Drift Smoke: Loss and Renewal in a Land of Fire

Preface

When I first accepted a high school friend’s invitation to join the Crooked River Ranch Volunteer fire Department in central Oregon , I couldn’t have envisioned that twenty-five years later I’d be writing about fire. At the time, in the early 1980s, volunteering to drag hose, squirt water, and throw dirt seemed like worthy public service, especially in a department populated by retirees in desperate need of young lungs and arthritis-free joints. Plus, getting to carry a pager and tear down gravel roads with red lights whirling and sirens screaming was pretty exciting for a teenager. For the most part, my experience with fire amounted to brief encounters with fully engulfed mobile homes and a smattering of wildfires in the sage- and juniper-blanketed high desert of a once-sprawling cattle ranch now sliced into ranchettes. A few years later, while I was attending Central Oregon Community College, in Bend, as a wildlife biology major, another friend enticed me to join him as a seasonal firefighter with the Prineville District of the Bureau of Land Management (blm). Though the job would last only a few months during the summer , the money looked good, as did the opportunity to work outside and get a foot in the door with a natural-resource manage- [ ix ] preface ment agency. For the next fifteen years, seasonal work as a fire- fighter with the blm and U.S. Forest Service helped support my meandering academic path, which ranged from science to theology to philosophy to environmental studies. My knowledge of geography also expanded along a meandering route that followed smoke plumes and dusty two-track roads throughout central and eastern Oregon. Although the bulk of my experience as a wildland firefighter lay in the rain shadow of Oregon’s Cascade Range, within the Deschutes and John Day River watersheds, opportunities sometimes arose to fight fires in other western states, such as California, Idaho, and Montana. But regardless of where I encountered it, I began to see fire as not merely something to engage as public service or as a means to offset my ever-mounting student loans; fire had been present with me from my childhood—in the form of campfires and hearths, burning leaf piles of autumn, and candles associated with birthdays and religious ceremonies. In time, I also realized that for my colleagues and me, attraction to fire was not only personal —bordering on the spiritual—but also primordial. Whether confronting the wildfires of summer or telling stories around the rock-ringed fires of fishing and hunting camps, we were participating in experiences and rites shared by our ancestors. However , articulating the significance of this was, and remains, no easy task. During the summer of 1994, before my final year at Yale Divinity School, I found myself fighting fire for the blm in central Oregon, just as I had for the nine previous seasons. Unlike the preface [ x ] preceding decade, though, this time the potentially deadly consequences of fire became real to me as fourteen firefighters— nine of whom were members of the U.S. Forest Service’s Prineville Hotshots—perished on the slopes of Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Another year in school passed, followed by another summer on firelines throughout the west. Then fall and winter. At last it was a time to write, a time to redeem fire from what I perceived as its too-often-demonized image, a time to celebrate fire for its role in our lives and society, a time to grapple with the deaths of colleagues who had performed the same work that I had and who would never perform that work again. These musings became the subject of my first book, The Seasons of Fire: Reflections on Fire in the West. But in the midst of celebrating the formative role that fire plays in all of our lives, a question lingered: Is there some unifying principle that might help explain our ambivalence toward fire on the landscape of North America, particularly the landscape of the American West? This question lay beneath my desire to study environmental writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, which, as I discovered, proved to be a strategic location for examining other fires that have shaped both fire policy and the collective psyche of land managers, firefighters, and the general public throughout the twentieth and...