On the Burning Edge (12 page)

After unloading the other hotshots’ bags, as they always did, Renan and Grant slept next to each other. They unrolled their pads and sleeping bags in the shade of a pine that great age had given character. Grant neatly stacked and folded his ash-covered pants and shirt beside his bed. Renan sighed when he took off his boots and sat for a long moment rubbing his naked and shriveled feet. Colonies of athlete’s foot were now well established in his toes, and above his sock line was a white ring that separated the dirt above his calf from the damp white flesh below. His body ached. Letting his feet breathe was a small luxury.

As the other hotshots collapsed into their bags, Grant pulled out the tobacco he’d bought and took a seat on a picnic table nearby. Finally alone, he rolled a cigarette. Since the gas station, smoking had become his quiet ritual—a small creature comfort before bed. Watching Grant smoke was the last thing Renan remembered before falling asleep.

Renan woke with a sharp inhale
. He knew this feeling. He hated this feeling. His back was seizing. Renan grabbed Grant, who was asleep beside him, and pulled him closer. Grant was slow to wake and
turned to see Renan’s eyes wide with panic as he slipped from consciousness. Renan began to writhe. Grant, now aware that something was very wrong, put his face close to Renan’s and screamed.

“Renan! Renan!”

His shout roused the rest of the hotshots. Somebody called an ambulance. Grant was kneeling over Renan when he regained consciousness. Renan saw only his friend’s face hovering six inches above his own. Grant kept repeating Renan’s name, and it sounded hollow and meaningless, but even through the lens of shock, he could tell Grant was terrified.

Renan’s body convulsed and blackness returned. Grant put a hand on his friend’s forehead and the other on his arm, and the tears streamed down as he felt Renan arch and quiver and arch and quiver. The entire crew surrounded Renan in a wide circle. Most were shirtless and in their boxers, trading guesses in hushed tones about what was happening to Renan and ideas about how to keep him safe.

When consciousness returned, it came in pieces. Hearing was first. Renan didn’t know who was speaking or what they were saying. The paramedics, who arrived within twenty minutes, loaded him onto a gurney and spread a wool blanket over him. The hotshots parted as he was wheeled to the ambulance. The first thing Renan remembered clearly was Grant and Donut framed by the ambulance’s side door.

Grant was crying. Donut had been. He grabbed Renan’s motionless hand and squeezed.

“You’re going to be okay, man,” Donut said. “We’re here for you.”

Tears welled in Renan’s eyes. He knew he wasn’t coming back to the crew. The paramedics closed the back door and said it was time to go. Grant looked down and tried to find the right words to reassure his friend but failed. The door was shut and Grant, Donut, and the rest of the crew watched the ambulance pull away.

T
ragedies both large and small punctuate the history of America’s long war on wildfire. In 1871, fifteen hundred people died in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a logging town near Lake Michigan, when, according to legend, a flaming front five miles wide and twice as tall as the Washington Monument swept through town. That same day, five hundred more people died in two separate large fires in Michigan and Illinois. By the end of the nineteenth century, wildfires would kill 836 more Americans, most of them civilians.

But for all the casualties, no tragedy has shaped America’s fire policy more than Idaho’s Big Burn. The same historic firestorm that made Ed Pulaski famous for saving forty-five of his crew members’ lives went on to kill eighty-seven people and blacken three million acres. Far from America’s largest or deadliest blaze, the Big Burn’s significance lay in its timing.

The fire sparked in August 1910, just five years after Theodore Roosevelt created the Forest Service and placed under the new agency’s control an area twice the size of Montana. The conservative Congress, many of its members deep in the pockets of timber barons, was incensed. Roosevelt had used an executive action to bring millions of
previously unclaimed acres under federal control, and he did so, in his typically willful style, without consulting Congress.

Congress, which sets the annual budgets for federal agencies, responded to Roosevelt’s brash action by giving the Forest Service an anemic and unsustainable budget. Two of the agency’s early directors resigned in protest of their low salaries, but it was even worse for the rangers, who received only $900 per year and were required to provide their own horses and saddles.

If the Forest Service was going to survive beyond its infancy, the agency and its charismatic first director, Gifford Pinchot, needed more rangers and more money to manage the land. They needed to move beyond the political battles and convince Congress that their relevance was greater than merely being caretakers of the wilderness. The key, once again, lay with the politicians beholden to the timber industry, which saw every blackened tree as a lost dollar. Pinchot and the leaders of the Forest Service quickly realized that controlling wildfires would become the agency’s way to secure sufficient funding.

The Big Burn made the agency’s case. Three million acres of forest burned in one mammoth firestorm, and the timber industry calculated the losses to be in the millions. Pinchot’s Forest Service rangers, though, were the ones leading the effort to extinguish the flames. They organized civilian militias raised from bars and churches and helped direct the Buffalo Soldiers and other cavalry when the Army got involved. In the Big Burn’s aftermath, Congress finally found purpose in the agency. Their job, as one early Forest Service director put it, was to keep the land ripe for the ax by suppressing wildfires.

Over the decades that followed, the Forest Service and the timber industry grew to depend on each other. Loggers clear-cut national forests in every western state, and the agency grew wealthy from the leases the companies paid to harvest publicly owned trees. To better curb the only scourge slowing the timber harvests, the agency invested heavily in fighting fires. During World War II, conscientious objectors served their country by fighting wildfires. The Forest Service shortened response times to wilderness blazes by building roads into remote mountain ranges, erecting watchtowers among swaths of
virgin forest, and founding the smoke-jumping program—an idea borrowed from Army paratroopers—to extinguish any fire too remote to hike or drive to. Army surpluses left behind after World War II—Jeeps, air tankers, helicopters—further militarized suppression troops, and the public was enlisted in the war on fire.

During World War II, the government issued posters that showed Hitler and an Imperial Japanese soldier grinning beside a wildfire. The Japanese had taken to sending high-altitude hot-air balloons across the Pacific to set ablaze America’s forests and its cities. They launched an estimated nine thousand balloons, and though 342 reached the United States, only one caused significant damage. The hydrogen-filled rubberized silk balloon landed in southern Oregon, killing a pregnant Sunday school teacher and five of her teenage students. They were the only U.S. combat casualties in the forty-eight states. The text beneath the government-issued campaign posters read,
OUR CARELESSNESS, THEIR SECRET WEAPON
.

Ultimately, though, it was a shirtless, shovel-wielding, ranger-hat-and-blue-jeans-wearing brown bear that colored America’s perception of fires. Created by the Advertising Council in 1944, Smokey Bear tapped into the nationalist fervor that had swept the country during the war years, and through radio and TV ads, folk songs by popular country musicians, and movies, like
Bambi
, that villainized wildfire, the phrase “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” became ingrained in the American psyche. The advertising campaign became one of the most successful messaging efforts in history. By the twenty-first century, Smokey’s fame rivaled that of Santa Claus. At a glance, 95 percent of adults and 77 percent of children knew Smokey Bear and his anti-wildfire message.

Many firefighters were dying trying to corral the burns. In the first thirty years of the Forest Service’s grand experiment to control the flames, 186 firefighters were killed on the line. These fatalities only strengthened the agency’s resolve to suppress fires. Smoke jumpers, fire engines, air tankers, helicopters, and hotshot crews were developed to aid the effort to extinguish any and all sparks in the forests.

Before suppression became the reigning management policy in the
1930s and ’40s, forest scientists estimate that more than thirty million acres burned in the West every year; after suppression was instituted, most fire seasons were held to less than five million acres. By the mid-1950s, firefighters were stopping almost all wildfires before they reached the size of a city block. In just forty years, the Forest Service had assembled the world’s most effective firefighting force.

What forest managers hadn’t
foreseen was suppression’s serious environmental consequences. Unwittingly, land managers had made more volatile. Naturally and regularly occurring fires played a crucial role in the evolution of most western forests. Removing the flames changed the self-regulating system. As a strategy for dealing with natural wildfires, dousing every spark worked just long enough for countless pine, fir, and cedar saplings to grow into mature trees. By the end of the twentieth century, the policy failures were nowhere more obvious than in the Southwest.

Suppression had changed the forests. The Southwest used to simmer with frequent low-intensity burns every summer. Lightning ignited some blazes, but native peoples intentionally set the majority to cultivate grass for the elk and deer herds they relied on for food. Smoky summer skies were the norm. Towering columns associated with extremely hot blazes were not. Fires burned at low intensity, with flames not much taller than knee height. These blazes meandered across the landscape, clearing the forest of underbrush every ten to fifteen years. Left behind were open meadows and ponderosa forests with widely spaced canopies and black charcoal scarring the trees’ trunks.

Without frequent blazes, brush and saplings choked out the open grasslands and created a ladder of fuels that grew from the forest floor to the tops of the pines. Since suppression began, millions—maybe billions—more trees have crowded into western forests. Though firefighters have limited the frequency with which fires escape, the ones that do now have exponentially more fuel to burn. In one New Mexico
mountain range, there are now 1,300 trees per acre where a century earlier there were just 150. Flames can climb quickly up the ladder and into the crown, where fires ignite the tallest tree and create infernos that are nearly impossible to control.

Nationwide, firefighters began noticing an uptick in fire intensity in the early 1980s. But it wasn’t until the summer of 1988, when more than a third of Yellowstone National Park burned, that the greater public took note of just how unhealthy the forests had become. For three months the fires raged, and national newspapers splashed across their front pages images of two-hundred-foot flames dwarfing park buildings. Dubbed the Summer of Fire, the conflagration closed the park to tourists, and Americans were concerned that they were witnessing the destruction of a national treasure.

“People were horrified by Yellowstone,” said Harry Croft, the deputy national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service during the mid- to late seventies. “We didn’t like what was going on, either. So we put together a plan that would reintroduce fire, logging, thinning—something to get our forests back on track and limit how often we get the Yellowstone anomalies.”

Croft and his colleagues released an updated National Fire Plan in 2000. It allowed fires that didn’t threaten houses, endangered species, or watersheds to burn unmolested by firefighters. The policy shift is part of the reason six-million-acre fire seasons are the new norm, and ten-million-acre seasons loom on the horizon.

“More acreage burned is a very good thing,” says Alexander Evans, a forest scientist who studies wildfires for the Forest Guild, a Santa Fe–based nonprofit that advocates for sustainable forestry. Before World War II, fire seasons that burned between thirty and forty million acres, much of it at a lower intensity, weren’t uncommon. “In a few places, we’re even seeing a return to natural fire cycles and the fuels getting thinner. That’s what we want more of,” says Evans.

But now that we’ve made it possible for forests to grow unchecked for years, it’s not as simple as it sounds. As acclaimed fire scientist
Stephen Pyne puts it, removing fire from the landscape is much easier than putting it back.

The combination of dense forests and drying climate has made highly destructive fires—like the Yellowstone anomalies—increasingly common. Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Colorado have all seen their most destructive blazes since the turn of the twenty-first century.

Forest scientists and the media alike have branded these blazes mega-fires. The term is imprecise and means only that a burn is destructive, extremely difficult to control, and, because of this, expensive. The term’s usage also turns a blind eye to the fact that large wildfires, though somewhat anomalous, have historically shaped American forests. Between 1825 and 1910, six documented fires—in present-day Wisconsin, Michigan, Maine, Idaho, and South Carolina—exceeded one million acres. Each of them burned more acreage than the largest blazes the United States has seen in a hundred years, and three of them were larger by a factor of five.

What the term “mega-fire” accurately reflects is that fires are burning more intensely now than at any point since the Forest Service became proficient at the business of suppression, and land management agencies are having a hard time coping. Though the Forest Service,
the BLM, and state agencies are still aggressively trying to control mega-fires, there’s a mounting body of evidence suggesting that it’s a costly and failing endeavor. Jerry Williams, the former national director of fire and aviation management for the Forest Service, who is credited with popularizing the term “mega-fire” in the mid-2000s, estimates that only one-tenth of 1 percent of the fires that burn each year qualify as mega-fires. Yet the severest 1 percent of blazes account for 85 percent of the suppression costs—hence the upper echelon’s significance.