White Man Fires
Annotated
I was about six years old when one of my chores in rural Iowa was to set the household trash on fire. I was young enough that I struggled to carry a full paper grocery bag of trash to the back of the yard where the burn barrel was, out past the outhouse and the well from where we drew our water, and maybe 20 feet from the berry bushes that separated our backyard from the neighbors.
We sorted refuse into garbage and trash. The garbage was given to the dog, and the trash was burned. I had helped Dad burn the trash for a long time and knew how to do it. He taught me how to light a match safely, set fire to the trash, and how to stomp out any fire that spread to dry grass. At that age, I wasn’t coordinated enough to pull the match from the matchbook and strike what’s called the striker pad to light the match. I had to put the match on the striker, close the cover over the match, and pull the match through the striker and the cover to light it. In other words, I couldn’t “close cover before striking,” as we are instructed.
Everything the dog couldn’t eat, including plastic and cans, went into the trash to be burned. I don’t recall if we didn’t have a trash-hauling service or if we just couldn’t afford it. I just know that I never took trash or garbage to the curb for someone to pick up.
I would make sure the trash was consolidated, light the match, then set the trash on fire. I’d always position some tissue or a piece of newspaper under some cardboard to get the fire started. As it burned, I imagined I was burning a small city composed of cereal boxes and other discarded materials. In my mind, plastic would melt in small lava flows. Glass bottles would break under enough heat. Eventually, if I could get the fire hot enough, even cans would melt. The most fun was when an aerosol can would explode and shoot high into the air.
In elementary school, my buddy Jerry and I used to help the custodian, old Bob Fulton, collect trash from the classrooms after lunch, mostly composed of empty milk cartons, paper plates, and napkins. We would dump them in a caged space next to the playground and light the pile on fire, smoke blossoming into the air. Many of the milk cartons weren’t quite empty, and the milk sizzled as the waxed cardboard melted and then burned. Bob needed our help, and it got us out of class. He paid us a nickel a week, and we were grateful.
When I was in Boy Scouts, we built fires all of the time. We had a great scoutmaster and were camping fools. We did a lot of winter camping (once at 22 degrees below zero), and I earned the fire safety merit badge.
When I was 12, I was initiated into the Order of the Arrow. It was 1966, and the Viet Nam War was escalating. In the dark, we stood in a circle of Scouts and Scoutmasters from different troops around a giant campfire, and there was a ceremony with lots of singing, recitation of pledges, and prayer. At the end of the ceremony, drums beat, and older boys in Indian garb ran around the circle at speeds unimaginable to me, whooping and hollering, pausing only to “tap” boys who were to be initiated. I was tapped (shoved) into the arms of someone behind me, who whispered that I was to go get my sleeping bag and go to a rendezvous point. And to talk to no one. I doubt the initiation met tribal approval, but we didn’t care then, and most people don’t care now.
Somewhere in the deep, dark woods, we were led down a trail, and one by one, we were told to make our bed and that we would spend the night at that spot, alone. At my spot on the side of a hill, I was warned again not to say anything to anyone. I was given three wooden matches and was told to build and light a fire at dawn, and if I didn’t have one going when a scoutmaster came by, I wouldn’t be allowed into the Order of the Arrow.
Dew was heavy that night, but I found some almost dry grass and kindling to burn just as the eastern sky began to lighten.
I was down to my last match when I heard boots coming down the trail. A tall, rangy old scoutmaster stood above me with a kind smile.
“Last match?” he asked.
I nodded.
He bent over, pulled a tube of something out of his back pocket, and a thick red gel emerged as he squeezed the tube over a larger stick, leaving a bright red gob about the size of a quarter.
“Light it,” he said.
I did, and my last match lit the gel instantaneously, and I was able to get a fire going.
He grinned and said, “same ingredients as Napalm,” and turned and walked away.
In the late 1990’s I was working in Mexico in the desert state of Chihuahua. Nearly every weekday morning, my Mexican friends and I would watch the news on TV while we ate breakfast at a cafe. It was back in the day before we had the numerous, monstrous wildfires we have out west today that we now mostly ignore like we do school shootings, and I watched with horror as homes in and around Los Alamos, New Mexico, burned.
My Mexican friends weren’t interested in the wildfires at all at Los Alamos and didn’t really want to talk about it. Finally, I pressed one of them about their lack of concern.
One said. “It’s about time…it’s karma.”
“Karma for what?” I asked naively.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
A couple of weeks ago, Iowa and much of the rest of the Midwest had an air quality alert as smoke from fires in Canada passed through.
The world has had approximately 20 million climate refugees every year as the earth burns.
Our youngest is home from college for the summer, and she wanted to have a bonfire at our house with her friends on Friday night. It’s what country kids do.
The firepit had a winter and spring’s worth of fallen branches in it, along with a couple of months of yard trimmings. The pile of combustibles was about six feet high, and I decided it would be safer if I lit the fire before the kids arrived. So I did. It was dry, and with one match, and in maybe 30 seconds, flames lept 15 feet high into the air, searing the leaves of a nearby tree whose branches reached out over the fire pit.
As the fire became smaller, I watched it burn, sitting in the shade in a lawn chair, sipping a cup of iced vodka and lime. I put another piece of firewood on it.
As twilight neared, I flashed back to 1981 or 1982 when I was working at a field camp on Black Mesa, on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. The crew had a small fire going, and I had stood up to put another log on it.
“No, don’t do that,” a young Navajo man told me. “It’s wasteful.”
He continued. “Don’t build a white man fire--build an Indian fire--keep it small and tend it carefully.”
They’re all white man fires.
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I love this, Bob. So many memories from my own childhood. Homecoming week in high school was capped by a bonfire party near the football field. Bonfires are a bit part of Montana heritage (sort of white man fires on steroids, I guess). And there is something culturally revealing about wildfire management: how integral fire was to indigenous practices, yet how many resources are expended trying to suppress fires that ought to be allowed to burn for ecological reasons. I moved into wilderness trails eventually because the philosophy of fire suppression was so repugnant to me. We were paid, essentially, to protect merchantable timber. That's what your federal taxes went toward: saving trees so that lumber companies could sell them. And whenever we did urban interface (with homes or residential communities), our resources were marshalled to protect trophy homes. Not once was I ever dispatched to protect a trailer court. Nuf said.
Two other firefighting memories -- both reinforcing your white man fire idea. I did a lot of prescribed burning with the Forest Service, typically to prepare logged plots for replanting. I've never met an Indian pyromaniac, but those 30-40 acre burns, typically on steep mountainsides, were redneck heaven. Government-sanctioned destruction, essentially. In the fall, we would burn "slash piles," big stacks of waste wood. And we'd fill jerry cans of mystery fuel from the fire station boneyard, pour them into buckets, douse the piles, and then toss fusees into the mix to light the whole thing. Grown men cackling like idiots about how big a boom they could create. It makes me laugh to remember it, but there's nothing culturally redeeming about that view.
And circling back to your own time in the Southwest, I was once dispatched with a crew to Arizona and New Mexico. We worked the night shift, 6pm to 6am, and I was amazed at how low the temperature dropped at night. Down to the 40s after a high of 110 or so. We were supposed to be digging up hot spots (mopping up, they call it), but many a night we would find a stump hole with a lot of coals underneath, and we'd stoke it up to keep warm. Those moments, when we weren't fighting anything, but huddling together in the dark around glowing embers, are some of my favorite memories of being a firefighter. Now you make me want to write an essay about all this!
As always, informative, thought provoking and beautifully written.