Pine grass and fireweed grow back two years after a fire on the Kootenai National Forest. Photo © Randy Beacham.
Up here in the Yaak on the Kootenai, part rot-country and part fire-country, I love the forests in all seasons and in all conditions. I love them before they burn—while they are waiting (sometimes for centuries, even millennia) to burn—I love them as they are burning, and I love them after they have burned.
A recently burned forest has a unique mix of dignity and newness: the craggy, tested character of the survivors (as well as the nonsurvivors) mixed with the elegance and vibrancy of the newly born and the newly released. In most postburn landscapes, there is just the right mix of everything. This middle-aged man is reminded that nothing lasts forever in a state of equilibrium. In the tipping back and forth, there is grace, design, order.
After the orange-gold flames are gone and the heat and smoke is but a memory, I love the joyful colors of emerald and shimmering, almost iridescent coal black, as black as a black bear’s shiny coat in autumn sunlight. Such hues appeal to the aesthetics of an artist, as do the fantastic whorls of weathering and checking—decades’ or centuries’ worth of natural mortality unleashed in a single day. And I love the feeling of richness in a postburn landscape, feeling this richness as might a farmer walking the fields after a soaking rain. These are all fields, our public land, all 2.4 million acres of the Kootenai National Forest. No crop-duster could distribute such wealth of nutrients as that which is bequeathed and redistributed to the needy following a wildfire; and everywhere, walking carefully through such a forest, you can feel the energies shifting, can feel the leaping, exuberant return of life.
I love the new geometry of a burned landscape—the spars leaner, sometimes; whittled by the heat; and often as not, a crazy new pattern of rhomboid, triangle and trapezoid exists among the fallen and the about-to-fall. The spring and summer and autumn winds in these burned forests sets the newly adjusted spars to creaking and rubbing like the strings of a giant violin, or some other nameless instrument, one whose tunes might help summon the return of life to that renewed land.
The scientist in me loves walking through such firescapes, noting the first clues of the world to come—cotyledons of fir and pine, larch and aspen and cedar—and imagining what new forest type will be assembled from this remade world.
The lands most beloved to me, the roadless lands, possess the highest integrity, having not yet had their more widely spaced fire cycles interrupted. For the most part, they are still well positioned for a more natural let-burn policy; they are so far from the responsibilities of the human populations in the frontcountry. These higher, farther lands still exist in the supple and dramatic rhythm of a fire system not yet interrupted by the policies of suppression. Fire is simply a natural phenomenon, not an enemy. In these roadless areas, fire is as much a force of creation as rain or geology or wind, or the mountains themselves.
It would not be fully honest of me to praise only the art and science, the grace and beauty of a postburn landscape. I love also the utility, the physical yield, of a new firescape: the astonishing flush of feathery larch seedlings—particularly in this corner of the world, the larch is a fire-crafted species whose seedlings outcompete all others in the uptake of nutrients from a postburn landscape—and the new flush of aspen groves, as beautiful in the leafless and sere silence of winter as they are in the blaze of autumn.
Even the antlers and bodies of the deer and elk I love to pursue and, with fortune, capture are birthed from these fires, drawn to and nourished by the richer forage of new growth, as are many of the delicious mushrooms and the huckleberries.
Some of the first returning sounds to a firescape, such as the exploratory drumming of black-backed woodpeckers, remind me of the warm-up clacks and pipings of an orchestra down in the pit. The first mountain bluebird—a smear of electric azure that seems to etch itself not just across the viewer’s winter-weary retina but scoring, like glacial striations, the brainpan itself—is like the first uplift of the conductor’s baton and the return, again, of amazing life. (Though even this is an inaccurate conceit, for life never left, but has instead been merely rearranged, restructured, reinvigorated.)
I love the gold frieze of larch needles on new-black char, and love some days most of all the totally nonnegotiable, absolute severity and absolute serenity of snow falling at dusk upon a just-burned landscape.
How unfortunate that we almost always refer to fire as being devastating, destructive or catastrophic. Uninformed news releases, often from eastern wire services, refer, for instance, to a fire as “destroying 60,000 acres.” It’s true, certainly, that some fires are destructive and that in some places, active prescriptive management could lessen the amplitudes of their return to the landscape. But not everywhere. It is not the black-and-white issue that politicians would have it. And the story goes on, always.
If those reporters and their readers could wander through a firescape the next spring and summer, I believe that even the most casual examination would show that it is often in the burning, rather than in the rotting or even in the growing, that the grandest and most elegant, sophisticated designs of the creation are revealed, when the world starts all over, each time, one more time, stronger than ever.