Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  What this kind of fly-fishing lacks in poetry and grandeur, it makes up for in finesse and stealth. The narrowness of the creek limits my back cast, as does the overhanging vegetation—for much of its length the stream resembles a tunnel. I’m lucky to find a hole I can hit from fifteen yards away. I sneak up behind boulders on all fours, fish holes hip-high above me from below, cast from all sorts of awkward postures—crouching, kneeling, sitting. I throw a fly into each hole three or four times, and if nothing rises I move on. The fish I do catch are small: mostly eight or nine inches in length, with an occasional thirteen-incher. Some of these trout are mongrels, many of them hybrid cutbows that show both rainbow and cutthroat characteristics. Their colors run the gamut from brownish-gray to green and gold and pink, shading into orange and red, some of them with big black spots on their sides and a telltale slash of orange on either side of the lower jaw. After the McKnight Fire in 1951, ash runoff killed most of the native trout in this stream, or so it was presumed—no one can say for sure—and later the state Game and Fish Department stocked it with various non-natives, dumping whatever was at hand. Before then, the stream was home to the state fish of New Mexico, the Rio Grande cutthroat (Oncorhynchus clarki virginalis), now a threatened species reduced to less than 10 percent of its historic range, which once spread across 6,600 miles of mountain streams that funnel their waters to the Rio Grande.

  According to scholars, the Rio Grande cutthroat appears in the first written mention of a North American trout by Europeans. In 1541, Pedro de Castañeda de Najera, a member of the Coronado expedition, noted “a little stream which abounds in excellent trout,” likely Glorieta Creek, southeast of modern Santa Fe. Over the past 150 years, mining, logging, road building, cattle grazing, fire suppression, and the stocking of non-native species have destroyed the fish in vast reaches of its range. Increasingly isolated populations remain, most of them in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, cut off from intermingling with their kind in other streams and therefore susceptible to genetic stagnation. Rising water temperatures, as a result of global warming, may also imperil their long-term survival. Government officials have so far denied efforts to list the fish as an endangered species—mainly, they admit, because they don’t have the money for a recovery program.

  Some of the fish I catch show the red coloring and huge black spots of native Rio Grande cutts, but intermixed with the rainbow’s pink stripe; some of them lack the cutthroat slash mark on the lower jaw. Others show signs of interbreeding with Yellowstone cutts, another non-native once let loose in this creek. The higher in the headwaters I catch them, the more they look pure Rio Grande. Though their genetics are a jumble, state law permits catch-and-release only with a barbless hook—an admission that though no one quite knows what these fish are on a case-by-case basis without a complicated DNA test, nearly pure Rio Grande cutthroat still populate certain stretches, and, being rarer by the year, they ought to stay here. The fish I land I quickly place back in the water, holding them in my hand just long enough to whisper a heartfelt mantra: Live long and propagate, my friend. They may not, in fact, live long; the state Department of Game and Fish is contemplating, among other options, poisoning the stream, ridding it of every last fish, native or non-native, and restocking it with pure Rio Grande cutthroats. Whether it’s a good idea to replace these fish, mongrel though their heritage is, with a mix of wild and hatchery-raised trout of purer genetics—that’s a deeply contested question. Poisoning the fish would poison insects and invertebrates too, though some studies show the insects rebound within a couple of years. Fishing would have to be barred while the reintroduced fish took hold, annoying the sporty types who care less about identifying exactly what they catch than they do about the fact they managed to catch it. I’ve seen men at public meetings on the subject foam at the mouth in anger at the fisheries biologists; I’ve heard state Game and Fish officials bad-mouth the Endangered Species Act for being an impediment to selling sport licenses. I tend to trust the biologists over the bureaucrats, and they tell me the best chance to have a thriving trout population in the stream for the long run is to populate it with fish whose genes evolved over millennia to cope with conditions on site—pure Rio Grande cutthroats, in other words. That places me in the camp of the poison advocates, a position that doesn’t exactly give me warm fuzzies.

  At dark I return to the dog, let her sniff my hands, which excites her when they smell of fish; I like to pretend she shares in the thrill of my success. I break down my rod and strap on my pack. The moon has risen above the canyon rim to the east, cool and white as bone china. Our way back is bathed in a bluish light. Three miles below the peak, a little before midnight, we stop in an open saddle at the head of two canyons. I gather some wood, light a fire, spread my bag on a soft spot in the grass. Alice snuffles through the Gambel oak, crunching in the fallen leaves of last year, sniffing for a sign of something to chase. I eat a little chocolate, drink a little whisky. The Big Dipper tips into view, encircled by the treetops around the meadow’s edge, and below it Draco the Dragon’s tail curves. For a while I whistle back and forth with a whippoorwill, trying to call it in close for a look, but it tires of my effort at mimicry and drifts off into silence. Now and then the wind comes up, blows some smoke off the embers of my fire, scents my dreams of trout and bear.

  In the morning I douse my fire with all my remaining water and toss dirt on the sodden ash to make sure the coals are dead out. I do not want to be known forever as the lookout who burned down his own mountain.

  It is the second week of May, and we haven’t seen a spot of moisture since a snowstorm in mid-March dropped eight inches on the crest. I know because I was in it.

  My friend Black Larry and I had planned a four-day backpack into the heart of the Black Range, a pre-fire-season look at the high country. We’d chosen a route entering the mountains from the east amid foothills of around 6,500 feet above sea level, climbing ten miles to the crest around 9,000 feet, following the crest north for ten miles to above 10,000 feet, and looping back to our starting point—more than thirty miles in all.

  Black Larry has been a friend for years, since the moment he walked into the bar where I worked and we discovered our mutual love of baseball and backpacking—as well as the fact that we shared an alma mater, the University of Montana. (Go Griz!) He’d earned his nickname from an unfortunate tendency to harm himself while mountain biking, having broken a hip, an arm, and a finger in various accidents. Soon after our meeting we undertook to explore every corner of the Black Range on multiday trips. He figured mountain hiking would be less likely to end in disaster than mountain biking. On our first outing we lost the trail and bushwhacked for eight hours only to find ourselves back where we started, minus Black Larry’s hiking poles and about a pint of blood apiece. On every subsequent outing we’ve encountered bad weather: rain, lightning, hail storms. So it came as no surprise when, on the second day of this trip, after a punishing first-day climb up the South Fork of North Dry Creek, we woke to strange clouds and temperatures of 12 degrees Fahrenheit. Being the pyromantic among the two of us, I got a fire going to boil some coffee and heat our frozen fingers and toes. When I shouted at Black Larry to get out of his sleeping bag and get moving, he unzipped his tent flap and thrust his middle finger in the direction of my voice.

  “Have some hot coffee,” I said. “You’ll feel better about life.”

  “I’m trying to feel okay about the prospect of freezing to death.”

  I laughed, added some wood to the fire. The prospect of death was one of the unspoken reasons we took these trips, and we both knew it. He owned a historic brick home back in town, had a smart Scandinavian beauty for a wife and two grown children making their way in the world, one a journalist, the other a lawyer. He worked fifteen hours a week as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company at some obscene hourly rate. He was on pace to retire well before the end of his fifties. (His motto is that of all highly paid consultants: “If you can’t be part of the solut
ion, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”) His daily life was structured for maximum ease and comfort, in other words, and while this had been the plan all along, on some level it troubled him. His broken bones were merely the most vivid evidence that he needed a brush with danger now and then, to keep his senses alert, stave off the onset of senility, remind himself he was, at base, just an animal—a highly evolved animal. It’s not as if either one of us loathes our domestic life. We love our wives, good wine, sports on television, dinner in a nice restaurant—especially our wives. It’s more a matter of achieving some measure of balance, some substantial contact with that part of ourselves that relishes a campfire under a sky berserk with stars, forty miles from the nearest social worker, completely reliant on our own dexterity.

  Within an hour of our breaking camp that morning, snow had begun to fall. We’d structured our trip with this possibility in mind, figuring we could reach the old abandoned lookout on Nana’s Peak in a pinch. Too far from a decent road to get people in and out with any ease, the lookout had been shuttered decades earlier. From the spot where we’d camped that first morning, Nana’s Peak was another nine miles, and we had no choice but to press on through the storm. We hiked beneath a gorgeous forest of spruce and fir and through the scars of old burns where blown-down aspen lay across the trail by the dozen. Snow collected on our hats and melted from the heat of our heads, refreezing into grotesque ice sculptures in the cold. We couldn’t see fifty yards in front of us, the snow was falling so hard, and almost every step was fraught with the possibility of disaster—a twisted knee, a sprained ankle. I hadn’t felt so giddy in months.

  We arrived on Nana’s Peak after five hours of tortuous walking and found the old cabin intact, though filthy with rat shit. Some good soul had left enough wood in the box to get a fire going, and Black Larry swept away the rodent droppings while I tended the hearth. Once we’d warmed ourselves and cleared away the worst of the filth, we found an old metal bucket and filled it with snow to melt on the stove, replenishing our water supply. All night the blizzard raged, but inside the cabin we were warm and dry. We found a deck of playing cards, a couple of candles, a pen and paper, and we settled in for cribbage at the crude table, keeping score the old-fashioned way.

  “Why don’t we make it interesting and play for whisky?” I said. “Winner gets a shot of the other person’s stash.”

  I had taught him how to play myself and figured I could school him as I usually did, capturing more than my share of bourbon in the bargain. I was wrong. He kept getting hands; I kept muttering, “This ain’t a hand, this is a foot,” and before long he was gibbering happily about his prowess at cards and my whisky supply had shrunk to next to nothing, though I’d barely touched it.

  “You have learned well, grasshopper,” I said.

  “Grasshopper like whisky,” Black Larry said.

  In the morning we woke to a world resplendent with light. Not a cloud could be seen in the sky, and everything glittered under the sun. We were momentarily blinded when we stepped outside the cabin. By noon the snow was melting off the roof, so we set the battered bucket under the eaves to catch the fresh water. The old tower beckoned, despite its wooden steps having blown away near the top. We carefully climbed its skeletal remains to look out on the Black Range in all its winter majesty. The scars of big burns stitched a patchwork of forest types, with the vegetation everywhere in some state of recovery from big fires—the Divide Fire, the Pigeon Fire, the Bonner Fire, the Seco Fire, the Granite Fire, each of them covering thousands if not tens of thousands of acres over the past twenty years. From where we stood there wasn’t a road within ten miles in any direction, and not a paved one within thirty. We were alone above 10,000 feet, in the heart of the heart of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, fifty miles of mountains stretching to our north and the same to our south.

  “I’ll bet we’re the first people to make it here this year,” Black Larry said.

  That night he graciously shared his whisky, my supply having been decimated, and I found an old scrap of paper I tacked to the wall, after writing on it the following message: “On this peak and on this rock Black Larry cleaned my clock at cribbage on a snowy night in March—the South End Sentry.” Meanwhile, Black Larry had been doing some writing of his own. “Want to hear Black Larry’s Rules for Black Range Travel?” he asked.

  “You’re some kind of guru now?”

  “Calm yourself and listen, son. You might learn a few things from a Black Range hand like myself.”

  1. Do not speak of Black Range travel in the language of conquest; the Black Range will make you its bitch.

  2. Pack a minimum of 4 ounces of whisky per person, per night, and do not gamble with it.

  3. Avoid the high country before May 1, unless you’re packing snowshoes.

  4. Use maps as rough general reference only; trails on maps may not exist on the ground.

  5. Add 50 percent to mileage on trail signs—all of them lie.

  6. Layover days are highly advised for anyone over the age of thirty-five.

  7. When in doubt as to your route, refrain from bowling up prematurely.

  8. Make friends with people in high places; they have Forest Service keys to locked gates and cabins.

  9. Always stow cold beer in the truck for the end of the trip.

  “One more and I can call them commandments,” Black Larry said.

  We considered several additional maxims, each of them with merit, before we settled on one that spoke to our immediate situation but also had a timeless quality: Thou shalt not complain of snow or rain in a land where they’re seen infrequently.

  Since then, two months of sun and wind have depleted fuel moistures. On the morning fire-weather forecast, fire danger moves for the first time from High to Very High. The same afternoon, as if on cue, I see a bloom in the shape of a mushroom, thirty miles west of me, drifting up over one of the ridges running north of Cherry Mountain. It settles a bit, drifts, blooms again. Unmistakable. Smoke.

  I turn to the binoculars, focus in, confirm the judgment of the naked eye. I hang the binoculars back on their hook, circle the firefinder cabinet, spin the ring with the flat of my palm. I squat for a look through the peephole, adjust it to settle the crosshairs at the base of the smoke. It’s so far away I need a moment to work up an accurate azimuth, but eventually I get it: 273 degrees, 45 minutes.

  Next I drop the big map on its hinges from the ceiling. I wrap a length of string around the nail driven into the map at my location, run it out over the compass rosette at 273 degrees and three-quarters. North of Cherry Mountain the string crosses a paved highway, right over a spot called Grandview Promontory. Plausible, especially in the absence of lightning. Whether out of malice or carelessness, there can be only one cause—Homo sapiens—and he rarely strays far from a road.

  Normally my next move would be to call Cherry Mountain for a cross, but no one’s home there. In fact, with the fire on the far side of a ridge from here, a mere six miles from Cherry Mountain and five times that far from me, it seems likely that if Cherry Mountain were manned I’d have heard about the smoke fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago merely by having my radio set to scan. Rumor has it that a paperwork snafu has delayed the rehire of my friend John, who should have been on duty for weeks by now. Until the bureaucratic cluster is untangled, the district has been sending its fire prevention officer up the mountain most days for a look around. Today, for reasons unknown, he failed to show. Maybe he had the day off and no one volunteered to spell him. No matter now. I’m on my own—and off my turf.

  It’s 5:00 p.m., so the angle of the light doesn’t help. The entire landscape to my west appears one-dimensional. I could take a good long while, study hard through the binoculars, try to map each faintly discernible ridge, maybe pinpoint the smoke within a quarter mile. But I figure it’s better to report now and err slightly with a location, since it will take crews as much as an hour to arrive on scene—an hour they can use to get rolling
and I can use to work up a more precise legal, if indeed my first hunch proves mistaken.

  I offer up my knowledge to the dispatcher, make sure she knows that my legal, without a cross from Cherry Mountain, remains tentative. Within minutes an engine is on its way. By the time it reaches Grandview Promontory, I’ve revised my initial report to put the fire three miles farther west, up Cow Camp Canyon: thus, the Cow Camp Fire. There the crew finds my smoke, arriving on scene, according to my notes, fifty minutes after my first call to dispatch—pretty good time on a winding mountain road. They immediately call for backup: another engine, a hot-shot crew. Fire size is modest, two to three acres, burning on a flat aspect in grass and ponderosa pine, active on all sides with flame lengths of two to eight inches. Spread potential is moderate. Cause appears to be human: a truck is parked in the center of the burn.

  On a fire this far away, I can be of little help beyond ringing the alarm bell. I’m too distant to offer radio relays or give the crew any intelligence about fire behavior. All I can do is sit in my tower and watch the character of the smoke for hints on the crew’s progress. For an hour or so there’s little change. The smoke puffs, rises, disperses, disappears, puffs again. I see no sign of real growth. With a force of more than thirty hard at work scratching a line around it, the IC calls the fire contained just after dark. As usual, mop-up duties will remain into the following day, but this fire, like most others, will barely make a mark on a landscape so vast.