Fire Season (7 page)

Such beetles are endemic in Western coniferous forests. The mountain pine beetle, for instance, attacks lodgepole pines and is responsible for decimating nearly 4 million acres of Western pine forests in 2007 alone. Add fir beetles and the tally comes closer to 7 million acres. Bark beetles typically feed on trees already weakened by other factors. Occasionally, when forests become stressed by drought, overcrowding, or widespread root disease, beetle populations erupt into epidemics. This has happened on an irregular schedule for thousands of years; it happened here over the past half decade. A forest overgrown from an absence of fire became further stressed by a period of drought: too many trees competing for too little moisture. The beetles found thick, susceptible stands of white fir and bored through their bark. They laid eggs in little galleries carved in the space between the cambium and the sapwood. The eggs hatched and became larvae, which fed on the cambium, the living tissue that cycles nutrients from the roots to the rest of the tree. After a year, the larvae emerged as full-grown beetles and flew away to attack new trees. Only the eventual decimation of the host tree species can halt an epidemic—either that or a late hard freeze that kills the larvae. No such freeze has occurred here in years, so the beetles had their way until they killed most of the white fir trees over an area bigger than the island of Manhattan.

About 60 percent of the more than half-million-acre Black Range District has seen fire over the past fifteen years—all of that to my north. In 2003, for instance, the Boiler Fire burned 58,000 acres. In 2006 the Bull Fire burned 80,000 acres. Such figures include the total perimeter of a burn; inside the perimeter many pockets of green remain untouched by flame, and even in the charred places big-boled trees live on. These fires—the kind that burn slowly, a few hundred to a couple thousand acres a day over a period of weeks or months—create a mosaic of habitats that in their overall health and diversity help prevent bark beetle attacks. The one area of the Black Range still starved of fire is the country running from my lookout south to the forest boundary, precisely the area with the worst beetle infestation on the entire range.

It’s not difficult to grasp why fire was kept at bay here for most of the twentieth century. There is, first of all, the presence of homes and cabins along the forest edge. A scenic highway passes by, and the tourists prefer green trees to black. The mountains here hold the watershed of two little towns beyond the forest, each of them perched astride the creek banks, and a fire would strip ground cover and result in rapid muddy runoff right down their main streets. The public angst likely to arise from the sight of flames and mud was judged not worth the risk. In my time I’ve seen crews suppress at least half a dozen fires that could have grown huge to my south if left to burn.

The consensus now, from the district ranger on down through the firefighters and even to us lowly lookouts, is that this corner of the forest is going to burn, has to burn, one of these years. It’s only a matter of how and when. Maybe we’ll get lucky with a late-season smoke that hangs on through cool weather and even light rains, burning calmly for weeks, chewing up the deadfall and duff on the ground, torching through occasional dog-hair thickets of pine and fir, and leaving the mature forest partially intact. On the other hand, when the big one comes in this part of the world, the stage is more likely to be set by high winds, hot summer weather, and low humidity—followed by ignition from dry lightning or the careless human hand. A fire that can’t be caught by anything but rain, no matter the manpower thrown at it. We see such fires with increasing frequency in the Southwest: the Rodeo-Chediski and Aspen fires in Arizona (467,000 and 84,750 acres, respectively), the Hayman Fire in Colorado (137,000 acres), the Bear Fire here on the Gila (51,000 acres), fires that blew through 10,000 acres a day or more and torched every last living thing they touched, leaving a charscape in their midst.

However it happens, I want to be here for it, partly out of a selfish wish for spectacle, partly because I’ve stared at the land for thousands of hours and feel I could be useful to the folks on the ground.

W
ith firefighters coming from between forty and a hundred and twenty miles away—no smokejumpers available in the Southwest just yet—I arrive on the peak about the same time the first crew of five reaches the Thief Fire. An airplane observer is up and circling, talking to the crew on the air-to-ground frequency. From the tower, I’m just able to see the top of the smoke rising above a ridge. It is my hunch, and it’s only a hunch, that if I’d been on the peak instead of hiking in, I’d have been a half hour later in seeing the smoke. Pure dumb luck to have been where I was, when I was.

The crew’s first task is to locate the fire’s origin and determine a cause, whether lightning or human. Much hinges on what they find. If it’s lightning-caused, my boss has several options. He can order suppression. He can put the fire in confinement status and wait to see how it behaves, planning to corral it several days out. Or he can call it a “fire-use” fire and let it burn for weeks or months on end. If, on the other hand, the fire is found to be human-caused, his only option will be total suppression.

For most of the twentieth century there was no such palette of options. The Forest Service judged each and every fire a potential travesty and responded accordingly. This policy can be traced back to the agency’s earliest days. In 1905, when President Theodore Roosevelt brought the nation’s forest reserves under the control of the Department of Agriculture, he appointed his friend and fellow conservationist Gifford Pinchot as the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Pinchot, like Roosevelt a political Progressive, believed the Western forests ought to be protected from the baleful forces that had laid waste to the forests of the East and Upper Midwest—clearcuts and fires, often in that order. The goal was not to preserve timbered lands as semi-wild getaways for that portion of the American public that liked dramatic scenery. That fell to the national parks. Rather, it was to impose a Progressive-era ideal of efficiency and rational use on the raw materials of empire.

Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, timber barons, railroad trusts, and mining concerns had mowed down vast reaches of mature timber to feed the nation’s hunger for wood products, whether for housing, railroad ties, mine shaft supports, or fuel. Forestalling these interests, powerful as they were, was the easy part; moving the forests to the public domain did much to inhibit their destruction. But one force proved a trickier enemy: fire. It had been a presence on the landscape far longer than big trusts and rapacious conglomerates. Free-burning fire, kindled by lightning, had been the norm in Western forests for untold millennia. Its intensity fluctuated depending on variations in fuels and climate, flaring in drier epochs, fizzling in wetter ones. But as the fire historian Stephen Pyne points out, wildfire has been a presence on Earth since the Devonian period, 400 million years ago, when sufficient oxygen for combustion flooded the planet’s atmosphere.

Once humans mastered fire, they wielded it liberally for their own purposes. They used it while hunting, to herd, confuse, and entrap their prey. They used it for farming, to clear the land of cover and fertilize the soil for cultivation. They used it in tandem with domestic livestock, to jump-start regrowth on previously grazed grass. They even used it for gathering purposes, aware that light burning made way for acorns, wild raspberries, and other food sources. Sometimes their fires escaped and burned over areas larger than intended. The combination of lightning-kindled wildfire and human burning created a crazy quilt of flame-licked lands.

So the landscapes gathered under the newly born American forest reserves had long been the site of a complex fire regime. With the coming of European civilization, fire’s presence only intensified. Yeomen farmers practiced slash-and-burn agriculture, dumping brush and grass back into the soil as ash and breaking up thick root systems in preparation for seeding with grain crops. Railroads threw sparks from their tracks and embers from their coal-fired engines, showering whole corridors of the West with fire. Loggers torched their leftover slash. Drifters, settlers, and prospectors lit fires by design and by accident. Campfires escaped. Mining towns burned into the surrounding hills.

To early Progressive foresters, all this fire on the land showed a promiscuous disregard for the nation’s timber resources. Bernhard Fernow, Pinchot’s predecessor in the Division of Forestry, considered this flowering of fire a result of “bad habits and loose morals.” Pinchot equated fire suppression with the earlier crusade for abolition: “The question of forest fires, like the question of slavery, may be shelved for a time, at enormous cost in the end, but sooner or later it must be faced.” On an inspection of Arizona forests in 1900, Pinchot rode horseback along the Mogollon Rim, looking over North America’s largest continuous stand of ponderosa pine. “We looked down and across the forest to the plain,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “and as we looked there rose a line of smokes. An Apache was getting ready to hunt deer. And he was setting the woods on fire because a hunter has a better chance under cover of smoke. It was primeval but not according to the rules.” It didn’t occur to him that what was primeval and what was the rule might be one and the same, and for good reason.

The great fire debate commenced sooner than even Pinchot anticipated. In the summer of 1910, five years after Roosevelt had created the Forest Service, and a mere three years after he and Pinchot had added an additional 16 million acres to the national forests in a sweeping exercise of executive power, fires broke out all over the country, from New York to Oregon. The worst fires flared in the northern Rockies. In the national forests of Montana and Idaho, nearly 3 million acres burned—and that doesn’t count fires in the surrounding national parks and Indian reservations, much less on private holdings or state-owned lands. Seventy-nine firefighters died fighting the biggest blazes. Whole towns collapsed in flame. Some estimates put the total burned acreage for the year in the tens of millions nationwide.

Three main arguments dominated the debate that followed. Some claimed the answer lay in light burning—the Indian way, it was sometimes called. In an article published in
Sunset
magazine the month the great fires blew up, three civil engineers made the case for “how fire must be fought with fire.” They pointed out that California’s pine forests had been burned by natives for centuries before white men arrived, and what white men found were healthy forests with open, grassy understory and accessible timber. By continuing such practices, foresters could make fire their servant rather than their master—lighting fires when conditions were favorable, in the cooler, damper weather of autumn, rather than fighting fires in the searing heat and squirrelly winds of summer. Preemptive use of fire would protect against the kind of blowups just then charring the northern Rockies.

For those who opposed federal control of the forests, the catastrophic fires reinforced their belief that settlement was the only appropriate response. Development would reduce fire danger by threading the forests with roads, chopping the vast stretches of continuous fuel into more manageable chunks; by opening the timber to cutting, which would further starve fire of fuel; and by populating the mountains with settlers, who could organize themselves to fight fire when it occurred. To the pro-development forces—and they included many powerful Western congressmen—the enemy to be feared wasn’t fire, it was conservation. Senator Weldon Heyburn of Idaho claimed the big fires were God’s revenge for not allowing industry to have its way on the land. He pushed a plan to remove the burned areas from national forests and hand them over to private owners. The
Idaho Press
went so far as to suggest clear-cutting the northern Rockies as a defensive measure: “It would really be better to cut down all the trees than to incur the imminent risk of such vast destruction and mortality as has been accompanied by these fires. For it is better to devastate forests than to devastate settlements.”

Pinchot and the Forest Service pushed back. They viewed such arguments as a means of undermining public confidence in the agency, which still faced opposition in Congress and an annual battle for appropriations. To usher in settlement or approve wholesale clear-cutting would defeat the very purpose of the national forests. To admit the efficacy of light burning would be to capitulate to primitivism, confusing the public. The Forest Service existed to preserve the public good, and fire destroyed the public good. What was required, in Pinchot’s reckoning, was a military-style assault on fire. Seventy-nine men had died in Idaho and Montana not for a misguided cause; they’d died because obstructionists in Congress hadn’t provided them with adequate resources. With a system of trails, telephone lines, and lookout towers in place in the national forests—plus the promise of emergency appropriations to cover firefighting costs—early detection and rapid response would give firefighters a decisive advantage. Fire could be banished, relegated to the history books.

This argument won the day, prevailing for sixty years. It had the virtue of simplicity: all fire in all forests was evil and must be stopped. It reassured the public that the men who’d perished in the big blowup had not died in vain; in fact they were the first martyrs in a noble crusade. With the trauma of 1910 seared in its DNA, the fledgling Forest Service had a defining purpose around which to rally. Dissenting voices would be marginalized for decades to come as the agency deployed its shock troops throughout the West, to wage its ruthless war on fire. The fact that roads, trails, telephones, and towers constituted their own form of development did not trouble the sleep of Pinchot. He had always said that “the first great fact about conservation is that it stands for development.” To him, there were two kinds of development: the kind that destroyed the forests for short-term private gain and the kind that preserved them for the long run. Fighting fire would preserve them for the long run.