The Big Burn by Timothy Egan

Author:Timothy Egan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-06-02T15:03:17.854000+00:00

10. Blowup

A WIND OUT OF the American West that tumbles in roller-coaster fashion is known as a Palouser, a Sahaptin Indian word that sounds poetic, named for the lilt of hills at the far eastern edge of Washington State, one of the most productive wheat-growing regions in the world. The skin of that land is lovely, stroked by easy breezes and nourished by soft rains in the spring. But the Palouse is one of those curious places in the West where a weather system can form benign and transform into something ferocious long after it has left the cradle of its creation. On one side is a desert, a high plateau that gets less rain than Phoenix in some years. On the other side are the well-watered forests of Idaho and Montana, with cooler air and steady moisture. When caught between the two extremes, the air over the Palouse can be volatile, or violent. So it was on the Saturday afternoon of August 20, when atmospheric conditions gave birth to a Palouser that lifted the red dirt of the hills and slammed into the forests—not as a gust or an episodic blow, but as a battering ram of forced air.

Stirring to life in midday, the wind rustled the tawny heads of wheat and tall grass before jumping over the Snake River into Idaho and barreling north into the Nez Perce National Forest, the longtime home of Indians who had saved Lewis and Clark from starvation. The Nez Perce country was open and park-like, with birches, cottonwoods, and big pines, room enough for the wind to bounce around, fresh spring in its step after every impact. In the canyons of the Clearwater National Forest, the air climbed swiftly through the mountains. The big river that gave the forest its name, flat and glassy in the lazy part of the day, became white-capped and shaggy as the Palouser raked over it. When it ran into walls of ancient rock, the wind compacted and accelerated. Forcing its way upward, following the contours of the land, the racing wind hit the first fires in a mix of pines at lower elevations. These fires had been ignored by the Forest Service, left to burn out once the underbrush was consumed. The wind took the hot floor of the simmering forest and threw it into the air, where it lit the boughs of bigger ponderosas and white pines, which snapped off and also rode the force of upward acceleration. Pine sap heated quickly and hissed as it reached a boiling point. Every headwall, every dead end of a canyon, every narrow valley served as a chimney, compressing the fire-laden air into funnels of flame.

The chain reaction of a wildfire had begun. Heated plant matter released hydrogen and carbon while drawing in oxygen, and the whole of it was on the run, a weather system of its own. Thus, three small blazes in grass met six bigger ones in the lower forest and then merged with a

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