It was summer 1977, and the skies over San Benito and south
Santa Clara counties shown in the blood red of perpetual
twilight.
The remote reaches of Los Padres National Forest in Monterey
County were burning.
It was summer 1977, and the skies over San Benito and south Santa Clara counties shown in the blood red of perpetual twilight.
The remote reaches of Los Padres National Forest in Monterey County were burning. Lightning strikes in the last week of July touched off what would become an inferno covering almost 200,000 acres that wore the name the Marble Cone Fire.
Smoke from the fire filled our skies, and ashes occasionally rained down nearly 50 miles from the fire for several days.
I was working as a summer intern at the Gilroy Dispatch. At the time, the Dispatch was published a few days a week, and it carried only one brand of news – local. I was desperate to get to that fire, and I tried every creative gambit I could devise, with no luck. The edge of the world was the Gilroy city limit, and there I would remain.
But there would be other wildfires, and I would be as close to them as I cared to be.
Something about fire fascinates nearly all of us.
Young and foolish, I invited my brother to accompany me to a fire high in the Gabilan Range in San Benito County. We entered a steep box canyon, eventually trading the car for shoe leather.
The fire was working well in the heavily wooded canyon, creating its own wind, which brought it only more oxygen and intensified its flames. We stood mute beneath the tree canopy, watching first one, then a string of gray pines begin to shiver in the heat. As they grew hotter, pitch with the scent of turpentine began to vaporize, and entire trees some 50 feet tall burst into flames like kitchen matches.
An air tanker painted us all pink with fire retardant and we beat a retreat.
Years later, I was attempting to teach our older daughter the finer points of trout fishing, but had succeeded only in burying a treble hook in my ear. Waiting for a ride, we spotted a plume of smoke down-canyon. The plume continued to grow into the Big Creek Fire, and we remained in the Sierra for several days as war was waged on the flames.
That fire was ignited when a squirrel incinerated itself by creating an arc across power lines. That’s the thing about wildfires: they seem so capricious and random.
And while it’s our practice to control fires as aggressively as we can, fire is not always an enemy.
Fire changes a landscape, but it does not necessarily change it for the worse. The Sierra where the Big Creek Fire roared through leapt back into life. New growth provided cover for wildlife, and the dead snags remaining brought in insects and nesting opportunities for a host of birds.
The Marble Cone fire cleared impenetrable thickets of chaparral, and allowed long-dormant seeds that depend on fire to regenerate to sprout and renew the place. Less than 30 years later, the land scorched in that fire is refreshed and vibrant.
We use fire as a management tool. Much of the chaparral below Fremont Peak was cleared in a prescribed burn. Today, in springs like this one following wet winters, the area explodes in bloom.
Most school children know that Native Americans used fire as a management tool to encourage the regeneration of food grasses and to keep the forests open and healthy. It’s a practice we were tardy in adopting, but the results speak for themselves.
