Fire, page 7
All the ridges beneath, looking flattened from this altitude, stood out mostly in two shades of color—the dark green of trees, and the bright green of brush-fields. There was too much brush, and after every fire there was likely to be more of it. In a hundred years there might not be much else, if they weren’t careful. Look what had happened, the professors said, in Greece and on the mountains all around the Mediterranean.
Besides the two greens he could make out the gray patches of rock on Reverse Ridge and Cerro Gordo, and the brown of the ripe grass in Reverse Meadow. Here and there a stream flashed brightly, or a red line along a ridge marked the course of a dusty mountain road.
Raising his eyes from what was directly beneath him, he looked northward. The blunt top of Lassen stood out clearly. A hundred miles farther still, he made out the two cones of Shasta; the lower slopes were hidden in haze, and the white tips just seemed to float in the sky.
The circling of the plane brought the eastern horizon into view, and he saw the main ridge of the Sierra; the boundary between Barlow and Rabbitbrush Districts. The Butte, rising a little over nine thousand feet, was the highest point in the Forest. It was black rock, but the other peaks stood out gray and glistening, reflecting back the rays of the afternoon sun. In that high country there were only patches of trees, but down around seven thousand began the solid forest of red firs. “Asbestos forest” they called it hopefully, because it was too moist and cold up there to burn well—at least, not very often. Still lower down and closer to him, he could half see and half imagine the infinitely irregular line where the firs began to thin out and the blue-green sugar-pines to take over.
But the plane still circled, and now he looked out over the flattish top of Cerro Gordo far below him. There was more haze toward the west in the lower country. Down there in the foothills the State boys were as usual having a few grass- and brush-fires on their hands. Still he could again half see and half imagine the lines where mixed conifer gave way to ponderosa, and it again gave way to all the scrubby stuff of the lower foothills.
His stomach felt better now. Partly it was the less bumpy air. Partly also, he knew, it was this having had a look around. He felt easier, for now he knew that during the hour in which his assistant had been handling things no fire had blazed up. “Well, Jim,” he said, “let’s get home.”
6
Like the trees, the names also covered the mountains. They too were rooted deep.
Oldest of all was that of little Waupomsy Creek, for it alone carried a name that the Indians gave it, though no one still remembered why.
Next came the emigrants of the covered wagons; from far off they named The Butte, for it stood as a high landmark, and there was none to compare with it.
Then came the miners, so feverishly in haste that they hardly stopped to give names at first. So they said North Fork and Middle Fork and South Fork, and North Fork of South Fork. But later, they named the streams, because they followed the streams and dug their gold there—Strawberry Creek and Onion Creek and Rabbitbrush Creek, for what grew there; Rock Creek, for the rock at the crossing; Buck Creek, for a tall buck who stood and pawed the earth proudly at the dawn, before they shot him; Grizzly Creek, for a bear seen at twilight, and to miners all bears were grizzlies. They named mines for good omen, and streams after them—Sheba Creek, Caribou, and Empire. Reverse Creek they named because it seemed to flow against the grain of the country. Polkville, they named for a president. Also they called streams for the men who lived or mined or died there. (Happy thought—to have a cool clear running stream forever as a memorial! And when the trout are rising, who cares what manner of man in his life was Kelly or Curran, or Hart or Jack or Potter?)
After the miners came the sheepherders. Like all men, they named the places which mattered to them—the springs and passes and flats and meadows. Poison Spring, they called it, because an herb grew there that poisoned the sheep. They named Bear Creek, not Grizzly, because they knew animals and were not given to overstatement.
After the sheepherders came the lumbermen. By Sawmill Creek you can tell them. They named Sugar-pine Point and Lodgepole Flat, for they knew one tree from another. They founded the town of Suffolk, but it was South Fork at the beginning.
Last of all came the foresters, and since they must always know quickly and surely where to send a crew to a fire, they named all that was left—the hills and ridges, the little creeks and lakes. The artificial townships they named artificially by the alphabet—Caaba, Cabbage, Cackleberry, Daadlar, Dabney, Dactyl—names to be easily distinguished even when the radio crackled.
There was humor in the names, as in Bacchus Creek—not the god of wine, but only a discreet spelling for a stream which seemed to run backwards.
There was memory of victory in Cerro Gordo. There was pride of a battle-hero in Barlow, though few remembered now the “boy-general,” who charged at the Bloody Angle.
So, from the seeding of the years, from the men who had gone before, the names like the trees covered the mountains.
FOURTH DAY
1
The English ships dropped anchor, and the men of the cities and sheep-walks and plowed fields looked shoreward. Beyond the sand and the blight of the salt-spray, the forest rose wall-like, solid-fronted as a jungle. In their first homeward-carried tales was the wonder of the trees, and the poet wrote:
The cedar reaching high
To kiss the sky,
The cypress, pine,
And useful sassafras.
Later, when they landed and built towns and explored inland, the forest still went before them. “All the country,” wrote John Smith, “is overgrown with trees.”
If you could have flown high above that land, westward through a summer’s day—in this manner the continent would have unrolled beneath.… First, as the sun rose behind you and shadows stretched far ahead from the ridges of the first mountains, you saw only the tops of the trees, unbroken broad-leaf forest of oak and ash, poplar and beech, chestnut and hickory. But later above the first flat lands, you noticed little openings and meadows. They grew larger, until the prairies lay like grass-green lakes within the darker shore-line of the trees. Then, when the sun was hardly yet at noon, the grass-lands were no longer lakes in the forest, but the woods were islands in the grass. They shrank back into thin fingers reaching off along the stream-courses, westward. And as the sun swung ahead into the west, you saw the grass during the passage of an hour or two. There were trees again on the western mountains, but they were pines, and stood thinly, as if struggling against some stronger power; then at last came the sunset on the western shore, where the hills and mountain-slopes were forest-covered, but only grass grew in the valleys.
Thus by the intricate working of rain and snow, of lightning and fire, the pattern of trees and grass once lay upon the continent.
2
In the light of day the grayish-white smoke, rising in tiny billows and puffs, drifting off with the breeze, had been the chief evidence of the fire. In the darkness of night the smoke was invisible, and the line of glowing coals, where the fire was eating into the duff of needles and twigs, was the chief manifestation of its life.
A big owl, flitting ghost-like on noiseless wings, passed into the smoke unknowingly. The great eyes blinked, and at the pungent bite the lungs reacted in a sudden sneeze. Then the speed of flight carried the bird beyond the drift of smoke.
From the branch of a pine-tree, up-wind, a wildcat eyed the glow suspiciously. Like the squirrel, he knew nothing of fire, and did not even sense that his own eyes glared back at the redness with a strange reflected light. Unlike the squirrel he was incurious, and he was also hungry. He returned to his hunting, sniffing through the underbrush to pick up the scent of squirrel-nests or roosting birds.
The fire burned steadily and quietly. During the day it had eaten ahead some dozen feet through the duff, now and then blazing up as it ignited a cone or larger twig. After sunset it had done little more than hold its own, but nevertheless it was stronger than on the preceding night. Its front glowed in an unbroken though wavy line ten feet long. The fire was stronger because, having worked uphill and a little away from the tree’s base, it had come to a spot where the duff was deeper, had now eaten down an inch or more, and beneath a little blanket of ash had found shelter from the dampness of the night.
Moreover, by growing only a little larger the fire enabled itself to grow larger still. Continuously, as its increased heat prevailed over the cold and dampness, its miniature flames reached out to more and more fuel. Thus the fire grew stronger still and larger, as a war, beginning with some frontier incident, augments and spreads, and in the end engulfs great peoples.
The fire had a look of tenacity and permanence—a beach-head force, after its first precarious days, now dug in and consolidated; an infection, once superficial and combatable by the natural forces of life, now eaten deeply into the tissues and awaiting only some favoring moment to spread throughout the whole body.
A puff of wind moved up the canyon. High above the ground, the tips and upper branches of the pines and firs swayed back and forth. Closer to the ground the air seemed scarcely to move faster. Nevertheless the dull red glow brightened to a luminous and more sinister orange, and for a moment even seemed yellow. Little flames licked upward. Then the upper branches ceased swaying, and the orange dimmed into a steady red.
3
Dave Halliday sat on a high stool at a high desk, worked at putting the last touches on his weather-map, and was happy. The early morning sun was bright outside; the teletype machine was clicking merrily. He was wearing a pair of old tan-colored civilian pants, and a gray Navy shirt, open at the neck. Thank God, the Forest Service didn’t go in for spit-and-polish!
He hung back on the hooks the rubber stamps with their familiar captions: LOW, HIGH, CT, S/MPK. He gave the map a last appraising glance, and was ready to get to work on what looked like a not too difficult forecast.
This was Thursday, and since he was out of touch with the weather, he checked back as far as Monday. That had been a typical summer situation. A massive Pacific High dominated all the oceanic part of the map, and extended a long drooping nose into the continent, through British Columbia down into Montana. Northward of the high there was a weak storm in Alaska and another in Manitoba. Nearer home, California lay in a long trough of low pressure stretching up from the Mexican plateau. He looked closer, and saw thunderstorm-symbols recorded for some of the Sierra Nevada stations. That would be the work of some Gulf-of-Mexico air having its last fling. The isobars on the map showed him how that moist tropical air must have flowed up the Rio Grande valley, and cut loose with magnificent fireworks when it hit the mountains of New Mexico and Arizona. Not much energy was left in the little of it that got over those mountains and worked north along the Sierra Nevada. The few lightning storms it managed to release, however, certainly kept the boys worried around here—they were even jumpier than seemed necessary, though being a newcomer he shouldn’t judge.
The Tuesday and Wednesday maps showed no thunderstorms; otherwise, no significant change for the region of his special interest. The two storms moved eastward. The trough of low pressure over California shrank back a little.
That brought him to today, Thursday. It looked, to tell the truth, remarkably like Monday, still showing the trough of low pressure over California, the massive high out at sea, and the two storms to northward. Of course, the storm now over Manitoba was the one which had been in Alaska on Monday, and the one now over Alaska was new. But as he looked more carefully, he saw that there had perhaps really been a change. Any good meteorologist could have told at a glance that Monday had been a typical summer day; it might have been in July. But there was a touch of autumn about Thursday. That was a funny way to put it perhaps, sounded like a nature-fan looking at the woods. There was something in it, just the same.
The new Alaskan storm was what showed the change most. Its center was two hundred miles south of where the other center had been on Monday. In fact, this storm was really over the Gulf of Alaska rather than over Alaska. It was a somewhat more intense storm too—lower pressure, stronger winds. The curves of the isobars showed where it pushed southwestward, denting in the top of the Pacific High. That storm would bear watching, he decided. It might even be bringing in the rain that the people around here were waiting for, holding their breath.
Nevertheless, the summer weather would certainly hold for another day. He tapped off a local forecast which could have been adequately enough expressed in the two words, “No change.”
4
Badger Hill Lookout picked up a smoke close to the Highway at 11:32, and a minute later got the report in.…
“Come on, you bastards!” yelled the Fire Crew Foreman at Suffolk Ranger Station. “Some God-damned son-of-a-bitch on the State Highway threw his cigarette out the window.” They ran for the tanker.…
The Dispatcher had Barlow Ranger Station on the line. “Get down fast as you can, Bart. She looks mean!” He broke the connection, and said, “Get me Sheba!” without even hanging up. Then he heard the siren. “Pretty good getaway!” he thought, as from the corner of his eye he saw the big red tanker swing into the highway with a roar, the crew strapped to their seats along the sides and swaying with the roll….
All over Suffolk and Sheba and Barlow Districts men were dropping tools between two strokes and cutting off conversations with unended sentences. They were running for trucks and starting engines. Radio waves were searching out after those beyond the reach of telephones. The siren let loose at Neva Lumber Mill. “Good Christ! A fire!” Far in the woods the buckers and fallers let their saws go dead….
The Supervisor slid his wheels to a stop, and ran for the Dispatcher’s office. He caught the Dispatcher between calls.
“Where is she, Arn?”
“In Gabbro! Right by the highway!”
“Smack in Deadman’s Corner!”
“Merriam’s Mill again, maybe!”
“Well, I’d better be gettin’ there!”
And the Supervisor’s long legs ran for the car again.…
5
All the lookouts had learned about the fire within a few minutes, and all of them who had any chance to see the smoke had lined up the proper angle and were watching.
From Cerro Gordo it would be at about 212, but a high flat-topped ridge blocked the view. Nevertheless in almost no time at all the smoke-column puffed up from behind the ridge. The jump that her heart gave really surprised her!
She had seen smokes already, but either they had been far away beyond the Forest boundary, or else they had been poor little things which had never been very dangerous and had been jumped on before they could get going.
But this one was different. Even though it was close to twenty miles away, she could see the smoke billow up and rise higher as she looked at it. That fire was rolling!
But she learned more about it from the radio than from watching. They had orders to stand by on the radio so as to ease congestion on the phone lines, and she heard a lot that went buzzing back and forth on her wave-length.
No one could stop to tell a green lookout just what was happening, or likely to happen. But from what she knew of the general background of the Forest already and from the scraps of radio-talk, she soon pieced together a good deal of the picture.
They were particularly afraid of this fire because it was in what they called Deadman’s Corner. That was the southwestern part of the Forest, and presented the worst fire-hazard because the country had been recently cut over, and the slash from the logging operation was still on the ground. Also this fire was close to the old Merriam’s Mill burned area, and that made everybody doubly jumpy—a kind of psychological hazard.
She had already been long enough on the Ponderosa to know about the Merriam’s Mill fire—or just “The Merriam’s Mill” as they said. It had swept ten thousand acres, killed two men, and burned some houses, and a barn with horses and poultry. It must have been about eight years back, although she didn’t know exactly. But she knew at least that among the personnel of the Forest it was a landmark like the Mayflower. Those who had come in since that time were newcomers; really to belong, you had to date back to the Merriam’s Mill. There was even a long rambling song about it that they sang at picnics and other get-togethers.
But though she kept huddled over the radio a good deal, she also made her rounds of the catwalk, and kept looking, particularly toward where she had seen the lightning-stroke. Just because there was a fire in Deadman’s Corner was no guarantee there would be no fire in the Basin also. And she was already enough of a lookout to feel that she would die of chagrin if Humbug Point or that old goat on Horse Mountain picked up a smoke somewhere under the nose of Cerro Gordo.
6
The Supervisor had made a fast run. He pulled in to the fire at 12:11, as he logged himself. The Suffolk ranger was on the job, and doing all right. The Supervisor decided to scout the fire himself, and went all the way around it. He was not noticeably tired when he got back; with his light body riding on his long legs he enjoyed a romp through the woods, even on a hot day. There was nothing special for him to do, and he would have liked to get out on the line with a shovel or McLeod, but that was bad for morale. If the men saw him working with a shovel, they would think things really had gone all to pieces. So he stood around and took it easy. He was something of a fifth wheel at a fire the Ranger was handling already. Still, there’s a use for a fifth wheel sometimes. Not having anything to do itself, it can look around and see whether the other wheels are working all right.…
Bart pulled in from Barlow at 12:42.
