A Song for the River by Philip Connors

Author:Philip Connors
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941026922
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Published: 2018-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

WHEN ITS GROWTH CEASED, four weeks after it began, the Silver Fire had moved across 138,705 acres, or 214 square miles. It lived on through the rains for an additional week or two in scattered stump holes, burning in the roots of trees it had already consumed aboveground, sending up smoke signals from the underside of the Earth.

Dennis granted me permission to return to my mountain in the final week of July. “Don’t get too depressed up there,” he said. “Remember, a big fire is just the birthday for the next forest. It will be green again before long.”

It was a peculiar hike in, that first time back. Much of the walk was lacking in living vegetation. It made me feel a little vulnerable to move through the landscape, visible as I was from a distance. Then I remembered the burn area was still under a closure order: the country was entirely mine, for a little while anyway. No one would see me but the birds. Still, it felt spooky to be so exposed in a place where the forest had once provided the shade of an intermittent canopy. Now there was no proper canopy, just a bare etching of black branches against a pale blue sky. On a trail I had hiked so often I could make my way along it in the dark, I felt as if I were having the inverse of a déjà vu experience—traveling through a familiar place made newly strange.

The view to the south, where the fire first got up and ran, encompassed a stunning tableau of destruction, a 10,000-acre patch of forest transformed into charcoal: a century of accumulated biomass reduced to blackened stalks overnight. It had the naked look of country whose soil structure might unravel with one hard rain. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I thought, as my fireproof Nomex pants accumulated streaks and smudges from burnt branches and fallen logs. I was slowly taking on the camouflage offered by the country—becoming, step by step, one with the char.

Three-quarters of the way to the top, big stands of intact forest appeared where the fire didn’t climb into the crowns of the trees, thanks to a mid-June rain that moderated fire behavior for a weekend. That pause helped preserve my immediate environs far better than I had dared hope, in part by allowing a window of opportunity for a burnout operation. With the smoke and flames tamped down by higher humidity, a helicopter was able to maneuver in close enough to drop ping-pong balls juiced with potassium permanganate and glycol in a big circle around the lookout. When the balls hit the ground they ignited the surface fine fuels but spared the trees above, robbing the Silver Fire of continuous fuel—fire fought with fire. Standing in the middle of the open meadow on the mountain, rejoicing in the sight of the cabin and tower standing unscathed, I could hardly tell there had been a burn in the neighborhood at all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.