel.

The entrance to the Franklin Street station was blocked with yellow police tape. I looked at the campaign posters for the mayoral primary—due to take place that day—taped to the railing above the stairs and thought that if I crossed the police line there would be no one to rely on thereafter but myself. What else was I going to do? Go back to my apartment and listen to the radio? Sit in a bar and watch TV? I lifted the tape, descended the stairs, and, in a last gesture toward civilized norms, swiped my MetroCard instead of jumping the turnstile.

No trains were running. No clerk was in the token booth. I waited a few moments to see if a train or an MTA worker would appear, but there was only an otherworldly quiet. With no one around to stop me, I lowered myself onto the tracks and began walking through the tunnel, creeping through the dark, careful to avoid touching the third rail. Not even the squeak of a rat marred the silence. It would be the only time I ever heard nothing in New York.

Ten blocks later, when I emerged into the light of the Chambers Street station, the platform was coated in dust, and ahead in the tunnel I heard water rushing with a sound like a waterfall. A couple of cops were in the station, hanging around the token booth, their radios occasionally squawking. I waited until they wandered off and then I climbed the stairs to the street.

I emerged a couple of blocks north of the towers, or at least where the towers had been. The streets were covered in ash and office paper. A cop stood alone in the middle of the street, watching a burning building, which I later learned was 7 World Trade Center. I walked over and stood next to her, both of us mesmerized. After a couple of minutes she looked at me. “That building’s probably going to go,” she said. “You might want to get out of here.” She didn’t order me to leave. She seemed to assume I wouldn’t. She merely offered it as a suggestion, one among a series of options available to me, take it or leave it.

I picked up a discarded dust mask, put it on my face, and began to make my way around the smoking rubble, through streets flooded with greenish-yellow water, or ankle-deep in fine gray powder. After crossing the West Side Highway, I entered the World Financial Center complex. The Winter Garden’s glass roof was shattered in places, and the palm trees in the courtyard were pallid with ash. All the shops were empty. I climbed the emergency fire stairs in 1 World Financial Center. I saw no one. The office had long been evacuated and was now, at least on the floor where I worked, coated in a thin gritty film blown in through shattered windows, though the computers still ran on the power of a backup generator. It was one of the most unnerving moments of my life, standing in that empty newsroom, wondering where everyone was, hoping none of my colleagues had been hurt or killed, all those computers humming with no one in front of them.

I went to my cubicle, blew the ash off my keyboard, set a newspaper over the dust on my chair, and logged on to my computer. I sent an e-mail message to the group of colleagues on my wing of the paper, asking if anyone needed anything, since I’d made it to the office. Those equipped with laptops immediately wrote back and told me I was crazy, that I ought to get the hell out as soon as possible, there was nothing I could do for them there, a gas line might explode, the building might collapse. I logged off and walked around the office, inspecting the damage, hoping I might see another editor, but I couldn’t find a soul. I circled back to my desk. The telephone rang. It sounded a little forlorn, even spooky, amid the unusual silence of the newsroom. I picked it up. It was my mother calling from Texas, where she was on vacation with my father, watching TV with her in-laws. I could tell from her voice that she was frightened witless. I said I was fine, we were just now evacuating the building, all was well, I would call her later in the afternoon. I hung up and checked my voice mail. There were eight frantic messages from friends wondering if I was okay. I got up and went to the men’s room. I felt strangely reverent as I stood before the urinal, aware I’d be the last man to piss there that day, that week, perhaps even that month or longer. (Almost a year, as it turned out.) The irony, when I thought about it later, was vertiginous: I had less devotion to the idea of the paper than anyone else I knew there, yet I’d risked my safety to get to the office—and for nothing. I was useless. Little did I know that if I’d wanted to be of help, I should have hopped a ferry to New Jersey, where a small group of editors was putting together a paper that would win a Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage. The
Wall Street Journal
of September 12, 2001, carried a banner headline in letters nearly as big as the masthead: “TERRORISTS DESTROY WORLD TRADE CENTER, HIT PENTAGON IN RAID WITH HIJACKED JETS.”

I suppose I could tell you how the smoke smelled when I went back outside, like every kind of noxious chemical burning you’ve ever known mixed into a cloud so thick you could almost chew it. I suppose I could tell you how, if you looked up at the bright blue sky a certain way, you could see waves of tiny glass crystals floating and sparkling like iridescent sea anemones. I could describe the firefighters standing around in the smoke and dust, holding their heads in their hands, some of them openly weeping, aware that hundreds of their colleagues were dead. But many people have written about what they saw that day, and I have nothing new to add. I was just one of the couple dozen spectators at the edge of the rubble, vainly hoping for a call to join a rescue operation, snapping pictures with a digital camera I’d snatched from the office, as if to preserve, in some form outside of myself, the ghastly images searing themselves on my brain—images eight seasons of wildfire have yet to put to rest.