We live under a diffuse gray cloud of smoke from the Wapiti Fire, which has crossed the Sawtooths from Grandjean. It has burned around Stanley Lake and is threatening Stanley and the small communities west of town.
Haze coats our windows. The lodgepoles in the yard are in soft focus. The forest across the Salmon River only exists as vertical dark shapes, hanging in mid-air.
It has been a matter of faith that the river is still there. Yesterday, when we finally braved the fire traffic on Highway 75 long enough to check our post office box in Stanley, we saw, just above town, that the water level was low enough to expose large sections of river-bottom rocks. High water seems a false memory.
Since the snow left, we’ve been able to imagine the Sawtooths as mountains somewhere in the Sahara, framed by dunes, glinting metallically in the heat of the sun. We can’t see them today from inside our cocoon of particulates, but if we could, they would appear dry, barren, smoke-choked, burning. No imagination needed.
The forest nearest us hasn’t caught fire yet, and won’t, if you believe the optimistic reports from the Fire Information Officers when the Rocky Mountain Complex Incident Management Team (RM CIMT1) conducts fire meetings in the Stanley Community Building. There are now more than fourteen hundred people trying to control the fire, and they say they’ll succeed by the first heavy snows. Highway 21 to Boise is closed and will remain so as long as fire traffic crowds its lanes. Vacation homes in the Grandjean area have burned. Thus far no homes around Stanley have been lost, although we are in touch with friends whose homes remain in danger.
We are in Evacuation Zone 6, which hasn’t yet been told to get ready to go. Forecasted wind patterns should keep the fire safely north of us. Friends have emailed us, wanting to know if we’re in danger, and we’ve replied that we’re fine, mostly. We’re staying inside, huddled around our air purifier.
We’re planning on surviving at least until next fire season. The morel mushroom crop next June looks to be off the charts.
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Stanley is empty of tourists, but the number of fire engines and crew buses on its streets occasionally threaten traffic jams. The only business that is doing well is Papa Brunee’s pizza restaurant. Hotshot crews pull their vans up every afternoon, and 20 or 30 hungry people go in and order pizza. They eat outside, mostly, even in the densest smoke. They’re tired and fire-blackened, and you get the feeling that if they could press a button and get the fire over and done with, they’d press it, overtime be damned. They’d be happy to go home to hot showers, home-cooked meals, transparent air, and welcoming families.
Here and there in town, fire personnel are talking to small groups of civilians. Information is at a premium, and rumors spread almost as quickly as the fire has.
This morning the Wapiti Fire is approaching 110,000 acres in size. It was not on anyone’s radar that it would get this big. I know that because it stayed small for 10 days. It started on July 24 and on August 3, it was still only 86 acres. The Boise National Forest, starved of funds by congressional budget-cutting, could not command the resources needed to contain it.
It was in difficult terrain, and firefighters are justifiably worried about putting line around a fire on steep slopes covered with dry fuel. A lot of fires were burning in the area at the time. This one promised to go uphill into wilderness, not downhill toward houses, roads, and vehicles. It didn’t keep its promise.
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We live in a different reality than the one we lived in at the start of the summer, one that has nothing to do with a tourist economy and its camping weekends, float trips down the Salmon River and the Middle Fork of the Salmon, wilderness hikes and horseback rides and honeymoon reenactments in lakeside cabins. Boats are still being towed to boat ramps, but the air above the lake surface is opaque. Nobody is waterskiing. A lot of boats never make it off their trailers.
Campground reservations, acquired with time-consuming effort in January, are going unused. The parking lots at Redfish Lake Lodge, where it’s normally impossible to find a space, are empty.
Even so, if the smoke clears even a little, a few tourists come back and sit on the beach in front of the Lodge, pretending they’re basking in the sun. They appear as dark silhouettes against the haze. Behind them, the water is still, flat, lifeless. Children still scream and chase each other. Sunshades still mark claimed territory, and the waterline still becomes crowded with paddle boards and inner tubes. But when the smoke thickens enough for the children to start coughing, they leave.
It has been weird to see people acting normal, however briefly, and gives a glimpse of how much of the world is made up of other people’s fantasies, which require stage sets and cosplay and ritual behavior. Dreams of a vacation in a green wilderness make a desk job tolerable for fifty weeks, justify the purchase of a diesel pickup and a giant fifth wheel trailer and a boat, require cowboy hats and hiking boots and fishing shirts for a journey back to Eden.
Except Eden is on fire. Julie and I have noted that our lives are made up of other people’s vacations. What happens when the vacations burn down?
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We haven’t gone to the community fire meetings. Covid has kicked up this summer, and while it isn’t killing people as often as it used to, it’s still a bad disease that spreads when you get several hundred people in a confined space. But we have tuned in to the video feeds that RM CIMT1 has set up.
The usual agenda consists of four or five speakers who impart information about the fire lines, the weather forecast, and the plans for the next phase of the fire. There’s a subtext of being in control, which is reassuring and disturbing at the same time. We’re reassured to the extent that we believe if getting a handle on the fire is humanly possible, it will happen. We’re disturbed to the extent that it may not be humanly possible.
We want someone to ask what is humanly possible, but the meeting organizers, after getting hostile questions about not getting on the fire sooner, quit allowing questions from the audience.
Acronyms contain their own truths, and RM CIMT1 reveals that the fourteen hundred fire personnel are part of the fire-industrial complex, a rigid hierarchy of interlocking agencies, suppliers, strike forces, overhead teams, and cutting-edge technologies. It has infantry and air support and giant tracked vehicles that can mow a path through thick forest. It has generals and colonels and lieutenants. It has logistics planners, mess halls, public information officers, and law enforcement personnel. It can put miles of sprinklers in the subdivisions that make up the wildland-urban interface.
Believe me, we’re thankful for all of it. But RM CIMT1’s efforts don’t reflect a larger awareness of climate change in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest and North America and the world.
Heating a forest a few degrees above normal can make the difference between an 80-acre fire and one that is 100,000 acres and still growing. That’s the changed situation we’re in, and hierarchical organizations respond to changed situations by doubling down on established procedures, procedures that took a lot of exhausting committee meetings and reams of paper to work through.
There’s a psychology of previous investment here, as well as a reluctance to commit resources to a fire until it’s worthwhile. When the fire was small and looked to be going south and east into wilderness, it was one of many active small fires. It wasn’t threatening any structures. Putting it out would have cost more than it was worth. Weeks later, when it roared over the spine of the Sawtooths and advanced toward Stanley, containing it would cost many millions more, but it was a much more justifiable investment of time and money.
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When I encounter people who deny the climate is changing, I point out that there were once cities and forests and flowing rivers across the Sahara. This information does not go over well, but it’s verifiable with a little research. I encourage any doubters to make the effort, and then research the CO2 equivalent of all the greenhouse gases floating around in our atmosphere.
Right now, it’s near 550 ppm, and that’s enough to kick-start planetary changes in cloud cover, temperature, ocean currents, and a bunch of other metrics that determine whether you can get up in the morning and breathe the air. Over time it determines whether your world is forest or desert. Over more time it will determine whether you will live or die.
We are in a new geological era, and whether you call it the Anthropocene, the Plasticene, the Capitalocene or the Pyrocene, it’s here. The ground rules have vanished, but that realization has yet to reach the Kremlin, the Chinese Politburo, the flooded fields of Pakistan and Africa, the dune-ridden agricultural areas of Spain, and the halls and meeting rooms of America’s governmental and financial institutions.
If it does, there will be a worldwide recognition that all the old rules and procedures are more or less useless. So are the old people who formulated them.
There will be blood, as the saying goes. Julie and I are hoping that historical inertia lasts long enough for us to live out our lives as privileged Americans, that we will occupy that short time between the understanding that civilization is going down and the appearance of torch-bearing barbarians at the front door.
For now, a forest fire means the evacuation of homes by civil authority, the appearance of retardant-laden DC-10s in our skies, helicopters, water-scooping planes, hotshot crews, fire engines on our streets and highways, and, usually, the eventual control of an out-of-control forest fire.
But the future of control, despite the institutions that we’ve established in its honor, is dubious at best.
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Yesterday we had breakfast at Redfish Lake Lodge. The wait staff was cheerful, the coffee was hot, and the food was good. We could park wherever we wanted.
It was one more instance of the normal being weird. It was one more instance of a troubled civilization still being able to provide protection and sustenance to a substantial share of its citizens. It was one more instance of empathy—for the lungs of the firefighters, for the people who have lost homes and farms to fire, for the animals who burned alive or lost crucial winter range, for the meadows and spring-fed moss-banked creeks and for the planet itself—causing the all-too-familiar pain of cognitive dissonance.
One would like to be part of a community, a group of people who look out for each other and make the concept of mutual prosperity work. So far, during the Wapiti Fire, our valley has been full of people working to help each other out.
But climate change, in the long run, is an assault on the concept of community. A few deeply selfish people are profiting from business-as-usual, and business-as-usual is leading to a burning planet, one where it will be hard for anyone to live outside an underground, air-conditioned bunker. Most of us can’t afford that sort of thing.
Today the smoke is clearing. A new cold front is coming in, and with it, gusty winds that are forecast to peak around midnight. The fire crews are in for a not-so-dark night, and we hope they can hang on until dawn.