By sheer dumb luck I happened to be facing the lightning when it struck. A blue puff of smoke bloomed skyward from the top of the ridge, superheated sap boiled to vapor in an instant. It dispersed on the breeze so quickly I wondered whether I had imagined the lightning.
I reached for the field glasses where they hung from a hook in the ceiling of the fire tower, an instinctual move made without looking away from the spot of the strike. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes, focused on the ridgeline.
I waited.
Remembered to breathe.
Waited some more.
Nothing amiss. Nothing new or different along the contour of the hill.
Then it happened: the slightest rupture in the continuity of the view, a light white fog that ghosted the length of the tree and twisted through its branches, only to disperse again on the breeze. This smudge of smoke confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating — that indeed a bolt from the clouds had lit the tree on fire, and I had been witness to the genesis.
When I first became a fire lookout, no one told me that the Gila National Forest was smack in the middle of a highly flammable swath of the American Southwest, although I would learn soon enough. At the time I didn’t care much about fire. I mostly marveled at the fact that I had stumbled into a paid writing retreat with beaucoup views.
“We thought we were putting out fires when in fact we were only putting them off.”
I set the binoculars aside, crouched behind the peephole of my Osborne Fire Finder, and waited for the smoke to puff again. When it did, I aimed the crosshairs through the viewfinder and noted the azimuth to the fraction of a degree.
Confident I had pinned the fire within a single square mile on the map, I called the dispatcher with my report: lightning-struck snag, narrow column of light-colored smoke, compass direction from me expressed in degrees azimuth, location by township, range and section. The Silver Fire: named for nearby Silver Creek.
The surrounding country had been starved of fire — every new smoke suppressed as quickly as possible — going back a hundred years, an astonishing feat of military technology and human hubris. We thought we were putting out fires when in fact we were only putting them off. If we are to properly manage the land, we need the humility to learn from how the land manages itself.
This one appeared poised to go big and stay awhile. I knew the mountain would be unrecognizable by the time the fire ran out of fuel, and maybe that’s what it takes to realize that our attitudes toward the wild must be reformed — just like a forest’s rebirth after a deluge.
All the ingredients for a conflagration were in place. For the sake of cattle forage and stability on the watershed and a pleasing view of dense green trees from a tourist highway and a dozen other excuses that taken together amounted to outmoded and contradictory dogma.
The result was an overgrown, unhealthy patch of forest further stressed by climate change. Thousands of dead white fir trees, killed by beetles a decade earlier, sprinkled the surrounding hillsides, and fuel moisture in the living trees had been sapped by years of substandard snowpack and above-average temperatures.
The weather forecast predicted the trifecta of hot, dry, windy conditions in the days ahead. All available smokejumpers had been dropped on two other fires earlier in the afternoon, so none were still on call for the initial attack. Despite being well outside the wilderness, the topography was too steep and thickly forested for helicopter landings, so the only option for suppression was to send an engine crew whose members would have to hike cross-country from the end of a bad dirt road, a trip that took four hours, drive time included.
For two full days I had a grandstand seat as my colleagues performed their suppression efforts — first the ground crew scratching a containment line, then air tankers dropping fire-retardant slurry. The containment line didn’t hold because big conifers kept toppling and rolling downslope, starting new spot fires below the crew, who had no choice but to flee for their lives. I stayed in service with them past midnight that first night, scanning their radio traffic on the tactical channel, eavesdropping on their progress and offering a communication link if they needed one, but I was of no use to their doomed efforts.
“The rules of that game had been written in a previous century, under conditions that no longer applied.”
The next day’s repeated slurry drops didn’t hold because the fire had grown too hot, actively burning through the sundown hours when agency planes were forbidden to fly for safety reasons. They offered an impressive spectacle by daylight, two alternating bombers flying low over the ridge, first one, then the other, load-and-return from the aerial firebase all day long. The red-tinted mud unfurled in translucent streamers, dispersing into the treetops like a poison mist, but every drop of it — 50,000 gallons of slurry, plus another 30,000 of water — was for naught.
It was one more run at the old game, putting out fires with emergency money in liquid form, but the rules of that game had been written in a previous century, under conditions that no longer applied.
The order to evacuate came just after lunch on Day 3 I was told I had 45 minutes to grab the possessions dearest to me and lock up the facilities for a departure of indefinite duration. A helicopter would soon spool up to pluck me from the peak and deliver me to the trailhead, where my truck was parked directly in the path of the fire.
Soon the distant buzz of the chopper made itself heard, a low percussive hum that gathered strength until it roared over the meadow. The grass bent beneath the force of the rotor like seaweed swaying in the tide. Two helitack personnel ducked out the side door and loaded my supplies, a perfunctory job, performed wordlessly. It was a humbling and even sort of sickening feeling to board the machine for the flight out. More than a hundred times I had come and gone from the mountain over the years, mostly under power of my own two legs, a few times by the legs of a horse.
When we landed at the pass, I stepped from the chopper and removed my flight helmet to watch the smoke rise and spin like a cyclone to the south, a vortex of unimaginable heat. Ash fell like flakes of snow on the hood of my pickup truck, and the growl of the fire could be heard more than a mile away.
I joined the Black Range district ranger and three firefighters standing on the edge of the paved overlook, none of us quite capable of articulating the awe we felt at what we saw and what it meant for a forest we knew well and loved. I reminded myself that the mountains had always known fire, were in fact born in a cataclysm of fire, during a great volcanic explosion in the Eocene Epoch, an event orders of magnitude more dazzling than even the most spectacular wildfire. Created in fire, the mountains would naturally succumb to it for renewal and rebirth. Today happened to be the day they did so.
When its growth ceased, four weeks after it began, the Silver Fire had moved across 138,705 acres, or 214 square miles.
My boss granted me permission to return to my mountain in the final week of July. “Don’t get too depressed up there,” he said. “Remember, a big fire is just the birthday for the next forest. It will be green again before long.”
It was a peculiar hike in, that first time back. Much of the walk was lacking in living vegetation. It felt spooky to be so exposed in a place where the forest had once provided the shade of an intermittent canopy. Now there was no proper canopy, just a bare etching of black branches against a pale blue sky. On a trail I had hiked so often I could make my way along it in the dark, I felt as if I were having the inverse of a déjà vu experience — traveling through a familiar place made newly strange.
“Landscapes we loved were being transformed on a scale that was hard to absorb; entire mountain ranges were burning up.”
The view to the south, where the fire first got up and ran, encompassed a stunning tableau of destruction, a ten-thousand-acre patch of forest transformed into charcoal: a century of accumulated biomass reduced to blackened stalks overnight. It had the naked look of country whose soil structure might unravel with one hard rain.
Many of us who lived in and cared about the American West felt that sense of mounting loss, felt it in our physical beings — our reason for living here rooted in the physical, after all, both the land’s and our own. We liked the look and feel and smell of the mountains, and we liked to test ourselves in them, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, horseback riding, fly fishing, elk hunting — you name it, there was something for everyone, and big chunks of public land on which to do it. But landscapes we loved were being transformed on a scale that was hard to absorb; entire mountain ranges were burning up.
For a hundred years we mostly kept the scorch at bay. And just as we awoke to the rude fact of our mistake, the fires became bigger and more intense than any we had ever seen, even in places like the Gila, with a decadeslong history of aggressive burning, though not quite aggressive enough. Scorched earth was now the ground we inhabited in the forests of the American West.
In the southern Black Range, the old, green forest lived only in remnants and memories, and some of the memories were mine. It was a sobering thought, the idea that my mind, if I lived another 40 years, might become one of the last repositories on earth of how certain stands of old growth looked and felt and smelled in a place once called “the wildest Wilderness in the West.”
At first, I wondered whether the fire would deform my connection with the country — whether it would inflict a wound that would forever disfigure my passion for it. Instead, I found I loved it more than ever, indeed felt an obligation to continue my annual mountain-sitting retreat for as long as I felt physically able, years into the future I dared hope, in order to see what the place would become, what capability for resilience it possessed, if only we could leave it the hell alone and let it burn.
This is a modified excerpt of Philip Connors’ essay “Birthday for the Next Forest,” in the collection of essays “First & Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100,” edited by Elizabeth Hightower Allen and published by Torrey House Press. Connors is the author of three books: “A Song for the River,” “All the Wrong Places,” and “Fire Season.” His work has won numerous awards including the National Outdoor Book Award, the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, and the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Book Competition.
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