Fire, page 4
“The girl would have had difficulty in explaining this,” she went on, still as if writing her composition. “First of all, it was the peace that went with freedom. It was like living in infinite space, like living in the sky. The closest things to her were the tips of the tall trees on the slopes of the mountain, and she even looked down upon them, as if they were little trees growing in a nursery. Far off, to be sure, she could see plenty of peaks that she knew to be higher, even Mount Shasta; but they were so far away that she had no sense of looking up or being dominated. Didn’t people say, ‘I’m on the top of the world!’ meaning they were happy? Why shouldn’t actually being on the top of the world really make you feel that way? [And—oh, yes—what were those lines about ‘regions mild’?] She fumbled for some lines, and then pulled them up, incorrectly no doubt, from somewhere in her sub-conscious:
In regions mild of calm and serene air
Above the smoke and stir of that dim place
Which men call Earth.
[Just a minute, though! Aren’t you thinking all this is so lovely and you’re so happy, because you’ve run away from things, and don’t have to face people? Oh, forget it, and let’s get this composition written.]
“And next, it was peaceful because the little room at the top of the sixty-foot stilt-legged [Professor Lehman will like that] . . . at the top of the sixty-foot stilt-legged steel tower was the most completely logical and ordered place that had probably ever existed in the world, or could exist. It was like the beautiful old Ptolemaic system of the universe. The room was just fourteen by fourteen, glass all around, with the narrow catwalk outside. Then it was oriented exactly to true north-south-east-west, so that it must always be spinning around with the earth in perfect harmony, just like the music of the spheres. And for a center, right in the middle was the circular fire-finder. In such a place you always knew what direction was what and exactly where you were. And wasn’t that another condition of happiness and peace? To express the opposite, people used words like ‘lost’ and ‘confused.’”
She snapped out of it, and got practical by walking around the catwalk for a careful look. There was nothing showing, except two of her permanent smokes. One was Magna Mill at 278, throwing up a big gray smudge, and the other was the Suffolk town dump at 252, just barely visible.
Back inside, she played with the idea of having a visitor. The visitor’s book showed that there hadn’t been any for several weeks. The road was too bad for most automobilists, and Cerro Gordo (official altitude 4565 feet) was not high and exciting enough to tempt hikers. Still there might be—a handsome young man, for instance. [Oh, that’s it, is it? Well as long as you’re at the business, why not make it a movie-star or the Duke of Berengaria.]
“‘Why, yes, Your Highness [Grace, idiot, Grace!] Why, yes, Your Grace, I shall be happy to show you everything. Certainly, as you so aptly remark, that strange-looking brass thing is at the center and we might well begin there. It is called a fire-finder, and is a device for sighting through and determining direction. If I place the indicator here and sight through the wires, I am looking in the direction of true north, and you will notice that the reading on the scale is zero or 360, which is the same thing.… Ha-ha-ha, certainly not, if it is a question of bank-accounts, very clever of you, Duke! [Your Grace, idiot!] But to go on, as you thus look north, the considerable chasm in the foreground is the canyon of Potter Creek, then a ridge, and behind that the canyon of Jacks Creek, another ridge and then the Middle Fork, still another, then the North Fork, and that last ridge you can just faintly make out is the one beyond the North Fork.… No, not clever. C’est mon métier. (Your Grace speaks French, I presume?) [I only got a C from Dr. Brenner, but I’ll not mention that.]
“Now let me take another sight. Here, about 60, between northeast and east. Look closer . . . Uh? [Even if he is a duke!] …Would you kindly take your arm away? . . . Oh, no, no offense I’m sure.… As I was saying, looking through at 60 you see Reverse Ridge, so called doubtless because it runs counter to the general trend of ridges hereabouts. Note the steep almost cliff-like drop-off on this side.
“Now here, at 65. Yesterday there was a lightning-strike over there, and I have to keep a sharp and continual watch for fear a fire may blaze up.… You’re not interested? Well, to hell with you then! Who asked you to come anyway? You’re probably a phony.… Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean it! Not that!! … God, he’s jumping from the catwalk!”
[Well, I disposed of that duke all right. Bring on your movie-star.]
“Thereupon the girl, with remarkable sang froid, returned to her appointed work. She was much too busy to spend her time burying dukes.”
By this time, she noticed, the sun was getting well into the west. The heat of the day was past, and the breeze rising up the slope from the canyon was cool. She made a round of the catwalk and started another, when—wham!
It was only the telephone, but smashing the long stillness of the afternoon it was like another thunderclap. Long, short, short, short. She grabbed the receiver.
“Cerro Gordo speaking.”
“Hello, this is Bart. Say, did you have any visitors today?”
“Yes, oh, no—I mean no. Why did you ask?”
“Well, I was just gettin’ you prepared, breakin’ the news easy. You’re going to have some visitors tomorrow—the Super and me.”
“That’s swell of you, Bart, letting me know. I’ll have the windows washed and the whole place pitchfork-clean.”
Bart laughed. “You’re kind of a card at that, ain’t you? Don’t worry too much though. We ain’t comin’ to see you special, and we may not even make it. Won’t be before two o’clock at best.… Say, you been watchin’ where that strike was?”
“I have, all right!”
“Nothing showed up, eh?”
“No, nothing.”
“Well, that’s fine. Keep watchin’ it!”
“But that’s twenty-four hours old. Wouldn’t it show up in this time? How long will it be?”
“Can’t tell, baby! Some claims that a fire can lay as a sleeper through a whole winter—smoulder right under the snow. Plenty of ’em will lay for a week.”
“All right, I’ll keep an eye at 65.”
“Yes, and don’t forget the other three hundred and fifty-nine points either. Don’t worry—I know you won’t.”
“What are you coming up this way for, if I may ask?”
There was a sudden pause, and she sensed something wrong.
“Oh,” said Bart, “nothing much. Just an idea of the Super’s! Tell you sometime. Well, maybe you and me and the Super will have a nice little get-together.”
•
The sun was low, and the breeze was slackening. From the catwalk she looked out northeastward again. There was no smoke, but just a touch of haze in the canyons.
From where she stood, she looked down the furrowed eastern slope of Cerro Gordo. Bacchus Creek, Curran Creek, and all their little feeders—she could see the lines of their courses, but they were so deep in their ravines that she nowhere saw the water. Where did all the names come from? Bacchus Creek—that was a funny one. She would have to ask Bart about it. She followed its course with her eyes. It met the solid wall of the cliff-like southern face of Reverse Ridge. “The creek must be undercutting the softer rock,” she thought, “and the lava on top stands up and makes the cliff. I ought to know some more geology.”
East of Reverse Ridge she looked into the mouths of the twin gorges, where Onion Creek flowed out to join the North Fork of the South Fork. But nowhere could she see the streams—just ridge after ridge in what looked like wild confusion, with the hard shadows now making them stand out even more sharply. Here and there little knobs and peaks poked their heads up, but mostly they were the long, smooth-topped ridges, sloping away gradually toward the west and south, except where Reverse Ridge expressed its individuality by cutting right across the general trend. A strange way to live in a country—by knowing the ridges so well and having not the slightest idea of what lay in the valleys.
And now, just at sunset, as the heat oozed away and the breeze died and the haze shrank back to earth, she saw her whole world of peaks and ridges lie cool and calm and clear. There were ten other lookouts in the Ponderosa, and she could see six of them—her fellow watchers. Far off to the northeast she made out the tower on Sheer Rock, high at the headwaters of the North Fork. Swinging more to the east, she raised her binoculars, and picked up the white speck of the little house perched audaciously on the topmost pinnacle of The Butte, thirty-two miles away. Walking around by the southern cat-walk, she saw Horse Mountain easily without binoculars, next Lovers Leap, and then Hamlin Point, off to the southwest. And that brought her round again toward the north where she looked across intimately at Humbug Point, her nearest neighbor, only eight miles away, across two ridges.
But the light was fading already, and when she looked again, she no longer could make out Sheer Rock. She lowered the trap door in the catwalk, bolted it, and was ready for the night.
7
Sometimes—so long ago that years mean little—there was an inland sea, and into it the rivers flowed and dropped their silt. And again there was dry land with volcanoes pouring out ash and lava. That was the beginning of that country, or as close to it as anyone knows.
There came a deep revolt of the earth. A molten mass poured from the center, and high mountains rose. The heat baked the older rocks into something different, and the mass itself cooled slowly into gray-white shining granite.
Time passed, some fifty million years, while the powers of rain and frost and wind warred against the granite heights, and wore them down until all that was left was a country of open valleys with gentle hills between. Broad rivers meandered in the valleys, laying down thick beds of red gravel, and with that gravel many shining particles of gold. Then other sheets of lava poured out, covering the gravels.
Once more the earth revolted, and a strip of land, a hundred miles wide and five times as long, tipped neatly upward along its eastern edge, thousands of feet into the air. The once level beds of the gravels and the lava-flows tilted to the west, and the streams of the broad rivers were cut off.
New rivers began, heading at the ridge. These were swift brawling torrents; as some millions of years passed, they cut down through the lavas and the gravels, and gnawed far into the granite, until each flowed in a deep canyon. But even so, the long ridge-tops between the canyons sloped away smoothly, still showing that they had all been once the surface of the level plain.
When at last the Spaniards came, they saw the shining snow on the highest crest, and called the mountains Sierra Nevada, “range snowed-upon.”
THIRD DAY
1
To ancient prophets and poets on the shores of the blue inland sea, wildfire was a common thought. Their minds encompassed the idea, and turned to it for simile or symbol.
Though the rainless kingdom of the Pharaohs had no forests, the priests still told an age-old story, perhaps enshrining the memory of a moist era, that Ptah became king of the gods because he mastered the trick of fire—“When a tree on the mountains was lightning-struck, and the forest burned.”
Moses saw it as no marvel that the bush burned—only that it was not consumed. His law laid down matter-of-factly the penalty: “If fire break out and catch in the brush.…” The Psalmist called upon his God to persecute his enemies: “As the fire burneth a wood, and as the flame setteth the mountains on fire.”
To Homer, the Achaeans in their dazzling armor marched onward “as a ravaging flame kindles a boundless forest on a mountain’s peaks.” Lucretius assigned the discovery of metals to some time “when a fire had burned down great forests on mighty mountains.” According to a famous tale, a blaze kindled by some ancient shepherds burned for many days, and swept bare all the range of the Pyrenees.
Even England, in drier eras, knew that fury. The chronicler recorded glumly for 1032: “In this year came wildfire such as no one remembered before”; and again, “The wildfire did much damage in Derbyshire and elsewhere”; and still again, twelve years after the Conquest, “This was the dry summer, and wildfire came in many shires, and burned many farmsteads and towns.” The names still testify to such an ordeal—Brentwood, Burntwood, Burntheath, Burnt Hill, Brantridge, Brindley—from Brent Fell in Westmorland to Burnt Oak in Kent.
In later centuries the rain fell more steadily, and woodlands were scantier. Then the English forgot. Neither Chaucer nor Shakespeare thought of forest-fires—unless we take the witches’ blasted heath to be a flame-scarred moorland. Milton, almost by himself among English poets, used the figure, likening the fallen Archangel to the withered glory of a mighty pine, lightning-struck and standing as a blackened snag. The translators of the Bible must have found it almost sufficient marvel that the bush burned at all rather than that it was not consumed.
The English of those days knew little of forests and even less of fire in them. But those who were to plant the colonies in America would soon learn much of both.
2
Arnold Sorenson, the Dispatcher, put down the receiver, and leaned back in his chair to plan things. He was tall and powerfully built, with big hands. His blond hair and blue eyes showed Scandinavian blood—the son of one of those emigrants who had poured into the United States, and being woodsmen at home, had naturally headed for the great forests of the Northwest. The father had handled ax and saw; the son was a forester too, but he worked with subtler implements.
“Well,” he thought, “we take off at three. That will give us plenty of daylight, and at that time of day any sleeper will be throwing up the most smoke it’s going to. Better check the location again, though.”
He got up, and turned to the large map on the wall behind his desk. It was mounted on ply-wood, and from it protruded the glass heads of eleven large push-pins, each fitted into a hole at the location of one of the lookouts of the Ponderosa Forest. Around each of the holes and pins was a neatly stamped circle, graduated into its three-hundred-sixty degrees. The Dispatcher took the pin at Cerro Gordo, and as he pulled it out, a thread which was held taut by a hidden spring followed the pin. Checking his memory from a written memorandum, he placed the pin so that its thread lay precisely upon the line of the circle marking sixty-five degrees to the east of true north. Then he pushed the pin into the board. Somewhere along this line would lie the location of the lightning strike, if the Cerro Gordo lookout had observed correctly.
Next he took the Horse Mountain pin, and with similar care placed it so that the thread lay at 320. He thus had a theoretical “cross” on the location of the strike, and he examined the map carefully at the intersection of the threads, so that he would be able to keep himself exactly oriented when flying.
The “cross” was clearly somewhere on the ridge between Wilson Creek and Onion Creek. But the exact spotting of a lightning stroke was difficult, because the stroke itself was momentary and startling, and because the observer was frequently not looking at the precise location. The old-timer on Horse Mountain was one of the best in the business, in spite of being a religious fanatic. But the girl on Cerro Gordo was green, and might easily record a considerable error. On the other hand, the strike was likely to be on a ridge somewhere, not in a canyon. So it was probably on this particular ridge.
He studied the map for a moment. The ridge was the middle one of three which formed the southwestern base of Howell Mountain, sticking out like three toes. It was a dangerous place to have a fire start. The topography was bad, for at this season the prevailing south wind would sweep the flames up-hill, and they might easily make a run clear up Howell Mountain before you could catch them. The area was roadless area too, although a good horse-trail led down the south side of Onion Creek.
Next he pulled two aerial photographs from his file, arranged them beneath the stereopticon viewer, and bent above it. The whole ridge, even individual trees, leaped sharply into three dimensions. He studied the combined pictures. There were no sharp rocks or especially outstanding and isolated trees which would attract lightning. The whole ridge was well timbered in pine and fir, with a good deal of reproduction and underbrush between the large trees. He wondered whether it was Jeffrey pine or ponderosa. The difference between them was chiefly in the chemistry of their sap, and that did not show in an aerial photograph. Bart could tell him of course; Bart knew every ridge personally. But as far as picking up a sleeper was concerned, species of tree made no difference, and there was no need for him to bother Bart.
He stood a moment, bringing the facts together in his mind and considering other possibilities. He seemed to have done all that he could in preparation for the afternoon’s scouting, and so he sat down at his desk and took up other work.
The girl with the fire-danger report came in.
“Good morning,” he said. “How is it?”
“Down one point.”
“Thankful for small favors.”
She went to the dial. From blue, when the pointer was straight up, the dial was colored according to the rainbow until it became red when the pointer, revolving clockwise, again approached vertical. The blue was labeled “Low”; the green, “Normal”; the yellow “High”; the orange, “Very High,” and the red, “Extreme.”
The pointer stood in the middle of the orange sector. The girl moved it slightly, but the change was hardly perceptible.
