Like many fires in Alaska, however, this 20,000-acre blaze proved to be unspectacular. It smoldered in the foot-deep carpet of moss above the permafrost, slowly charring the sparse timber as it advanced. To contain this fire, helicopters would ferry the men to points along the perimeter, where the crew would hack trenches out of the moss and fell the trees for 20 feet on either side to prevent burning limbs from dropping across the fire line.
THE FIRST FEW days were miserable. Ten hours of ax-swinging is grueling work for a newcomer, and the olive green cans of C-rations and the soggy ground back at the campsite offer little solace. When fresh food shipments arrived, they contained a pound of butter and several quarts of apple juice per man, but only one piece of fresh meat. The men's bodies quickly became caked with accumulations of sweaty soot, but no one had the energy or the tolerance of cold to wash in the glacial streams at night. It became almost impossible to keep feet dry in the spongy moss. On the fire lines, the thick gritty smoke dried throats out quickly every morning, but the quart of rationed water had to last for ten hours, so most men simply endured the dryness.
Half the crew got tired and quit after a week of firefighting, but the remaining men underwent a slow mental transformation. They began to live as if civilization had never existed, if they had always eaten C-rations, lived in a simple tent, sported a dirty beard, and swaggered through marshy taiga. As the sun floated over Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range each morning, their bodies would drift into effortless ax-swinging--a muscular rhythm now as familiar as walking. When the helicopter failed to meet them on time after a day's work, they would sit on a mountainside covered with blueberries and eat the fruit or watch the huge black bears roaming in the distance.
At night they would watch flocks of long-legged cranes fly over the isolated valleys or the aurora borealis fill half the sky with a light show.
Once the fire died down, the men did busywork or went on fire patrol, an institutionalized form of loafing. The copter pilots would fly several squads, sometimes only a few hundred yards (BLM paid the helicopter rental companies by flight time--$130-$1,125 per hour), to a hillside behind the fire where they were instructed to build fire lines. The firefighters could see little point in doing the work, especially since the snow would soon extinguish the wilderness blaze without human intervention.
THE FIRE PATROL game grew more popular as the fire grew less dangerous. Men would goof off in small groups on the fire line until the supervisor's helicopter appeared in the distance. Then the hillside would come alive with men dramatically extinguishing blazes that happened to be their own lunch fires. The fire boss would circle overhead a few times, return to camp, write his report, and then go fishing for Arctic grayling in the nearest stream. The men would then return to their routine--putting out occasional smokes on the perimeter, but telling stories or dirty jokes for much of the day.
One squad spent its afternoons collecting spiders for a Finnish arachnologist, while other men spend hours creatively decorating their metal helmets with goose feathers, McCarthy buttons, toilet paper, obscene photographs, and extremely elaborate designs and slogans chipped in the green, white, and blue Hotshot helmet paint. Wearing the more elaborately decorated helmets became a status symbol and an expression of defiance of busy-work.
In early September, a dry wind stirred the fire up again, but a few dozen men armed with hand tools can do little if the wind is one the opposing side. By the time they flew out, the 20,000-acre fire was almost as it was shortly after their arrival.
When a paddy wagon drove them from Fairbanks International Airport back to the smokejumper base, the firefighters underwent a period of cultural shock. They became high on novelty. Inside the truck, they felt like monsters caged for the first time with a crew of other wild apes. They suddenly discovered upholstered chairs instead of logs, porcelain plates instead of tin cans ... silverware, firm ground, women, bright colors, music boxes. The clean, fragile people around them in the town were tense; they walked in odd bursts of nervous movement and talked too quickly.
Firefighters have been known to lose a two-thousand dollar paycheck in three nights of drinking and whoring in Fairbanks.
WHILE at work, firefighters often develop a cynical attitude toward their job, even when the fire at hand is too dangerous to allow goofing off. They claim that their leaders often use poor judgment in deploying them to build fire lines. But besides this sort of complaint, which is, after all, common to other manual laborers, there is a deeper sense of futility among firefighters. They are flown to some corner of the wilderness and told to work long hours and risk their lives to save a few trees that no one will probably see for decades to come, except from the air. They also argue that since most of the isolated fires they combat are started by lightning (75 per cent actually are) why not let them burn, as fires have for centuries? Many biologists are now asking the same question.
When a fire truck screams down a city street, you often get a feeling of cosmic disunity--someone somewhere is suffering, you think--and instantly a newsreel image of a three-story building burning to the ground or a fireman rescuing a screaming kid comes to mind. Urbanites equate uncontrolled fire with property damage and loss of life. Thus fires are bad; they must be stopped.
Since this reasoning is generally true in the city, Smokey Bear has found it very easy to convince us that it is also true in the woods. We easily extrapolate our urban attitudes towards large fires to wilderness situations. After all, forest fires cause air and water pollution; they destroy timber and wildlife and threaten human beings.
But in Alaska and some other states, such damage is not very extensive. Many Alaskan fires burn so slowly that even spiders can outrun them; very little wildlife is destroyed. With permafrost so close to the surface, it often takes trees 70 years to reach a diameter of four inches. They are "useful" only for pulp, but the nearest roads for a hypothetical pulp mill are often hundreds of miles from any particular forest. The fires' contribution to air pollution is only temporary, and the grass and moss burn so in- completely that humans' fire trenches may cause as much erosion as the fires.
In fact, forest fires are actually beneficial in a way. They remove the climax vegetation--the tall aspen and spruce--and open up the land for other types of vegetation. Black bears fatten themselves for the winter on blueberries growing in old burns, and other animals also depend on the low shrubs and grasses that can only gain a toehold after a burn.
AT FIRST glance, Smokey Bear seems to have a firmer position in the "lower 48," where timber plantations and city watersheds seem threatened by fires. However, some recent research from California has hinted that even there, government forest fire policy may need radical revision. Forestry experts have found that large forest fires are so hot that they destroy small roots, organic matter, and essential soil nitrates to a depth of several inches, while a series of small, controlled fires does not reach such high temperatures and does not inflict such severe damage.
At the moment, whenever a fire is spotted, it is immediately extinguished. This policy allows large quantities of leaf litter to accumulate on the forest floor, and when the inevitable fire does strike, this excess fuel not only raises the temperature beyond the soil's danger point but also produces a much harder blaze to control. A series of smaller fires in timber and range lands might be better for the long-term benefit of the soil.
In Thailand, one hill tribe under study has developed a burning technique so successful that they have farmed the same fertile land in rotation with jungle for 1,000 years. In areas of California, Alaska, and other states, a policy of burning off undergrowth and litter every decade or so might be preferable to the present policy of absolute suppression. But even if further research confirms this, it seems very doubtful that this policy could be applied as long as private landowners continue to lobby for total fire prevention in their own short-term interests.
THIS IS NOT to say that firefighters should be driven out of business, but only that a less anthropocentric view of natural fires should be taken. At the moment, urban man imposes his personal search for order an nature and tries to bridle all natural processes. Man finds something unclean, uneconomical, and therefore unnatural about natural fires.
Add to this myopic viewpoint the fact that the fire suppression creates jobs in backwoods areas, and you have a magnificent sacred cow. Many Alaskan prospectors and Indians, for instance, depend heavily on firefighting for their annual grubstakes. It is widely believed, but yet to be proven, that native villagers start their own fires if their village crew has been idle during the fire season. Last year, the Federal Government spent $9.2 million in Alaska alone to suppress fires, most of which were started by lightning, and many of which occurred in distant wilderness areas. If controlled forest fires really are as useful as some biologists think and if the loss of life and high injury rate among firefighters continues, perhaps it is time to depose Smokey Bear and find some safer way to distribute money to poor frontiersmen.