The Wild Marsh (37 page)

Is there one massive fire making all that smoke? Or are there hundreds of smaller ones seeking to conjoin? (After all is said and done, only four percent of the forest will have burned—but four percent of a couple million acres is a lot, and even a small fire yields a lot of smoke, so that to our thumping, frightened hearts, it seems as if everything is burning, and as if there is no chance, none, that anything cherished—such as a home, or a favorite grove—will be spared. As if it has all been but a bright dream, and that now the
rug is being pulled out from beneath our feet, the very earth itself being pulled out from beneath our feet, and some other, perhaps truer version of the world, some abyss of loss, revealed. Such is the nature of panic, and weakness...)

I don't know what we're expecting, when we finally drive up: the sight of flames, perhaps, advancing like the tide; trees burning like candlesticks, perhaps, and swirling sparks. We're veterans of past fires in the valley, but always before they have been in the mountains, never down low, where people live.

The crew has already come and gone—has moved on to other fires, other defense. In the dry bent grass, it's easy to follow their path into the forest; less easy, then, to track them, and I can't discern any one towering column of smoke, as if from a single chimney, like I'd imagined; instead, there is smoke everywhere, smoke low to the ground like fog, smoke in the trees, smoke in the sky, smoke lost inside of smoke.

It seems different, however, from past fires—in a way I can't quite describe in words, it smells closer, and living, somehow, and it even seems to me that I can discern the odor of green, living trees burning as well as dead and dry logs, and twigs, and branches, taking in the scent of it as one might the nuances of an aged wine in the first sip.

It's odd not to be able to pinpoint the fire at first, for it to be so close. As I draw nearer, I can smell it—the charcoal odor of burned-black wood denser than the living smoke—this burned-tree odor anchored rather than drifting, and then, even before I see the flames, I can hear them crackling, and it's a most unsettling sound.

I ascend a little rise and look down into a swale where the fire is still burning, and the sight of it is both beautiful and awful, exhilarating and terrifying, and I stop for a moment, spellbound by this sudden change. All the hundreds of times I have been through these woods, in all seasons, they have always been more or less the same, and unsurprising—comforting in their regularity, reassuring in the predictability of the face they present to me and the world, in step and on time with the meter and rhythm of the seasons.

Now, however, it is as if the woods have changed identity entirely, as if having abandoned that old logic and accepted a more reckless and less calculated course, or even as if the woods have thrown off some mask, one that had led me to believe I knew these old woods—patient, steady, and enduring—and that some deeper and more volatile and completely contrary way of being has sprung flaming into the world, rising from so far beneath the surface that there had never even been any clue to its prior existence; or none that I had recognized, at any rate.

My first impression is that the fire is still totally out of control and is still consuming whatever it wants, eating anything and everything it can reach. Breaking out of my frightened reverie, however, I walk closer, down into the ravine where it is located—the fire is about an acre in size, circular in shape, like a glowing, burning eye—and now I can see the human presence that was here yesterday, the new-sawn brush cut and piled away from the fire, and the foot-wide scratching of bare dust, a tiny barrier across which the fire, in theory at least, will be loath to creep, if indeed no wind arises; or rather, if indeed the old forest remains windless, even as the rest of the valley, and particularly the mountains, receive their winds.

In technical terms, this fire is only contained, not controlled, and certainly not extinguished. In theory, it's burning in on itself, wandering, gnawing at tree trunks and pine needles and branches and limbs, and eating its way underground too, when it can, consuming even the buried roots of trees: traveling anywhere there is a sufficient combination of fuel and oxygen.

With my heart pounding—even the heat from this small fire is intense, and the wild energy it's throwing out, the unpredictability and forcefulness of it, is considerable: far more than any one person's, or indeed, even any small group of people—I turn and hurry back to the house, where I begin filling gallon jugs of water and loading them into my backpack.

For the next twenty-four hours, I will haul water nonstop, ten gallons at a time, and will water the fire as if tending a garden, or an antigarden, in which I want a thing to stop growing. Later, in my exhaustion, it will come to seem like a form of prayer, a sacrament and offering both, breathing in the smoke, and making an offering
with each labored step, one after the other after the other, back and forth: offering the water to the burning soil and hissing coals and ashes, and to the flames themselves, and understanding, with each additional trip, that there can never be too much water, can never be enough water, and continuing on anyway.

Fallen tree trunks gleam in a beautiful latticework of glowing red coals that reveal the gridlike structure of the cell walls once the mask or skin of the trees' bark has been burned away. And it is sobering, each time I think I have extinguished even a single burning log, or the roots of a single burning tree—thinking, finally, that I have at least put out that part of the fire—to find, upon my return a half-hour later, with another ten gallons of water, that the stubborn log has burst back into flame again, is sucking air with every bit the vigor of some newborn, strident creature.

It's amazing to me how much heat has been produced in only forty-eight hours of burning. It's amazing to me how much fuel, how much
biomass,
can be contained in one acre—how much history—and no amount of water is going to put it out. I'm only fighting hot spots within that acre, and dampening the edges.
Puny.

It quickly becomes an exercise, a lesson, in the giving up of control. The fire might appear one way to me upon leaving—upon emptying my paltry ten water jugs—subdued, even, in that one certain hot spot I might have targeted, only to appear completely another way when I return an hour later: as if I had never been there, and with wild new orange flames blossoming elsewhere, as if in some beautiful, savage garden.

And even within this one simple lesson, observed each time between the back-and-forth of my trudging, the lesson expresses itself in even smaller, similar patterns, the same rule and law written now in miniature, within that acre. I can be pouring water on one end of a flaming, cracking log, for instance, and the flames will be extinguished for a moment, but then the other end of the log will begin to flame, spontaneously, it seems, or as if on some sort of seesaw in which some perfect balance must always be struck: where some certain amount of fire
must
exist, and displacing it from one area only sends it elsewhere. That it is a meteorological phenomenon, as impossible to control as rain or drought, or a hurricane; or a living,
biological organism, as impossible to control as life. Or that it is its own thing, a hybrid that is partly meteorological, and yet almost alive too—as time itself sometimes seems to have almost a biological, physical component. In these moments, the fire seems to be almost an organic, living thing, with all of life's various stages—birth, youth, middle age, old age, senescence, death, decomposition. Birth.

Clearly, the fire is feeding on something at the surface—the various fuels, particularly the decades' buildup of needles and twigs and branches—the dust and detritus, the shed skins, of life—but it seems to be feeding on something in the air, too—temperature and humidity, I suppose—for it is more becalmed early in the morning but then increases in energy throughout the day, each day, as the temperatures increase, no matter how much water I tote, so that it soon seems to me that the fire is exactly like a restless, living thing, corralled only tenuously by that hastily scratched fire ring; and that the animal of it sleeps or at least rests at night but then gets up and wanders again in the daytime, looking for a place to feed.

(Even as up in the mountains, similar but larger animals of fire—indeed, entire galloping herds—are running, accelerating in the daytime, on the rising convective winds of their own consumption, up the slopes of the mountains, driving themselves up into higher, rockier, drier country, where they will eventually run out of fuel, or food.)

It seems to me too that the fire is feeding on a third thing, not just wood at the surface or the heat and aridity of the day's air, but on some secret set of instructions or code below—almost like a yearning or desire, perhaps: some conspiracy or partnership between geology and time (if indeed the two are dissimilar enough to even deserve separate names) that calls out for
this
type of forest to grow in this one place, at this certain point in time, and for
this
tilt of mountain to receive
this
much sunlight, and to drain away
this
much moisture, and to generate, and receive,
these
certain winds, until one day finally the fire must come as if beckoned.

And to the land, at the confluence of that hard-rock essence of geology and the wandering animal of time, the fire might feel as
pleasurable, as necessary, as the scratching of an itch, as complete and satisfying a fulfillment of fate, perhaps, as when the natural histories of our own lives conspire to assemble with such fitted grace that we are compelled to use words like
destiny
and
preordained.

After the first twenty-four hours, by which point I've come to understand that though still dangerous and unpredictable, the fire is—for the moment—contained, I'm able to sleep, weary and sore, having learned already to adjust myself somewhat to the rhythms of the fire: resting when it rests, and awakening when it awakens.

And as I learn the terrain of that burning one acre, I become more confident, walking out through the ashes to douse a burning stump or to rake soil and ash together with water to make a slurry, a paste, helping to cool down or even extinguish the various hot spots within that acre.

The woods around me are filled with the militaristic sound of helicopters that I cannot see through all the smoke, the airships coming and going, fighting other fires, many of them hundreds or even thousands of times larger than this one, and I can hear also the deeper, steadier drone of the B-52s and C-130s, giant carriers loaded with thousands of pounds of fire retardant. The air is tense with the electricity of engagement, of battle, and the news of each day's developments passes quickly from neighbor to neighbor, through phone calls and visits.

Fire meetings, briefings, are held regularly at the community center, and there are firefighters and people in uniforms everywhere, coming and going, responding and reacting. People in the valley—residents—begin making checklists, in case a few days of strong dry winds should sweep through. Family photos, heirlooms, that sort of thing.

Sometimes when I wade out through the ash to get to a burning log with one of my jugs of water, I will encounter a deeper well of ash, as if plunging into a snowdrift, and I'll stumble, momentarily off-balance, and I will have to remind myself to be more careful, to go slower. What if I were to pitch forward into some bed of glowing coals just beneath that blanket of cooler gray ash? How quickly we become accustomed to almost any situation; how readily we learn to assume that as a thing becomes familiar it can no longer be dangerous.

The smoldering roots are the hardest to extinguish—impossible, really, so that only the snows, when they come, will accomplish that—and there are instances in which root systems smoldered all winter long, venting through the husks of the fire-blackened spars like chimneys. The roots take the heat far underground, as if that is where the fire came from in the first place rather than from the sky, and as if the fire is seeking to return to its secret lair. Sometimes you can feel the roots burning below, even though the patch of ground above is unburned, and that is one of my main concerns—that even though the fire line might hold up all right at the surface, little fingers of fire will burrow beneath the containment ring, like escaping prisoners tunneling to freedom, following the paths and fuel of the underground roots, traveling slowly but undetected, before finally popping back up to the surface on the other side of the line.

And indeed, I find evidence where such a phenomenon, such a yearning, is occurring—places over on the "safe" side of the line where the ground cover, kinnikkinnick, wild strawberries, and pipsissewa, are drying out and curling, scorching and browning, for no apparent reason; and when I touch those places with my bare hand, the ground is uncomfortably warm, so that I know the fire is just below. When I dribble some of the precious water onto those spots, steam rises from the ground and I can hear the muted, underground gurglings and hissings and belches of the smoldering fire protesting, pausing, and perhaps—for a while—retreating; and my sleep is troubled, and in the afternoons, the dry winds continue to blow.

This is where we live, however, and because I want the girls to learn it all, to know it all, and to respect rather than fear the power of this place, I recruit them to help me work on the containment, so that by the third day, they are walking through the woods with me, carrying their little garden can sprinklers and splattering the flames and coals and ashes with me, and scratching at the hot spots, turning the older, cooler ashes up to reveal the warmer ashes below, doing this again and again, ventilating the fire, trying to get some of the heat out of it, turning the ashes over and over as if working autumn tillage into a garden, or as if furrowing the soil already for a spring planting.

It's a new world for them, this burning forest, and their eyes are
sharp; they quickly spy a singularly beautiful sight that I have overlooked, a lone bead lily plant growing unharmed, untouched, near the fire's epicenter, its bright blue egg-shaped fruit glowing like a jewel in that coppery, hazy sunlight.