The Big Burn (38 page)

At last, a truce of sorts was declared in the final years of the century by Jack Ward Thomas, Chief of the Forest Service. Some fires would be fought, some would be allowed to burn.

"Fire is neither good nor bad," said Thomas. "It just is."

There is evidence that Pinchot had arrived at the same conclusion during his 1937 trip out west. In his Buick, he traveled more than five thousand miles, over single-lane roads of primitive gravel, chugging up to the Continental Divide, along roaring streams. Smoke was often in the air, despite the strongest efforts of the Forest Service. Pinchot chased trout in riffles and got up early for sunrises. When the legs felt strong, he hiked high for better views. With him was Henry Graves, one of Pinchot's oldest friends from Yale and the agency, and one of the original seven members of the Society of American Foresters, formed at Pinchot's house in 1900. When Pinchot was fired by Taft, it was Graves who took over, as second Chief of the Forest Service. They made for quite a couple in the summer of 1937, two elderly eastern gentlemen in tweed jackets and ties knotted around their necks touring the national forests they had once overseen. In Portland, Graves and Pinchot were invited to a Kiwanis lunch, but it turned into a humiliation. To Pinchot's surprise, "nobody seemed to know us."

Like Teddy Roosevelt, Pinchot intended to have his words outlive him. It would not matter if the man who mistook his life for forestry was a mere asterisk in the storytelling of the young nation; Pinchot would have his say in at least one sphere. In 1937, he was just getting started on his conservation memoir, a book that would
take nearly a decade to finish. It was encyclopedic in detail, with much settling of ancient scores and with frequent praise for the saintly Roosevelt. He never mentioned Laura. John Muir had died years earlier, in 1914, and with Roosevelt gone for nearly two decades, the book would give Pinchot the last word on the conservation ideals this trio had presented to the world. He was out west in 1937 in part to test his beliefs as he began to summarize his life. He wanted not just to see how the legacy had held up, but to seek some of the old magic in the land. Pinchot's publisher also asked him to revive his 1914 book,
The Training of a Forester.
So it was really two books that he mulled while touring.

Going over the earlier book, the old man blushed at some of what the young man professed. Did he really believe—still—that forest fires are "wholly within the control of man," as he wrote? Could generations of college-trained foresters really hope to contain something as elemental as wildfire? Was fire indeed the biggest foe of the woods—"no other so terrible"? And could man himself shape nature to his design? It appears that the younger Pinchot had made a pact with his hubris: in promising in the early days to whip wildfire, he won enough public confidence to see the Forest Service through its birthing pains. But the price of that bargain was now clear in the idea that the timber industry had embraced while co-opting the Forest Service: yes, fire would be defeated, at all costs, to keep standing trees for industry. If universal suppression meant sick, overburdened, ready-to-burn forests, that was another cost, one that would not become obvious until later in the century.

In the last years of his life, Pinchot showed a more humble side. A forest was "a complex community with a life of its own," he would write in the new memoir. And that complexity included fire. Also, he was appalled that the public forests had become mere commodities. He could force a reflexive statement of principle — "the national forests belong to the people," as he wrote in California—but the landscape told a different story, of logging, private concessions, lodges: "Most dangerous thing I've seen on national forests." Growing increasingly cranky, he sought solace. "Even in the wild places you can't get away from people."

Finally, near the end of the tour, he was back in the High Sierra, the Range of Light, John Muir's temple—"the only spot I have ever found that came up to the brag," as Ralph Waldo Emerson had said. It was there that Pinchot had undergone something like a religious experience when he stood under a huge waterfall in Yosemite, jumping in and out of the spray. Now Pinchot ditched his companion and the crowds in Yosemite to search for a touchstone of his youth—"went off by myself. I had to." His heart beat heavy and his breath was labored as he hiked over granite, much of his dexterity gone. The closer he got to the high points in this sanctuary, the more excited he got.

"Washburn Point—incredible."

He pushed himself farther, risking collapse, to find another landmark.

"Glacier Point left me all in. Went and stood on the overhanging rock where I threw my bed 41 years ago & looked down." He wheezed and gasped in the mountain air, sweating and somewhat parched. It did not matter. "If it cost me a year of my life," he wrote, "it would be worth it." Onward and upward he pushed until rock, ground, and forest came to an end, until there was nothing but a sharp edge of blunt earth protruding in the late light of the range, where he could see well beyond the park boundaries to national forest land that he had once scouted on foot and horseback. He remembered it then as roadless, the only trails being those hacked by Indians and prospectors. He had taken notes on the flora and fauna, commented on the age of the bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, the scrub oak in the valleys, the condors overhead, the trout in alpine tarns. He had lassoed that wild land in ink, returned to Washington, and sent the sketch to the president, who preserved it for posterity. What did Michelangelo feel at the end of his life, staring at a ceiling in the Vatican or a marble figure in Florence? Pinchot knew. And those who followed him, his great-great-grandchildren, Teddy's great-great-grandchildren, people living in a nation one day of five hundred million people, could find their niche as well. Pinchot felt God in his soul, and thanked him, and weariness in his bones. He sensed he had come full circle.

"One of the great days of my life," he wrote. "I think the greatest sight I ever saw." Of course he had seen it before, but to an old man it had more power. For a fleeting moment, after more than five thousand miles of driving around in pursuit of something lost, Gifford Pinchot found what he was looking for.

He lived another nine years, barely enough time to finish the book, and to feel that his life philosophy had been vindicated by the second of two Roosevelts to be president. Just before World War II ended, Pinchot and Cornelia went to see FDR at the White House. Much had changed since Pinchot roamed the halls with Teddy; the war atmosphere made it seem more like a command center. To many in Washington, Pinchot was an embarrassment—or worse, a bit of a joke. The reputations of Muir and Teddy Roosevelt had grown immensely since their deaths; they were the heroes in the fight for conservation, while Pinchot was an afterthought. The very fact that he was still around, still making speeches, still annoying his enemies, this gangly relic from the turn of the century, was a big part of the condescension. His life had spanned from the last year of the Civil War to World War II.

For Pinchot the meeting was all about a big idea that he had carried for some time. The war would soon be over, and he wanted Roosevelt to summon the nations of the world for a conference on conservation, to take stock of a planet shattered in midcentury by iron and atomic blows of nations against each other. What people had in common was this earth, which for the first time they could destroy with the press of a button. Such a gathering had been proposed by Teddy Roosevelt in the last days of his presidency in 1909. Nations had accepted, the meeting was set—but then President Taft killed the conference. Would Franklin consider reviving such a thing?

Indeed he would, and promised to bring it up at his Yalta meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, as postwar planning gained steam. The world was going to be reorganized after this dreadful war, and what better time to start thinking about it in different ways. In a letter to his secretary of state, Roosevelt wrote, "I repeat again that I am more and more convinced that Conservation is a basis for permanent peace. I think the time is ripe."

Roosevelt died before the global conservation conference could take place, and Pinchot fell ill with leukemia. The forester's last day was October 4, 1946. He died at the age of eighty-one. At his funeral at Grey Towers, his son Gifford Bryce Pinchot slipped a favorite fly rod into the casket.

Three years after his death, the Forest Service renamed the green-mantled land south of Mount Rainier as Gifford Pinchot National Forest. At the dedication ceremony Cornelia held back tears. When it came time to speak, she apologized to the foresters and dignitaries for being so emotional. Then she steadied herself and tried to give an account of her husband's legacy, a man who had already started to fade from history, a footnote. Cornelia wanted the rangers, politicians, and reporters gathered to know one thing about her dead husband: "Conservation to Gifford Pinchot was never a vague, fuzzy aspiration," she said in the forest given his name. "It was concrete, exact, dynamic." And then, summoning the voice of the old progressive and the spirit of the words Pinchot had written so many times in speeches for Teddy Roosevelt, she said Pinchot's idea of humans never taking more from the earth than they put back was simple, an American virtue. It was, she said, "the very stuff of which democracy is made."

Elers Koch retired from the Forest Service in 1944. He spent the next five years writing his life story and advocating for protection of wilderness in the Rocky Mountain West. His children were grown and his beloved Gerda was gone; she had died of cancer in 1942. The war brought another blow to Koch: he lost his oldest son, Stanley, in the Allied landing at Normandy. The fog of depression that
followed the death of his wife and his boy would not lift; it was like smoke from the summer of 1910. At the same time, he found it increasingly hard to move around, his muscles aching from the daily little cruelties of sciatica, his hands knotted by arthritis. Nobody would publish his book. On a late November day in 1954, Koch killed himself. He was seventy-three. Forty-four years after his suicide, his book,
Forty Years a Forester,
was published and became an instant and influential classic among people who loved the outdoors. Koch Mountain, a 9,072-foot peak in the Bitterroots, is named for him.

Pinkie Adair outlived them all. In the late 1970s, she sat for several days with Sam Schrager, an oral historian, as part of a project of the Latah County Museum Society. Talking about her homestead in the wild Bitterroots, about foresters on horseback and stagecoach rides on moonlit nights in town, about the pet bear her father kept at the house in Moscow, she could have been recalling medieval days. She got the last living word on the Big Burn of 1910, at least among the major players in the drama. What was the fire like? She said it was chaos in the woods, martial law in town, so many people lost. Even so, a thrill.

"It was exciting," she said. "Very exciting."

The interviewer seemed taken aback at the words from the mouth of this old lady, with her thick glasses, curled fingers.

"You never knew when you got up in the morning whether the wind was bringing the fire your way or taking it some other way ... very exciting."

Pinkie died at home not long afterward, on November 26, 1977. She was ninety-four years old.

On August 20, 2005, a day when the sun baked the Bitterroots with not much of a breeze to break the heat, top brass from the Forest Service assembled along Placer Creek, less than a mile from Wallace, Idaho. They came to the northern Rockies to remember that
other August 20 nearly a century before. An honor guard in crisp green uniforms and white gloves marched in single file along the road to the creek. They carried flags and blew bagpipes, the sound filling the forest and the steep slopes of the mountains. They also carried Pulaskis, shiny and chrome-plated, holding them across their chests like riflemen clutching their weapons.

The faces of these foresters, from members of the high command, who had taken two days to travel from the capital, to first-year rangers just learning the ropes, both men and women, were solemn, as at a funeral. For a time, nobody said anything; the pipers blew their mournful sound into the woods and tried to imagine what it must have been like for Ed Pulaski and those people in the mine tunnel in 1910. When at last the bagpipes were stilled and the speeches began, people spoke about a man who did not sound like the one who had spent his last years feeling betrayed by this agency. To the end, Pulaski loved the land, perhaps more than some of the rangers stamped by the Yale School of Forestry. But he never could understand why the government did not love men like himself back.

On this day, Pulaski was eulogized in mythic terms, a hero certainly, and the best kind, a selfless one. He was described as no-nonsense, and not so much a forest ranger as an old-fashioned woodsman, born to the wild. The occasion was the dedication of a trail and memorial to the man who could not get the government to do the same thing for the fallen firefighters while he was alive.

Time had been good to Pulaski. This fire, with its force unleashing energy greater than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, had grown with the passing of the years and the telling of the story. It was not just the largest wildfire in the history of the United States, these forest dignitaries said; it was still known as the fire that gave the agency its mission. One speaker said the fire of 1910 was like the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. "The 1910 fires gave the new agency a defining purpose," said this speaker, Mark Rey, "to demonstrate that destructive wildfire could be controlled and prevented." Rey was an odd choice to preside over this ceremony in the woods. He had been a powerful advocate for the logging industry, a lobbyist and partisan, arguing fiercely against protection for dying species and wild land in the public forests. When President George W. Bush came into office, he put Rey in charge of the very agency that he had long fought.