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Prologue Across my thirty-five years of writing about the natural and cultural history of the American West—logging nearly a quarter million miles of highway and some 30,000 miles of trail along the way—wildfire has been a common companion. I’ve seen its handiwork all around my longtime home in southern Montana; how it’s driven new generations of aspen and lodgepole forests in the Beartooth Mountains; and farther to the south, in the outback of Yellowstone, the way it’s cleaned and pruned the Douglas-fir and Engelmann spruce forests. Flames at my back have sent me scurrying like a startled mouse out of the lonely folds of Hells Canyon, while big burns have eaten beyond recognition some of the landscapes I roamed in my youth: slices of the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, the Weminuche Wilderness of Colorado, the southern uplands of Utah. When I first came to the West as a young man in the late 1970s, wildfire was still seen largely as a destructive force, which of course at times it can still seem today. But across the decades I’ve also come to know it as a powerful agent of healing, a mighty wand that wipes the land free of disease and insects and fallen timber to create a stage for healthy, altogether magnificent new flushes of life. By returning essential nutrients to the soil, fire allows a flush of grasses that can provide especially nutritious graze for elk and bison, not to mention food for dozens of species of groundforaging birds. At the same time, small mammals who feed on the seeds of those grasses tend to increase in number after a burn, in turn providing food for hawks, owls, coyotes, and the like. Lately, though, I’ve also been witness to this land changing, increasingly being wrung dry by severe episodes of drought. And as a consequence, wildfire is establishing itself as a far bigger, much more forceful presence than ever before. In many recent years my neighbors and I have choked on smoke from burning forests, have turned our heads up to the August sky looking for rain until our necks hurt, and on several occasions have packed up a few precious belongings and evacuated our homes, hearts in our throats, in the face of advancing flames. Despite the hubris humans have so often brought to our relationships with the natural world (in the case of wildfire, once believing we could all but eliminate it), fire has proven awfully good at dealing blows to swagger. What will we do as tens of thousands of acres of conifers, stressed by drought, succumb to infestations of beetles and disease, creating fuel loads that sooner or later will feed massive infernos? How do we control the invasive grasses and shrubs flaring across western landscapes, not only diminishing grazing values but also serving as flash fuses for the rapid spread of wildfire? With annual costs of fire suppression already in the billions, how do we fund not only future firefighting but also the prescription burning and forest-thinning operations needed to reduce the risk of major conflagrations? And even if we do find money for things like prescribed burns, will communities allow them, given growing concerns about air pollution as well as the possibility (though small) that such burns can now and then get out of control? And finally, how will the astonishing webs of life that are now strung across these great landscapes—encompassing salamanders and grizzlies, pikas and pinyons—be changed by the conditions that today allow wildfire such a heavy hand? Like it or not, today seventy -five million people find themselves living in the western United States in a time of fire. And fire—like other big forces of nature—doesn’t suffer fools. It has no patience for our stubborn refusals to acknowledge the realities of our time. If we expect to minimize loss and suffering in the decades to come, we need to start making some serious changes to get along better with wildfire, not to mention living in ways that minimize the climate shifts that are making fire an ever more dangerous force. Maybe the first step is simply to ask questions. To learn—from the men and women whose lives turn around wildfire, as well as from the land itself. To educate ourselves toward some deeper understanding of how to live intelligently, even gracefully, in what has clearly become a land of flames.
