Fire Season (5 page)

At 9:15 we recite our weather observations to the dispatcher: wet and dry temperatures, percentage of relative humidity, percentage of cloud cover, wind speed and direction, any lightning or precipitation over the past twenty-four hours. We measure humidity with a nifty tool called a sling psychrometer. It holds two thermometers, side by side, in a metal casing on the end of a chain. One of the thermometers has a small cloth sleeve over the bulb, which is dipped in water. Spun by the chain in the shade of a tree, the thermometers offer two different air temperatures, one wet, one dry. Using a chart calibrated by elevation, you can gauge the relative humidity by the difference between the two readings. On those rare occasions when the readings are the same, you have 100 percent humidity, which you’ll have known already since you’ll have been twirling your psychrometer in the rain.

One morning in late April we receive the unofficial signal that fire season has truly begun. Around 10:30 a.m. the dispatcher advises all personnel to stand by for the “fire-weather forecast.” The man who recites it sounds as nervous as a grade-schooler chosen to read, in front of the class, a story with a few unfamiliar words. The peculiar thing is, only the numbers change. The words remain the same: high pressure, low pressure, relative humidity, upper- and lower-elevation temps, twenty-foot winds, transport winds, mixing height, ventilation category, Haines index, lightning-activity level… It’s a morning poem of meteorology, and he never fails to bungle it in the beginning, mispronouncing a few words, audibly clearing the frog in his throat. Eventually he settles in and finds a rhythm, his self-consciousness ebbs, and the language of fire weather begins to sound like a Gary Snyder riff. The delivery is neither sonorous nor sensitive, but he can read, goddammit—he is predicting atmospheric conditions, he knows the whole forest is hanging on his every word, waiting for the day when the lightning-activity-level number rises from a one (no lightning expected) to a three or even four—but day to day he will never become a more fluid reader. He always falters out of the gate and slowly gains confidence and ends with his dignity repaired, and we are thankful for our poem.

And then the holy silence.

Time shapes itself around me in that silence, shape-shifts from mistress to shade, caressing and haunting by turn. Days pass in which there is nothing but wind, bending the pines to postures of worship of an unseen god in the east. The sun bores through the glass windows of the tower, solar heating at its essence. The world becomes the evolution of light. The almost imperceptible shift of color in the sky before dawn, the turn from midnight blue to sapphire. The way the mountains move through shades of green and blue and on through purple and black in the evening. The dark blue reefs of cloud in a backlit sky at twilight. A crimson lip at the edge of the world where the sun has gone, like a smear of blood, reappearing at dawn in the east. After dark the cosmos glitters gaudily, the planet Venus sharp and bright as a diamond in the west. A full moon spotlights the peak and throws a crisper shadow than in any city, where the light is diffuse and multi-angled, not one source in the sky. On moonless nights with thick clouds I can’t see my hand three feet from my face. I step out the door of the cabin for a midnight leak, and mule deer drum down the hill, fading as they go, the drummers invisible in the squid-ink dark.

Being here alone I may not be my best self, in the social sense of the phrase, but I am perhaps my truest self: lazy, goofy, happiest when taking a nap or staring at the shapes of mountains. My friends back in town often want from me a report on the nature of solitude, on what it does to the mind to spend so much time alone. In these early days, I’d have little to tell them. A few quiet words from Gary Snyder’s “Lookout Journal” guide my days—

fewer the artifacts, less the words

slowly the life of it

a knack for nonattachment

My own insights are fragmentary, fleeting. I write something in my notebook and forget it an hour later. I do not so much seek anything as allow the world to come to me, allow the days to unfold as they will, the dramas of weather and wild creatures. I am most at peace not when I am thinking but when I am observing. There is so much to see, a pleasing diversity of landscapes, all of them always changing in new weather, new light, and all of them still and forever strange to a boy from the northern plains. I produce nothing but words; I consume nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being virtually useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself.

S
een from above on a topographic map, my peak sits near the tip of an arrowhead-shaped convergence of mountain ranges. The arrowhead, encompassing a couple million acres of the wildest country in New Mexico, aims along a line parallel to the Rio Grande and points toward the Mexican city of Chihuahua. The Wahoo Range, the Black Range, the Mimbres Range, the Cookes Range, the Pinos Altos Range, and the Mogollon Range make up the angled edges of the arrowhead; its interior is filled out by the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Elks, the Lueras.

Off to my north it’s all heavy forest and deep canyons dropping away from the rim of the Black Range, the heart of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness: sharp ridges, pink bluffs, dry arroyos, the occasional perennial stream fed by a spring on the lip of a cool
rincon
. Another lookout brackets the north half of the range, at Monument Mountain, and beyond him I can see both the Wahoos and a sliver of the grassy Plains of San Agustin. Far off to the northeast rise the great volcanic hulks of the San Mateo Mountains, former stronghold of Victorio, and just over their flank I can make out the Magdalenas.

To my south, the pine and fir forest of the high mountains eventually gives way to piñon-juniper foothills and finally to desert, with stark sky islands in the distance, the Floridas and the Tres Hermanas, hogback upthrusts of stubbled rock. To my immediate west are a series of ridges thickly covered in timber and brush, ridges that descend toward the valley of the Rio Mimbres. Along their tops can be seen the scars of old burns, grown back now in aspen, oak, and locust—none of which have yet leafed out, leaving the country in that direction looking rather drab, a charred snag looming up here and there like an iron spire. Beyond the Mimbres another string of mountains rises, the Pinos Altos Range. A lookout sits at its southeast tip, on Cherry Mountain, twenty-five miles west of me. He watches over my west-facing flanks, I cover his east-facing flanks, and we share a view of the valleys and mesas between us.

To the northwest is the roughest country of all, the headwaters of the West Fork of the Gila River. Out that way the mountain ranges crash upon each other like waves, each one higher than the next: the Diablos, the Jerkies, the Mogollons. A lookout occupies Snow Peak, the highest and most remote such post in all the Gila, just shy of 11,000 feet elevation and twelve and a half miles from the trailhead: the crème de la crème of wilderness lookouts. Its presence out there on the horizon evokes in me a perverse and loathsome envy, probably due to the fact that in all respects it is superlative to my own peak—bigger, lonelier, farther from the sun-seared asphalt, more intimate with the heavens. The two lookouts there, Sara and Razik, have a combined four and a half decades of experience on the mountain, and their best stories are better than mine—for instance the summer they were airlifted out by helicopter ahead of a fire that burned within twenty feet of their cabin. Slurry drops were required to save it, and they spent the latter portion of that season scrubbing out their cistern, the water in which had turned the color of pink lemonade from the slurry splashed over the cabin’s roof.

The forest boundary is only five miles away to my east. Most of what I can see in that direction isn’t forest at all, though occasionally it burns too—grass fires—and the private property owners and the Bureau of Land Management are as eager as the Forest Service to know when their turf catches fire. The Ladder Ranch makes up the greater part of the foreground to the east, a 150,000-acre swath of high mesas, broad canyons, and semi-arid grasslands owned by Ted Turner, one of the massive Western properties that make him possessor of more private land than any other American. East of the Ladder Ranch spreads the valley of the Rio Grande, running south at the base of the Fra Cristobals and the Caballo Range. Beyond the Caballos, farther east, is a brutal and mostly waterless stretch of desert known for centuries as the Jornada del Muerto, or Journey of the Dead Man. This ninety-mile length of the old Camino Real—the “royal highway” between Mexico City and Santa Fe—offered the traveler a relatively flat shortcut around the tortuous side canyons and up-and-down terrain of the Rio Grande drainage between present-day Las Cruces and Socorro. The trade-offs were oppressive heat in summer, little reliable water for humans and stock, and the ever present danger of Apache attack. The Jornada del Muerto took three days to cross if you didn’t stop to rest at night, and, lacking water, most who took it did not.

Beyond the Jornada del Muerto I can see the San Andres Range, the mountains responsible for the white-gypsum sands of the Tularosa Basin, one of the natural wonders of North America. Sculpted by wind and water into sensuously curving dunes, some of them fifty feet high, the gypsum crystals on the east side of the San Andres spread across 275 square miles of nearly pure white desert, open to public visitation at the White Sands National Monument. The White Sands Missile Range sits just north of the monument. Off-limits to you and me, the missile range serves as a proving ground for some of the U.S. military’s most advanced killing tools. It also contains that scarred piece of earth known as the Trinity Site, where man first unleashed on the world the splendors of the Bomb. Twice a year Trinity opens to visitors, who can inspect the desert for a new kind of rock, trinitite, which formed when the blast melted quartz and feldspar into green-colored glass.

In summary, then, I have a view of spruce-fir high country, ponderosa parkland, piñon-juniper hills, several river valleys, arid grassland mesas, dry arroyos, high-desert scrublands, and the occasional fire scar grown back in aspen and locust. Amid it all are contained the birthplace of the wilderness idea and the birthplace of the nuclear age—a landscape overlaid by history with equal parts hope and dread, and plenty enough irony to keep the mind at play through the long afternoons of no smoke.

A
s a lookout in high country, I like to tell people I get paid to look at trees. But the longer I work this mountain, the more I find myself thinking of grass.

For millennia, fire and grass worked symbiotically here. Grass—bromes, gramas, muhlies, fescues, all the various bunch grasses native to the region—burned quickly and fertilized the soil, whence came fresh grass. Both lightning-caused fires and human-lit burns moved quickly through the forest understory. Trees lived in mature stands where most were hundreds of years old. Ponderosa covered much of the forest in open, savanna-like parkland, with trees widely scattered, surrounded by a sea of grass. Dendrochronology research—the study of tree rings for evidence of climate fluctuation and fire scars—shows that for centuries much of the forest burned once, twice, even several times a decade, until the late 1800s.

Then the sheep and the cow arrived in numbers previously unknown. With Geronimo’s surrender in 1886 the last of the Apache holdouts were finally subdued, and livestock barons pushed their herds into the most remote corners of the Southwest, searching for good grass on what was left of the open range. Hundreds of thousands of head of livestock swarmed over southern New Mexico, up to the highest reaches of the Gila country. The consequences were shocking and immediate. In 1895, a great flood swept out of the Pinos Altos mountains and tore through what was then the heart of Silver City. Subsequent floods wreaked even more havoc. Homes, businesses—even famously a grand piano owned by the justice of the peace—were washed away in the periodic surges. The town’s commercial strip had to be moved one block west after the original Main Street became a fifty-foot crevasse, the floods having scoured the earth to bedrock. That scar, colloquially called the Big Ditch, can still be seen today.

With the coming of the Forest Service at the beginning of the twentieth century, two attitudes prevailed: deference to ranchers and disdain for fire. In 1826 the explorer James Ohio Pattie had reported being “fatigued by the difficulty of getting through the high grass, which covered the heavily timbered bottom” of the Gila River drainage. By 1909, forest ranger Henry Woodrow noted that in the heart of the Gila, at what today is the point in New Mexico farthest from a road, “There were cattle all through the mountains and grass was hard to find.” He had to ride his horse a dozen miles to find something on which it could graze. Elsewhere on the forest sheep were driven from grassy mesas to water sources in the valleys, carving trails where every living thing was trampled; the trailways acted as barriers to the spread of fire. By the middle of the twentieth century, much that was wrong with the Gila could be summed up in six words: too many livestock, too few fires. The forest had become a scenic pasturing ground for private ranchers, as indeed too much of it remains.

On this day, though—tax day, April 15—I need only look out my windows to see how far we’ve come in embracing fire’s utility. A line of smoke rises just this side of North Star Mesa, on land once grazed by the GOS Cattle Company, one of the biggest ranching outfits in the history of the Gila. Instead of cows converting grass to protein, fire converts it to ash. Instead of an incident commander marshaling resources to squelch it, this fire—a “prescribed fire”—is led by a burn boss. The burn boss directs the movements of men and women walking along a pre-mapped perimeter with drip torches, canisters that pour a mixture of diesel and gasoline out of a nozzle and past an igniter, allowing their users to dribble flames on the ground. The goal is for the fire to catch and begin to move east, burning several thousand acres over the course of a few days, mimicking an ecological function removed from the land for most of the twentieth century. It takes a good deal of study and some imagination to see in the mind the mesa as it was once: a lake of grass rippling in the springtime wind. Partially colonized now by juniper and various forms of woody scrub, it little resembles the state in which it was first seen by whites and Hispanics. Fire, so the hope goes, will begin to change that—fire in its ancient marriage with grass, the two of them conspired against brush.