Fire

I looked up from writing and noticed something creating a veil across the lake, softening the pines on the far shore. Rain? Mist? I stepped outside and instantly smelled smoke not of my own chimney. It’s cold here--not even getting out of the 40s--but it’s dry and windy and explosive. To our south, Duluth has a “severe fire conditions” warning.

Fire. 

In June of 2018, I called the Forest Service to report smoke. Fires were raging in Canada, and I’d been fooled by traveling smoke before. So I didn’t call until there was actual ash falling on me. The Forest Service sent up a Beaver scouting plane from the airbase on Shagawa Lake in Ely. I soon saw it buzz my horizon, and within minutes I was called and told to evacuate. 

It was a small fire that I discovered, but they didn’t name it after me. It is officially known as the Gunsten Lake Fire. Instead, I was questioned by an investigator. I didn’t realize I was a suspect until he told me it would cost nearly a quarter-million dollars to respond to this fire, all the while leaning hard on my hood. Of course, “firebugs” report their own fires--I get it. I was profiled. But there’s no way I would walk in the mid-June bush, lousy with black flies and mosquitoes. He must not be a very good detective. 

Today, the voice at the Forest Service told me the smoke is from a prescribed burn near Birch Lake. “Thanks for calling, though,” she said. “I’ll let the airbase know you called.” Sure enough, not much later the Beaver flew over to the south horizon of Gunsten Lake. It’s nice to feel safe, and to know the Beaver pilot has a high view of our forest. 

I have a mixed mind, however, about fire, about being part of a larger Forest Service Management Plan. The politics of prescribed burns mean that much of Superior National Forest and the adjacent Boundary Waters are a tinderbox, including Gunsten Lake. The planned fire at Birch Lake today is akin to peeing on a forest fire. However ambitious they may be, the most progressive minds at the Forest Service are constrained by our unfortunate relationship with fire. The public won’t have it.

The eastern spruce budworm, a native to North America, has decimated the spruce and balsam for miles in any direction here in Superior National Forest. It’s a natural part of the forest cycle, or at least it is for a second-growth forest where there’s lots of spruce and balsam rather than a mature forest of red and white pine. But that’s a different story for another time. 

By design and by accident, it is time for the forest to be reduced to its fire-hardy constituents. Time to be rebirthed, transformed, replenished.

My own neck of the woods is full of standing Roman candles; gray, dead standing trees as dry and crackly as newspaper, waiting for ignition. They frequently fall in windy weather, forcing me to carry the chainsaw along the trail to the swimming beach and even on trips to town. (Few people drive our roads, and we may be the first passerby after any storm. I learned this turn-around lesson on impassable roads more than once.) I have tried to cut and burn my dead spruce close to the cabin, but I can’t keep up with more than a careful perimeter.

We all know that Smokey the Bear has been quietly shushed from warning us off of forest fires. Smokey’s messaging is much more complicated these days. Fires are a necessary and difficult part of a healthy ecosystem, but we only tolerate a fire under certain conditions. A lot of smart people, such as the Ojibwe, who lived here for quite a while, knew fire differently than white colonizers. But then there was a Great Forgetting and those ways were forced into silence. A century or so later, some of us are willing to acknowledge that we’re either going to invite fire back to the forest and live with it as a companion, or fire will come for us like a ravenous manidoo. 

My presence here, sitting in my remote cabin, is an inconvenient fact. I’d like not to lose my cabin, of course. I don’t want a raging fire. But I think it inevitable. Not only is the forest a tinderbox, it’s explosivity is multiplied by the longer fire seasons and blowdowns that have arrived with global warming. It’s not if, it’s when. Those on the west coast know this sense of impending change.

So I prepare myself for this future. Of course, I have the insurance and the metal roof and so forth.

But I speak more of preparing myself for losing everything I think I love about this place.

When you love a place, you are finally forced to love it’s nature. For me, that means knowing much of what I love is impermanent. This forest is not mine to have and hold. It is a place, but it may change at any moment. I’m one lightning strike away from a conflagration. I try to learn to love everything about this forest, not just her postcard moments. I want to learn to love her fire. 

A few summers ago, I paddled a portion of the eastern BWCA that had been scoured by the hot Ham Lake Fire. Our long, deep lake ran at least a mile from west to east, a tall cliff on the north shore. The land--every ridge, every rock wall, every fold in the earth--showed itself as we paddled the length. The forest was already reclaiming the charred ground, and green was the dominant color. 

What I anticipated to be sad and unpleasant became fascinating. I realized I’d never seen such a thing. I had been so far removed that I didn’t know what this place looked like in its normal state of affairs. To see such bones and unexpected growth! 

I saw Yellowstone for the first time 1990, two years after the fires transformed the park. To my eyes, it was still superlative. It was all of Yellowstone I have ever known, and it’s still wondrous.

This gives me hope that I can love a place even after everything I thought I loved most is gone. I’m committed. I’m cultivating a willingness to accept fire, to accept change. Unlike the prairie, where fire can ravish in April and the grasses return by August, this forest regenerates in decades, even centuries. I’m living in a slower timescape. I will make way for the fire when she comes, as gracefully and gratefully as I can.

Maybe the cabin will survive a fire, and the tallest white pine where I leave offerings will stand, and those who come later will think, “Of course there was fire.” Because they will be wiser than us. 

Or maybe it will be all gone, and this journal will be left.

Maybe it will all still be here when it’s time for me to die, and my ashes will be the precursor.