Why Not Let the Forests Burn?

THE SUMMER of 1968 was Alaska's worst fire season in ten years: forest fires burned close to a million acres of land in three months.

Early in the summer, a few forest fires had been contained on the outskirts of Fairbanks--an overgrown frontier town that is the closest thing to civilization in Alaska's 400,000 square-mile interior. Throughout August, the distant fires still created a persistent haze and a strong smell of pine incense. At any moment, lightning could ignite the dry moss in a forest much closer to home and destroy some section of the town, but the pool of trained firefighters was nearly exhausted. Besides local volunteers, firefighters from Montana, Idaho, and other Western states and laborers from the local prison were pressed into service on the fires, but the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (the BLM is the largest landowner in the country) needed still more men.

Shortly after midnight on August 14th, the BLM sent a call over the radio for 125 emergency firefighters to bolster the 2000 men already out on the lines.

The Fairbanks employment office next morning resembled an army recruiting post during World War I. A ragtag army of bums, miners, Eskimos, fishermen, Athabascans, acidheads, and students had assembled in the building to defend civilization from an enemy that most of them had never seen. Many of the men were simply drifters whose luck had run out in Fairbanks and who wanted to earn enough money for the next month's grubstake. The government clerks passed any high school kid who could lie about his age with a straight face and any drunk who could look sober enough for a three-minute interview. The recruits then piled into two buses and drove off to a smoke-jumper base.

Most recruits were given a few hours of training and shipped off to the nearest fire, but the BLM designated 50 of that morning's volunteers as a special "Hotshot" unit with the hope that a little more formal schooling would turn them into an elite outfit like the trained crews from native villages. The men were paid $45 a day and allowed to vegetate for a week at the smokejumper base under the guise of intensive training.

ON A TYPICAL training day, the local junkdealer would wake the men up at 7 a.m. with a shrill fife sounded in each tent. After breakfast in an army field kitchen, the men would line up for roll call, and the junkdealer and a Montana ranger who had neven seen an Alaskan fire would give them a little pep talk and a lecture of old wives' tales on the chemistry of fire.

Then the morning commissary call often killed an hour or two: six or seven instructors would sit around and pass the time of day while distributing the few dozen items the men had ordered the day before.

Most afternoons were spent rooting out stumps in a clearing as practice for digging trenches, but after the first day, they had removed most of the stumps. Afterwards, they tried to look busy by moving branches from one brushpile to another, but after a while the sham became a bore, and most of the men threw stones at floating cans or leafed through nudist magazines for hours at a time.

Long before dinner was served, one or two hundred men would gather at the kitchen tent, not so much because the menu was outstanding, but because the food line passed a warehouse where a nubile brunette bounced around in her low-cut blouse and tight dungarees loading supplies for helicopter shipment.

Since the government instructors loafed almost as much as the elite firefighters, the recruits received their most significant foretaste of the job ahead from bearded veterans who resembled chimney sweeps after working for weeks in the smoke without washing. They learned how dangerous the job could be: several men had been killed in a recent plane crash, and an Indian firefighter had lost an eye when he walked into a helicopter's tail rudder.

One day, two returning veterans walked into the training camp and claimed that their entire crew had traveled four hours to the end of the potholed road, where they expected a helicopter to ferry them to an interior fire. The helicopter removed from the fire the crew which they were to replace, they said, but when five o'clock rolled around, the pilot quit work for the day. The new crew of firefighters jammed into the nearest village tavern; everyone got drunk, and the government abandoned the uncontrolled fire.

After hearing this story, one of the green recruits, an acidhead who had been sleeping in an aspen grove, sat up and said, "Well, it's time to earn a few more dollars." He rolled over again and earned his next $3.75 by sleeping for an hour.

THE ONLY REAL break from the training camp's ennui was occasional evening leave when a few dozen recruits were released on the town. The local movie theater was showing a Walt Disney kiddie film, so most of the men made the rounds of the saloons lined up along Second Avenue or tried to pick up a "squaw."

After watching their men sleep for the better part of a week, the BLM administrators gave the order to fight a fire 150 miles out in the wilderness. Each firefighter picked up a pack, a plastic tent, a sleeping bag, and a huge, double-edged Pulaski ax or shovel and climbed into a rickety DC-3. The air was so filled with smoke that for much of the flight, the men could barely see the wing tips. At the bush landing strip, they saw sooty veterans who had been swinging their axes for 15 hours a day, lying exhausted in the shrubs or simply staring at the clean newcomers.

A green firefighter waiting on a wilderness airstrip for a helicopter ride to a fire has a lot in common with a soldier manning the trenches. He realizes that a clumsy bureaucracy has plucked him out of his familiar city life and pumped him full of tales about his opponent's evils, but his training seems suddenly inadequate. He is defenseless, and his overriding concern becomes to pull out of this latest adventure in one piece.

Like many fires in Alaska, however, this 20,000-acre blaze proved to be unspectacular. It smoldered in the foot-deep carpet of moss above the permafrost, slowly charring the sparse timber as it advanced. To contain this fire, helicopters would ferry the men to points along the perimeter, where the crew would hack trenches out of the moss and fell the trees for 20 feet on either side to prevent burning limbs from dropping across the fire line.

THE FIRST FEW days were miserable. Ten hours of ax-swinging is grueling work for a newcomer, and the olive green cans of C-rations and the soggy ground back at the campsite offer little solace. When fresh food shipments arrived, they contained a pound of butter and several quarts of apple juice per man, but only one piece of fresh meat. The men's bodies quickly became caked with accumulations of sweaty soot, but no one had the energy or the tolerance of cold to wash in the glacial streams at night. It became almost impossible to keep feet dry in the spongy moss. On the fire lines, the thick gritty smoke dried throats out quickly every morning, but the quart of rationed water had to last for ten hours, so most men simply endured the dryness.

Half the crew got tired and quit after a week of firefighting, but the remaining men underwent a slow mental transformation. They began to live as if civilization had never existed, if they had always eaten C-rations, lived in a simple tent, sported a dirty beard, and swaggered through marshy taiga. As the sun floated over Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range each morning, their bodies would drift into effortless ax-swinging--a muscular rhythm now as familiar as walking. When the helicopter failed to meet them on time after a day's work, they would sit on a mountainside covered with blueberries and eat the fruit or watch the huge black bears roaming in the distance.

At night they would watch flocks of long-legged cranes fly over the isolated valleys or the aurora borealis fill half the sky with a light show.

Once the fire died down, the men did busywork or went on fire patrol, an institutionalized form of loafing. The copter pilots would fly several squads, sometimes only a few hundred yards (BLM paid the helicopter rental companies by flight time--$130-$1,125 per hour), to a hillside behind the fire where they were instructed to build fire lines. The firefighters could see little point in doing the work, especially since the snow would soon extinguish the wilderness blaze without human intervention.

THE FIRE PATROL game grew more popular as the fire grew less dangerous. Men would goof off in small groups on the fire line until the supervisor's helicopter appeared in the distance. Then the hillside would come alive with men dramatically extinguishing blazes that happened to be their own lunch fires. The fire boss would circle overhead a few times, return to camp, write his report, and then go fishing for Arctic grayling in the nearest stream. The men would then return to their routine--putting out occasional smokes on the perimeter, but telling stories or dirty jokes for much of the day.

One squad spent its afternoons collecting spiders for a Finnish arachnologist, while other men spend hours creatively decorating their metal helmets with goose feathers, McCarthy buttons, toilet paper, obscene photographs, and extremely elaborate designs and slogans chipped in the green, white, and blue Hotshot helmet paint. Wearing the more elaborately decorated helmets became a status symbol and an expression of defiance of busy-work.

In early September, a dry wind stirred the fire up again, but a few dozen men armed with hand tools can do little if the wind is one the opposing side. By the time they flew out, the 20,000-acre fire was almost as it was shortly after their arrival.

When a paddy wagon drove them from Fairbanks International Airport back to the smokejumper base, the firefighters underwent a period of cultural shock. They became high on novelty. Inside the truck, they felt like monsters caged for the first time with a crew of other wild apes. They suddenly discovered upholstered chairs instead of logs, porcelain plates instead of tin cans ... silverware, firm ground, women, bright colors, music boxes. The clean, fragile people around them in the town were tense; they walked in odd bursts of nervous movement and talked too quickly.

Firefighters have been known to lose a two-thousand dollar paycheck in three nights of drinking and whoring in Fairbanks.

WHILE at work, firefighters often develop a cynical attitude toward their job, even when the fire at hand is too dangerous to allow goofing off. They claim that their leaders often use poor judgment in deploying them to build fire lines. But besides this sort of complaint, which is, after all, common to other manual laborers, there is a deeper sense of futility among firefighters. They are flown to some corner of the wilderness and told to work long hours and risk their lives to save a few trees that no one will probably see for decades to come, except from the air. They also argue that since most of the isolated fires they combat are started by lightning (75 per cent actually are) why not let them burn, as fires have for centuries? Many biologists are now asking the same question.

When a fire truck screams down a city street, you often get a feeling of cosmic disunity--someone somewhere is suffering, you think--and instantly a newsreel image of a three-story building burning to the ground or a fireman rescuing a screaming kid comes to mind. Urbanites equate uncontrolled fire with property damage and loss of life. Thus fires are bad; they must be stopped.

Since this reasoning is generally true in the city, Smokey Bear has found it very easy to convince us that it is also true in the woods. We easily extrapolate our urban attitudes towards large fires to wilderness situations. After all, forest fires cause air and water pollution; they destroy timber and wildlife and threaten human beings.

But in Alaska and some other states, such damage is not very extensive. Many Alaskan fires burn so slowly that even spiders can outrun them; very little wildlife is destroyed. With permafrost so close to the surface, it often takes trees 70 years to reach a diameter of four inches. They are "useful" only for pulp, but the nearest roads for a hypothetical pulp mill are often hundreds of miles from any particular forest. The fires' contribution to air pollution is only temporary, and the grass and moss burn so in- completely that humans' fire trenches may cause as much erosion as the fires.

In fact, forest fires are actually beneficial in a way. They remove the climax vegetation--the tall aspen and spruce--and open up the land for other types of vegetation. Black bears fatten themselves for the winter on blueberries growing in old burns, and other animals also depend on the low shrubs and grasses that can only gain a toehold after a burn.

AT FIRST glance, Smokey Bear seems to have a firmer position in the "lower 48," where timber plantations and city watersheds seem threatened by fires. However, some recent research from California has hinted that even there, government forest fire policy may need radical revision. Forestry experts have found that large forest fires are so hot that they destroy small roots, organic matter, and essential soil nitrates to a depth of several inches, while a series of small, controlled fires does not reach such high temperatures and does not inflict such severe damage.

At the moment, whenever a fire is spotted, it is immediately extinguished. This policy allows large quantities of leaf litter to accumulate on the forest floor, and when the inevitable fire does strike, this excess fuel not only raises the temperature beyond the soil's danger point but also produces a much harder blaze to control. A series of smaller fires in timber and range lands might be better for the long-term benefit of the soil.

In Thailand, one hill tribe under study has developed a burning technique so successful that they have farmed the same fertile land in rotation with jungle for 1,000 years. In areas of California, Alaska, and other states, a policy of burning off undergrowth and litter every decade or so might be preferable to the present policy of absolute suppression. But even if further research confirms this, it seems very doubtful that this policy could be applied as long as private landowners continue to lobby for total fire prevention in their own short-term interests.

THIS IS NOT to say that firefighters should be driven out of business, but only that a less anthropocentric view of natural fires should be taken. At the moment, urban man imposes his personal search for order an nature and tries to bridle all natural processes. Man finds something unclean, uneconomical, and therefore unnatural about natural fires.

Add to this myopic viewpoint the fact that the fire suppression creates jobs in backwoods areas, and you have a magnificent sacred cow. Many Alaskan prospectors and Indians, for instance, depend heavily on firefighting for their annual grubstakes. It is widely believed, but yet to be proven, that native villagers start their own fires if their village crew has been idle during the fire season. Last year, the Federal Government spent $9.2 million in Alaska alone to suppress fires, most of which were started by lightning, and many of which occurred in distant wilderness areas. If controlled forest fires really are as useful as some biologists think and if the loss of life and high injury rate among firefighters continues, perhaps it is time to depose Smokey Bear and find some safer way to distribute money to poor frontiersmen.Two firefighters retrieve their axes and packs from a hovering helicopter. In recent years, government agencies have relied heavily on helicopters to ferry men from their "spike camps" to critical points along large fires' perimeters. Last year, the U.S. Bureal of Land Management spent $1.95 million for 7,000 hours of helicopter rental time on Alaskan fires alone.