“The way to prevent big fires is to put them out while they are small.”—Chief Forester Graves.
Lightly do we go into the woods, bent upon a holiday. There we kindle a fire over which we are to cook our camp supper. How good it all smells, the wood smoke, the odor of the frying bacon and fish and potatoes; how good in the crisp evening air the warmth of the camp fire feels; and above all, how beautiful everything is, the deep plumy branches on whose lower sides shadows from the firelight dance, the depth of darkness beyond the reach of the illuminating flame, the rich strange hue of the soft grass and moss on which we are sitting! It is all beautiful with not a suggestion of evil or terror about it, and yet, unchecked, there is a demon of destruction in that jolly little camp fire before which we sit. Now the supper! Nothing ever tasted better, nothing can ever taste so good again, the fish and bacon done to a turn, the potatoes lying an inviting brown in the frying pan, and the hot cocoa, made with condensed milk, steaming up into the cool evening air.
After supper we lie about the fire and sing or dream. Perhaps some one tells a story. The hours go so rapidly that we do not know where they have gone. And when the evening is over? The fire is still glowing, a bed of bright coral coals and gray ash. The fire will just go out if we leave it. Besides, we haven’t time to fetch water to put it out with. No, nine chances out of ten, if we leave the fire it will not go out, but smoulder on, and a breeze coming up in the night or at dawn, the fire springs into flame again, catching on the surrounding dry grass and pine needles. Soon, incredibly soon, it begins to leap up the trunks of trees. Before we know it, it is springing from tree to tree, faster than a man can leap or run.
In dry weather you and I could go out into the woods anywhere, and with a match not much bigger than a good-sized darning needle, set a blaze that would sweep over a whole county, or from county to county, or from state to state. Millions of dollars’ worth of damage would be done, and the chances are that the careless, wanton act would be the means of having us put into prison—which is precisely where, given such circumstances, we should be.
Have we ever stopped to think for a moment, we who camp so joyfully, what loss and injury such carelessness on our part may mean to a whole community? To begin with, there are the forests themselves, and all they represent in actual timber, in promise for future growth, and in security for rain supply. Then in fighting the fire thousands of dollars’ worth of wages will have to be paid and hundreds of men’s lives will be in danger. The sweep and fury of such forest fires, unless one has lived in the neighborhood of one as I have, is beyond the comprehension or the imagination. Burning brands are blown sixty feet and more over the tops of the highest trees and the heads of the men who are fighting the fire. Before they can check the blaze of the fire nearest them, one beyond them has already been started.
Also there are the life aspects, big and small, of such a fire. Not only are the lives of the men who fight the blaze endangered, but all the homes, camps, farmhouses, villages, and their inmates are in imminent risk. What it has taken others years to gather together, to construct, may be swept away in a few hours. Helpless old people, equally helpless little children—all may be burned.
Beyond this question of human life, which every one will admit is a very great one, is still another which, I am sorry to say, will not seem so important to some girls. Maybe it is not, but if you have ever heard the screams of an animal, terrified by fire, being burned to death, as I have; if you have ever heard the blind frenzied terror of the stampede which takes place, the beating of hoofs and the screams of creatures that are trying to escape, but do not know how, as I have heard them—then you will have a new sense of the tragedy which a forest fire means to the creatures of the forest. Of a forest fire it may be said, as of an evil, that there is absolutely no good in it: it is all bad, all devastating, all injurious.
In a forest fire scores, hundreds, thousands of wild creatures are killed, those little creatures which, given the chance, are so friendly with their human brothers. Think, the little chickadees, tame, gay, resourceful, filling even the winter woods with their song, the tiny wrens, the beautiful thrushes, the squirrels and chipmunks, who need only half an invitation and something on the table to accept your offer of a nut cutlet, the rabbit who lets you come within a few feet of him while he still nibbles grass, and looks trustingly at you out of his round prominent eyes, the bear that thrusts his head out of the edge of the woods, full of curiosity to see what you are doing, the deer, even the little fawn, who will become your playmate and take sugar from your hand—all these trusting, interested, friendly creatures are killed by the hundreds of thousands in a forest fire. The smoke stifles them, the loud reports of the wood gases escaping from the burning trees terrify them, and the light and heat confuse them. It is difficult to find a single good thing to say for a forest fire. It spells devastation, loss, untold suffering, and in its path there is only desolation. The merciful fire-weed springs up after it, trying with its summer flame to cover the black ravage, the gutted ground, where the demon has burned deep into the peaty subsoil. Everywhere one sees what an awful fight for life has taken place: thousands of little birds, suffocated by the smoke, have dropped into the flames, thousands of creatures, tortured by the heat, have rushed into the fire instead of away from it. Worse than the flood is fire, because the suffering is so much the greater. Somehow there is something utterly, irredeemably tragic to any one who has gone over these great fire-swept stretches of land in our country; the thick stagnant water that is left, the charred bones, and the look of waste which shall never meet in the space of a human life with repair.
No time to put out the camp fire? That little fire will just go out of itself, will it? Yes, probably, when it has accomplished what I have described for you, when it has killed happy life, razed the beautiful trees, gutted out the earth, and devoured, careless of agony, all that it will have. Fire is the dragon of our modern wilderness, and it will be glutted and gorged, and not satisfied until it is. That jolly little camp fire is worth keeping an eye on, it is worth the trouble, even if we have to go half a mile to fetch it, to get a pail of water and ring the embers around with the wet so that the fire cannot spread. Never leave a camp fire burning; no registered guide would do such a thing, and no sportsman. It is only those who don’t know or who are criminally careless who would. If the public will not take responsibility in this matter, the fire wardens are helpless. Some enemies these men must inevitably fight: the lightning which strikes a dead, punky stump in the midst of dry woods, which, smouldering a long while, finally bursts into flame; the spark from an engine; even spontaneous combustion due to imprisoned gases acted upon by sun-heat. But there is one enemy which the fire wardens should not need to meet, and that is man: the boy or girl camping, the man who drops a cigar stump or match carelessly onto dry leaves, the hunter who uses combustible wadding in his shotgun. Let us help the fire wardens, those men who live on lonely mountain summits or in the midst of the wilderness with eyes ever vigilant to detect the starting of a fire—let us help, I say, these fire wardens to get rid of one nuisance at least, and let us keep our great, cool, wonderful American forests as beautiful as they have ever been and should always be for those who are in a holiday humor.
