“Dad, can we have a fire tonight?”That is a question that my son Sander would ask every evening we spent at Swan Lake over a summer, at least when he was a few years younger.
Sander had assumed the role of head organizer for beach fires on summer evenings at Swan Lake. He collected dry branches from the woods around the cabin and maybe threw in a couple hunks of dry spruce from the woodshed that were too knotty to make into stovewood. He prepared some kindling and laid the fire, then pestered me or some other adult until it was time to put a match to his creation. Later, without the need for adult supervision, he would get the whole thing ready by himself, light the fire, and announce to all within earshot that that their presence at the campfire was requested.
A flickering fire on the beach after a day of adventure and relaxation has been more or less a family tradition for more than 70 years. But the summers lately have been different. This year, Sander didn't even bother to ask about a beach fire.
The woods around the cabin are dry as flaky skin. Several large spruce have fallen in recent winters and I am now regretting that I have not gotten around to bucking them into firewood. They lie there in the tangled brush, waiting for an errant spark. Stately old birches surround the cabin, but in recent years they have thirsted for water as the long hot summers have gone on and on, and those birches are succumbing to the change. The lake is lower than I can remember it being, and the water though pleasant to human skin, is eerily warm when compared to past seasons, and unsettling to contemplate.
For our family, there were no beach fires again this year. The gauzy haze that hung over the valley, the brilliant orange sunsets, and the occasional taste of drifting smoke said it all.
For those of us who are not in the business of thinking about fire, researching its behavior or working to prevent or extinguish it on a daily basis, fire is something we generally take for granted as a source of warmth and general well-being. A crackling fire in the woodstove on a chilly morning, a blaze in the fireplace on a winter evening, or a beacon in the woods, signalling camp at the end of long day of chasing elk in the snow - that's what fire is for.
But lately, as we greet days with a pall of smoke hanging over our valleys, obscuring the mountains around them, there is a new awareness of fire. When we breathe the bitter air, there is a tightness that invades the chest.
The fires that are raging around us in Montana and around the Northwest are no longer just an abstraction or an interesting news item from somewhere else. They are here and the world around us seems to be aflame. And many more among us have been touched by fire in recent years. Some have lost homes and possessions. Many have been evacuated. People have had to halt work, stop projects, and change daily lives until fires abated.
And folks are learning much more about the quirky behavior of fires and the incredible challenges faced by resource managers and fire professionals who must deal with those forces. It is not easy to think of fire as much of a source of comfort at a time like this.
Instead, fire has transformed into a force so powerful and overwhelming that it is really beyond our human means to control it completely. There are things that can be done to encourage a fire to go one direction and not another, but in the end, the fire makes the big decisions.
Back before modern science complicated matters, the ancient Greeks boiled things down to some basic elements when they were trying to figure out how everything fit together. They may not have agreed on the details, but there seemed to be a recurring theme that some combination of earth, air, fire and water pretty much accounted for the whole shooting match. It was fire, however, that got special attention.
Heraclitus, most famous for his observation that you really can't step into the same river twice, also had some interesting things to say about fire, such as, “Fire advancing on all things shall judge them and convict them.” And, “All things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things, as goods are exchanged for gold and gold for goods.“
Now our detailed understanding of how the natural world works may have come a long way since Heraclitus, and for those of us who live in the relative safety of town, his notion may seem a little far-fetched. But many Montanans have already been forced into that exchange, and in the days and weeks to come, more are sure to follow.
While we direct tremendous resources at attempts to protect lives and property from those fires, nobody is suggesting that we humans have the capacity to truly control them.
Once again, the awesome forces of nature are reminding us mere mortals that, try as we might to assert our dominion over the world around us, we humans are not the final arbiters.
I was thumbing through Joseph Kinsey Howard's anthology, “Montana Margins,” the other night and I came across a passage that evoked for me what must be the essentially humbling experience of watching a huge wildfire at work. This selection was taken from a magazine article by a man named H. T. Gisborne who later was in charge of forest protection for the Northern Region of the U.S. Forest Service. In 1929, he had witnessed the large fire that burned Teakettle Mountain and 90,000 acres of Glacier National Park.
“Like all truly massive movements the great pillar of smoke belching from the north face of the mountain seemed to move slowly. Black bodies of unburned gases would push their fungoid heads to the surface of the column, change to the orange of flame as they reached oxygen, and then to the dusty gray of smoke. Huge bulges would grow slowly on the sides of the column, obliterating other protuberances and being in turn engulfed.
“Such a spectacle, even as it enlarged one's heart enough to interfere with normal breathing, made us wish for the presence of others to enjoy the thrill.”
“Thrill” is surely not the word that many on the fire lines today would use, but surely the experience of being in the presence of a fickle and indomitable force must be cause for wonder, awe and somewhere down the line, reflection.
The fires will ebb when the time comes, and we will assess the damage and learn from the experience. Where fires have burned we will see a different land. Some, invariably, will look out over the charred landscape and see nothing but devastation and loss. Others will see contours long hidden by blankets of forest, and new life emerging.
And life will go on. We will turn our attention to more mundane matters. We will venture out on the rivers and into the mountains.
And maybe, again one day, we will have fires on the beach.
Greg Tollefson is a freelance Missoula writer whose column appears each week in Outdoors. He can be reached at gtollefson@bresnan.net
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