Author: Bob Hagan

I haven’t posted lately on the North Fire, which has now burned more than 30,000 acres in the San Mateos and is still going strong, and I don’t have the heart to follow the progress of the Dog Head Fire on the east side of the Manzanos or the fire closing on Show Low in AZ, or the fires in Utah, Colorado, California and elsewhere in the West. Nobody comes to this site for red-hot (sorry) news anyway. If you’re interested in tracking the various conflagrations, I generally look at NMFireInfo and Wildland Fire Assessment; otherwise just surf Yahoo and other news sites for the latest.

Personally, I find it too depressing. I hate Fire Season. I know it’s all part of Mother Nature’s Grand Plan (the bitch), the cycle of birth, growth, destruction and renewal that governs not just Western forests but all creation so comprehensively that it can’t be anything but God’s message writ large: this is life.

But I hate the smoke. You would think a forest fire smells like a campfire, but it doesn’t; my eyes itch and my nasal passages burn with it, my abused lungs labor for a breath of fresh air. And I hate the sense of dread it carries with it on the wind. Is it someplace I know and love? Have I ever hiked or camped there, and will I ever return?

I haven’t tracked the FS reports on my map, but it appears likely the North Fire has moved up Bear Trap Canyon toward Monica Saddle and is threatening to descend the ridge toward Monica Spring. I believe that’s approximately the same route Nana and his Raiders took through the mountains in 1881, and I know that country pretty well. The forest recovers, and it’s life-affirming to watch the progress over a generation. But in the immediate aftermath even a low-intensity ground fire scars the terrain for years. Mother Nature has time without end, but I personally don’t have a lot of years left.

It’s tempting to think we could remove fire from the forest ecosystem altogether. But we tried that  with disastrous results – which should make any thinking person pause to consider the hubris underlying our grandiose plans to control the climate. Now fires are “actively managed for multiple resource benefits.” It will probably be another generation before we know whether that strategy is more successful than Smokey’s old prescription of total eradication.

In the meantime, every time I see smoke in the mountains I think of James Baldwin’s rendition of the Biblical promise of the rainbow: “No more water, the fire next time.”

I’ve updated the prologue to add John Bourke’s thumbnail description of Nané (as Bourke spells it). Bourke was a keen observer whose views on the Apaches were sympathetic but unclouded by sentimentality. His perceptive comment on the old man’s “under stratum of cruelty and vindictiveness” goes a long way toward explaining the events of the Raid.

The “North Fire” in the San Mateos has nearly doubled in size and is now 12,500 acres, according to latest FS report. Still low intensity, which is just what’s needed to clean out underbrush and reduce risk of future catastrophic fires, but the smoke is an irritation. I believe I can feel it in my eyes in Albuquerque, more that 80 miles away as crow flies or smoke blows.

This is a trivial thing, but I do get tired of the way people feel free to distort and rewrite history to fit their particular political narrative. Michelle Obama tells graduates she “wakes up in a house built by slaves.” That’s BS. In fact the building we now call the White House was built by skilled Scottish stonemasons, burned down in 1814 and rebuilt and remodeled repeatedly over the next 150 years, always by paid workmen. Here’s a short history lesson for anyone interested in the actual facts.

None of this is secret or even arcane information. There’s certainly some poor wretch someplace in the bowels of the federal gov’t who is familiar with the history of the Executive Mansion. I assume that FLOTUS has a highly-paid cortege of speechwriters to prep her public remarks, and they are in turn backed by competent researchers and fact-checkers.  Apparently she and they are all indifferent to historical reality and cynically confident that no one in her audience (either the college grads she’s addressing or the reporters who are listening in) knows or cares more than she does.

I’ve been out of town last several days. In the meantime, my latest column for NM News Svc ran in the Carlsbad Current-Argus, Gallup Independent and other papers around the state.

 

The North Fire is burning about 7,600 acres in the San Mateos, 25 miles SW of Magdalena. According to the Cibola Nat’l Forest news release the fire is “moving down ridge lines” in Water Canyon, on the southern edge of the Withington Wilderness, heading east.  Lightning caused, which is good (man-made forest fires somehow make me feel personally guilty, even though I’m always careful to drown and bury my own campfires) and the Forest Svc. is quite properly allowing it to burn while monitoring its progress to keep it from getting out of control. Wildfires make for healthy forests, but I still hate to see them burn.

 

According to the Journal, on Saturday hikers discovered all that’s mortal of 59-year-old Stephen “Otter” Olshansky, reported missing in November,  in “a facility” at Lower Lagunitas Campground east of Chama. I’m guessing the “facility” was a FS pit toilet; not the place I’d pick to shuffle off my mortal coil, but as Stewart Brand (or somebody; I haven’t been able to track down the exact quote) said, “Few of us are given the opportunity to depart this life with grace and style, and most of those blow it.”

If it sounds as though I’m making light of the man’s passing, I’m not.  But there are worse ways to go than hypothermia, and far worse places to meet your maker than high in the mountains. It’s yet another reminder that hiking and camping alone is dangerous business.