White Hill
Horse Boarding
THROUGH THE MUSCADINE continued
Katherine Smith, a local from Pinebluff, is
an Alaskan greenhorn and accidental poet.
She’s currently working in Chugach National
Forest, living to make life that is art.
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Contact: Craig Dodson
Call: 919-775-9939
Come visit:
1019 White Hill Rd
Sanford, NC 27332
$99 a month!
Call Craig
for details.
15 acres of pasture.
Stalls for shelter.
Storage for feed.
Fire Season
by Katherine Smith
As cricket song mushroomed into the
smoke, my fear quieted away. The sun was
setting on Boulder Creek Fire in Methow Valley,
Washington. Two days fresh from Alaska, our
22-person handcrew clicked on headlamps
and dug line around the five acres. We watched
Perseid’s meteor shower overhead during our
MRE dinner. And until 3 a.m. when we marched
off the mountain to set up our tents, that familiar
cricket chorus hugged me close and carried my
pounding heart home.
The next morning, we improved our
handline, anchored from an old logging road.
With pulaskis chopping in front and combis
scooping in the rear, we dug down to mineral
soil a line one and a half times as wide as the
dominant fuel height. Beneath big burning logs
or other “heavies” that could fall and become
“rollers,” we dug trenches. Once enclosed by
line, our crew boss reported the fire “100 percent
contained,” and we began “mop up.” With ten
feet between us, we walked into the black, using
our tools to stir, stomp, and soak every smoke
and flame. After smothering the visible signs
of fire, we gridded again with one bare hand
on the earth, feeling for heat. Up and down the
mountain we crouched to the ash, until, with
our name and reputation adjoined the fire, we
reported it extinguished.
Type II Initial Attack handcrews are
rudimentary firefighters. Our rental trucks
are filled with the gear we need to be the first
responders to small fires—two water pumps,
hoses, bladder bags, fusees, chainsaws,
handtools and enough food and water to last
three days on the line. Most of the members of
our R-10 fire crew are seasonal trail builders,
maintenance workers, wildlife or fuels
technicians, hodgepodged together for two
weeks of firefighting.
On the USGS satellite thermal map, Boulder
Creek Fire was barely visible, a red spot above
the town of Winthop, flanked on two sides by
the Crescent and McLeod Fires. Assigned to the
Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, we soon
after worked with hundreds of resources on these
fires that covered 60,000 acres combined. Smoke
jumpers, hot shots, air support, engine crews
and tiers of hand crews filled the fairgroundturned
firecamp. More trucks ratcheted with
fire gear lined the roads than cars, and more
dirty green nomex pants walked the grocery
store aisles than regular customers. Locals wore
masks as they walked the streets of Winthrop
and Twisp and crowded around updated maps
highlighting evacuation zones.
My crew dug lines through the woods, cut
every small tree within 30 feet of miles of logging
road, and ran thousands of feet of hose up
bulldozer lines, all contingency plans to hold the
fire when it inevitably arrived. Against the force
of firefighters staged in town, the fire was even
more inexhaustible, and every day we awoke to
thicker smoke clogging Methow Valley and ash
from miles away on our tents. One afternoon,
while waiting for two flat tires to be repaired
on our rental truck, I met a woman whose most
cherished possessions filled the back of her
car. It was the most frequent question asked of
neighbors and friends, she said. “What’s in the
back of your rig? What’s in your evacuation kit?”
Few are the tangible comforts for those seeking
refuge of a warming planet.
I thought of my own relics — the cricket song
and the dusty pine needles and the falling stars
on our first night, feeling the home without
hugging close home within. I remembered the
relief as wild animals returned; a night hawk’s
wings whooshing above our tents, a mule deer
creeping through the perimeter, a black bear
sow and cub.
Significant increases in soil pH, carbon and
nutrients immediately follow a wildfire, while
nitrogen and phosphorus top pre-fire levels
within a year. Fire euthanizes small shrubby
growth and ladder fuels, both ensuring that the
next fire will burn low and cool while saving the
canopy for strong tall trees. Fire diversifies the
local ecology, promoting the growth of fungi
that compose 90 percent of the soil, extend trees
ability to take in food, and recycle dead matter
into nutrients.
The forests where we fought fire had gone
far too long without burning. In some places,
the thick canopy kept the forest floor dry and
scraggly, while in others, a recent clear cut
yielded trees close together in age and height,
barely taller than the eager underbrush. Many
forests that go this long without nature’s pruning
become unproductive, so the fires that do finally
happen are violent.
Wildfires need to burn, unsuppressed, in
order to return the West to homeostasis. But
the people, homes, and beloved earthen coves
in the fire plains are real in the face of rationale.
Wildfire, like death, is natural and necessary,
welcoming infant life, but we do not canvass it;
do not mime cold statistics to the threatened and
grieving. I wrestle with the balance. Through the
smoke I see the hearts and homes of my distant
kin, and together we fight fire, this beautiful,
terrible inevitable.
Katherine Smith, fighting the Boulder Creek Fire in Methow Valley, Washington.
What lies behind you and
what lies in front of you,
pales in comparison to
what lies inside of you.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
No. 132 The Pinehurst Gazette, Inc. p.33