Fire Season (6 page)

Fittingly, it was Aldo Leopold who first began to tease out the connections among grass, brush, and fire. In 1919, ten years after arriving in the Southwest, he was appointed assistant district forester on 20 million acres in Arizona and New Mexico—a job that involved oversight of personnel, finances, fire prevention, and roads and trails. He inspected the forests up close, taking long horseback rides on all the reserves in both states. He devised a record-keeping system for inspection tours and wrote detailed memoranda of his findings. What he saw troubled him.

Changes could be read everywhere on the land. On the Blue River of the Apache National Forest in Arizona, for instance, widespread erosion had torn out the lush river bottom where settlers once farmed. Trout streams had become waterless ribbons of cobble bar and driftwood. Marshes had been drained by the cutting of gullies. Two questions presented themselves to Leopold. What had caused the changes, and what could be done to mitigate them?

The prevailing ideology of the Forest Service prized mature and loggable timber above all, measured in board feet and dollars. Grazing went hand-in-glove with timber production; it kept the grass down, limiting the spread of fire. Fire took potential money in the form of timber fees and sent it to the sky in a puff of smoke. With fire removed from the scene, new trees took hold, trees that could one day be cut. Cows and sheep, in this formulation, helped make the timber ripe for the harvest. Two sources of revenue, mutually reinforcing: grazing fees and timber fees. A government bureaucracy’s dream.

Something had gone wrong, though. On his first reconnaissance mission in the Apache, in 1909, Leopold had found 300 people homesteading on the river bottom of the Blue. On his return twelve years later, ninety people remained. The riparian ribbon of life along the river was desiccated. Willows had been torn out by violent floods. Good soil, each inch of which had taken as much as a thousand years to build, had washed off the hillsides. Gullies scarred the slopes. Lacking competition from surface fires flashing through the grass and snuffing saplings, trees and chaparral were spreading on the benchlands and foothills. More timber, perhaps—but at what cost? Leopold spent weeks at a time in the field. He saw firsthand the condition of the land, and everywhere he went he looked hard for answers. Grazing appeared the obvious culprit.

Through a series of extraordinary reports and articles in the early 1920s, we can follow the evolution of Leopold’s thinking as he put forth theories to explain what he saw. In 1920, he wrote dismissively of the notion that fire could have any positive impact. “Piute Forestry,” he sneeringly called it, a form of primitivism and an insult to his scientific cast of mind. In the course of a few pages in
Southwestern Magazine
, he got everything we’ve subsequently learned about fire ecology dead wrong. Four years later he was a little less sure of himself. He had studied tree rings and burned-over juniper stumps—becoming a pioneer in the use of dendrochronology to determine fire history—and was puzzling over whether grasslands were the “climax” vegetation, aided by fire, or just a phase through which the land passed on its way to a different climax of deciduous scrub and dense brush: oak, manzanita, mountain mahogany. He got this wrong too, at least for a while. But of the changes and their cause he had no doubt, as he wrote in the
Journal of Forestry
:

Until very recently we have administered the… Forests on the assumption that while overgrazing was bad for erosion, fire was worse… . In making this assumption we have accepted the traditional theory as to the place of fire and forests in erosion, and rejected the plain story written on the face of Nature.

In an article that same year for
Sunset
magazine, he went so far as to note that in an arid climate such as the Southwest, any grazing at all, even of the most conservative kind, would likely produce erosion. For a high-ranking member of the Forest Service, this amounted to apostasy. To this day, stubborn advocates of public-lands ranching refuse to hear of it.

Needless to say, the answer is not as simple as removing all the cows and torching the mesas they once grazed. One fire won’t be enough to adequately thin the spreading brush and juniper; fire will need to be a recurring presence, and it remains to be seen if both the civilian public and the Forest Service have the stomach for it over the long run. Prescribed fires don’t always obey the boundary of their prescription, the most famous local example being the Cerro Grande Fire of 2000. Begun as a prescribed fire in the Bandelier National Monument of northern New Mexico, it escaped control and burned for a month before it was contained. The smoke plume blew so far east it could be seen over the Oklahoma panhandle, 200 miles away. Forty-seven thousand acres burned, causing a billion dollars’ total damage, including $340 million worth to the Los Alamos National Laboratories. The habitat of endangered spotted owls was incinerated. The town of Los Alamos had to be evacuated. More than 350 families lost their homes. Officials quibbled for years over what had gone wrong, and why. Aside from the quantifiable destruction of property, the biggest loss may have been public confidence in the very notion of prescribed fire as a legitimate tool for ecosystem restoration—at least in the intermix zone of wildlands and homes. It’s hard to win a friend for fire when you burn down his house with it.

The Gila, though, provides a canvas on which to paint with fire that is superior to any other place in the Southwest. Indeed, if it can’t be done here, it probably can’t be done anywhere in the Lower Forty-eight. Only a few tiny towns are sprinkled throughout the forest. The vast majority is uninhabited: less than one-half of one percent of it qualifies as wildland-urban interface. The biggest town around, Silver City, with a population of 10,000, lies at the Gila’s southern edge, and with prevailing winds out of the southwest, the smoke impact on humans is close to negligible. None of this means precautions aren’t taken, down to the tiniest detail. As the writer William de Buys has said: “Consider the alignment of stars a burn boss on public land must achieve: archaeological clearance, interagency consultation on threatened and endangered species, environmental analysis, survival of appeals, clean air permit, crew and equipment availability, weather window. A thousand-acre burn can take a year or more of preparation… . Even then its chances of occurring in optimal conditions are slim.”

On this mid-April day in the Mimbres Valley of the Gila National Forest, the stars have aligned. Winds are light. Fuel moisture is advantageous: neither too dry, which would make a burn dangerous, nor too wet, which would make a burn pointless. The fire goes off without a hitch, several hundred acres a day, and from where I sit it even looks rather beautiful, a soft white smoke rising off the tablelands, blown east over the Black Range crest before dispersing on the desert.

I
n the third week of April, the snowpack having receded, the packers Les and Kameron arrive with the boxes I stowed in the shack at the saddle. They tie their animals to various trees in the meadow, and together we empty the mules’ panniers of my supplies. When I shake Les’s hand and ask how he’s doing, he smiles through his neatly trimmed beard and says, “Living the dream, man. Living the dream.”

Hard-handed and bow-legged, these men practice one of the great and dying arts of a world without roads, and over the course of my season their handiwork today will lessen the punishment my body takes in getting to the lookout. With a base of dry and canned food in place, I will resupply myself every two weeks with fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, chocolate, cheese, and tortillas. Their effort today is rather simple, just two men on horseback, each of them leading a single mule on a rope, with panniers holding my boxes balanced at each mule’s side. I have seen them supply a big crew in rough country, however, where a single man may lead a string of as many as ten animals, and it is a sight of calm and purposeful synchronicity sweet to behold, not least because the mules seem to enjoy it.

We stack my boxes on the porch and share lunch in the warmth of the cabin. Les has enough food for three men, a feast put together last night by his wife: sandwiches, yogurt, cookies, homemade trail mix. He graciously offers me his leftovers. I consider most of what he brought a luxury here. I do not turn it down.

“You ever get lonely up here?” Kameron, the younger of the two, asks as he looks around the cabin.

“Nope. Not really.”

“You ever get, you know, sad or anything like that?”

This requires a thoughtful response. Sad is too small and mean a word for the feelings this place evokes in me, yet I’d be lying to say I live here in a state of perpetual ecstasy, like the blissed-out bodhisattva Kerouac dreamed of becoming. On the other hand I’m not about to tell two guys in leather chaps and cowboy hats about my very real and near-mystical hours of longing and nostalgia, alone in my little glass box, brooding over and exulting in my own mortality amid mountains silently magisterial in the late-day sun. Nor the hours of sitting and staring into the inscrutable heart of the desert, not thinking anything, not feeling anything—neither happy nor sad nor any quantifiable mixture thereof. Merely alive with a hungry retina and a taste for dry mountain country and a jones for the sight of that first twist of smoke.

“The only time my heart sinks is when hikers show up. But it doesn’t happen often and they never stay long.”

They laugh and look at each other, wondering, perhaps, if I’m trying to tell them something. It’s no wonder our Forest Service brethren think of us lookouts as the freaks on the peaks. We have, in the words of our forebear Edward Abbey, “an indolent, melancholy nature.” Our walk home is always uphill. We live alone on the roof of the world, clinging to the rock like condors, fiercely territorial. We ply our trade inside a steel-and-glass room immaculately designed to attract lightning. Our purpose and our pleasure is to watch: study the horizon, ride out the storms, an eagle eye peeled for evidence of flame.

Kameron leans back and yawns, rubs his clean-shaven jaw. The clouds have begun to spit sleet, compact little crystals flying horizontally on the wind, even as the sun shines overhead. Though it’s just a little squall, unlikely to last long, it serves as their excuse to get moving down the trail. I stand in the meadow and watch them descend through the trees. Les turns, offers a wave of his hand, and then they are gone. If I’m lucky, they’ll be the last of my government colleagues to set foot on this mountain all year. From here on out the peak will be mine. The thought makes me smile, as does the knowledge that hidden in my boxes of books are three spare bottles of bourbon.

O
n the last Monday of the month I hike in for the start of another tour, smelling along the way the sweet dry smell of pine needles in sunlight, the dog fifty yards ahead of me, both of us loafing along, finding our rhythm—no reason to rush on such a fine spring day, a beautiful morning in the Black Range for April, unusually calm. We’re a mile up the trail from the saddle, just crossing a short ridge connecting two hills, when I see a globule of smoke curl out of a canyon bottom, a mile northeast and a thousand feet below.

Fire.

Several thoughts occur to me in rapid succession. First, there is no relief lookout as yet on the mountain. On my days off—and I’ve been working overtime thus far, twelve or thirteen days instead of ten, with only a day or two off at a time—the lookout remains unstaffed, my boss having hired as my relief a student who won’t be free until the last week of May. The absence of an upcanyon haze of drift smoke indicates the fire has just popped up. The color and the shape of the smoke tell me still other things, so by the time I drop my pack and key up my radio—Alice looking at me curiously, her head cocked to one side—I’m pretty certain I’m the only person on earth who can see it. I also have a good idea of where it is, how it started, how big it is, and what sort of fuels it’s burning in, a bit of guesswork I can indulge after eight seasons in this line of work.

Although my knowledge of the ways of fire has grown, my initial reaction to the sight of a smoke remains unchanged over the years. It’s always a major kick. I take a couple of minutes to regulate my breathing and douse my sizzling nerve ends in the cold water of government professionalism before I press the transmit button on the radio. Otherwise I’d sound as if I were the thing on fire.

Out of habit I call dispatch under the name of my peak instead of my last name, which causes them confusion given my location. More than once they request my azimuth reading on the fire, before I finally get them to understand I am calling from the trail and not from the top. I tell them the fire is about a mile north-northeast of Wright’s Saddle, that it’s on the east side of the Black Range, in a canyon bottom, about a tenth of an acre or less, burning most likely on the ground, in grass, a small column of light gray, almost white smoke. With four and a half miles ahead of me, I tell them to give me an hour and a half to get to the top, at which point I’ll be happy to give them my azimuth from the tower. Then I switch channels and call my boss to make sure he has a copy on all I’ve just said, and by talking it through—him back in the office with maps, me standing on a boulder looking into the canyon—we put a pretty firm location on the fire: a little ways beyond the end of a road heading west out of Embree, near where a trail turns up Thief Gulch. Thus, the Thief Fire.

If you threw a hundred darts at a map of the Black Range, you’d be hard pressed to hit a spot more conducive to an unwanted fire. Brushy fuels cover steep slopes at the confluence of three drainages, offering the fire ample combustibles and plenty of avenues to move. Fire has been ruthlessly suppressed in the surrounding country for a hundred years, so fuel loads are unusually high. The rough terrain makes the area too dangerous to work with a helicopter, removing one tool from the suppression arsenal. The proximity of Embree, less than two miles east, adds private homes to the list of concerns. Were the fire to spread upslope to the west, it would begin to find thick pockets of dead fir perfectly poised to burn. Beginning in 2003, engraver beetles began to attack white fir stands on the southern end of the Black Range, resulting in an almost total mortality for that tree species over tens of thousands of acres. During my tenure I’ve seen the needles of the firs to my south turn from healthy green to bright red, then become ashen gray and fall to the ground, leaving dead standing trees to weather and rot.