Smoldering

Speed

It's the speed that really shocks you, when you think about it. We think of fire as hot. We may love the smell of a cozy fire on a cool night. But our relationship with fire tends to involve measures to keep fire stationary. It's called a fireplace, after all, not a fire-go-round. But when Seattle turned from a gloriously sunny Labor Day to a smoke-choked dusk in a matter of minutes, it was the speed everyone was talking about.

Winds in excess of 50 MPH whipped in from the east, bringing with them all the smoke from Eastern WA wildfires and, as always when the east winds come down the Cascades, heat (we are farther north than Montreal here, but it will be 90 degrees the next two days.) Since July 1, Seattle has managed to record a big 0.17" of rainfall. While summer is hardly the rainy season in the Pacific Northwest, that total is still less than a tenth of average. And this is the "wet" side of the mountains. 

This time of year, the state, like its West Coast siblings Oregon and California, is a tinderbox. So are Idaho, Montana, Utah, Arizona, Colorado and more. But the wind gives fire speed. When you've noticed a fire, it's already outpacing you.

Scale

When you've said you saw a "big fire," how big was it? Was it a bonfire? Did you see a whole building engulfed? Maybe you saw a large plume of smoke, visible for miles... some industrial accident, say. 

On Labor Day in WA, more than 330,000 acres of land burned. That many acres is more than 10% of the total land area of Connecticut. The fires up and down the coast have grown since. There is next to nothing to stop them. As I type this, huge swaths of states are piles of smoldering earth, surrounded by ever-growing rings of flame.

Yes, there are planes and helicopters dropping all sorts of things from the air to slow those spreads. There are corps of hundreds of firefighters on the ground doing all they can to stop those spreads. That is how these fires are fought. 

A common misconception is that these crews put the fires out. They do not. The term is containment. Containment doesn't mean out. It means confidence the fire cannot spread beyond a certain point. The fire will burn. The ground will smolder. Smoke will fill the air for hundreds of miles. All until, at some point, it will rain or snow. And in the case of some of the biggest fires, sometimes the water will somehow not get to places the sparks managed to and even after the winter melt, crews will search for lingering hot spots and finally, at last, snuff out what remains.

If it doesn't sound like an elegant process, that is because it is not:

Tonight, some of the world's best firefighters, dropping planefuls of fire suppression fluids at insane clips of speed, far too close to the ground, are simply hoping a "spot" fire kicked up by embers from a much larger fire 10 miles away (imagine something 10 miles away from you setting something of yours on fire) runs into something that cannot burn.

And this is where the scale of the fires grows in another way: into our lives.

Spots

The Creek Fire in California caught my attention almost as soon as it went from being a "contained" small fire on fewer than 200 acres to a juggernaut more than 100 times larger overnight at the beginning of Labor Day weekend (remember: speed). The Creek Fire was burning things I had seen. In fact, the blog post prior to this one is all about that area. Go to Shaver Lake and hang a right and you'll be around the Dinkey Lakes Wilderness. A lot of Shaver Lake burned. A lot of buildings on the highway up to Shaver Lake burned. And, tonight, a spot fire near Courtright Reservoir is being tended to on ground I was within perhaps a mile of when camping and hiking, if I didn't hike over it specifically. 

It's a spot in my life. Here in Washington, lands North of Yakima that surround one of my favorite drives in the state are burning. In 2017, the Eagle Creek Fire scarred the Columbia River Gorge where I have traveled and hiked (that one was still smoldering in May of the following year. It got through the whole rainy season and winter.) 

You don't need to own anything in these spots for the fire to affect you. These and countless places like them are spots in our lives. The land will repair itself over hundreds of years, but the pictures and memories you have from those places take on as asterisk of sorts. "We used to go there," you might say, "before the fire. Since then it hasn't been the same."

And even if you're not a traveler or a camper or a boater or a hunter or anything that falls under the "land of many uses" slogan, the fire will do its best to come find you when the wind is right.

Smoke

It's hard to explain wildfire smoke descending on your city or town. That sentence fails spectacularly in and of itself: the smoke descends on areas the size of states. The "city" is small compared to the smoke. 

Ash falls in some cases. The sky shines bright yellow when the sun is at the right angle and the sun glows orange. It is not something you can avoid. You go outside and it's on you. You breathe it in. Your eyes burn a bit. The local authorities will call the air "unhealthy for those with sensitivities." 

But it will find you. Don't get me wrong: the benefits of West Coast living far outweigh the downsides. The geographic and geologic diversity is incredible. Being three hours "off" means the East Coast has already freaked out about something by the time we wake up and, often, have already chilled out about it. Sports are done by dinnertime, usually. If you know what month it is, you know what the weather will be. I can go on.

One of the very few downsides is that September is fire season. Last year, we got lucky and had a handful of days with a little bit of smoke high in the atmosphere here. It was nice for sunsets, but didn't affect much else. 2018, though, felt like the edge of the apocalypse, with weeks of orange sun, dingy air and more... all from fires in northern British Columbia! (Imagine smelling something that is 400 miles away. With fire, this happens.)

We mask up, we persevere, we deal.

Smokey

The Eagle Creek Fire was started in 2017 by a 15-year-old shooting off fireworks during a burn ban. We know that, this year, in California, an incendiary device from a gender reveal party started the El Dorado Fire, which is now more than 10,000 acres and taking firefighting resources away from naturally-sparked fires.

There are things we should be looking at to minimize fires - clearing of dead underbrush, clearing of dead trees, other such healthy forest things - but they all have a thing in common that has become the biggest barrier to doing anything in America, it seems: they cost money. From the forests to the roads we build to get to them, over and over again, we choose to pay the costs in losses and repairs than in prevention. This year is showing just how much the systems our country depends on are designed to work only under ideal conditions. As conditions erode, so do those systems: bridges start to fail, mail slows down, businesses go bankrupt and more. We choose not to pay to make a more resilient country. So, then we choose the fires, too, or at least the severity of them,

Smokey the Bear told us "only you" can prevent forest fires. He probably wasn't talking about wanting us to fund the Forest Service as much as not being careless with matches. Sadly, we're not very careful with matches, either. While gender reveal parties (always a bad idea, to be honest) and fireworks are high-profile firestarters, I've been on camping trips during burn bans when people have lit campfires. Electronic signs in WA remind drivers to secure their tow chains to avoid causing sparks. Someone simply drops their cigarette in the wrong spot and thinks they've ground it out.

Worse, no one will really say anything to these folks. A handful or rangers cannot patrol every mile of trail in a forest. We are also socialized to "agree to disagree" about everything in this country, a habit that is also catching up to us in our lack of ability to have consensus on anything. 

The system only works if we choose that we want it to work. 

A lot of people don't want the system to work, if even only to spite the people that do want the system to work. 

I remember losing recess time in elementary school because a couple kids couldn't behave. It didn't matter that 80% of the kids were behaving. It mattered that we let the 20% get away with it, either because we didn't want to get involved or because we liked those kids in some other context. Maybe they snuck candy in every day and let us share. 

It seems even as adults, we'd rather let the whole suffer if we take some individual benefit in doing so. So we have people saying they'll be "very careful" with their campfire during a burn ban. We have people that think that setting off something explosive in the middle of extremely flammable dry tinder won't catch on fire this time, and, even if it does, well, we've got the hose right here (again, remember: speed).

Solace

The rains will come again. The grasslands of eastern WA will heal quickly (in a geologic sense, anyway). Trees like the Douglas fir will be scarred, but in many cases survive. The landscapes themselves will heal. A ride over Santiam Pass in Oregon a few years back traverses a large burn area from the early part of this century and, while clearly scarred, signs of life have emerged (though some parts of it are burning today, in fact).

The smoke will clear.

Scare

What doesn't heal is the loss. Loss of place and property in the immediate sense. I feel sure I will wake up and find that the forests I hiked in July are ablaze, which under a permit system in place there, would make me one of the last people to camp there and see it virtually untouched. The next opportunity people will have to see something like that in that spot would be in generations. 

Longer term, though, we have to reckon with climate change. Since I've been a West Coast resident, we've been warned by the climate scientists that it is only a matter of time before the fires, long a mainstay of Eastern WA, start to be sparked on the west side of the Cascade Crest. Tonight, the towns of Enumclaw, Bonney Lake and Sumter are wary as crews fight to contain fires along Highway 410, which are absolutely what have been predicted in a long-term sense. The town of Graham had a serious fire yesterday. I worry that someone will toss a just-still-lit-enough cigarette out of their car into the brush just down the hill. Because we won't have time in those cases. (Remember: speed.)

And we have to reckon with the fact that, much as we may all think it would be nice to just be left alone, we're all dependent on each other to make this whole thing work. 

What scares me most is whether or not we'll speak up to that 20-30% and still get to have recess... or not.