Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  Leopold had come out of the Pinchot school of thought—quite literally. He had earned his forestry degree at Yale in 1909. The curriculum there was the first of its kind in the nation, the forestry school having been founded in 1900 with an endowment from the Pinchot family. Oldest son and scion of a timber magnate, Pinchot used the bequest to put his stamp on a generation of forest rangers. The Forest Service in its early years was often referred to as the Washington, D.C., chapter of the Yale alumni association; Pinchot’s first rangers, Leopold among them, were called “Little G.P.s” for their loyalty to the chief, not to mention the education that formed them in his mold. The Pinchot doctrine of highest use was summed up in his famous dictum: “the greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” It’s worth remembering that Teddy Roosevelt, advised by Pinchot, chose to fold the forest reserves into the Department of Agriculture, not the Department of the Interior, when he founded the Forest Service—a tacit admission that trees and the watershed they maintained were crops to be tended and protected, not unlike corn or wheat.

  Leopold’s first major job as a professional forester, in the summer of 1909, had been to run a reconnaissance mission on Arizona’s Blue Range. The forest reserve there had been established in 1907, and the first thing the Forest Service wanted was a thorough inventory of its new lands. Leopold arrived in time to play his role as one of the “arranger rangers,” the group of young men who mapped and cataloged the nation’s store of forest wealth and reported their findings to the home office on F Street, back in the nation’s capital. Leopold and his crew assessed the type, amount, location, and quality of the timber while mapping and surveying land that largely remained, until their work was finished, a tabula rasa to the American government.

  In letters home to his parents around this time, Leopold wrote about his joy in the job, about not having to “fight society and all the forty ’leven kinds of tommyrot that includes. [It] deals with big things. Millions of acres, billions of feet of timber, all vast amounts of capital—why it’s fun to twiddle them around in your fingers, especially when you consider your very modest amount of experience. And when you get a job to do, it’s yours, nobody to help, nobody to interfere, no precedents to follow.” The big job that loomed on the Blue, once he completed his survey, involved supplying the copper mines in nearby Clifton with 15 million board feet of timber a year for fuel and mine shaft supports. “I want to handle these 15 million a year sales when they come,” he wrote. “That would be something.”

  In the years to follow, Leopold supported efforts to hunt wolves to extinction, believing this would increase the number of deer available to hunters. He favored fire suppression as a means of increasing the timber yield. He advocated draining the Rio Grande Valley around Albuquerque to lay claim to marginal farm land. He argued for stocking non-native trout in Southwestern streams to improve recreational fishing. He personally oversaw some road-building projects in the Southwestern wilderness, as part of his agency’s “good roads movement.” All of this fit with Pinchot’s philosophy of scientific management and highest use.

  By 1921, the achievements of that philosophy were everywhere evident: roads blasted through the mountains, cattle running the ranges, irrigation works funneling water to farms, predator populations reduced to near nothing. As Leopold surveyed the Southwestern forests, a new and troubling question gnawed at him. Could there be such a thing as too much progress? And if so, what of value would be lost in the bargain?

  He first attempted to answer these questions in a 1921 paper, “Wilderness and Its Place in Forest Recreation Policy,” a blandly titled essay the effects of which would ripple outward for decades and eventually lead to the creation of tens of millions of acres of protected wilderness in America. Leopold admitted his bias in favor of developing natural resources and even quoted Pinchot approvingly in regard to the doctrine of highest use. “The majority undoubtedly want all the automobile roads, summer homes, graded trails, and other modern conveniences that we can give them,” Leopold wrote. “It is already decided, and wisely, that they shall have these things as rapidly as brains and money can provide them.” But then he turned the whole concept of highest use on its head. What of that “very substantial minority” of people who wanted precisely the opposite experience of wilderness? Shouldn’t the Forest Service attempt to provide for their needs too? Leopold not only answered in the affirmative, he stated that “highest use demands it.” Because so little of the original Southwestern wilderness remained without roads, it was imperative that a portion of what was left be preserved in that state, in order to provide a recreational experience that would vanish otherwise.

  As an example of the “substantial minority,” Leopold pointed to the wilderness packer. “The man who wants a wilderness trip wants not only scenery, hunting, fishing, isolation, etc.—all of which can often be found within a mile of a paved auto highway—but also the horses, packing, riding, daily movement and variety found only in a trip through a big stretch of wild country.” The national parks were unlikely to provide such an experience. For one thing, they banned hunting. In addition, “the Parks are being networked with roads and trails as rapidly as possible. This is right and proper. The Parks merely prove again that the recreational needs and desires of the public vary through a wide range of individual tastes, all of which should be met in due proportion to the number of individuals in each class. There is only one question involved—highest use.” To conclude his argument, he offered an example of how and where these needs could be met—by preventing new roads in the core of the Gila:

  This is an area of nearly half a million acres, topographically isolated by mountain ranges and box canyons. It has not yet been penetrated by railroads and only to a very limited extent by roads… . The entire region is the natural habitat of deer, elk, turkey, grouse, and trout. If preserved in its semi-virgin state, it could absorb a hundred pack trains each year without overcrowding. It is the last typical wilderness in the southwestern mountains. Highest use demands its preservation.

  Thoreau and Muir, among others, had voiced support for wild things and wild nature, and Muir had lobbied tirelessly for the protection of the high Sierras and other scenic lands. But he was, in the words of historian Stephen Fox, a “radical amateur,” and lacked the power to impose his vision in any direct way. His method was to plead and cajole and write for a mass audience, hoping to reach the like-minded and stir them to action. Aware of the need for converts to his cause, he had been willing to support roads in Yosemite as a means of bringing the average tourist into contact with the wild. Leopold, on the other hand, worked close to the levers of power, inside a public-lands agency. He had only to convert a handful of his superiors to his vision for the Gila. His proposal arose out of the awareness that “it will be much easier to keep wilderness areas than to create them.” In fact, he noted, “the latter alternative may be dismissed as impossible.” The ironies and tensions in his writing from this time are palpable: Leopold’s concept of wilderness could have been invented only from inside a culture bent on destroying it.

  His article, published in the Journal of Forestry, received a warm reception. This was partly the result of crude bureaucratic concerns. Many in the Forest Service saw Leopold’s view as a means to gain the upper hand in a turf war with the Department of the Interior, which had shown a willingness to usurp scenic Forest Service lands and bring them under its own umbrella as national parks. This had happened with the Grand Canyon in 1919. Others genuinely shared Leopold’s concern over the disappearance of roadless country. But some of his colleagues thought his plan was madness; his old boss on the Apache, John D. Guthrie, wrote him a letter of protest: “We are too much getting away from the real forestry idea in this country, and more and more making the national forests into half-baked national parks.”

  In October 1922, Leopold submitted a formal memo laying out his plan to preserve the Gila headwaters, complete with a set of maps that delineated the wilderness boundary. Afte
r dithering for nearly two years, the Forest Service implemented Leopold’s plan, and the world’s first wilderness was born: 755,000 roadless acres in the heart of the Gila.

  Leopold’s thinking on wilderness would continue to evolve for decades to come, long after he left the Southwest. He began from a simple scarcity theory of value. To this he added a cultural element, whereby wilderness would allow for the perpetuation of certain skills associated with our vanishing pioneer past, most notably travel by horse or canoe. Eventually he evolved a biological rationale: wilderness should serve as a laboratory of land health, “a base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an organism.” By the last decade of his life, he had abandoned the Pinchot camp and joined Muir in his belief that wild nature had a right to existence entirely separate from all human claims, whether economic, cultural, or scientific. In A Sand County Almanac Leopold wrote:

  It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.

  Above all we should, in the century since Darwin, have come to know that man, while now captain of the adventuring ship, is hardly the sole object of its quest, and that his prior assumptions to this effect arose from the simple necessity of whistling in the dark.

  It would be naïve to argue that the Gila Wilderness exists in anything resembling a “pristine” state, whatever that might mean at this stage in history. Parts of it have been chipped away by road-building, despite the original proclamation. A third of it was lopped off by the North Star Road in the 1930s, a road that severed the Black Range from the rest of the wilderness to the west. Several years later another road was built to the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument—a picturesque grouping of thirteenth-century Native American homes on the West Fork of the Gila River—in order to grease the tourism trade. Cattle grazing continued in the wilderness for decades, denuding the watershed. Non-native fish were let loose in the streams, decimating natives. Fire suppression altered the cycle of burn and regrowth. The detritus of a human presence litters the landscape: ruined cabins, barbed wire fences, initials carved in aspen trees, potsherds, pictographs. You could even say the presence of my tower, my propane stash, my outhouse, and my cabin diminishes the wildness of the place. You’d get no argument from me.

  I’ve read the literature of the wilderness deconstructionists, so I can list by rote their complaints against wilderness preservation. By encircling wilderness on the map, we actually extended our dominion over it—subdued it for the last time, as it were, by barring it from settlement and dictating the terms of its use or non-use. We imposed an artificial distinction between the human and the nonhuman worlds. We privileged scenic landscapes (high mountains) over more humble ones (marshes, prairies). And we protected places where, in the language of the Wilderness Act, “the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man,” despite the fact that indigenous people lived on those landscapes for millennia until they were removed at gunpoint.

  The creation of “managed wilderness” is one of our culture’s fundamental paradoxes, and defining why we value it, and how we ought to relate to it, will remain an unfinished project. But leaving aside the notion of simply gifting what’s left of it—less than 3 percent of the landmass of the Lower Forty-eight states—to the gas, oil, timber, mining, livestock, and hydropower industries, which at least has the value of a certain stark simplicity, these criticisms never lead to a better idea than the one hammered out by Leopold: that certain samples of our natural heritage should remain, in a gesture of humility to future generations and the nonhuman world, beyond the reach of the bulldozer and the backhoe. “The environment of the American pioneers had value of its own,” Leopold would write, “and was not merely a punishment which they endured in order that we might ride in motors.”

  To mark the birthday of the Gila Wilderness, Alice and I set out on a walk at quitting time, with provisions for an overnight camp: water, matches, a sleeping bag. Seven miles away there’s a nice flat spot on a ridge above two canyons, one draining to the north and the other to the south. The trail along the way is almost vanished from lack of upkeep. The notes in the visitor log at the lookout show no record of anyone having been this way in ten years. It’s not merely the prospect of guaranteed solitude that attracts me to this wild, windswept ridge. In late May 1922, Leopold broke away from his inspection tour of the Gila to check on a fire that had burned for days, over hundreds of acres, on this very spot. Leopold’s colleague Fred Winn, then supervisor of the forest, wrote of the fire in his diary:

  5/20/22

  Fire is in almost impassable country—awfully dry and rough and water very scarce… . My idea is to let the east side burn as it will stop at Cave Creek for lack of fuel and there is less timber there and of little value… . The danger is in the south and west on top of Black Range… . if fire once gets into [that country], 500 men cannot hold it.

  5/21/22

  Up at 4 A.M. Painter, Reid and I discussed the situation. They feel that the fire is “corralled” but not safe and rushed a bunch of men out at 6:30 A.M. to take up patrol where the night shift left off… . If we can hold the line today, and God Almighty will not send a gale but a westerly wind, we will have it… . Leopold came in at 2:30 P.M. Discussed situation with him in detail.

  5/22/22

  Fire is practically under control according to Painter and Reed… . Leopold and Painter left at 3:30 P.M. to ride around fire line… . Turned in at fire camp at 9:00 P.M. after Painter and Leopold came back from fire line and figured it safe.

  For the next month, often in the company of Winn, Leopold would ride the forest, inspecting the range, assessing the safety of lookout towers, recording the condition of ranger stations and firefighting tools. In what spare moments he had, he looked over the country with an eye toward marking his proposed wilderness boundary. Sometimes, in the evenings, he fished for trout. Then another round of fires broke out—over the course of one ten-day stretch, forty-one new smokes popped up on the forest—and he pitched in to fight them where needed. It was the busiest fire season since 1904. When he returned to Silver City on June 21, Leopold praised the men he’d worked with in the field: “I have seen fire fighters of many kinds in many places, but I believe the settlers and range men of the Gila Forest, with good equipment and supervision, are the most efficient men on a fire line that I have ever seen.”

  Some of those men, with Leopold at their side, almost certainly trod the ground where I lie in my sleeping bag eighty-seven years later. I try to imagine them in their cowboy hats and bandannas, their faces smudged with charcoal and reddened by the heat of the flames, the banter they shared as they cooked their provisions over the fire at night. Try as I do to hear those voices and see those faces, I come up mostly empty. I turn instead to the earth around me. Claret cup cacti bloom bloodred in the rocks. Wallflowers and penstemon stipple the forest floor yellow, orange, and scarlet. I listen to the wind rustle the shaggy needles of the pines. Alice wanders off in search of small game, heeding her impulse to hunt. Words drift away, images dissolve. I open myself to night sounds and starlight, the sigh and sway of tree limbs, constellations I can and cannot name. A wild and solitary peace, a dream-filled sleep. By dawn the dreams have vanished and my fire is cold. A seven-mile hump stands between my resting place and my workplace. I cannot imagine a sweeter commute.

  A spell comes over the mountain in early June. The wind dies, bees hover outside the open tower windows, the cinquefoil blooms butter yellow in the meadow. Clark’s nutcrackers flutter their black and white wings as they move from tree to tree. Lenticular clouds dot the highest peaks, their elliptical shapes and striated edges bringing news of howl
ing winds a few thousand feet above me. In the land below them a stillness reigns, and in my little bird’s nest I gawk for hours on end. I call in a fire along the Rio Grande, forty miles away, and am told an hour later by dispatch it’s a farmer burning his field. The landscape moves through moods all day, morning haze in the valleys, every hollow and river course darkened in shade and swaddled by smoke. Come afternoon, the topographic variations flatten in the absence of shadow. The scene outside my windows leaches of contrast. A searing sun scalds the desert. The cloudless sky seems to open like the lid of a vault, blue to infinity. The job becomes an exercise in just how much watching I can stand. I’ve yet to find the limit.

  This tolerance for watching goes a long way back. As a child I liked to climb the silo on our farm by day and look from the second-story window of our house after sunset. With the onset of dark I could see the solitary yard light that marked the horizon one mile down the road. Over time I discovered I could ignore it, or pretend it was something else, which freed me to imagine all sorts of worlds other than the one where I lived. Maybe the light was a lantern in a lighthouse, and beyond it lay a craggy coastline. Maybe it was a cowboy’s campfire low on the flank of a mountain. Maybe it was an oil lamp, hung from a pole where a raft was beached for the night on a sandbar. My secretive nighttime reading of Louis L’Amour and Mark Twain fed these visions, but by daylight a world of geometric precision reasserted itself, row upon row of corn and beans in perpendicular lines, county roads crossing every mile, the oppressive grid of monoculture farming. All those replicating corners made me feel hemmed in, claustrophobic—every potential escape route a ruse. As far as I could ride my bike the pattern repeated ad nauseam, well beyond the horizon delimited out my bedroom window.