PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC SPACES : Waiting in the Mountains for Fire’s Other Face

High above the debris-strewn city, on the jagged granite spurs of the San Jacinto Mountains, jays dip and swoop amid the trees. The wilderness: thick forests of pines--ponderosa, Jeffrey, sugar and Coulton--incense cedars, gnarled California black oaks, natural meadows in valleys fed by mountain snows, alpine flowers, each pinprick of color startling against the blanket of greens, browns and white sand. It is unexpectedly cool. The end of fire season is only weeks away.

All through these mountains are the scars of fire: the great ’74 Saboba fire, 17,000 acres perished; the terrifying ’79 Dry Falls fire, 30,000 acres laid bare for a generation. Blackened stumps, slowly covered with chamise and manzanita, with shrubs and young saplings. Seeds survive; life continues its cycle.

This cycle of life and death is always with Doug Pumphrey, district ranger, U.S. Forest Service. He grew up in a time--such a short time ago--before man had overridden the land and its natural clock. Before artificial fertilizers, men learned to rotate crops, to feed the land, to let it rest, to wait for life and energy to return. They raised soybeans where corn would drain the land, paid attention to it, good guests of its bounty.

But Pumphrey, a farmer’s son in Iowa, dreamed of the West, of men on horseback away from the flat, inevitable plains, of mountain gorges and streams in place of wheat fields, of mountain lions and eagles in place of hogs and chickens.

“I aspired to work in something I could enjoy,” he says in his quiet, Midwestern way. Sometimes now, he escapes from his desk, from government papers and management jargon, and rides off into the wilderness. He will rein in on an overlook and take in the mighty sweep of land beneath Tahquitz Peak. The Cahuilla Indians said that an evil demon lived within, that his anger was lightning and thunder, that his vengeance carried off hunters and gatherers.

If he squints, if he blocks out the weekend A-frames and patchwork of houses, the forest ranger can still imagine the Indians roaming the land--taking from it, but also giving back, harvesting but not destroying. The soil here is poor, but the land is rich--300,000 acres of wilderness held in trust for us all.

But listen: Even here, in the thin, cool, fresh air, a mile above the vengeful city: the sound of man, raucous and uncaring; the constant hum of traffic on distant highways, of planes and machinery. A great haze hangs over the valley beneath the towering escarpments: the westerly wind, the once gentle and renewing wind, the prevailing wind, blowing in from the far ocean, bringing with it now the filth and poisons of a vast city.

Dotted over the hillside are patches of brown--clumps of dying trees. The fifth year of drought, the long years of pollution: Trees, stressed and weakened, are overcome by pests--the five-spined ips attacking their tops, the Western pine beetle boring into the Ponderosas, the California flathead borers, the red turpentine beetles. An invasion of death.

In the forest town of Idyllwild, by Strawberry Creek, barely a trickle now, huge 600-year-old pines show signs of their perishing: bark riddled with holes as woodpeckers reach for swarming beetles. Locals hate the sight.

“A lot of people in the community want me to do something, to stop it,” says Pumphrey. “What they see now and today, that’s the way they want the land to look for ever and ever. But nature isn’t like that.” Storms, rain, lightning, natural fires and pestilence have ever changed the face of the land. In the beautiful stands of fire, there is birth and growth, and there is also death.

Earthquakes made these mountains, fires ravaged them, destroying trees but also their enemies. And in the blackened soil, waiting seeds come to life. “I guess in understanding nature,” says Pumphrey, “I see that we’re all here for a small period of life, and that we have to live those days one by one--to take, but also to give back.”

Doug Pumphrey: the good guest.