Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  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.

  Decades would pass before the folly of this approach was finally acknowledged. Trails, phones, and towers would be supplemented with tankers, helicopters, and bulldozers, and the cost of fighting fires eventually would run beyond a billion dollars a year.

  At a little past noon, the crew returns its verdict on the source of the Thief Fire: an abandoned campfire, no surprise given the absence of storms and the fire’s location on a trail in a creek bottom, not far from a dirt road. Perhaps a couple of weekend turkey hunters broke camp hurriedly, confident a stone ring would hold their fire’s embers in check. No such luck, not this time. I have camped in heavy Black Range downpours, managed to get a campfire going, and found hot coals from which to rebuild it in the morning despite overnight showers. In the weather we’ve had lately—warm and windy, following on a dry winter—a pit of ash over coals can smolder for a couple of days, heating the surrounding earth until the pine duff around the stone circle ignites.

  At 12:40 Tony, the incident commander (IC), calls his size-up in to dispatch. The fire is ten to twelve acres now, burning in grass and piñon-juniper, smoldering and making isolated runs, with flame lengths of two to three feet. Winds are light and variable, gusting to seven. Values
at risk are private property holdings: the community of Embree, as well as some old mining shacks to its west. Potential for spread is high. Tony requests a heavy tanker for slurry drops and a second hot-shot crew in addition to the one already on order. After signing off with dispatch, Tony dials up his crew on one of the tactical channels I’ve reset my radio to scan, in order to eavesdrop. “Jimbo’s gonna mark off the fire’s origin with some flagging tape. Make sure you’ve got plenty of water. I’ve got reinforcements coming. We’re gonna need everybody to be heavy hitters on this one.”

  By midafternoon seventy pairs of boots are on the ground—three hot-shot crews and two engine crews—working furiously with chain saws, Pulaskis, shovels, and rakes to cut and dig a containment line down to mineral soil along the fire’s flanks. The goal is to halt the fire’s spread by starving it of fuel, keeping it inside the line. The observer plane circles overhead, giving the IC updates on the fire’s behavior. The observer-plane pilot requests a TFR—total flight restriction—over the area, to 3,000 feet above ground level, in order to keep civilian and military aircraft clear of aerial operations over the fire. Guided on its drops by another aircraft called a lead plane, the tanker makes runs with slurry over the ridge tops, hoping to hold the head of the fire in check long enough for the ground crews to bring their lines along both flanks and tie them into the slurry. Every now and then a stand of thick timber torches, and a dark gray cloud of smoke rises into the sky.

  I turn away from the fire momentarily, undertake my periodic survey of the country in the other direction, to the north and west. I’m scanning the Pinos Altos Range through the binoculars when something big and black takes up half my view. It’s on top of me almost before the sound of it arrives: an air force fighter jet. I don’t even have time to offer my customary one-finger salute. I call the dispatcher, as is the protocol in such situations.

  “Silver City Dispatch, Apache Peak, I’ve got a visual on a military jet headed due east over Apache Peak.”

  “Apache Peak, dispatch, we copy. Thanks for the info.”

  I switch to air-to-ground, call the observer plane.

  “Heads up, John, my tower just got buzzed by a military jet.”

  “Yeah, we copied direct… . In fact, we’ve got him in sight. Stand by one.”

  While I’m standing by, the observer plane is forced to take evasive action. The pilot dives and turns 180 degrees. The wing man identifies the incoming aircraft as a delta-wing single-exhaust Tornado jet: hot-dog flyboys, out on a training run. They love to fly the Gila. It’s wild, it’s rugged, hardly anyone complains of the noise because hardly anyone lives out here. I see them a couple dozen times a summer. Somehow, though, someone didn’t get the message on the TFR, and the results are nearly fatal—certainly way too frightening to mention in any detail on the radio, though no doubt the pilot and the spotter uttered choice words in that cockpit.

  “Apache Peak, Thief Air Attack.”

  “Thief Air Attack, Apache Peak.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, buddy. That got real Western there for a second.”

  “Copy that. I’d say he came within two hundred feet of my tower.”

  “No excuse for that. Or for blowing the TFR. We’ll make sure they get an earful over at Holloman [Air Force Base] when we get back in tonight.”

  Given how the culture of wildland firefighting, almost from the beginning, has borrowed its tools and tactics from the American military, it’s no small irony that on this day a rogue air force jet provides the nearest brush with disaster.

  Around four o’clock the Thief Fire crosses the main creek bottom and begins to burn up the other side. The IC admits to the observer plane that despite their suppression efforts they may not catch this one. “Don’t know what to recommend to you,” the spotter replies. “You’re doing all the right things, but it’s kind of a dog’s breakfast down there.”

  The IC calls me next. We know each other well, Tony and I. He’s my boss’s second-in-command, has been on the Gila five years. No need to mince words. We both know the score: If the fire continues to the top of the ridge on the north, it will eventually find continuous brush and heavy timber for miles to the west, including all the way to the top of my peak.

  “Phil, have you got your safety zones planned out?” Tony asks.

  “I’ve got options. The meadow is big and open and mostly grass. There’s also a little boulder field where the deer have munched away all the vegetation. And of course there’s always the cistern. I could drop down in there and tread water for a couple hours if it came to that.”

  “Well, we’d try to fly you out by chopper before then. But just think ahead a little for me. Safety’s absolutely number one.”

  “Copy that,” I say. “Good luck down there.”

  In addition to the options mentioned above, I have three others. I could simply stay in the tower, which rises far enough above the meadow to protect me, unless the trees to my north torch in flame lengths of fifty feet or more (always a possibility), in which case I’d roast in the tower like a chicken in an oven; I could light my own backfire, burning up enough of the meadow ahead of the main fire to rob it of fuel and allow me to lie down in the ashes; or I could run to the cabin for my fire shelter, a kind of miniature tent of aluminum and fiberglass that reflects radiant heat and traps breathable air, allowing a human to survive inside of it while a fire passes over. None of these options is terribly attractive, and each would be a last resort in case a helicopter couldn’t come for me. But with three and a half miles between me and the fire, and prevailing winds working against it, the danger is far from imminent. I’ll say this for my superiors: they mean it when they talk safety first. Last year, for instance, twenty-six firefighters died in the line of duty on wildland fires in the United States. It’s an inherently dangerous line of work, and planning for maximum safety is always my bosses’ top concern.

  At 5:15 p.m. a second tanker arrives on scene, and for a couple of hours the two tankers trade off, working load and return, load and return out of Grant County Airport in staggered increments, dropping 3,000 gallons of retardant with each load. Designed to coat vegetation in moisture, the retardant contains 85 percent water, 10 percent sulfate-based ammonia fertilizer, and a small amount of iron oxide to color the mixture red, so the pilots can see their handiwork. All radio communication on the fire is punctuated by the whine and roar of chain saws in the background. When the observer plane returns to the airport for fuel, I take over as eyes from above on fire behavior. The crews continue to build line on the fire’s flanks. It’s my job to let them know if the color and volume of the smoke change. Every now and then it does, as fire finds brush and trees to torch; the crews report several slop-overs, meaning fire has crossed their line and new line must be scraped to contain it.

  As dusk begins to fall, the fire cools amid rising humidity, falling temperatures, lighter winds. This is the moment of truth. With one last desperate push, the separate crews tie their lines into the slurry barrier, and the fire’s growth is halted at twenty-five acres. There will remain several days of mop-up and monitor duty, not to mention a long night of patrolling line and cooling off hot spots on the edges, but the battle, this time, has been won. The IC thanks the tanker pilots for their work and cuts them loose. The observer plane bids farewell, turns back toward the fire base. “You saved our bacon on this one,” the spotter tells the tanker pilots. “That could have been twenty thousand acres if things didn’t go our way. Let’s do it again sometime, but maybe not real soon.”

  No injuries, no damage to property, no explaining to prying reporters why this one got away: all in all the best possible outcome, at least from a public relations standpoint. The residents of Embree will sleep easy tonight, and once the crews are back in camp and bedded down around midnight, so will I.

  2

  May

  I was expected to sit still and watch mountains and long for company and something to do, like playing cribbage, I suppose. I was going to
have to watch mountains for sure, that was my job, but I would not be without company. I already knew that mountains live and move.

  —Norman Maclean, “USFS 1919”

  The pleasures of Frisbee golf * a helicopter beer run * cowering before the wind’s wild power * an encounter with the Electric Cowboy * trout fishing by moonlight * Black Larry’s Rules for Black Range Travel * a love story * smokejumpers on the Cobre Fire * the brief career of one relief lookout

  I love my office. Twenty paces from the cabin, sixty-five more up the steps of the tower, and just like that I’m on the job. With my housekeeping complete, my supplies put up, and a good stack of wood on the porch, I begin more or less full-time service here, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., an hour off for lunch—a schedule not unlike that of any other jogger on the hamster wheel of the eight-hour day.

  Many visitors think I work both night and day, assuming fires are easier to spot after sunset, with bright flames dancing in the dark. It is true that if a fire gets going, it can sustain itself overnight for days or weeks. In high winds or drought conditions it may even grow substantially at night. But wildfire thrives in warm air and low humidity—conditions found between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., roughly speaking—and it usually shows itself not with open flame on the ground or in the crowns of trees, but in tendrils of smoke drifting up and curling, perhaps even puffing and then disappearing for a while, a kind of taunt or tease that leads a lookout to reach for the binoculars and keep coming back to a single swath of country.