Raising Wild

by Michael P. Branch

  Chapter 12

  12. Fire on the Mountain

  Here in the remote western Great Basin Desert we dwell as guests in the house of fire. Of course wildfire has helped to shape most natural landscapes, but that fact is easy to forget in urban and suburban settings, while out on this wildlands interface the presence of fire is tangible. From the windows of our home we look out over open desert that is dotted green with Utah juniper trees but also dotted gray and black with the charred snags of junipers that have been consumed by flames. We see fire-protected, rocky spots with immense, seven-foot-tall sagebrush, while other areas have burned over so recently as to harbor only the sprigs of bunchgrasses, rabbitbrush, desert peach, gooseberry, bitter cherry, ephedra, and balsamroot. Fire visits our area almost every summer, and the vibrant mosaic of trees, plants, grasses, and flowers visible on the distant hillsides has in fact been produced by flames. Because its presence on the land is so conspicuous, we tend to think of fire as a neighbor—albeit a neighbor who, like rattlesnake and mountain lion, is deserving of immense respect.

  As a parent I’ve worked deliberately to avoid demonizing fire, just as I’ve resisted misinformed violence toward maligned endemic species like rattlers and scorpions. Hannah and Caroline understand that this desert place was the residence of coyote, buzzworm, and wildfire long before we chose to make our home here. The girls have come to appreciate these neighbors—to offer respect by giving them a wide berth, but also to learn about them, and never to encounter them with the irrational fear that too often characterizes human relationships with the desert environment and its creatures. I hope this desert will teach my daughters to accept that we are subject to natural forces larger than ourselves and often beyond our control, since it is the humility inspired by that awareness that helps lead us from a blind assumption of dominance toward an enriching imagination of reciprocity with the natural world.

  We are fortunate that the desert we inhabit has been sculpted by fire. In a normal fire regime, low-intensity ground fires have substantial ecological benefits. These fires often wipe out invasive plants that compete with fire-evolved natives, and they help to balance the populations of many insects. Their passage opens the way for the growth of grasses and forbs that provide excellent forage for mule deer, pronghorn, and many other animals. The ashes they produce add nutrients to the soil, and there are even species of trees and plants that are unable to reproduce without fire. Unless the land has been excessively degraded by destructive forces such as road building, overgrazing, or previous colonization by invasive exotic plants, the presence of fire tends to catalyze biodiversity and improve ecosystemic health. The fire history revealed by dendrochronology suggests that in a natural fire regime the wildfire cycle here might be as short as twenty or twenty-five years. The northern Great Basin sagebrush steppe is a biome that needs its fire.

  Knowing that we are fire’s neighbors, we’ve made extensive preparations for cohabitation. We’ve designed and built a wildfire-resistant home with a stucco exterior and concrete tile roof, and we’ve sited our propane tank far from the house and away from trees. We’ve done extensive fuels-reduction work on our property, engaging in the kind of thinning performed by fire while also decreasing the fuel load available for combustion when the flames do come. We maintain firebreaks and defensible space, and we’ve landscaped with native plants chosen for their resistance to fire. We’ve installed freestanding hose bibs on all sides of our home site, and we have a propane generator that can be used to run the well pump and thus provide water to fight a ground fire even if the electricity has been lost (or cut, which often occurs during fires). We’ve laid out our long driveway with wide turns and a loop up near the house to facilitate access by emergency vehicles. We’ve even made sure that down at the gravel road our address numbers, which are reflective, are mounted on a noncombustible post. We’ve done all this because out here we are so far away from help that we can’t afford to count on good luck. In our years on this remote hill we’ve witnessed dozens of fires, and twice we’ve been evacuated while emergency crews occupied the firebreaks that we maintain with such vigilance. Someday wildfire will return to our home hill, and it is our responsibility to prepare for that day while also respecting fire’s ecological value and resisting the urge to view it through the distorted lens of fear.

  Ecologists employ the paired concepts of resistance and resilience to understand and describe the effects of environmental disturbance. Resistance refers to the capacity of an ecosystem to retain its essential structure and functioning despite stressors, which might come in the form of extreme weather, invasive species, human activity, or wildfire; resilience describes the capacity of the ecosystem to regain its essential structure and functioning once altered by a disturbance, like wildfire. In other words, we should take care not to compromise the health of this desert ecosystem, because its well-being is essential to its ability to withstand and recover from environmental stress. The concepts of resistance and resilience are helpful to us in imagining our own lives as well. If we remain healthy, we’re better able to resist illness and disease; in the unfortunate event that by some accident we are overwhelmed by a major environmental stress, our chances of being sufficiently resilient to restore ourselves to health are vastly improved.

  When the smoke alarm went off upstairs, Hannah and Caroline had already been asleep for an hour or so, snuggled in their bunk beds in their shared bedroom on the ground floor of the house. Eryn and I were sitting on the stone hearth, enjoying one drink before the warmth of the wood stove, talking over our day and sharing that sweet, brief calm that comes to parents after their children are asleep and before they have themselves succumbed to the day’s fatigues. It was Valentine’s eve (which happened to be Ash Wednesday), and we had just finished cleaning up from helping the girls make their Valentine’s cards, which they would give to their friends at school the following day.

  “Here we go again,” I said in exasperation, taking one more sip of rye before setting the tumbler down to go deal with the problem.

  “I’ll check on the girls in case the noise wakes them,” Eryn said.

  “Thanks,” I replied. “I’ll get the ladder and see which one it is this time.” I had yet to make it through a full year without an alarm going rogue, and while the problem was usually solved with a fresh nine-volt battery, I had also replaced several of the devices that simply wouldn’t keep quiet. As I headed down the hall to fetch the stepladder from the garage, I felt certain this was another false alarm—until a second alarm also began to sound from upstairs.

  I paused for a single moment before turning on my heel and sprinting down the hall to the stairs, which I took three at a time as I raced up to my scribble den. Although I smelled no smoke, the two alarms continued to blare convincingly in an echoing, alternating rhythm, as if synchronized. As I grabbed the doorjamb and swung myself around the corner and into the room, my eyes went first to my writing table, where my laptop sat open, surrounded by stacks of papers important to the book project I had been working on that afternoon. Beneath the table were piled boxes full of books, notes, papers, and manuscripts associated with the various other projects I had finished in recent years or hoped to write in the years to come. My eyes then shifted a few feet to the left of my writing table. There I saw bright orange and yellow flames several feet high blasting up through a sizable hole in the floor.

  The physiology of alarm is not easily translated into words. For a single instant I felt as if the air had been sucked from my collapsed lungs, while my legs had suddenly turned to molten rubber and my mouth was filled with a nauseating metallic taste. And then the adrenaline rush hit with such intensity that it felt as if my body had been struck by lightning from the inside. My breathing suddenly quickened, and I could feel my pulse pounding in my neck and my heart hammering in my ribs. It was then that I smelled the smoke.

  “Eryn, this is for real! Call 911 and get the girls out, NOW!” I yelled down the stairs. Over the blaring of
what were now at least three smoke alarms, I heard her acknowledge me, and I caught a glimpse of her running down the hall toward the girls’ bedroom. Turning back into the study, I grabbed the fire extinguisher from the top of a nearby bookshelf, yanked the pin as I ran across the room, and unloaded the extinguisher’s contents into the flaming hole in the floor. As I sprayed the foamy fire retardant the flames disappeared, and for a brief, hopeful moment I imagined that the situation was under my control. The instant the extinguisher ran empty, however, the flames shot back up out of the hole, as if I had done nothing at all to discourage the fire. I then scrambled over to the upstairs bathroom, where I removed a second extinguisher from beneath the sink, ran back to the study, and repeated my efforts. Once again the flames vanished only while the retardant was flying, immediately surging back out of the hole as the extinguisher ran dry. It was now clear that the fire was intense and that it was burning within the floor beneath me.

  I sprinted down the stairs and then down the hall and into the garage, hitting the garage door button as I dashed out. I grabbed an orange five-gallon bucket from the garage floor, ran to my workbench, and lifted the large fire extinguisher I keep there into the bucket, which I left sitting on the bench. I then jumped into my pickup, started it, and backed out onto the gravel driveway. I jammed it into park, threw open the door, and jumped out.

  “Eryn?” I called loudly.

  “We’re out front!” she replied, from around the corner of the house.

  “The truck is running here—come get the girls off the hill!”

  “Where’s the puppy?” she hollered back.

  “No time! Get off the hill now!” I shouted, dashing back into the garage before I could catch a glimpse of Eryn, Hannah, or Caroline.

  Barely breaking stride, I grabbed the plastic grip on the wire handle of the bucket, swung it off the workbench, and ran into the kitchen, leaving the door open behind me. I retrieved a small fire extinguisher from beneath the kitchen sink and tossed it into the bucket. I then sprinted with my bucket to the hearth, where I kept another extinguisher near the kindling rack. As I crossed the living room in a rush to the hearth, I had a strange experience. The fight-or-flight dump of dopamine from my exploding adrenal glands had produced the odd effect of time slowing down, and so even as I worked frenetically, I had bizarre moments in which it seemed that I had paused to engage in leisurely contemplation of a particular image or sensation. Now, as I sprinted across the room, I noticed Eryn’s half-full wineglass and her cell phone and my rye tumbler sitting placidly on the stone, as if nothing were amiss. Behind the glass doors of the wood stove lapped our lovely little fire, just as before. The scene looked cozy, and although the thought must have taken only a millisecond to register in my racing mind, I reflected on how strange it was that the fire behind the glass appeared so controlled while just upstairs burned a sister fire that was fierce. This protracted moment of slow-motion perceptual intensity was so dreamlike that it caused me to wonder if I might awaken to discover that this strange fire had been ignited only within the wildness of a dream.

  I snatched the extinguisher from the hearth, added it to the bucket, and ran back upstairs with my load. Although I had been gone only a short time, the situation upstairs had grown a good deal worse. The hole in the floor had at least doubled in size, and the flames too had increased, now leaping three or four feet out of the burning floor. Worse still, the room had begun to fill with smoke, and while visibility was decent at eye level, the ceiling was now a wall-to-wall mat of thick smoke. I set the bucket down and lowered myself to one knee next to my writing table, hoping to achieve a low angle that might allow me to blast retardant further up under the floor, toward the unseen source of the flames. I emptied one extinguisher into the flaming hole, and then the second, and finally the third. Each time the flames retreated as the foam splattered into the hole; each time the fire flared up the instant the extinguisher was emptied.

  It was clear from the five empty extinguisher canisters and the increasingly intense flames rising toward the ceiling that the fire was raging hot and fast within the floor. I now began to realize, for the first time, that it was entirely possible our home would burn to the ground. The fate of the house would be determined by the outcome of a race between the fire and the people who, unlike me, have the skill and equipment to fight it—people who, because of the remoteness of our home, are a very long way away when you need them most. All I could do was try to slow the spread of the fire, buying precious time until help arrived.

  Having exhausted all my extinguishers, I now ran with my empty bucket to the upstairs bathroom, where I slid open the glass shower door and turned the tub faucet on full blast. I jammed the empty bucket beneath it and watched as time once again slowed to a crawl. How long had I been fighting this fire? How long would it take for help to arrive? How many years before this bucket would fill with water—water that fell as if it were a viscous plasma, with a slowness that made me question whether the law of gravity had been repealed? In the eternity it took for that bucket to fill I kept hearing, over and over, the percussion-driven rhythm of the Grateful Dead surrounding Robert Hunter’s provocative lyrics for “Fire on the Mountain”:

  Long distance runner, what you holdin’ out for?

  Caught in slow motion in a dash for the door.

  The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor.

  You gave all you had, why you want to give more?

  The more that you give, the more it will take

  To the thin line beyond which you really can’t fake.

  There’s a fire . . . fire on the mountain.

  I finally lifted the bucket out half-full, left the water running, and ran back into the scribble den. Fearing the collapse of the burning floor, I didn’t dare put my weight too close to the blazing, ever-expanding hole. Instead, I stood back and flung the contents of the bucket all over the floor in the general area of the flames. I then ran back and refilled the bucket, again dousing the room, but this time slamming water onto the walls as well as the floor, trying desperately to slow the spread of the fire.

  It suddenly occurred to me that although the fire in the wood stove appeared small and controlled, it might somehow be contributing to the fire in the floor above. Filling the bucket a third time, I hauled it downstairs, threw open the wood stove door, and tossed the full bucket of water directly onto the coals and logs that were burning within the stove box. The dousing produced a loud hissing sound, audible even over the piercing blasts of every smoke alarm in the house, as an immense cloud of acrid, sulfurous, ashy smoke billowed from the wood stove and rose up the rock hearth to the ceiling.

  I ran back upstairs and continued my bathroom-to-study shuttle run, splashing buckets of water onto the floor, carpets, cabinets, walls, and, eventually, even the stacks of boxes, books, and papers that comprised all of my writing projects. The full wisdom of my adrenaline-driven logic might be summarized this way: “Wet stuff doesn’t burn, right?” As the room continued to fill with choking smoke, I finally noticed the flashing lights of emergency vehicles out in the distance, though their movement through the blackness of the desert seemed preternaturally slow. Encouraged by the prospect of help, I resumed my sprint-and-douse dash.

  Finally, two firefighters arrived in my study. They were dressed in full battle regalia, complete with helmets, face shields, head-to-toe yellow fire suits, giant fireproof boots and gloves, and air masks with hoses that led to the oxygen tanks they wore on their backs. I was wearing old jeans, a Buddy Guy concert T-shirt, and broken-down trail running shoes. Worse still, I was standing in a flaming, smoke-filled room in a burning house holding a half-full bucket of water. Ignorant of the social protocol surrounding house fires, I wasn’t sure if I should toss those last few gallons onto the fire or instead address the men. “Thanks for coming,” I offered, sheepishly setting my little bucket down. “Can I do anything to help?”

  “Sir, you need to evacuate this structure immediately,” s
aid one of the large yellow men, who seemed surprised to see me. He then spoke a string of commands into his walkie-talkie. It was clear that my shift was over. In a matter of moments our “home,” which had already become a “structure,” would be what emergency responders call a “fireground.” Reaching the bottom of the stairs, I had to jump aside as three guys hauling fire hoses over their shoulders came rushing in the front door and charged upstairs into the smoke. As I stepped slowly out into the cold, carrying nothing at all, I was surprised at how many emergency vehicles had already arrived: a command car, two fire trucks, a water truck, and a sheriff’s deputy car—and I could see more flashing red lights off in the distance.

  I stood out in our firebreak, between patches of old snow, shivering in my T-shirt. I first looked west, in the direction I always imagined the fire would come from—the wildfire I had worked so hard to prepare for. Out there in the black depths of the open desert there was no fire save the stars ignited in the moonless sky. I then turned and looked back at our house, where the wild force of fire was traveling through the floors and perhaps also through the walls and ceilings. The power had been cut, but through the unshaded windows I could see the firefighters’ headlamps, laser-like, slicing through the thick smoke as they worked in the murky darkness. I heard chainsaws revving and then droning while I caught glimpses of large yellow men cutting holes into the walls and ceilings as they chased fire through the bones of our home.