In the sixth chapter of his newly released book
The Seasons of Fire, David J. Strohmaier pens an
articulate elegy for the firefighters who died in Colorado’s 1994
South Canyon Fire. When Strohmaier traveled to the fatality site,
“it had been only six weeks since the fire, but already thousands
of small, light-green Gambel oak shoots had groped their way up
through the talcum-like ash.
“Close by,” the
former BLM firefighter continues, “were a dozen heavy-gauge spikes
driven into the ground,” each marking the spot where a firefighter
died. He muses, “The presence of both, rooted in the ash next to
each other, hints, however dimly, at possible moral dimensions of
fire …”
Strohmaier’s is one of three new books
that hint not only at fire’s moral dimensions, but also at its
spiritual, emotional and cultural aspects. It is a very personal
work, based on years of chasing fire in the wilds of central
Oregon’s Deschutes and John Day River drainages. In the tradition
of Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Rick
Bass’ Winter, Strohmaier meditates on the
seasonal rhythms of a landscape – in this case, one shaped by the
unbending force of fire.
Strohmaier, one of
wildland fire’s seasoned hands, recalls the near-evangelical
message of early firefighter training films, namely that “green is
good and black is bad.” By the 1990s, 80-odd years of this sort of
evangelism had created an explosion waiting to happen. But what
prompted federal land-management agencies to pursue a policy of
absolute fire suppression in the first
place?
Stephen J. Pyne’s new book, Year
of the Fires, takes us back to where it all started: the
incredible summer of 1910.
Pyne tells the story
of the desperate fight against “a vast tsunami of flame” in which
more than 2.6 million acres burned in the Northern Rockies alone.
The tale centers on two days in August, “The Big Blowup,” when high
winds fanned flames into massive firestorms that swept northern
Idaho (HCN, 4/23/01: The Big Blowup). Pyne paints a gritty picture
of those two days’ madness, including a series of rescues made by
train crews “over trestles already aflame” and ranger Ed Pulaski’s
legendary stand to save his crew. Despite such heroism, 78
firefighters lost their lives.
Ultimately, the
legacy of the 1910 fires proved not to be the deaths and damage
they caused but a new insistence, voiced by Chief Forester Bill
Greeley, that “the first and greatest commandment of American
forestry is to keep fire out of the woods.”
The
third new book, Wildfire: A Reader, edited by
Alianor True, is a collection of 24 essays and excerpts that
approach fire from a wider range of
perspectives.
The collection has a little of
everything, including Cherokee and Miwok fire-origin tales;
excerpts from Norman Maclean’s tragic classic Young Men
and Fire, and from his son John’s book about the South
Canyon Fire; Ed Engle’s firsthand description of the firefighting
subculture; Ted Williams’ hilarious chronicle of bureaucratic and
pseudo-scientific wrangling during the 1988 Yellowstone fires; and
Margaret Millar’s essay about regeneration in the chaparral
ecosystem after fire.
All three books provide an
emotional depth to wildland fire that moves beyond the stern
warnings of (as Williams writes) “the fire-scarred, shovel-slinging
black bear” named Smokey.
- The Seasons
of Fire: Reflections on Fire in the West, David J.
Strohmaier, University of Nevada Press, 2001. 172 pages. Softcover:
$21.95.
- Year of the Fires:
The Story of the Great Fires of 1910, Stephen J. Pyne,
Viking, 2001. 320 pages. Hardcover: $25.95.
- Wildfire: A Reader, edited by Alianor True, Island Press, 2001. 224 pages. Softcover: $17.95.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Three fiery reads.
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