David J. Strohmaier - The Seasons Of Fire: Reflections On Fire In The West

Fire warms, dissolves, enlightens;

is the great promoter of vegetation and life,

if not necessary to the support of both.

WILLIAM PALEY, On the Elements

Fire is a happening, a dynamic event, smeared across space and time and encompassing human as well as physico-chemical dimensions. Aspects of this happening may be easy enough to quantify in terms of British thermal units, flame lengths, or degrees Fahrenheit and Celsius, but the broader significance that fire has for human lifenot to mention its diverse ecological rolesis more elusive. Fire is not a mere thing that can be examined in isolation, as if you could pick it up, turn it over, palpate its contours, and then set it down again.

To exist, fire must remain in motion, which adds to its ethereal character. In a wildfire, flames stretch vertically into the atmosphere and fan horizontally over the landscape. Motion, however, is just as real for the penned-up fire in a cast-iron woodstove. Even there, fire sweeps across the surface of split wood, igniting vapors in a swirl of flames that dance their way around the firebox: a happening.

Besides movement through space and time, the dynamics of this happening also include life. Terrestrial fire requires fuel, andfuel comprises vegetation that once was, or still is, alive. To the extent that animal life is directly affected by what, and how, fires burn, it is also a part of this happening. Human beings, too, are intimately bound to fire. We live in both the season of fire under open sky and the season of fire ensconced as contained warmth, and for the most part, we maintain enough continuity in our lives to recognize ourselves as the same persons in each. As a result, in any solar year, we straddle several generations, several seasons of firefire that has a life and environment all its own yet, at times, has a life very dependent on us for its continued being and coming to be: a symbiotic life on which, maybe more than we realize, we too depend.

In a very real sense, our motions contour the equinoctial movements of fire and have done so for a very, very long time. Countless millennia ago, fire from the heavens connected to earthen tinder, and wildfire was born. In geologic time, its only been recently that our ancestors began playing with embers. And with modernitys ability to manipulate fire through technology and industry has come a corresponding desire to control and rein in native firemotivated by fear, by revulsion toward that which destroys, and by indifference toward the prosaic roles that fire has filled in nature. Nevertheless, as long as humanity holds an unreflective antagonism toward fire, we will fight fire in the wildlands with a vengeance. It will remain anathema for anyone who engages fire on the pseudo-battlefields of forest and mesa to sound sympathetic toward the alleged enemy; this would be the height of treason. But, despite our efforts to the contrary, the fires of summer will come, as they always have and inevitably will, and sympathetic I am. Fire in the wildlands, taken as an event, does destroy life; seen as a process, it brings forth life. As both event and process, fire may even be a thing of beauty. This book is an apologetic on behalf of fire and on behalf of those who find value in watching, tending, and engaging fire.

The term season can be applied to multiple subjects. To speak of a season is to speak of an unfolding period of time, identifiable though dynamic: A season is in motion. Some seasons recur in endless cycles of renewal; other seasons unfold toward a terminus. The seasons of the year press forward from spring to summer to fall to winter and to spring once again, seemingly forever. A final winter will come to the earth billions of years hence, so were told, but this is a cold abstraction. Human life is also marked by seasons. Our lives are analogous to the annually renewed flora that sprouts, matures, then goes dormant or dies. We are born, we grow, and we mature. Eventually we slow, weaken, and die. However, the winterthe terminusof human life is no abstraction; it is a hard reality.

Like the seasons of our lives and of the year, fire also has seasons. It manifests itself in those discrete solar periods, identifiably different in each. The fires of spring are not the fires of summer, fall, or winter. The fire that is natures offspring is different from that kindled by human hands; it has a seasonal beginning, middle, and endthe spring of fire, the summer of fire, the fall and winter of fire. But with the help of humans, fire can exist even during winter, beyond the grave.

Any person who has ever fought fire or stoked a glowing hearth realizes that human attraction to fire transcends our mortal (somewhat illusory) ability to control it. The wooden match, the pilot light, or an automobiles engine are all human-initiated means to produce combustion. Well and good. But there is another dimension to fire. The fire that blooms under open sky and unlocks the growth rings of natures bounty can be more than useful; it has the potential to incite reverie, which for many embraces the spiritual. Fire has much to reveal if we will only listen to it and stare intently into its flame. We probably do so already and dont even realize it, or we realize it and feel ashamed or incapable of knowing how to articulate our feelings. So besides offering an apologetic forfires significant place in nature throughout the seasons of the year, I offer a hearth upon which to gaze, revisiting how fire in large and small ways has played, and might still play, a role in our lives.