Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  The bureaucracy has coined a phrase for this strategy that obscures as much as it reveals. Any time a lightning fire is not immediately suppressed, it becomes, in the terms of the trade, a Wildland Fire–Use Fire Managed for Resource Benefit. In other words, where the fire is doing good, we will let it burn; where it threatens to do ill, we will check its spread.

  For two days the wind threatens to whip the Meason and Diamond fires into a gallop—I measure gusts up to fifty-seven miles per hour, which means winds at twenty-five to thirty in the lowlands—and for two days the observer plane recommends fighting back with an “air show,” flyboy language for helicopter bucket drops and slurry tanker runs. The forest aviation officer, who sits shotgun as the spotter on the observer plane, even goes so far as to call it “my air show,” unabashed by the possessive and theatrical character of the phrase. He comes on the scene like a god from above, able to tell ground personnel what their fire looks like over thousands of acres in a matter of minutes, just by spinning a couple of donuts around it. Pretty neat trick, and useful too. For these reasons, among others, his suggestions usually hold. More often than not, his recommendation is to invite aerial company along for the ride. The bias is understandable. One would be surprised were it otherwise: imagine an air force pilot admitting army infantry were always and everywhere sufficient to the task at hand.

  For all I know, every gallon of that slurry sloshed across the forest is necessary to prevent a catastrophic fire and save threatened trout. I don’t get the details up here—the briefings, the maps—which is fine by me. I am both of the bureaucracy and above the bureaucracy. What I do know I piece together from static-filled radio transmissions and the occasional update given by fire personnel to the dispatcher: acreage burned, general fire behavior. Mostly, I sit and look at smoke.

  So many competing interests are involved that it’s always easiest to err on the side of overwhelming force and smaller, more manageable fires. There is owl and fish habitat to think about, road access to preserve, private land to protect, downwind smoke pollution to consider; there are archaeological sites to worry about, weather and bureaucratic mandates to dance with, public relations to massage. I’m glad the headaches aren’t mine. Nonetheless, from my throne above the fray, I tend to think those in charge are too prone to traduce wilderness values on fires that don’t threaten a thing: too quick to approve chain saw use, too quick to approve slurry drops, too quick to approve helicopter landings, complete with chain saws cutting neatly manicured landing zones—too quick at every turn to give themselves the right to do in the wilderness things the rest of us are barred from doing by law. I’ve seen it repeatedly over the years. The hypocrisy is glaring, though few in the firefighting establishment seem to question it. Those who fly the choppers, drop the slurry, and run the chain saws would no doubt tell you they are protecting wilderness, not violating it—that if they carve up a few pieces of the landscape with motorized tools, it’s a small price to pay for protecting Gila trout, which not too long ago were an endangered species close to extinction.

  If I’ve learned anything in my eight seasons here, it’s that there are no easy answers when it comes to fire—no blanket prescriptions, no ironclad laws. Having ruthlessly suppressed every fire for seventy-five years, we created not just overgrown forests but a firefighting apparatus addicted to the big money to be made off an emergency budget line. Someday it will have to be told that the funds are not unlimited. (Do what needs to be done and send the bill later for guaranteed payment: we know how that turns out.) Just as smothering every fire the moment it’s detected is no longer the answer, neither is standing back and letting every fire burn under conditions no one could construe as entirely natural. It took most of a century to create the problems we’re faced with now. It will take that long or longer to burn our way out of them, and it won’t always be pretty. All throughout the West fire officials, biologists, private property owners, and communities large and small are going to have to put their heads together and get creative with fire use, prescribed fire, mechanical thinning—a potpourri of approaches to the fire problem, varying from place to place and year to year as conditions dictate. Global warming won’t make the task any easier, but it does make the effort necessary: we can either allow the land to burn on our terms and hope the resulting mosaic stays healthy despite rising temperatures (a big hope) or we can watch as it’s reduced to blackened stumps and sterilized soil over millions of acres, the evolutionary work of millennia gone in the blink of an eye.

  As much as I may quibble with specific tactics on specific fires, it’s also true that no forest in America has worked harder than the Gila to bring fire back to the landscape. Statistics bear this out. In my first full season as a lookout, 260,000 acres of Forest Service lands saw fire use nationwide. Nearly three-quarters of that was on the Gila. During that summer, the Boiler Fire burned 58,000 acres beyond the northern boundary of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, making it the largest fire-use fire ever to burn outside a wilderness area. Two years later, 290,000 acres of Forest Service lands saw fire-use fire nationwide—107,000 acres of that on the Gila. Just about any way you look at it, this forest is on the cutting edge of the effort to restore fire-adapted ecosystems. The Gila can justifiably call itself the epicenter of American wildfire.

  After two days of checking the Meason Fire’s northeast flank with aerial drops of water and slurry, the fire manager calls a halt. If the fire wants so badly to burn across the road and on toward South Diamond Creek, so be it. The winds have calmed somewhat, and the forecast calls for cooler, wetter weather in the days ahead. Fire honchos will sit down with maps and plot a series of what are called trigger points—plans of what to do and when to do it as the fire reaches certain predetermined landmarks. This may mean lighting a backfire to rob the main fire of continuous fuels and slow its rate of spread; it may mean employing further water drops by helicopter. It may mean calling in state Game and Fish employees to remove Gila trout for safekeeping in hatchery tanks, until the fire runs its course and the fish can be repatriated. It may even mean doing nothing at all if the fire looks good. Everything will depend on weather and fire behavior.

  By the evening of June 8, the Diamond Fire covers more than 7,000 acres, the Meason Fire nearly 3,000. The mountains to my north are mantled in a haze of drift smoke stretching sixty miles. On June 9, a cold front approaches from the northeast, bringing showers and touching off lightning. Even as existing fires calm somewhat amid the higher humidity, several new ones appear, scattered across the forest and beyond it. On the morning of the tenth, John spots three fresh smokes from Cherry Mountain, two of them near Lone Mountain in the Arenas Valley. The first he calls Lonesome, the second he calls Dove, and I laugh to myself when dispatch approves his nomenclature.

  In the afternoon, the fish evacuation team goes to work in South Diamond Creek—stunning Gila trout with an electric shocker, scooping them up in nets, ferrying them by helicopter to the hatchery. How their work goes I will have to learn later from the newspapers. My boss has borrowed Mark, the relief lookout from Cherry Mountain, to spell me for a few days. Although by this point in the season I’m deeply in tune with the rhythms of solitude, the play of light on mountain landforms, the watching, the thinking, the sheer lazy lying around doing nothing, it’s also true that day after day of sitting in my tower has aroused a desire to be on the ground and on the move, soaking up the particulars of all the little niches on the landscape. If I’m going to pass the torch for a few days, I may as well make an adventure of it. The Meason and Diamond fires will still be there when I return. My maps have called forth an itch it’s time to scratch. The dog and I are going camping.

  Alice is the only living being I know who will take a forty-mile walk in the woods without any need for cajoling, planning, or consulting a calendar. We just go. If there’s a trail on the ground she leads; if not, I make her heel while I blaze one. She carries her own food in a mini-pannier draped across her back. We find water at springs and c
reeks, though not all of them run in June. Only a half dozen streams can be considered perennial, and only in their headwaters, on the east side of the Black Range, and many of the springs are intermittent at best—the scarcity of water a goodly part of what makes this place so little traveled. The water I drink must first be pumped through a filter to rid it of giardia lamblia, a protozoan parasite found in many Western streams; it causes severe intestinal problems, or what we used to call where I grew up the green-apple quickstep.

  I get a kick out of Alice on these hikes, burdened by her pack but still feeling frisky, darting off the trail to hunt small game, her attention focused on one goal, scaring up movement to then give chase. I let her lead for half an hour, let her work up a little lather. Then I remove her collar, command her to heel. With her jingling silenced and her roaming curtailed, we just might meet a bear, an elk, a deer, a bobcat, some turkeys, who knows.

  As in Frisbee golf, so in hiking: the movements of my limbs help my mind move too, out of its loops and grooves and onto a plane of equipoise. I have been followed all my life, in the chaos of my thoughts, by a string of words: song lyrics, nonsense phrases, snatches of remembered conversation, their repetition a kind of manic incantation, a logorrhea in the mind, and all of them intermingled with sermons and soliloquies—the spontaneous talker weaving his repetitive spell. At other times, tired of the words themselves but intrigued by their internal mechanics, I find myself unconsciously counting syllables in sentences, marking each one by squeezing the toes on first my right foot, then my left, back and forth in order to discern whether the final tally is an even or an odd number. (Eighty. Even.) If I weren’t a walker I suppose I’d be a television addict, a dope fiend, a social butterfly. Instead I note fluctuations on a landscape scale for hours on end each day, powerless to alter a thing out there in the world, utterly above it all, and when I slip into fevered solipsism I walk my way back to the place beyond words.

  For an hour or two, out on the Ghost Divide, I move in thoughtlessness—allowing sights, sounds, and smells to wash over me—until I come upon a weathered human artifact. A trail sign, broken in three pieces, rests against a fallen log: “Ghost Creek 8,” one chunk says, indicating eight miles between here and there. Having studied the maps, I know this is false—unless it’s mileage meant for ravens. Using the math proposed by Black Larry’s Rule No. 6, I figure it must be more like twelve miles, minimum. “Entering Black Range Primitive Area,” another sign says, a relic of the time, pre-1980, when the Aldo Leopold Wilderness was only a wilderness study area and did not yet have the force of law.

  Studying this second sign, I think of the men and women—many of them radical amateurs or low-paid wilderness advocates, people such as Dave Foreman and Kent Carlton and untold others whose identities remain unknown to me—who spent years of their lives inspecting the proposed boundaries of the Aldo in the 1970s, learning the lay of the land and writing letters and attending meetings and arguing with the Forest Service to include more roadless country in its final plan. Their work enlarged the wilderness by tens of thousands of acres, some of it to the east and south of where I stand. To offer but one example, the Forest Service initially argued that it didn’t want the country around Apache Peak included, on the off chance it might get the itch to build a road to the lookout one day. It goes without saying that I’m glad that never happened—glad the eco-freaks, god bless their funky souls, fought back—mainly because such a road would have fragmented wildlife habitat and become yet another corridor of death and destruction through the forest, littered with empty beer cans and the roadkill carcasses of squirrels and deer. Of course I’m also glad because I doubt I could have stood to be a lookout on a mountain overrun by the motorized hordes: only three lookout peaks in the Gila still require a hike to reach them. The other seven have roads carved right to their towers.

  These half-rotted trail markers attempt to impose a human scale on the land, a project that begins to appear laughably puny when geology comes into account. It may be true that I stand on the old boundary of the Black Range Primitive Area, but I also stand inside the cauldron of a great volcanic eruption. Sometime around 34 million years ago, at the beginning of the Oligocene epoch, 500 cubic miles of ash, pumice, and hot gas spewed onto the surrounding landscape, a volume roughly equal to the amount of water in Lake Ontario and Lake Erie combined. This explosion was a hundred times greater than that which gouged Oregon’s Crater Lake, and more than a thousand times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The volcanic outflow—called the Kneeling Nun Tuff by geologists—was welded by tremendous heat into a layer of harder-than-nails rock that grew thinner the farther it spread from the vent where it erupted. Some of the outflow sheet traveled more than a hundred miles. Apache Peak was near the epicenter. According to Jim Swetnam, who with his wife was the lookout on Apache Peak through most of the 1980s and was there to help build the current outhouse, it took six pounds of dynamite and a lot of chiseling to carve a three-foot vault from the rock.

  I try sometimes to imagine the landscape roiling, pulsing, steaming, scalding the vegetation, oozing slowly onto the surrounding plains, but the magnitude and time span of it befuddle me. Geologists say that with the magma chambers of the volcano emptied, the surface of the earth collapsed, creating an oval cauldron thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide. This cauldron did not stay sunken for long. Resurgent magma exerted pressure from below, uplifting chunks of Precambrian granite a billion years old, some of them overlain by sediments from a time when the area was submerged beneath a warm-water sea, as recently as 65 million years ago. Magma spurted through vents in the rock to form rhyolite domes. After cooling, contracting, and cracking, the volcanic tuff eroded here and there into pinnacles and spires. Surface water carved deep valleys and washed the sediment in broad aprons toward the Rio Grande. The result of all this vulcanism, faulting, and erosion is a landscape of tremendous topographical variation: hoodoos, turrets, conical peaks, hogback ridges, steep canyons, bare cliffs. The pictorial definition of gnar-gnar.

  Alice and I spend the night on the ridge, overlooking the gnarliness, and in the morning break camp and continue the walk to Ghost Creek. The trail barely shows on the ground along the last nine miles. Mostly the hike involves blind route finding, bushwhacking, retracing our steps and trying another way when the first choice fails. I lose Alice for half an hour on a massive prow of rock with couple-hundred-foot drop-offs on two sides. Once I find the path down, I shed my pack and hike back to the top to show her the way. It wasn’t obvious at first, even to me, and she sometimes freezes when she gets scared. By the time we reach the creek bottom her doggy pannier is a shambles. One side of it hangs by a few measly threads. I stuff it inside my own pack and let her run free. She promptly scares up several turkeys and three cow elk.

  Challenging though our journey has been, we move through the landscape in a state of awe and joy unknown to some who’ve come before us. A stark reminder of this fact greets us in a meadow above Ghost Creek, where fifteen graves stretch in a row beneath a tattered American flag waving pathetically from a metal pole. Nearby, tucked in an alcove of a side canyon, a plaque displays a replica Medal of Honor encased in hard plastic. These military monuments testify to the fact that control over the piece of earth where we stand was once contested in blood.

  Given the fractured topography, it’s little wonder the Warm Springs Apache increasingly used the area when chased by the U.S. cavalry in the late 1870s. Known by many names—Chihenne, Red Paint People, Copper Mine Apaches, Eastern Chiricahuas, Mimbres Apaches—they had hunted and camped here for hundreds of years though they lived mostly at Ojo Caliente, in the shadow of the San Mateo Mountains, just northeast of the Black Range. It was an easy morning’s ride from their home camp around the warm springs to high, cool country that beckoned in the heat of summer, beckoned for its plenitude of wild game, nuts, and berries. Given the option, they’d have preferred to stay forever on the land surrounding the springs, with hunting privil
eges in the Black Range and other nearby mountains. But the American government had other ideas.

  After the end of the Civil War, settlers—many of them former Union and Confederate soldiers—streamed west in search of land, adventure, and riches. Prospectors struck gold and silver throughout the Gila region, ranchers undertook to meet the miners’ need for meat, and the army arrived to protect the interests of both. But the Apache had a reputation as warriors of the first rank, and their dominion over the land around the Mogollon Plateau and the Gila River had gone largely unchallenged for centuries. They would not go quietly.

  Amid the flux of new settlement, Chief Victorio and his people lived much as they had for generations. They hunted deer, elk, and antelope. They gathered acorns and raspberries, yucca flowers and cactus flesh. They raided and traded, back and forth across the Mexican border, stealing horses and cattle to swap for guns and other provisions. In their reckoning, cattle, like deer, were part of nature’s bounty, only slower, stupider, and easier to liberate. Horses provided both meat and locomotion. The Apaches considered raiding an extension of hunting and gathering, an entirely natural pursuit. The ranchers they raided felt otherwise.

  As the pace of settlement increased, Victorio sensed that his people’s wide-ranging existence would be constricted. He did not want open war with the new arrivals. He wanted to skim a bit of their bounty and he wanted the promise of a permanent reservation at Ojo Caliente. Again and again he repeated this hope. For a time his wish was granted, and an agency was established there. But government rations were insufficient and game increasingly sparse, forcing the Apaches to resume raiding surrounding ranches and villages for stock, which they then butchered or traded to Mexican settlers near the warm springs. The raiding led to pleas from the new arrivals to concentrate Victorio’s band with other Apaches on a single reservation, ideally across the border in Arizona, at San Carlos. By the 1870s, whenever a horse was stolen, a cow killed, or a gun fired anywhere in southern New Mexico or northern Chihuahua, the Apaches were blamed. To this day the word Apache is synonymous with the practice of scalping, though it was the Mexican government that encouraged widespread use of the tactic, paying Anglo and Hispanic bounty hunters handsome rewards for Apache scalps. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, among the finest American novels of the past thirty years, reimagines that sordid episode with the care of a documentarian and the language of a biblical prophet; it is not for the faint of heart.