Ashes to petals: wildfire and rebirth

On our way to Alaska, we were stopped by a wildfire in British Columbia. It had jumped the road and was burning on both sides. The RV park where we spent the night slowly filled with people who were turned back as they drove north. The manager warned us we might be asked to evacuate further south during the night.

But late the next morning we could drive through, still in a fog of smoke. I’d never seen a forest right after a fire. The pitch-black trunks were stark along the road, grayer farther back, where the dense haze softened them. Smoke rose from the still-smoldering black ground, rough with burned plants. Nothing green was left.

I was longing to stop for a picture, but we were the first in line after the pilot car guiding us. There to keep crazy people from stopping in a still-smoldering fire to take pictures. But that vertical black and shifting gray landscape was unforgettable.

Most people associate wildfire with devastation. It was easy to see why as we drove through that barren and spooky landscape. The power of a forest or wildland fire can be terrifying; the destruction incomprehensible. Also easy to see why earlier forest service personnel felt that they should fight as many fires as possible.

But we have learned the costly lessons of trying to outflank nature. Forests cease to exist without fire. Fires keep the lands they burn healthy, whether they are forests, meadows, or deserts.

Centuries of fire suppression fuel much of the strength of current wildfires. We have left the forest full of flammable material: crowded, aging trees, heaps of fallen branches, dried shrubs. Not enough green, succulent growth on the forest floor to slow new fires.

Almost every year now is both the hottest year on record and the one with the most wildfires. One of our fellow campers that night was returning home to Fairbanks, Alaska. “The whole state is on fire,” she told me.

These days, more fires are allowed to burn unless they pose a hazard to life or property. Once in Alaska, we saw plenty of evidence that the state had burned earlier in the summer. After our arrival in mid-July, the weather grew steadily wetter. But we passed vast stands of black trunks. Lighter trunks from earlier fires interspersed the darker ones. Trunks that had shed their burnt bark and were weathering to a silvery gray.

Initially, a wildfire leaves a devastated landscape. Those blackened trunks can stand for years while the surrounding growth recovers. It takes decades for trees to grow tall enough to replace those lost.

But a fire opens the ground to sunlight. It eliminates competition from tree roots and shrubs. Its ash fills the soil with nutrients. New growth is almost instantaneous. By the time we drove down Route 97 six weeks later, the ground under the burned trunks was a lush, vivid green.

Native Americans, knowing that ecosystems like forests and grasslands need disturbance to thrive, used controlled burns. These got rid of twigs and dry branches to eliminate fuels for forest fires so they would stay small. That lush new growth we saw is extra nutritious and would attract wildlife, which made hunting easier. Burning and pruning created shrubs with lots of straight shoots for weaving the indispensable baskets. Ash nourished the tubers they planted.

Having opened the ground to light and filled it with nutrients, fires start a new cycle in the forest. The first arrivals are wildflowers, springing from seeds dormant for years, sometimes decades. In many areas, deciduous trees sprout up, growing quickly, racing past the slow evergreens that will slowly out-compete them. During their long maturation, you will have years of glowing wildflowers.

Then, depending on where you are, you may have years of aspens or birches turning the mountainsides gold every fall. Shimmering vivid green in the spring. Their trunks silver above the snow in the winter. The conifers will one day catch up and take over. As they grow, they block the light from the wildflowers and grasses, which retreat into dormancy. There they await the next fire to burn through and release them.

In Banff, Alberta, I went into the visitors’ center to ask where to find wildflowers. A friendly young woman told me about a wildfire at Stanley Glacier in nearby Kootenay National Park. Off I went, confident there were treasures awaiting me. I was right. The flowers accompanying this post are from that hike.

Since I was so smitten with the flowers, I never took a picture of the terrain. It was full of three- and four-foot high lodgepole pines, lushly green and healthy. Around them grew fireweed, the first to arrive, mixed with wild orchids, and paintbrush in the most vivid colors I’ve ever seen. Columbine and fleabane were everywhere.

The fire burned through in 2003, so it took a long time for the trees to grow four feet. We are used to fixing things quickly. If a house burns down, there can be a new one in months. If a forest burns down, it requires a very different mindset. Rebuilding is the work of decades.

A house is no good until it’s finished, but each stage of a growing forest is as vital as all the others. The wildflowers growing among the toddler trees at Stanley Glacier are just as much the forest as the trees that succeed them.

Life on Earth is a ceaseless conversation. Growth, death, change, renewal. Fire, flowers, aspens, lodgepole pines, fire. Ashes, petals, bark. Fireweed next to blackened trunks, wild orchids among the baby pines.

It’s an ancient dialectic that we interrupt at our peril. We don’t comprehend the infinity of factors that go into Earth’s forces. It has taken from colonial times until recently to understand that interfering with wildfires damages everything we think we’re saving.

If a fire were raging through my neighborhood, I would want firefighters to make every effort to put it out. At the same time, I accept that living on this gorgeous, verdant planet brings with it certain dangers. The shifting of the plates means we will always have earthquakes and volcanoes. A planet with vast, moving oceans will guarantee hurricanes. The co-existence of boundless stands of timber and lightning will always ignite wildfires.

These are disasters in our eyes. And yet they are the reason there is ever-renewing life on Earth. A fire burns everything to the ground, and then the forest starts again. Without that mix of cataclysm and rebirth, there would eventually be no forest. A difficult reality to live with.

We can make better choices, especially about where and how we live. But if we could stop these forces, we would live on a barren planet. They are both dangerous and crucial We are left, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said, to “Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going.”

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