He walks with the aid of a fancy cane now, and his voice has lost some of its rasp. His wireless glasses give him a vaguely donnish look. The black-metal pole looks like something between an increment borer and the sleek stalk of a sotol. He uses it as a pointer, though his blackboard may be a panorama thirty miles wide and twenty deep. It has something of the power of a swagger stick, without the swagger, of which he has no need. Anyone who meets him instantly recognizes he still has some bark on him. He doesn’t mutter anymore about unhelpful critics, that they “chaff my ass.” He speaks instead about what most engages him, the woods. Specifically, he holds forth, in a gentle manner and with the conviction born of long experience, about the ponderosa pine forests of northern Arizona. They are a mess. Doc Smith knows why, and he thinks he knows what to do about it.

He pulls out an increment borer from his pack and hands it to a youngster to finger and puzzle over. He is standing amid a pine patch on the Coconino National Forest outside Flagstaff, Arizona. He shows the boy how to grip the borer and then points the boy and the tool at a ponderosa pine approximately twenty inches in diameter and tells him to twist. The borer spirals inward. The boy repositions his feet, and Doc tells him to be patient, as he works the borer another turn. When he has gone halfway, Doc tells him to stop and reverse his twists. The borer creaks and screams and slowly spins out. From it, Doc extracts a lengthy core of wood, the size and shape of a long drinking straw. The group crowds around. The core shows clearly the tree’s annual rings. He lets the boy begin counting them. This dowel of wood, he explains, is a historical document. It contains the pith of the past. That’s where our understanding must begin, Doc says.

He walks to a large pine nearby. He points to the base, where a big cavity draws their attention (a “cat face,” he calls it) and describes how surface fires have hollowed out that cavity. After the fire, the tree puts on new growth and buries the scar within. Then another fire arrives, and the tree absorbs that scar. This is what the end result looks like, he tells them, as he plucks out of his pack another object, a plank of wood like a thick, warped boomerang, the cross section of a tree. Its surface is planed smooth and buffed and shellacked. The scars show clearly. Labels date them, year after year. The tree that “donated” this section, he chuckles, came from a short distance away.

This slab, he explains, is a hard-text chronicle of fires for this place. It’s a minimum number because not every fire will enter the cat-face. Note, he emphasizes, holding the slab high, how often fires occurred until here—he points to a label titled “1876”—and that no fires have scarred the tree since it died a century later. This is typical of trees and landscapes everywhere in the Southwest. Lots of fires until the late nineteenth century, few fires since then. The big pines you see around here grew up under the old regime. The small guys grew up later. Many of them grew up all at once, in 1919. (Early foresters in the region, he notes, almost muttering, wondered how they could coax ponderosa into better reproduction—what it took to get thick regeneration in this climate. Then came 1919, and they found out.)

That’s the simple story, he concludes, as he heads back to the van. You can’t understand what the problems are and what to do about them until you know how they came about. It’s called history.

Doc’s hand sweeps across the horizon. He is standing on the sunny south-facing side of a picnic area that looks to the San Francisco Peaks. Before them stretches a park, a dry swamp of bunchgrasses that at a distance resembles a prairie. To the southeast rises Mount Humphreys, a dormant volcano and the tallest peak in Arizona. To the south pushes up a somewhat smaller peak, Mount Kendricks. Their slopes are clothed with forest—pine from the parks up the flanks, then often aspen, then spruce and fir.The vast swath of pine is gray and black and barren of needles, as though a great flood had scoured through the woods, splashing and plucking in a violent, cascading rush. The floods were, in fact, wildfires. The Hochdoeffer and Horseshoe fires of 1996, the Pumpkin Fire of 2000, a host of lesser burns: like a San Andreas Fault, rupturing at its oldest stretches as the strain builds, a sequence of crown fires has been sweeping through the plateau’s woods, part of the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the world, and stripping them clean. Another twenty years of such burns and the entire panorama will be scorched, seared or perhaps simply swept away.

This is not how fires used to burn here, Doc tells the group. There have always been plenty of fires. The Southwest reeks of lightning fire. Year after year the area gets pounded. The years with the most burning were those that turned dry after several years of abnormal wetting, a rhythm linked to the beat of El NiÒo. But although fires were common, they stayed mostly on the ground. The pines grew large and in clumps, and the landscape resembled a pine steppe, a temperate savanna. The fires burned briskly through bunchgrasses. The forest was open: the frequent burns, every three to six years, sometimes more often, flushed out the understory and prevented serious pine reproduction, much as spring floods scour out their channels. There were exceptions, of course. The land is not a simple mesa; it holds ravines and even canyons and cinder cones, and good seed years fluffed into patches of dense thickets that could surge into flame. But all in all the land burned widely and often, not intensely. A surface fire might torch an occasional tree, but such fires did not propagate crown fires, not in the pine belt.

It’s different today. More and more of the ponderosa forests vanish into violent fires that do not slosh along the ground but gut the canopies and everything in between. Decade by decade the number of large fires has increased, and they are large not merely by their size but by their furor. So today nasty, all-sweeping crown fires are savaging the plateau. Doc holds up his fire-scarred slab. We changed regimes, he explains. The little fires went; the big fires have replaced them.

Doc knows well what this means. He spent thirty-five years in the U.S. Forest Service, all of it in some capacity in fire, and has a fresco of plaques, like multiple diplomas, on his office wall to testify to his achievements. He moved up the fire ranks with the big fires. He first achieved “fire boss” status in 1974. Next he became a Type I incident commander in Region 2, the central Rockies. In 1986, he served as area commander for complexes of large fires in Alaska, with multiple incident commanders under him. He helped teach the “fire generalship” course at the national level. Then it was California during the Siege of ’87, Yellowstone in ’88 and a rash of outbreaks in the Boise National Forest in ’89 and ’92. After he retired, he was asked to return, like Cincinnatus, to assume area command over yet another eruption of fire through the Boise pine forests that were experiencing high-intensity flame unlike anything their evolutionary history had prepared them to accept.

These were the same kind of fires that have raked over the Coconino: cognates to those burns that extend beyond his evocative hand. Doc has seen them elsewhere because the same crisis has afflicted most of the western woods. He has watched such fires firsthand, has understood the futility of trying to fight them mano a mano, knows that the great firefight, although magnificent and drenched in adrenaline, cannot continue. The fact that we tried to fight them all is, paradoxically, part of the problem. More history, he mutters. There has to be a better way.

The experiments at Chimney Springs began in the 1970s. Doc tromps through the dead, fine-stemmed pine, in places tangled like a briar patch. The idea was simple enough: Since the exclusion of fire was a primary cause for the overgrown, undernourished woods, its once profuse glades of forbs and grasses now paved over with pine needles, the solution was to reverse that trend. Put fire back in. After a fire or two, under the caressing hands of prescribed burning, the forest would correct itself. The small pine saplings would burn away, the needles would incinerate and leave flowers and fungi to thrive in its ash, the large old-growth ponderosa—the West’s fabled yellow pine—would recover vitality and again be inoculated against crown fires.

It didn’t happen. Fire simply synthesized its surroundings: the dense, overgrown woods, groaning under its load of duff, gave rise to equally problematic fires. These fires killed the young growth but could not burn it up, which left them to stand and shed needles, adding to the overall fuel load. They smoldered in the knee-deep duff under the old-growth, slow-cooking roots that had grown up into the organic soil created by the long-unburned accumulation of decomposing needles, and after a year or two, the great giants often died. The end result could be fuels as serious as those that originally prompted the experiments. In a few places, controlled fire worked its alchemy. In most, it only catalyzed whatever was there. Fire alone was insufficient because fire does indeed take its character from its context, and that context, as Doc patiently points out, was historical. It took him a long time to come to that realization.

A small-brimmed Stetson covers his balding head. He stoops a bit, lowering his five feet, ten inches height, but the chunky torso still testifies to a youth of hard labor split between Mississippi, where he was born and spent World War II, and La Luz, New Mexico, where he grew up, and El Paso, Texas, where he graduated from high school in 1954 before heading into the navy. It was while he was in the navy that he got his nickname; he can’t recall why. “No big story behind it—it just seemed like a good name.” After his tours at sea, he turned to the woods, and that meant fire. He saw his first fire in 1958 as a smokechaser on the Wallace District in northern Idaho, ground zero of the Great Fires of 1910. He impressed Don Durland, his boss, who in 1949 had been a smokejumper, the year of the Mann Gulch Fire. The next season Durland wangled Doc into the Missoula jumpers. These were the glory years of aerial fire protection. Prior to World War II, the federal government had bulked up fire protection, almost overnight, through the Civilian Conservation Corps. A full recovery waited until the end of the Korean War, when surplus military hardware sloshed into civilian uses, particularly through the Forest Service and its fire cooperators. Air superiority became a shibboleth in the United States’ cold war on fire. It was all around him: the skies roared with engines observing smokes, carrying firefighters, dropping chemical retardants, resupplying remote fire camps. At Missoula, Doc found he had joined a fraternity that claimed for itself the pinnacle of the era’s ambition. All in all, it was a powerful elixir on a young man: this was where the action was.

As with so many future rangers, fire was Doc’s entry job into forestry. That, in truth, had been the case with professional forestry itself. Their fire mission obsessed early foresters: as much as anything, fire control defined the need both for public lands and for a force to protect them. With the help of some well-placed fires and political timing, the Forest Service committed to all-out fire suppression, and in 1960, when the Wallace District celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Great Fires, the Forest Service had no good reason to look back except to measure its remarkable advances. Controlled burning had virtually disappeared, save in logging slash. Fires that started from lightning, arson or accident were attacked relentlessly. Burned area plummeted. That summer, though, Doc had to skip fire season to attend summer camp for his forestry degree. He married, began a family and returned to fire during his last summer at Colorado State University, this time working for the Bureau of Land Management as a firefighter and ranger. A year later he got on permanently with the Forest Service on the San Juan National Forest in Colorado.

There is, he explains, no going back. His vigor will not spring back to his bones; his career will not restart; the old 10 a.m. policy that stipulated control of every fire by ten o’clock the morning following its report will not revive, nor should it. A more complex policy was needed then, as a more complex policy now exists. The problem is that we cannot return to 1960 or to 1910 and replay the past. The past endures in the United States’ awkward policies and fire programs. The past has shaped our understanding and political response to fire as fully as it has sculpted the fire-disturbed forests of the Coconino. By the late 1960s, it had become apparent that fire’s abolition could be as powerful ecologically as fire’s kindling. The western pineries were disturbed as fully by the abrupt disappearance of fire as the North Woods, cracked open by railroads in the 1870s, were by the reckless insertion of fire.

Like most foresters, trained to seek a science-based solution, he ignored the past as irrelevant. Know the right principles, apply them and the problem will go away. But he came to realize, as the profession did, that history mattered. The land looked the way it did not only because of what had happened but because of the sequence of those happenings. Take fire, he tells the group. It wasn’t easy to change regimes. It began with overgrazing. In northern Arizona, that commenced in the 1870s as sheep, driven by drought from California and drawn by advancing rail lines, moved onto the plateaus and cropped off the grasses that had sustained fire. Then came the simultaneous removal of the American Indian, a prolific source of burning and a shaper of fire’s regimes. Well afterward, the land went into permanent reserves as public domain, principally as national forests that became committed, even fanatical, about abolishing fire from any and all sources. The three blows knocked out fire. By the late 1930s, burning was at impossibly low acreage. Then the rebound began, quickening during the late 1970s, until by the 1990s the grim scenes on the flanks of the San Francisco Peaks were typical of those throughout the once fire-frequented forests of the West. A century earlier the Norwegian naturalist Karl Lumholtz had commented on a profound paradox, that although the American Indians of the Southwest and northern Mexico burned continuously, above the blackened ground the forests “stand green.” The burning made them, Lumholtz believed, “indestructible” by fire. Now the inverse was true.

Doc lets the lessons sink in. He walks a little here and there among the dead sticks and fresh needles, probing with his cane, allowing the group to fan out and touch the crisp, fire-seared saplings, fondle the flaking bark of the deep-cooked, once old-growth yellow pine, kick gently at the duff. It’s going to be harder than we thought, he says at last. What Chimney Springs demonstrated was that no easy reversal is possible. We can’t put fire back in the woods as simply as we took it out. A lot of things happened to make this mess. A lot of things will have to happen to start correcting it.

And it’s not just nature that’s involved, he reminds them. You’ve got to deal with everything else in nature and people. There are invasive weeds and campers and birdwatchers and houses out in the woods now. There are people, a bunch of them, and what they think about all this—that will determine what might happen.

On the Gus Pearson Natural Area, part of the Fort Valley Experimental Forest, Doc opens a tall gate and strides along a path that began its existence as a fire line for a controlled burn. The gate is the single break in a tough, high fence designed to shield the site from ungulates, from deer, elk or an occasional cow if any strayed that far. On one side, the plot borders a cluster of now historic buildings, the residences and office of what was the first experimental forest established by the Forest Service. That happened in 1908. The other side of the plot fronts a woody jungle of pine, dense enough to hide a Mayan ruin, deep enough to smother a swamp. This is what the protected forest looks like ninety years later.

Doc lets the group walk a ways before stopping. You are in the middle of the prototype for the next generation of fire-restoration experiments, he informs them. The woods are in too big a shambles to accept fire as they are. Silviculture won’t solve the problem, he notes—a tough admission for a career forester. The truth is, logging was part of what shattered the old woods by taking the big trees and allowing the brush and reproduction to reclaim felled sites and then arguing for the protection programs that stopped fires from flushing them clean. But fire alone won’t solve it either, he reminds them. What you see here is a kind of synthesis, what we hope is the best of both. We’ve thinned out the small stuff, left the big ones and started burning. This is what we think it was like a century ago. It’s what a lot of us think all the woods around here ought to look like in the not-too-distant future.

Like many of his generation, Doc got into forestry to mingle with trees, wildlife, mountains. And like most of his cohorts, he found himself dealing mainly with people instead. That admission dawned on forestry and the Forest Service with painful slowness. They tended to equate people with politics and politics with corrupt thinking and bad practices. But about the time Doc’s career ladder carried him into the administrative rungs, the people decided they didn’t like what the Forest Service was doing, and national politics, bolstered by litigation, forced the rangers to sit down and deal with lots and lots of people. The early critics wanted mostly more wilderness, more protection for endangered species, more recreation, less logging and ranching. Many didn’t like the way the Forest Service handled fire either. Gone was the naive belief that rangering ought to be about engineering—experts making technical decisions and then applying them in the woods. Too many groups wanted too many things, and every one, it seemed, had a member of Congress or at least a lawyer at its elbow.

So Doc learned to deal with the public. As a district ranger on the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming, on the Wasatch in Utah and on the Toiyabe on the east side of the Sierra Nevada, he increasingly found himself spending more time with people than with wildlife. Decisions flowed out of conference rooms, not the forest. For a while, fire protection seemed different: an emergency response to a crisis. But suppression was clearly incompetent by itself. Some variety of prescribed fire also was needed, and that meant more negotiations with more people. It wasn’t enough to keep people out and put fire in. It was a tough nut to crack, though, to decide what kind of role people should have.

He could use the demo plot as an example but leaves it to the group to work out the political geography. There it sits, halfway between untouched woods and a housing development. All three scenes are the outcome of choices people have made. Doc begins pointing out the features within the fenced plot—the stakes, the collecting dishes, the transects, the instruments, all the apparatus of modern research, for a nominally science-based program is the only kind Congress might fund. He explains the outcomes: greater biodiversity of ground plants and insects, more robust big trees, more open vistas. Then he comes to the gist. The inspiration for the prototype did not derive from ecological first principles or natural models or silvicultural experience. It came from history. Restorers saw the past and decided it worked.

Specifically, relying on their ability to date the living trees and various stumps (which rot slowly in this climate), researchers from Northern Arizona University unraveled the structure of the forest as it existed around 1870, before the onslaught of sheep, railroads, loggers and the rest. The scene had been one of clumps of old-growth pine amid a veritable steppe of grasses and forbs. Perhaps twenty trees grew on an acre. With that as a target, crews restored the scene as much as possible, or at least its structure. They removed the small trees, most of which had generated in 1919; left the big ones; and spared an assortment of largish trees to make up for those that had existed in 1870 but had since expired. Then they instituted a burning regime, a roughly five-year cycle. The high fence prevented elk, in particular, from cropping off the lush ground cover and people from meddling with the experiments. Invasive weeds sprouted, then gradually succumbed to an invigorated flush of native plants.

Doc wanders over to a patch of untreated forest, left as a control. The group strains to see five feet through the woody thicket. The ground holds little save dense pine saplings, needles and dead branches. Where the treated plot hosts twenty trees, the untreated bristles with nearly 2,000. It is, by any measure, a sick woods. Moving farther in, Doc comes to a residual yellow pine, pushing up through its root crown of needles, encased in a latticework of thick-barked saplings. Down it, like a crack of doom, rips an old lightning scar. The message is there for all to read: the decision about the future is not wholly ours to make. The fires will come. Which kind of forest do we want those flames to hit? What kind of fire do we choose?

That question—and the fact that Doc and others would ask it—comes from the experience of his own career. The public must decide what it wants to do on the public lands. There is no way to remove people from the scene. Among the biocentrics, however, a certain resentment simmers over the fact that the fire scene has become contaminated by people at all—by their campsites, their summer homes, their urban perceptions, their politics. People, they feel, have caused the problem by suppressing a natural force. People should correct it by staying out of the way and letting nature heal itself. Or if prescribed fire is necessary, people can assist by not whining about occasional escapes, smoky skies and fleetingly ugly scenery. People get in the way. People make mistakes. People are the problem.

But it is trickier than that. The fact is, people have been on the land since the forest began taking its modern form after the last glaciation. Over the long millennia since then, the period of the late nineteenth century, when the forest was wiped clean of people, is the anomaly. A good fraction, if not most, of the missing fires of the last hundred years had been set previously through deliberation or littering by those humans; the flames had disappeared along with their tenders. That people recently are reappearing is itself a weird restoration to a norm. Whether people might return is not a serious issue: they will reenter the forest. They are already doing so, in ways both smart and dumb.

Doc is not so sure what role people had historically. In a sense, it doesn’t matter because in a place like this fire would be abundant without people. He prefers to talk about the historic fire regime as natural and to sidestep the metaphysics, as he would a cow pie in a pasture. What makes the 1870 date so ingenious is that a determination of such particulars doesn’t matter. Whatever swirl of forces converged to make a landscape of grassy parks and old growth, the biota was better off then than it has become. Besides, an appeal to history scotches the objection that this is only silviculture and logging in disguise, that restoration is really driven by commercial calculations. Instead, the scheme targets a time before rails connected sheep and timber with markets. Someone asks the obvious, “Isn’t the date arbitrary?”

“Of course,” Doc snaps. “But any date would be, even one we set in the future as a goal. It just seems to me,” he says slowly, through a sly smile, “that we have to do something.”

He leaves it to the group to survey the panorama, the buildings, the demo plot, the jungled woods. Whatever happens in the future will be the outcome of people making some decision or another, just as it has been in the past. His whole career has taught him that. Whether or not people are the problem, they have to be part of the solution, or nothing will happen. He looks from the prepared plot to the untampered one and back again. This is good enough for him. People will enter the woods. At the moment, he is himself leading a group of them.

This will be their last stop, Doc assures them, as he slides out of the van. He walks along a dirt road until he reaches an unfenced border. To one flank stands a swarm of burned tree trunks, black as a raven’s wing, a flame-fried forest. To the other, a less-congested woods still redolent with a needled canopy.

A high-intensity wildfire blasted through a few years earlier. But before that conflagration arrived, some portions of the forest had been partially thinned and then prescriptively burned. The wildfire had ravaged the untreated forests, which lack only explosive craters to qualify as a scene from the Western Front. The treated area, though, had removed the source of the fire’s fury. Like a hurricane pushing inland, the conflagration had lost its punch, had burned over whatever carpets of needles had been cast since the controlled burn, had torched a tree or assorted clump, but had not the means to surge through the crowns. The lightly slashed-and-burned plot had survived; the untreated had not. An aerial photograph of the contrasting plots made the front page of the New York Times as the 2000 fire season had raged on, and the contours of a National Fire Plan began to form, in part around the proposition that some regimen of deliberate cutting and firing might be essential to certain of the West’s public forests.

That, in truth, is where the architects of the demonstration plots would like to go. Doc explains that the program has a large-scale project under way at Mount Trumbull in the Arizona Strip. He doesn’t explain that this is a place so remote as to be almost extraterrestrial—the Area 51 of fire management. The isolation means they can work through their trials without critics inhaling their smoke or breathing down their necks. The results will take years to sort through. They hope, more briskly, to connect to the intermix problem and are doing so around Flagstaff. With or without any controlled burning, a dose of woods thinning to something like historic standards will go a long way toward calming that volatile scene and to accustoming the public to the concept that some landscaping can help check wildfire. The National Fire Plan has proposed even more, perhaps a national campaign of industrial-strength woody weeding. But the devil, as always, will be in the details.

The photo and its instant-obvious lessons are, in fact, worryingly simple. There is no single protocol to protect every forest. Nor will such treatments eliminate fire, only change its regime to something like what the forests had known earlier and probably then only because people will reclaim the torch and do most of the burning. The photo makes good propaganda, the kind of political theater that pries loose money in an election year. The truth is that some kind of intervention is only the beginning, not the end, of restoration. Doc accepts that term, restoration; nuances of language and philosophy that would question its use rather than terms such as recovery or regeneration he brushes off as he would deer flies. He wants to see what actually exists on the ground.

So he doesn’t lecture the group about having to choose one plot or the other. He isn’t an academic: he became “Doc” as a navy moniker. He did acquire a master’s degree in forestry, though, after he had retired from the Forest Service and taken up duties as a liaison with the Ecological Restoration Institute. He doesn’t need to hold forth because his audience believes him. They listen raptly to his sometimes vernacular musings. He can speak quietly because he has a convincing authority behind him, the legitimacy of experience. He has lived through it all. The history lesson he conveys has less to do with this particular plot or that, this spared forest or that incinerated patch, a standard set in 1870 or 1780, than with the simple tenor of his presence, which is the complex sum of his own past. He ceases to talk and lets the group look for themselves. He doesn’t end with a codified list of history’s lessons.

He doesn’t need to, and perhaps he knows that history doesn’t work that way. He was a better incident commander and a better ranger at the end of his career than at the beginning because he just knew more and could make better decisions, not because he had racked up a list of Principles and Lessons Learned from History. History meant experience; history’s lessons meant a better-informed judgment. History never seemed to present the same scene twice, so why should knowledge gleaned in one moment apply unvarnished to another?

So it is with nature. Every site is different. Sure, there are general principles, but they have value only if they are shaved and whittled to fit the particulars, which takes appraisal and tact. And if people are involved, as they must be, all technocratic bets are off. All this takes judgment, which can happen only when knowledge and experience have passed through the mind and emerged as something resembling wisdom. That, in fact, is what the Pearson plots convey and the Times photo should confirm: the history that must guide our choices will not be encoded in lessons, expert systems, simulation algorithms, prescriptions or other technocratic blather about learning from the past. That past will speak only through particular places and in particular thoughts. Above all, if the past is to hand on its experience, it will speak through a human voice.

That should do for now, Doc says. The tour has ended. They pile into the van. There are many such tours to make and thousands of decisions about what to do with this patch of wildland or that stretch of woods. There are other researchers, other sites as vital to the future of the rehabilitation of fire, other prescriptions and tangled histories, other guides and oracles and prophets in one wilderness or another. If they are wise, or at least shrewd, however, the groups that listen will understand that the lessons of history they have learned reside less in the fire-scarred slab Doc held than in the hands that gripped the slab and in the mind that guided those hands. Somewhere, the choices to be made will have to merge into a voice. If woods-goers are lucky, the voice they will hear will sound a lot like Doc Smith’s. FM