On The Number Four
As I write this preamble, on a scale of one to five, the National
Preparedness Level is FOUR. But this number does not refer to the capricious
antics of a group of radicals ready to do in the likes of the
United States. This number is formulated not on the unpredictable
social behaviours of humans, but rather, it's gleaned from the
data of hard science: meteorology, hydrology, geography. And yet,
unlike a precise chemical equation which can perfectly balance
reactants and products, it is not the perfect instrument for predicting
the number of conflagrations which might emerge from the proclamation
of a condition "FOUR". This number four is representative
of a system known as the National Preparedness Level for wildland
fire burning conditions. This model has it's limitations. It is
restricted to understanding the interactions of the atmosphere
with the nature of only three physical properties, a triangle
of combustion: fuel, oxygen, and heat. And although this model
readily accepts the limitations placed upon it by the probabilities
of an "act of God" mainly, lightning strikes, or rain
showers, it has no way to incorporate that dubious and capricious
nature of those hot dog cooking radicals that leave a campfire
still smoldering, in the middle of nowhere, not "dead out"
as Smokey Bear would advocate.
The level number four for today is generated throughout the year by the National Multi-Agency Coordination Group. Metaphorically it translates into millions of dollars being spent, thousands of structures at risk of being lost to fire, and thousands of lives potentially at stake. Practically speaking, it reflects the pyro-landscape of the present, even today, an America that, as I write this, has no less than fifty-two raging wildfires burning within its borders, with over twenty of these fires burning in the Pacific Northwest alone.
The thousands of lives, spoken about here include those, residing and recreating in an entirely new... man-made forest. Ironically enough, this includes a group of people of whom many have never heard of the number for today....... FOUR.....let alone what it means to index these potentials for disaster with a number. But it will impact them. Furthermore, many of these people would rather depend on a belief system rather than a science to protect them from the inevitable. And it will come. They most recently saw evidence of that in the Lake Tahoe fires. These are people, forest residents who live and play squarely in the middle of that triangle. A space filled to the brim with the potential for a fire storm. Disasters that are truly chemical in nature, yet without a doubt, clearly cultural in design.
Additionally, the human element here represents thousands of people who are not playing in the triangle, but rather trying to figure it out. They are the wildland firefighters that every season put themselves at risk for the sake of those above, for the sake of the flora and fauna of the forest, for the sake of Smokey Bear. However, these men and women, many very young, many deeply and romantically engaged with this firefighting experience, are really there for more reasons than Smokey and his friends. Some are college bound, some are looking to make a car payment, some simply want the excitement, and some may be fulfilling a dream wanting to become a wildland firefighter. No matter what the reasons, by default, they have come into a job which produces a common bond amongst all of them. Indeed, they are a family. Their friendships, their energy, their sweat are melded together by a force that is steeped in the mystical, the ancient; the harnessing of yang, the control of one of the four classical elements...a force.....stolen from the Gods on Mount Olympus; delivered by Prometheus to mortals below, to manage, to live and to die by......FIRE.
The books discussed within these podcasts are
foremost about four
members of this family who have
left this earth. Yet, because they are a family, one quickly sees
that what happened at the Thirtymile Fire will impact many in
this family as well as Smokey and his friends for years to come.
Managing Pyrolandia:
A New Nation In The West?
One afternoon in the Okanogan, I went to visit my aged father.
He was suffering from a mind degenerating disease, yet I tried
hard to carry on a conversation with him, because, well, he was
my dad. It was in the heat of a bad fire year in the west and
just to make conversation, I mentioned to him about some nasty
wildfires burning in the area. With all due respect, in his senile
state, he looked at me and proclaimed "let her burn!"
We both chuckled, went in his room and ordered up a cold lemonade.
Understanding fire as a natural agent for cleansing the forest is clearly understanding one aspect of a balance of the ecological (natural) processes that brings biotic equilibrium to the forest. But nature for the most part no longer has a natural forest to cleanse. The trees are no longer like the wispy, soft baby hair that resided on your head in your early days. Your hair has been cut, designed, thickened, coloured, lost, and manufactured to look a certain way. Ask your hairdresser! Managing this adult growth on your head is different. Likewise, to suggest that something as natural as fire, be used to manage something as unnatural as orange spiked hair on a punk rocker is something rooted in the same perspective of my father's rhetoric.
Yet, "let her burn", without limitations, is a prescribed method amongst many in forest management today. The Achilles heal, however, is indeed, what in fact you are going to let burn. Is it a natural forest? Or, is it a pasture of trees? Overgrown with years of tinder dry undergrowth, fuel, derived from the policies, the choices, to suppress fire no matter what it takes; the forest today is a much different place than it was at the turn of the twentieth century. But well-meaning policies established well before the days of Smokey Bear now need thinning themselves. The consequences of this human management choice should make the determinist ecologists shout "told ya so!" But ironically, it's that ecologically natural thing, FIRE, when applied without thought to this "head of hair," that becomes an unnatural culprit. Today, something as natural as fire, does little for the natural, because there is little of anything natural, for it to do anything natural to! Rather the consequences of this management style produces a landscape not much unlike the exploited home place that Plato describes in the 4th century B.C. "What now remains compared to what then existed is like a skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and the soft soil having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left." He was describing the consequences of the deforestation of Attica, by the hands of man. It was a choice! Greece needed tall ships, not tall forests. Yet he may as well of been describing the Yellowstone, after the fires of 1988. It was a choice. A choice to grow tinder box forests, without balanced management, and let them burn. Naturally? Have we given up on the tall forests?
Pyro Prose
Some things never change. Fire is one of them. It's hot, it's
mean, and it was as destructive in the days of "Homer"
as it is today. The Greek poet writes, "Through deep glens
the fierce fire ranges on some parched mountain-side, and the
deep forest burns, and the driving wind whirls the flame every
way." Kathie FitzPatrick could have been a Greek poet. She
has an odyssey with fire, and she describes it in her book Angel
Promises. Her prose and poetry recalling the moment of the loss
of her eighteen-year-old firefighting daughter, Karen, emulates
in almost Homeric terms a peaceful Okanogan landscape transformed
by a vicious, mean, fierce fire. She writes, " Meanwhile,
The Great Dark one rejoiced in a great victory. A fireball of
his presence rolled through the forest, taking one half of the
trees as he went singeing and burning them." In John Norman
Maclean's book, The Thirtymile Fire, he describes the inferno
thus, "Once flames passed the entrapment site, they burned
into a stand of heavy timber up-canyon. A double fire plume tossed
trees about like pickup sticks and flattened whole swaths of timber."
Both of these authors make salient poetic and painful points about
a fierce wildfire, the Thirtymile Fire, that hot dry day in the
Okanogan. But where both of these authors meld, where their thoughts
fuse together in the heat of this conflagration, is around the
number 4. Four. Four young firefighters, died that day. Some might call
it an act of God, other's an act of the Devil himself. Some might
dismiss the metaphysical all together and simply call it the odds.
These two authors take on all of the above and by default, like
a line from Dante's Inferno, take their readers on a journey,
"....through the forest, I mean the forest that was dense
with spirits."
The following podcasts are interviews with author Kathie FitzPatrick and John Norman Maclean. They do little justice when compared to reading their books, Angel Promises and The Thirtymile Fire: Chronicle of Bravery and Betrayal. Both are steeped in human drama, emotion, and irony. Both come from points of view unique to their writer's approaches to a problem. The Thirtymile Fire is a problem, like every fire and especially this one, the worst since Storm King Mountain in 1994. It's a problem that will not go away, and closure for many in this drama just has never come. For the first time, litigation beyond belief, against the Forest Service, is setting a precedent that has already set the tone for a new way of looking at fire control management in itself. In Kathie's interview, she talks like a parent, a mother, and an author, about her Daughter, Karen, the youngest female firefighter ever to be killed in the line of duty. She takes on the issues of Divine providence, and what an "Act of God" like this means to a family. In contrast, John's interview looks briefly at the management of Wildland fires and how it has brought us to infernal dramas such as the Thirtymile Fire. He does not adumbrate but rather directly takes on the debate of what happened in the Chewuch River canyon that tenth day in July 2001. In nearly an hour long interview, he suggests what the future may look like for Wildland Fire Fighting if the agencies involved really learn the lessons of the Thirtymile and other fires.
That day," the FOUR in the Okanogan" was much greater than just a number. Much more than simply an indices representing a potential for disaster. That four meant four young lives. "....now the fireweed will blossom in those places not forgotten. Where the forest burned and the people learned, of the four in the Okanogan."
Dr. M. Mustoe
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Perceptual Writings from
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