A talent for taming a primal force

The war on forest fire is just over a century old. It has had heroes, tragedies, and shifting strategies about when and how to send young men and women into harm's way.

|
JEREMY MARTIN/LARAMIE BOOMERANG/AP
SMOKE ROSE JULY 9 FROM A FIRE IN THE MEDICINE BOW NATIONAL FOREST NEAR LARAMIE, WYO.

Fight them or let them burn? The notion that forest fires should be stopped seemed absurd to native Americans and early settlers. Fires were a constant of rural life. Smoke was always smoldering over fields and woods being cleared or because of lightning strikes or other unpredictable causes. 

Then an excellent thing happened: Shortly after taking the oath of office in 1901, Teddy Roosevelt began using his presidential authority to protect public land, establishing national parks, national forests, and a string of reservations to safeguard endangered species and priceless monuments. The 230 million acres Roosevelt set aside – places with evocative names like Crater Lake and Devils Tower – were dubbed “national treasures.”

As with any national treasures, the first impulse was to protect them. At the dawn of a can-do century, that meant creating the US Forest Service and marshaling brigades of young men (and later, women) to combat the forest fires that boiled up every summer. 

The 100-year war on wildfires has had heroes, casualties, and dates that live in infamy. One of the earliest of these was in the dry, windy August of 1910, when a firestorm exploded in the upper Rockies and 78 firefighters perished, more than in any event until the 2001 terror attack on the World Trade Center. One of the heroes of that terrible summer was a taciturn ranger named Ed Pulaski, who saved 40 men after herding them into an abandoned mine shaft and throwing water on blankets covering the entrance until he passed out. He survived and went on to invent the firefighting tool that bears his name.

The Mann Gulch fire of 1949 claimed 13 firefighters in the still-young profession of smoke-jumping; that tragedy was immortalized by Norman Maclean in “Young Men and Fire.” Caught inside a blowup, he wrote, a firefighter could only see pieces of what was raging around him – “burning cones, branches circling on wings, a log in flight without a propeller.” In his stirring ballad “Cold Missouri Waters,” James Keelaghan recounts the improvised escape fire that foreman (and survivor) Wagner Dodge lit but could not persuade others to enter.

Firefighting has always been dangerous, hectic work, and a smoke jumper like Tim Quigley, as you’ll see in Dan Wood’s cover profile, is a study in quiet professionalism set against a backdrop of woodland splendor and the possibility of sudden, overwhelming danger. 

If you know a firefighter – in a town or city or forest – you know what Mr. Quigley is made of. Fire is a primal force, gentle and useful when tamed, merciless when unleashed. After more than a century of battle, a consensus is building that not every forest fire must be fought and that homeowners, ranchers, and businesses can do more preventive work to avoid putting the lives of firefighters on the line.

Even so, we’ll still need firefighters. We’ll still need men and women drawn to the awesome beauty of wilderness and brave enough to face its occasional, awesome fury.

John Yemma is the Monitor's editor-at-large. He can be reached at yemma@csmonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to A talent for taming a primal force
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editors/2014/0907/A-talent-for-taming-a-primal-force
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe