When my bladder provokes me out of the cabin, the
Montana night is deep. The door closes behind me. I step down two
stairs to the frozen, scoured ground. It is warm and breezy. The
wind sounds like river current moving among the black stalks of
tree trunks. An acrid hint of fire is in the air, as much a taste
as a smell. The fire is more than a year dead, but its scent
lingers.
I stand near the fence, naked but for boxers and
moccasins, and savor the breeze while I pee. The moon is nearly
full. Its light flickers across the rumpled foothills through the
gauzy film of clouds.
Earlier in the day, we drove up
Bridger Creek Road, right to the front door of this Forest Service
cabin. Midwinter, but the road was clear of snow, only icy here and
there. Inside the cabin, the air was stale and cold, more frigid
than outdoors. We unloaded gear from the car, started a blaze in
the stove, and pulled on boots for a walk up the ridge.
The snow was intermittent and thin, dry and crusted. Even where it
had drifted it lay only a few inches deep. The five of us fanned
out and worked up the slope, occasionally using faint game trails
or old four-wheel tracks left from the fire-fighting, but mostly
feeling our way across the denuded country. The forest stood
blackened and stark around us, like a thin coat of fur on the land.
None of the trees had survived the Derby Mountain Fire of 2006, a
conflagration that consumed more than 200,000 acres of southern
Montana.
In fact, this was the epicenter of the blaze.
Derby Mountain raises its bulk out of the foothills only a few
miles away. The swaying boughs of ponderosa needles, the dense,
prickly whorl of juniper branches, the rustle of aspen leaves, all
memories, old expectations of forest.
When the tip of a
branch brushed across our clothing, it left a fine charcoal line.
Halfway to the ridge our coats and pants were striped with black
pencil marks. The soil was seared and loose, sandy, mixed with ash,
sterile-looking. Even the rocks crumbled underfoot, crystallized
bonds undone by the intensity of heat, erosion on fast-forward.
And yet, here and there, impossibly, a dried clump of
green grass or the browned remains of a flower, hints of recovery.
The blackened bark of trees had been worked at by woodpeckers,
nuthatches, prying birds hungry for insects. Flakes of bark were
chipped away, rows of holes drilled, and the true, nut-brown color
of tree revealed beneath the husk of black. There too, stamped in
the dirt and across patches of snow as I sidehilled, the tracks of
deer on their way somewhere — to water, to
shelter, to food.
If there is a good thing to say about
charred forests, it is that the views are revealed. Through the
aisles of black the descending foothills, the distant broad swath
of the Yellowstone River Valley, the sere sweep of prairie to the
north, and more ridges and mountains clothed in the fur of burn.
Denuded of vegetation, views in every direction, dramatic, yet
skeletal.
At several points we could look back down to
the cabin, our van parked out front. Around it, a thin girdle of
live trees, a small island of ground and structure successfully
defended against the blaze. I imagined the hot winds beating
against water hoses and foam, the engulfing roar of flames, the
breath-sucking heat, the people and vehicles making a stand to save
a little, nondescript cabin with its woodshed and outhouse. Nearly
600 firefighters confronted the blaze, at a cost of more than $15
million. Yet, even in this thinly settled country, some 50 homes
and buildings succumbed.
Higher on the ridge, clustered
together on a small rocky summit, the wind clawed its way up the
hill, tore at our clothes. We held our hats against it, made a
quick survey, before clambering below the skyline again.
Now, shivering, I turn away from the breezy, moonlit night and
return to the warmth and greater darkness of the cabin. I squeal
the stove door open, throw in blackened logs already burned once,
but now keeping us comfortable through the winter night. Back in my
sleeping bag, warming up, I listen to my family breathe around me
and to the muffled popping of wood in the stove box.
I
think about the drive in to the cabin through miles of burn, a
valley full of black. We passed several structures that had been
consumed to their foundations. Most of the structures, however, had
been saved. At every home site or ranch building, the same circle
of living trees, a tight noose of survival where the fire had been
beaten back, where possessions and shelter had been preserved at
awesome cost and significant risk.
I thought, too, how
these islands symbolize the way it will be for some time, how, in
fact, it is a reality we already live with. Everywhere, these days,
we carve out and defend habitable oases in an ocean of destruction;
not just within the hot fury of fire, but among the gathering
detritus and lifeless zones accruing from all our insults against
nature. There we are, safe for the moment, looking out across the
panoramas brimming with our legacy.
Alan S.
Kesselheim is a freelance writer based in Bozeman, Montana. His
latest book, written with Susan Wicklund, is This Common Secret: My
Journey as an Abortion Doctor (Public
Affairs).
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Standing outside, late, in a charcoal forest.
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