A Dream That Dares Disaster
If you live here and try not to think about fire, you’ve got a big job ahead of you. The sky is a gray haze because of the Front Range fires. The effects of drought are everywhere: You are allowed to water your lawn twice a week for 15 minutes. The forests immediately to our west are as dry as our lawns; that these dry trees are not burning is a state of grace that we’re not taking for granted.
Fire sweeping through Western forests and grasslands is the oldest story both in and outside town. It’s a story that began long before rural subdivisions spread into the forests.
Before we had the federal government and aggressive fire protection to blame for our troubles, Indians often watched smoke fill the air as trees and grasses burned. Sometimes lightning started the fires; sometimes the Indians used fire to encourage conditions more favorable to game. Either way, the Western forests burned.
Combine lots of biomass (aka, plants) with an arid or semiarid climate and fire is an entirely predictable feature of regional life. Yet an unwillingness to let the recognition of risk restrict individual freedom is an equally predictable feature of Western life. In the summer of 2002, these two dynamics have collided: Never before have so many Western homes been located, voluntarily and even willfully by their builders and owners, in the line of fire.
At the core of the Western dream is an individual who insists on making his own choices and refuses petty regulation. The Western landscape is rugged and tough, but the Westerner is more rugged--and tougher. He settles where he wants to and lives according to his own, self-reliant terms.
Until, that is, he needs help.
The Western dream has a golden parachute, a bail-out sequence, an escape clause and an exit plan. Pioneers intruded into Indian territory, and when they got themselves into a mess, the Army arrived to protect them and remove the Indians. Farmers tried to grow crops in places with low rainfall, and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built the dams and reservoirs that filled in for the rain. Homeowners wanted to live in houses with stunning views, and counties built the roads and supplied the services to make these sites accessible and livable.
Western risk-taking has often relied on this back-up plan: We get ourselves in a pinch and the government--local, state and federal--rushes to get us out of it. Nature presents challenges that are at once dangerous and appealing, but human ingenuity and government funding quickly drain the danger out of these challenges and leave only their appeal.
Will the fires of 2002 lead to a different outcome? In the mountains of the West, Americans seek tranquillity, leisure and escape from the tension and friction of normal life. A landscape in flames, with fire bearing down on an architect-designed dream house, rebukes this vision with a force that should challenge our perceptions and the customs that flow from them.
But how justified is such a hope? Will a different, wiser West arise from the ashes of this summer?
Disaster will not necessarily discourage settling in the forest, a lesson Westerners might have imported from the East. People are still drawn to sites along the hurricane-vulnerable East Coast, even though a single hurricane can destroy a far greater number of homes than a whole season of Western forest fires. The Mississippi River floods repeatedly, and yet development of flood plains has not significantly slowed. Government programs to buy out storm-damaged homes pale in comparison with (and achieve a whole lot less popularity than) those that fund the rebuilding of communities.
And a season of fire, unlike a hurricane or flood, can even give a reassuring sense that now that misfortune has occurred, its recurrence is unlikely, thus nearly eliminating danger in the near future.
In some unexpected ways, the fires may strengthen the belief that the West is still an exciting, adventurous, wild place. Resilient real estate agents may already be at work on the new ads:
“Special home site with views unmarred by trees. Feel safe in the wide open spaces close to nature; recent fire means little hazard for the life of your mortgage! Improved habitat very likely to attract elk, bears and mountain lions to your viewscape.”
Along with a weakness for real estate agents, Westerners have a deep-rooted hostility to regulation and are die-hard advocates of the rights of private-property owners. These attitudes are, apparently, inflammable; fire passes over them and leaves no mark. Few rural areas have any zoning, and many get along without building codes, not to mention the sort of regulations that might reduce fire hazards.
The human mind comes well-equipped with a set of time-sensitive blinders. Past and future danger falls out of the range of vision. If unpleasantness comes to a merciful end, and a comfortable present is restored, the lessons of history fade quickly from view. But every now and then, a lesson sticks.
In the 19th century, nearly every newly founded U.S. city or town endured a big fire, sometimes two or three. San Francisco blazed spectacularly several times; cities in the interior U.S.--Denver and Spokane, for example--similarly went up in flames. After one or two rounds of rebuilding with wood, a shift to brick and masonry in downtown buildings demonstrated that a lesson had, at last, been learned.
Sometimes, city regulations produced this change. Sometimes, it was common sense. But before common sense reported for duty, a remarkable amount of effort went into gathering and transporting wood, stacking it up into structures, watching the structures burn, and then repeating the whole peculiar process.
The practices of our times might strike detached observers as equally mysterious. Westerners have stacked up flammable material in remote locations, embedding these structures in forests that burn episodically. A visitor from an entirely different culture might wonder: Could this be a religious ritual, a purposeful challenge to fate, or a sacrifice of wealth to the universe’s greater powers?
Or is it simply an assertion of the Westerners’ right to settle the land as they please, without bowing to social or natural constraints?
When Daniel Boone found that his isolation had been breached, and he could see the smoke rising from his neighbors’ chimneys, he felt compelled to move on. When today’s settlers see the smoke rising from their neighbors’ living rooms and bedrooms, what actions will that frightening sight inspire? Can the minds of Boone’s ideological descendants expand to embrace the idea that the constraints of society have something to recommend them? Can those who celebrate Western freedom bend to the recognition that regulation and restriction are not always petty and intrusive but sometimes wise?
Over the last few decades, many people who have lost homes to disaster have shown great pluck, reckoned with their losses and plunged in to rebuild. And, with an admirable generosity, Americans have responded to other people’s calamities with a “barn-raising” spirit, albeit a barn-raising aided by insurance and federal and state relief. But should pluck and generosity outweigh foresight and caution?
Maybe our response to wildfire will, in the long run, differ from our response to floods, hurricanes and other disasters. Our fellow humans who risk their lives to save us and our property from fire are much more visible (though their counterparts appear during floods and hurricanes, too). Our yellow-shirted knights, some of whom literally drop out of the sky, prove that none of us is an independent Daniel Boone when it comes to coping with fire. Their stories, sometimes tragic, touch us. They remind us that even on the edge of wilderness, we are embedded in society and our actions affect the lives of others.
The fires of 2002 present an opportunity to reevaluate our habits and practices, and to see, through the smoke now clouding many Western skies, a different, less complacent, more responsible way to inhabit the West.
