Mobius syndrome

THE WIND DRIVES the rain in sheets, rippling like dense drapery. Raindrops the size of pine cones splash off the pavement. We sit in the fire cache, crouching on milk drums and rounds of ponderosa pine, our fire packs at our knees, roughly grouped around a fuel-oil heater. Lightning flashes, not far distant. Another bolt cracks in a long rumble that probes across the Transept like the tendrils of a vine. It's hard to believe that fires could start amid such conditions, much less thrive and inspire a crew to hike in and extinguish them. But we know they do. Not here of course, not just outside the cache's great gated doors, but beyond the pale of the unwashed windows, beyond our huddled selves, a fire that will send us, all of us, the North Rim Longshots, dashing to an engine with a holler and a hope. That's why we now sit and wait for a smoke report from Recon 1, our aerial observer. We wait; we listen; we think, those of us who have been on the Rim for a few seasons, on what we have learned and why we are here.

The short answer is, we are here because of fire. No fires, no fire crews. Our lives arrange themselves around wildfire much as we now cluster around the virtual fire of the heater. But none of us is solely interested in fire alone. Smokechasing-the practice of finding and attacking wildland fires-is not just an adventure; it's a life. We relish the place. We aren't swatting out fires in a city's vacant lots or a fallow field: we live on the Rim of the Grand Canyon. Sure, the place would be a lot less interesting without fire. Without fire we might have to live as fee collectors or ranger cops or fern-- feeling naturalists. But the fires are there for anyone who chooses to pursue them. Fire season is a time in our lives for which the Rim is a geographic expression. A fire on the Rim is what makes the site habitable and our time there meaningful, what makes this the best of all lives in the best of all places.

For some of us, smokechasing can trek beyond the Rim and become a model for life: the smokechaser as scholar. It's not for everyone, nor is it the only way to learn about a larger world. Mostly, scholarship is more deliberate and less physically taxing, although I know more people who have broken their health with a pencil than with a pulaski, who can trace more ailments to a flickering computer screen than to a flaming snag. No shovel-wielding Longshot ever suffered from carpal tunnel syndrome. No crew flush with fires ever sank into clinical depression.

For someone attracted to environmental history, the transfiguration of smokechasing into scholarship comes seamlessly. History has been famously described as the search for a usable past. Environmental history adds to that, the search for a usable place. That's a smoke report I can rally to. I keep a fire pack for research travels on the shelf, loaded, ready for dispatch. I have put fire at the center of humanity's existence, much as it was for the Longshots on the Rim. By themselves, the fires are not enough; but with a suitable place to site them, they can make a life. They have made mine.

OUISIDE,ANOTHER BURST of hard rain, and a blast of lightning whose flash and crack are one. The rookies in the cache think back on fire school, trying to recall the sequenced lessons, the Ten Standard Firefighting Orders, the lengthening lists of Situations That Shout "Watch Out." I'd like to say that everything I needed to know I learned in fire school. In fact, two or three days of classroom instruction mean little. They mean we get a certifying document, a red card (the Park Service's were pink; I never learned why), and this allows us to go on a fireline. The lessons, however, are a bureaucratic scam unless followed by labor in the field. The only real learning comes by doing. A parody of the Paul Simon song "Kodachrome" (revealingly renamed "Overtime") would annually make the rounds: "When I think back on all the crap I learned in fire school, it's a wonder I can work at all."

The point is to get into the field. A sign hangs over the cache, a warning to those who enter: "If you don't get outta here, you don't get outta here." Begin the morning by hanging around the cache, and you'll hang out all day. There is always a canteen that needs refilling or another memo to file. Start in the cache, stay in the cache. The value of a fire, a real fire, is that it forces you to get out. No Longshot would want it otherwise because it is always better to be on a fire, any fire, than to potter around the cache sharpening axes, linseeding shovel handles, or washing the 1/4-ton Chevy. Better to be called in to help mop up a fire. You get to smell smoke, do some real work, and maybe claim some overtime. Still, mopping up is never as good as having your own fire, however wretched or magnificent, be it smoldering duff or a fully flaming ponderosa. Every rookie should be rabid for the adventure of tracking down that smoke, for the immortality of naming it, for the thrill of calling in and directing others (including the old hands) to do the grunt labor of cutting line and mopping up. The trick is to get a big fire, but not too big; not so big that outsiders arrive to take it over and absorb it into the bureaucracy of big burns and relegate the smokechaser to smoke stomper. When that happens, it's time to return to the cache, replenish your pack, and wait for another call.

Our usual dispatch procedure is to send out a veteran and a rookie together because that's the only way the new Longshots can learn; because, very shortly, they must become vets themselves. A bad crew runs by seniority. Those with experience and standing claim all the fires, sop up most of the overtime, and leave the mopup to the newcomers. Politics and bureaucracy take over, however packaged in pedagogical cant about mentoring. Seniority rules when there are more firefighters than fires, when the bust is not big enough to send everyone, when someone has to remain and tend the cache. Better, rather, to be stretched than flabby. Better to have a crew too small than too big.

There is ample precedent that the same holds for scholarship. The last great round of scholasticism, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, also slopped over from France. Its essence was a glut of critics and a deficit of texts.The upshot was a deepening tar pit of glosses, and glosses on glosses, until the texts themselves dissolved amid the acidic sludge of rhetoric. Worse, the practice had the sanction of the establishment. To argue against the prevailing premises of the Schoolmen was to risk charges of heresy. The risk was there even if one did not directly attack the reigning dogma but simply ignored it. One could not speak against the protected categories, nor could one speak without reference to them.

What finally broke thought free was a determination to read the book of nature, which was really not a text at all and which therefore demanded a novum organon, a new logic, the methods of modern science. The authority of Nature challenged the authority of the Ancients. The antitext of Nature was an antidote, intractable and inexhaustible. The true Otherness of Nature defied rules of rhetoric. Nature proved unbounded, Nature frustrated intellectual bureaucracy, Nature blasted constructed categories with the violent indifference with which lightning strikes stone and snag equally. Moreover, science acquired additional power because it bonded with technology. It was tested not merely against logical consistency and ideological templates but against whether or not it worked.

The contemporary counterpart to scholasticism is postmodern cultural analysis and a guild that has too many apprentices for too few jobs. The one is a condition of the other. A profession that requires eight, nine, or ten years to complete a degree is training mopup crews and cache-workers, not smokechasers. Its apprentices don't make history; they study historiography. The solution is to get into the field. The way to remove scholarship from the Mobius strip of rhetorical scholasticism is to turn again to the natural world. A guild cannot control nature as it can texts, canons, or degree requirements. Whether environmental history can evolve a novumorganon is doubtful; but it is ideally situated to strike off the shackles of a miserable solipsism and a stupid scholasticism. Nothing else comes close. But having originated in the Earth the discipline must ultimately return to the Earth. The test of its rightness will be whether it can site a usable place.

That understanding is intuitive with the Longshots. We know that release is there -- that nature sets fires, if according to its own ineffable logic and whim; that we are not left to endless manuals, computer screens, drills, and memories. Our task is to seek those smokes out, which we do by sending a Cessna 172 aloft to dart through thunderheads, by staffing Kanabownits lookout after hot storms, by pausing as we drive to the Grand Lodge to scour the eastern horizon, the limned bulk of Walhalla Plateau, for smokes, by clambering up to the crow's nest of tree tower 1, atop a blasted white fir. "You can't wait for inspiration," Jack London once wrote. "You have to go after it with a club." We go after it with binoculars, a compass, and a shovel.

Two smokes are reported on Swamp Ridge: Bill and Sandy scamper to Engine 652 and, because it's an early report, Tommy Deshennie Begaye, one of the Navajo SWFFs, goes as well, while Barry and Fran and Henry Goldtooth race off in 653. Get those rookies out of the cache and onto fires. The bust is on.

THE STORM CELL CONTINUES to boil out of the Canyon, its crashes rumbling from the west. In its wake, Reconnreports a possible smoke on lie Dragon. The wisp of a groan rises from the Longshots. It's not that a fire on The Dragon is unexpected or unwanted. Acre for acre, the mesa, almost wholly cut off from the Rim, has more fire than anywhere else. This is prime habitat for a fire crew and a place known to them. The problem is that The Dragon's fire has become problematized.

The Dragon is an ideal setting for what the National Park Service calls a "prescribed natural fire," which is defined as a fire kindled by natural means that burns in a predesignated place under approved conditions known as a prescription. This is a dictionary definition, not an operational one. No one knows what it means in the field. What it means on the Rim is that we staff the fire but don't fight it. Or that we fight it and try to disguise that fact. Or that we ignore the smoke-let it blend into the greys of the Kaibab limestone-and congratulate ourselves for our creative restraint.

The route to the PNF is as overgrown with good intentions as the trail to The Dragon is with black locust. It emerged as a device to let a natural process seek its own destiny yet still have a political bureaucracy maintain control. It allowed us to put fire back into a biota that craved it yet assign responsibility for the outcome to nature. We could be there, yet not be there. We could install natural fire as the pith and purpose of fire management, yet justify intervention where, for reasons of scale, politics, or past history, the PNF proved impossible and plain-old prescribed burning would have to substitute. As the years rolled by, the Park Service, inspired by the PNF chimera, burned up almost half of Yellowstone at a cost in excess of $150 million and when PNFs became suspect succeeded in burning a chunk of Los Alamos in the name of naturalness at a cost in excess of $661 million.

The PNF was a cultural creation, the invention of a society that had polarized the world, that said we either had to fight fires or let them burn, and preferred that we do both at the same time. This was a society that had no working concept of a usable place. Yet what critics condemned as a contradiction and advocates defended as a compromise, the philosophically gifted might recognize as one of Modernism's many paradoxes. The prescribed natural fire joined Russell's paradox, Godel's proof, Bohr's principle of complementarity, and Heisenberg's principle of indeterminancy, all of which struggled to incorporate the observer into the observed system. The question whether such fires were natural or controlled was of a piece with the question whether electrons were particles or waves. If physicists could cope with electrons, surely historians can cope with events that are both natural and cultural. (If they can build bombs, we can write books.)

The philosophically challenged might note that cognates existed in popular culture as well. Over the winter 1967-68, during which the Park Service reformed the policies that led to the evolution of PNFs, Star Trek began its TV serialization. Both Starfleet and the Park Service accepted the same Prime Directive: non-interference in the evolution of other life forms. If somehow that order was violated, then it was acceptable to intervene to restore conditions to what had prevailed previously. This describes almost exactly the philosophy of wildland fire management at the time. The PNF was Starfleet's mission to an environmentalist Earth.

"Please, please, not another Recapitulation fire," Scott mumbles. Last summer lightning had blasted an enormous snag on The Dragon, part of a far-flung bust. Scott and Fran had flown to the he lispot on the north flank, then hiked in, felled the snag, corralled the flames with a fireline, and hustled to another smoke, while a couple of South Rimmers replaced them for mopup. Park officials, however, squirmed over the episode. They couldn't leave the fire, yet neither did they wish to engage it. So they secretly instructed the South Rimmers to repair the damage the Longshots had inflicted. This was a natural-a wild-place. There was no justification for displaying the human presence. We should remove the history of our unwise acts. So the South Rimmers flushed the stump, burned up evidence of cut logs, and rolled back the pineneedle bean that rimmed the fireline. Then they flew out. Two days later, a large smoke blasted out of The Dragon. The fire had rekindled and overrun the restored fuel. Another squad of Longshots attacked it, felled more snags, cut more line, and fired out the interior. This reestablished control, but left unresolved the question of our continued presence. So instead of spading every smoke into submission the crew sat around for two days munching on rations, sleeping under the pines, and reading broken-spined paperbacks until the fire expired.

The Recapitulation fire had become large enough that it demanded a narrative report, not merely a coded form. But how do you write such a narrative? It is not apparent how we should be on The Dragon, or how we should tell the story of our being there. If we exclude ourselves completely, then we have no story. If we only observe, then we end up with stories about ourselves observing, which means in practice stories of ourselves observing ourselves. Yet if we center the story wholly on ourselves, then we lose the special, unsettling power of natural fire and The Dragon. Instead, the narrative becomes an exercise in justifying theory and its expression as policy, which by definition cannot be wrong. Eventually the concept of the PNF imploded, no longer an accepted strategy of fire management and stricken from its working vocabulary. What should replace it is not clear. The 2000 fire season witnessed a wholesale breakdown: we couldn't control fires we started and couldn't suppress those nature kindled.

Such matters concern the smokechaser-as-scholar. The PNF flourished in the same years as the breakthrough books of environmental historiography. Pre-contact landscape and, in particular, wilderness proposed a sublime and brutal contrast with American society and suggested-maybe demanded-a new strategy for doing history. Certainly it stopped the usual practices: it was no longer acceptable to simply suppress nature from scene and story. But the polarity, however majestic, was too great to sustain, and after the initial shock, it was not obvious what kind of narrative report historians should file. To remove ourselves-to accept a let-burn strategy- is to yield to ecological history, a biotic chronicle with people rubbed out or stripped of moral agency. To continue to bumble around-pretending we are both there and not there-will likely spawn historiographic fiascos akin to the Frijoles Canyon #2 fire that bolted out of Bandelier. The easiest, the default, solution is to center the story around ourselves.

That is what humanistic history would like. It could absorb what passes for environmental history within its prevailing operating system-the codings for race, gender, class, and ethnicity; the Windows"' of academic history-and could then apply the same strategy that Microsoft has used against its competitors: embrace, extend, extinguish. Environmental history as a distinctive project will be subsumed, sidelined, or squashed. It will be shrunk into body studies, surgically transgendered, strip-mined for environmental justice, dissolved into a misty sense of ethnic place. Since discourse resides within institutions, institutions will become the object of the discourse. Historians will study fire policy and park bureaucracy; The Dragon will exist as a problem, not a patch of land. All of this is scholarship, much of it good stuff, but such history will thrive at the cost of abolishing what made a fire on The Dragon special, that is, not us but fire and The Dragon.

"Maybe," Scott mutters, "Recon 1 saw a waterdog." Recon 1 isn't sure. There are enough true fires popping up that it isn't worth committing a crew to The Dragon just yet. The issue of how we should "manage" fire there remains deeply, deliberately ambiguous. If such fires were all we had, we would dissolve from boredom and paralysis. The Longshot position is that if fire belongs on The Dragon, we ought to put it there. We ought to burn it ourselves. The story should be of us doing just that. But this would be too simple-would confuse a natural process with an unnatural act; would apply a pragmatic logic to what the reigning authorities obviously cherish as an unresolved, and unresolvable, problematique. Instead, debate will replace decision; power will shift to those skilled in the arts of discourse. Fortunately, there are plenty of fires elsewhere. Recon i spots one in The Basin.

THE DELUGE PAUSES, catching its breath. The inexperienced Longshots nurture the belief that the storm is ending. The older are more wary. They know storms beat to their own logic and rhythms. All turn their thoughts to the mechanics of those in the field and rehearse the stages of smokechasing. Recon 1 has flown over Engine 652, parked on the Swamp Ridge road, in a direct line to the smoke, about two miles distant, and reckoned a compass bearing of 153.

The bearing by itself means nothing. What matters is its correction. You learn quickly-a single fire is sufficient--that Recon 1 flies on true magnetic bearings such that "north" on its compass points to the magnetic north pole. But the maps that guide smokechasers point to the north pole of rotation. On the North Rim the difference between map and compass is 15 east, a distinction known as magnetic declination. The gap matters. Even over a short distance-a mile, say-a 15 misreading could put you on the wrong ridge. On the North Rim, where the terrain resembles a corrugated roof bent into a shallow dome, all heavily forested, to follow an uncorrected bearing is to get lost, and amid the rush of dispatching that happens annually. It will continue to happen so long as those observing and those responding have compasses set to different norths. Within that difference crews at night can lose not only their fires but themselves.

The Longshots have many names for this disparity, most of them unprintable. But a good literary term for that gap is irony. It's not a word you hear often on the Rim because it's not a usable concept. It is not, ultimately, an instrumental word that belongs in a fire pack with flagging tape and rations, or that can be hoisted on a shoulder like a chainsaw. On the Rim irony is little more than a bluster of wind, because once recognized its defining gap can be sealed. In Modernist scholarship, however, irony endures as a structural condition much as declination persists as a shaper of narrative. No one, it seems, wants to close that chasm.

From the beginning, irony has been the voice of Modernism and has thrived on the great gaps of modern times-between expectation and reality, between the promise of progress and the atavistic horrors of the twentieth century, between a world of tradition and one of modernity, between nature and culture, between people and place, between the world we say we want and the world we actually make. But these are ancient lapses. What is distinctive about Modernism is that it refuses to grapple with that gap, to close or bridge it. Instead Modernists have typically sought either to eliminate the chasm by razing one side completely or by holding the chasm permanently open. The former has inspired some of the worst absurdities and vast terrors of the past century. The latter leads, limping and huffing, to the vapid voice of Postmodernism. Postmodernism is irony playing tennis without the net.

Much of environmental history-like nearly everything else in the Modernist panorama- is a literature framed by irony. The distance between culture and nature is ideally suited for ironic commentary. Think of the contrast between the wild and settled. Think of stories of contact and colonization where the distance between rhetoric and reality tends to be huge and the ditch between people and place can be as wide as the Atlantic Ocean. So pervasive is the ironic voice that it shapes the stories one might choose, selects the frames, polishes the phrases. Irony is the default setting of academic history. No one is chided for speaking ironically, but not to speak with an ironic edge is to risk charges of naivete. Once a discussion has been framed ironically, it typically ends. Irony knows no back of beyond.

It makes good banter in a cache while seated around a heater, holding coffee cups or outfitting axes with leather sheaths. (I say this as someone who has made a career as a aerialist ironist.) But irony is worthless, even fatal, in the field. It belongs in the cache like safety posters, not on an engine. Those at a desk have a luxury of pondering whether one can ever truly "find" a smoke or whether, over the long run, one can "suppress" flame. Those in the field huffing tip another damn ridge, soaked from brushing past soggy firs, see it differently. Iliev prefer to keep irony as a kind of mental whistling-what Recon i describes as a small hill may well seem to a groundpounder like a miniature Matterhorn. But no Longshot would seriously accept irony's vision as a bearing to take into a smoke. No smokechaser would be rewarded, as a contemporary scholar might, by showing the futility of smokechasing. No fire, no firefighters.

Irony requires, ultimately, an unusable place, because if people reconcile themselves with the land around them, the gap closes and irony becomes irrelevant. They set their compasses to a common standard (it doesn't matter which, only that it be the same). Like Modernism, irony has shown itself superb at dismantling old structures, and has proved wholly incapable of building anything of its own, for that would demand that it close the gap that makes its vision possible. Yet the Modernist project requires a cultural breach that now exceeds its gasp. Irony has enjoyed a monopoly, and like all established monopolies, it has become predictable, oppressive, boring. In firefighting terms, irony is no longer even a sculpted snag but a smoking root hole. A smokechaser compassing through the woods at night with a chainsaw on his shoulder doesn't have the luxury of contemplating the unresolvable difference (or differance) between privileged bearings. You can get very lost, or very hurt. Maintaining that gap becomes either an indulgent game or a cruel exercise in power. It's time for a post-- ironic culture.

In fact, the public is out there, oblivious to the philo-babble of Postmodern criticism, its sleeves rolled up, doing things in the dirt to make a usable place in which to live. Historians can point out that, granted irony's implacable status, such efforts are doomed, or we can join them and write histories that are the intellectual equivalent of ecological regeneration. To do that we will have to remove irony from its privileged pulpit and have it join the choir, to take it out of our mis-set compasses and put it on the tool racks with the pulaskis and korticks. And to do that we have to scrap the protected categories of thinking that make irony inevitable. This why "ecological restoration," for example, is a regrettable phrase. Yes, its use is pervasive and its pedigree honorable; sure, it carries real cultural clout-that we are making good what we have wrecked, that we've seen the past and it works. Yet "restoration" locks us, again, into an ironic narrative. We can never truly restore a place. What matters is making where we live habitable. Better to speak of ecological recovery or ecological regeneration. The point is the future, not the past.

Another smoke is sighted along Swamp Ridge near the Tipover tank. Randy and Jan and John Paul roar off in a borrowed ranger pickup parked under the big white fir by the hose rack, hastily outfitted with extra tools and rations and sleeping bags wrapped in plastic garbage bags. The rear tires spin as they grab for the edge of the pavement. So, in truth, the world rushes over and scatters our categories like so much loose gravel. Irony belongs with those loose pebbles by the road and the occasional cracked windshield.

THE LIGHTNING SEEMS more remote, the rain more feeble. Recon 1 has veered north to escape a ferocious thunderhead over Saddle Mountain and spots a smoke to the northwest, near \TF Park on the North Kaibab National Forest. He reports it to the Forest Service dispatcher in Williams who requests that the park respond. An off-park fire: always an adventure. Any fire outside the park is better than no fire within. Our vehicles, however, are getting scarcer. One Longshot, Larry, and two SWFFs wheel out in a stake truck borrowed from maintenance, more often used to haul garbage and asphalt. They leave with Larry defiantly holding up a pocket notebook to record his anticipated overtime.

Sometimes, though, we travel further. We go to the Strip, sometimes to regional parks like Zion and Mesa Verde, occasionally to California. Going off-park is another way of testing our skills in new settings. A Longshot has to demonstrate that what he or she knows matters elsewhere. So too a smokechaser-scholar has to travel out of academic departments, beyond the borders of defined disciplines. Or as William James, waving a different kind of notebook, put it, you have to ask what in experiential terms the "cash value" of our ideas really is.

This can get sticky for a discipline like History grounded in the humanities, that in the final tally create and analyze moral universes, that address questions of who we are and how we should behave. Surely, nature is amoral and stands outside the purview of humanistic scholarship. What value is the humanities to natural history, or natural history to the humanities? A lot. The humanities have value, first, because creatures besides humans make choices about their behavior and hence exercise judgment, which is to say, even nonhuman nature is not wholly removed from moral realms. Because, second, nature prompts people into moral agency. It forces us to choose-catalyzing and compelling decisions and acts-and thus becomes a moral presence. Its human-shaped landscapes record those choices.

Because, finally, ecology is a historical science like geology that cannot explain why landscapes look as they do except by appealing at some level to history, and because it cannot ignore what is often the keystone species in the evolution of landscapes and still hope to offer more than fanciful tales of how and why it all happened. An environment without people is even more abstract and meaningless than the ideal frictionless surface beloved of physicists. A place inhabited by humans ought to be the norm for analysis and a place emptied of people should be considered an outlier, an exception, not the ontological basis for understanding. One might as well shut off rains or sunlight, either of which would also simplify,, calculations and flow charts. But to put people into those places means one must understand how and why people act as they do. That the natural sciences cannot do.

Fire demonstrates this nicely. We are born genetically equipped with the ability to manipulate fire, but we do not come programmed knowing what to do or how or why. And since our capacity over fire is a species monopoly, our fire behavior serves as a unique index of our own ecological and moral agency, a measure for which no neutral position is possible, for fire can be as ecologically powerful removed as applied. If that isn't a subject fit for environmental history, nothing is. If environmental history can't speak to the needs of fire management, then it is truly and pejoratively academic. In fact, it can, though it has largely chosen not to.

The last time it did for me was in 1998 when I went off-park to Ghana.The Forest Service and the International Tropical Timber Organization, the sponsoring agencies, didn't want a historian. They wanted a sociologist. They wanted some technocratic brand of scholarship that could address the fact that people were behind Ghana's fires. They wanted "methodologies" and "manuals" and the authority of science -- its political if not epistemological authority-even if they had to seek for it in such troubled disciplines as sociology, which in any event had no one up to the task. So they settled on me.

Actually, I could do much of what they needed. I could tell them how America had evolved from a rural, fire-saturated landscape to an urban, fire-starved one; how Australia had sought to reconcile rural traditions of burning off with a search for national identity; how Europe seemed congenitally unable to conceived of fire as anything but a social creation. I could tell them why, based on historical evidence, fielbreaks worked and failed. I could recommend how to segregate science from management, how the political ecology of fire worked, how institutional inventions like forest reserves have survived the withdrawal of the colonial powers that installed them. I could tell them why they didn't need a formal questionnaire, only suitable questions.

As a scholar grounded in the humanities I could read with skepticism the text of a Netherlands-sponsored proposal for a ten-year project in bushfire control. The Dutch wished to erect a system of cultivated "green firebreaks" around the threatened forest reserves. The literary critic warned about the choice of words and imagery. Would the scheme have the same punch if those barriers were called "cassava corridors" or 11 plantain patches"? Would it have the same political panache if it were not premised on the vision of the Sahara marching to the sea? The philosopher noted the many political values embedded in the coded cliches of three-year plans and sustainable agriculture, and masked in ambiguous phrases about holding village lands in trust. The historian identified the persistence of European ideals about landscape, of beliefs about the relationship of trees and climate, of concepts such as "desertification," tough as spores, which have survived in the face of hostile evidence for millennia. The cultural critic observed that the Dutch were treating the shallowing forests of Ghana as they have their own shallow seas, that the firebreak barrier was a kind of seawall, that the intricate network of green fuelbreaks was a system of dikes by which one could drain fire from the landscape. All this the Ghanaians needed to hear.

But ultimately the humanities need to hear Ghana even more. It was only by default that they were there at all. The recent humanities seem to see nothing except people of specific categories and texts of unspecified abstraction. But semiotics is not consuming Chromolaena and mahogany; combustion is. An ironic voice cannot say whether, on a February afternoon, flames in three-year-old fallow will hurl embers over a forty--meter-wide fuelbreak. tendering cocoyams and maize does not determine when forest guards should early-burn along the slashed boundary of the Pamu-- Berekum Forest Reserve. Wildfire does not care whether the colonial era privileged indigenous forest or exotic teak plantations. Drought comes regardless of ethnic choices between shrubs and woods. Play with fire - real fire - and you can get really burned. The humanities, and much of environmental history that derives from such scholarship, stand apparently helpless before those flames. What burns away finally is History's own presumption that the world needs it more than it needs the world.

Every fire crew knows that dispatches end with returns, that you aren't paid until you submit your report. The paperwork counts. The written word is what survives and what the bureaucracy believes. Yet a report by itself is worthless, or if submitted without that informing smoke, fraudulent. The report-and all the appended memos attached to it as it migrates up the institutional food chain-might by itself be good enough for some endeavors. It's not good enough for smokechasers because they know that what matters is the flame behind the fortune, that the money is only an excuse for the experience. Those wild fires are not on the North Rim because of us. We're there because of the fires. THE DOWNPOUR ABRUPTLY TURNS to hail and lashes across the metal roofing of the cache like a sandstorm while rekindled lightning causes the lights to blink. Ralph the rookie worries that the fire bust has ended without him. The veteran Uncle Jimmy mutters that there are always fires, if you know where to look and keep the faith. You just don't find them on the shelves next to the NPS administrative handbooks or amid the chatter of the Grand Lodge saloon. Ralph replies hopefully that if nothing else they might be summoned to bring in supplies and help mop up one of the existing burns. It could be worse. That's when Recon 1 reports a fire south of the Point Sublime road, near the Rim.

The smoke is puffing up near an aspen grove, not a good omen. But Recon 1 believes it is actually coming from the base of a big yellow pine. Well, any fire is better than no fire. They shoulder their packs. Besides, Sublime is hours away. The storm could break, the wind rise, embers spill over the rim into ravenous chaparral. That much nature would determine. What they made of it was up to them. Ralph has already decided to name it the Genesis fire, in the hopes that it might become the start of something special. Uncle Jimmy rechecks their handtools.

It's what they live for. Ralph nods, and shows his newly acquired fire-school lore by declaring that they had better hurry, that the point is to get to the fire before it gets too big. But Uncle Jimmy, wise in the ways of the Rim, shouts his disagreement over the hail. The point, he insists, as he scrambles out the doors, is to get there before the fire goes out.

Stephen J. Pyne is a professor in the Biology & Society Program, Department of Biology, Arizona State University. This essay was written for, but not read as, the Distinguished Lectureship in Forest and Conservation History jointly sponsored by the Forest History Society, the Duke University Department ofHistory and Nicholas School ofthe Environment, and the North Carolina Humanities Council. Given the mixed character ofthe audience, another lecture, "The Source," was prepared and delivered for that occasion.

Copyright Environmental History Oct 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved