FE4.7 - Phase Change

Gold Hill (Oregon) Lookout in Aug 2021, photo by Mt. Hood National Forest US Forest Service

Ironside Lookout in September 2009, photo by Ron Kemnow

Summary

A story of memory, ghosting, and fire: how we can change the place we call home, and how it too can change around us.

Click here to read a transcription of this episode

Another version of this story can be found, along with many others, in the pages of Fire Season II — out now at fireseason.org

Ironside Lookout in August 2015, photo by Ron Kemnow

Show Notes

This episode was written & read by Lincoln Kaye, and was produced by Mendel Skulski with help from Adam Huggins.

Music by Tomoko Sauvage, Benjamin Kilchhofer, Modern Biology, Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison, John Also Bennett, Kanahuaxtli, Alexander Borodin, and Thumbug

Special thanks to Hsu Mei-Lang, to Brandon Hocura at Séance Centre records, to the Sitka Foundation for supporting our 4th Season, and to Liz, Amory, and all the Fire Season contributors for 2 beautiful publications.

✨ Future Ecologies is an independent production, and is supported by our community of listeners on Patreon. You can join them for as little as a dollar each month — at patreon.com/futureecologies 🌱

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Future Ecologies is recorded and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the WSÁNEĆ, Penelakut, Hwlitsum, and Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul'qumi'num speaking peoples, otherwise known as Galiano Island, British columbia, as well as the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam (xwməθkwəy̓əm) Squamish (Skwxwú7mesh), and Tsleil-Waututh (Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh) Nations - otherwise known as Vancouver, British Columbia.

Transcription

Introduction Voiceover  00:05

You are listening to Season Four of Future Ecologies.

Lincoln Kaye  00:12

Ironside Lookout’s a goner: burnt to ash in an instantaneous explosion in last year’s River complex fire.

Lincoln Kaye  00:23

As a U.S. Forest Service wildfire spotter, Ironside’s little glass cabin had been the subjective centre of my world for 12 years. That adds up to roughly a sixth of the Lookout’s eight decade lifespan and nearly the same percentage of my own age to date. Tenanting the cabin — and, even more so, coming to terms with its sudden extinction all these years later — has taught me plenty about memory, ghosting and phase change.

Mendel Skulski  00:54

Welcome back. Mendel here, and today we have something a little different for you. My friend and neighbour, Lincoln Kaye, brings us a story about how we can change the place we call home, and how it too can change around us.

Introduction Voiceover  01:12

Broadcasting from the unceded, shared, and asserted territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, This is Future Ecologies: exploring the shape of our world through ecology, design and sound.

Lincoln Kaye  01:32

Now in physics, given a sharp enough jump in temperature or pressure, a seemingly substantial solid – a forest, building or a road – can bypass the intermediate states of phase change: skipping liquefaction to “sublimate”, as they call it, straight into a gas. Wildfires can do the trick, much as they can force traumatized humans to elide the five fabled stages of grief.

Lincoln Kaye  02:05

Such sublimations are triggered by a particular temp-to-pressure quotient, called “specific latent heat,” which is unique to each substance.

Lincoln Kaye  02:16

My own unique specific latent trigger is jingoism. When it reaches a certain pitch, I just steam into a cloud of alienation and drift off into exile. That's how the silent majoritarianism of Nixon's 1970s and the dawning of Reagan's Morning in America propelled me right out of my native USA into decades of drifting around Asia.

Lincoln Kaye  02:48

And there, I married a Taiwanese artist, raised three children, and covered half a dozen countries as a staff correspondent for a slick news weekly magazine. But then, when we were living in India around Y2K, the country erupted in mutual Hindu Muslim pogroms, and that was another jingoistic flection point for us.

Lincoln Kaye  03:13

We were ready to try exile from our exile and head back to my supposed homeland: the US — specifically to northern most California. And homey enough it seemed too, at least at first. We settled into our one acre mountaintop homestead and busied ourselves adding garden terraces, a goat barn, and a paddock. Until 9/11 launched us all into the War on Terror quagmire, and local teens started coming back to Trinity County in body bags. By fall of 2004 when the W Bush war cabinet looked set for reelection, my specific latent heat kicked in again. Exile once more seemed a promising career option... but maybe internal exile this time rather than abroad.

Lincoln Kaye  04:06

And in this brooding mood, I sublimated my way all the way up the tallest peak I could see from my deck: a 7000 foot Trinity Alp, looming over our county seat. I hardly expected to find anyone living at the trail end summit, but there in a regulation 14 by 14 foot glass-walled US Forest Service fire lookout cabin, I ran into a shy local housewife that I'd vaguely met before at the town library. Now though, she shed her personal identity and reincarnated simply as Weaver Bally, so named after the mountain itself. The same dashing nomenclature applied to all the other lookouts in the forest: Bonanza King, Plumber Peak, Backbone, Hayfork Bally, Eagle Rock, Mad River, Horse Ridge, etc. Radio handles for mountain kings and queens with multi-thousand mile view pans of their own. And each of them wielded a BK two-way radio as scepter of office. Such dignities, Weaver Bally felt, more than amply compensated for the lookout's lowly GS-5 status at the bottom of the US Civil Service pay scale.

Lincoln Kaye  05:26

"Amazing enough isn't it to be paid anything at all just to sit here and look at scenery all day" she confided. "After all, that's what I'd be doing at home anyway for free."

Lincoln Kaye  05:39

"Pretty nice work if you can get it" I nodded.

Lincoln Kaye  05:41

"See that peak over there?" she pointed out Ironside mountain, west-northwest about 35 miles away as the turkey vulture flies. "That cabin is about to go begging" she said. "I bet you could nail it, if you filed your online application real quick."

Lincoln Kaye  05:57

"But," she cautioned, "lookout work is not for everyone. Many are called, but few are chosen."

Lincoln Kaye  06:05

And just what she meant was brought home to me the very next day, when I drove the 63 twisty, semi-paved miles from my Trinity homestead up to Ironside for a look-see. The incumbent lookout there was already packing up to leave. She was fed up, and she scoffed when I reported Weaver Bally's comment about being paid to admire the view. "Scenery, she calls it?! Gets to seem more like just wallpaper before long, or maybe tiling on an unpadded isolation cell. It'll drive you crazy for loneliness after a while. Unless of course, you're made to go in for that sort of thing..." She eyed me suspiciously.

Lincoln Kaye  06:51

Well, I guess I must be made that way. Right from the get go, Ironside's viewpan struck me as the most hypnotically dynamic wallpaper imaginable. A vista that would change colour month by month. It could shroud itself in mists, or dazzle with frosts, blossom with ground fogs, festoon itself with rainbows, and sometimes crackle with lightning.

Lincoln Kaye  07:30

As a US Forest Service fire lookout, my mission was to optically scan the full circuit of my 2000 square mile viewpan every quarter hour, and report any suspicious smokes, flares, lightning strikes or thunder heads. I'd peg such anomalies according to their estimated distance and azimuth on a 360º compass, as measured from the very centre of a century old gunsight-like contraption called an Osborn Fire Finder, mounted on a pedestal in the middle of my 196 square foot tiny house.

Lincoln Kaye  07:41

Strange to think of that cabin as a goner now. It seemed so eternal atop its rock spire perch, at the craggy mile-high end stump of 170 million year old batholith. Its very dimensions projected an air of for square permanence, and it's breadth-to-height-to-pediment proportions, the lookout happened to replicate the sacred Golden Ratio quotients of the Athenian Parthenon. I doubt though that that's what its make-work Civilian Conservation Corps contractors had in mind, back in the Great Depression of the early 1940s when they knocked the cabin together out of locally-milled Doug Fir lumber from the Shasta Trinity national forests.

Lincoln Kaye  08:55

Still, Ironside persists in my mind as a temple of sorts. Although over 25 road miles from my nearest neighbor, I never felt entirely alone there. The mountain seemed haunted, not just by the spirits of prior lookouts, but also by the presence of the Chimariko: its endemic Native American First Nation — now federally derecognized and allegedly extinct. Nevertheless, I'd still happen upon their moss-shagged ceremonial rings on my walks through the forest. Then too were the ghosts of three Chinese miners who died in a cataclysmic 1890 mudslide that still scars Underwood mountain across the river. But by far the most charismatic mega-spook of the mountain had to be the elusive Sasquatch or Bigfoot: a gigantic proto-human akin to the Himalayan Yeti. On a plot map in the downriver Sasquatch museum, Ironside turns out to be the epicentre of reported Bigfoot sightings.

Lincoln Kaye  10:06

Tree ghosts stalked the very forest itself! Truncated stumps of primordial firs and cedars loomed like colossal Easter Island heads grimacing amidst the swarm of second and third growth successor trees. And even some of these successors had already grown 100 foot crowns, festooned with ectoplasmic fringes of beard lichen that flailed restlessly in any wind. Enough to set my mind toying with notions of transience and timelessness.

Lincoln Kaye  10:43

These thoughts were just idle conceits that first season. Before the real onrush of 21st century wildfires forced me to engage more earnestly with notions of ephemerality and ghost hood.

Lincoln Kaye  10:59

Luckily, for a green horn like me, we didn't see a lot of fires late in the summer of 2004. And that left me with plenty of time in between horizon scans to pour over Geologic Survey sector maps. Learning to spot local landmarks, the better to situate reportable fire traffic locales. On some clear days, I got to play mirror tag with roving engine crews on distant peaks. The field teams would angle a signal glass so as to bounce a sunbeam straight at the lookout. I'd reciprocate with a mirror flash of my own.

Lincoln Kaye  11:39

Quite a relief to point my mirror outward, rather than back at myself. My interlude of internal exile came at a stage when Ahloong, my bride of over 40 years, felt she could use about 63 miles of daylight between us. We'd communicate by flip phones, signal permitting, and reunite awkwardly on my fortnightly weekends. But even so, I was starting to feel a bit canceled and ghosted myself. Whenever I chanced a glance at the silvered side of my signal glass, the face that greeted me looked so spectral that I soon gave up shaving.

Lincoln Kaye  12:19

The resulting gray beard plus my solitary mountaintop aerie might have lent me the superficial air of a hermit sage — at least in the eyes of one runaway teen who lived alone in the flats below, caretaking an isolated ranch. Now and then he'd crashed straight up the slope through thickets of poison oak, in the vain hope of ringing some life-affirming wisdom out of me. Not that I had much to offer him beyond a sympathetic ear. All the while nervously scanning the horizon for smokes.

Lincoln Kaye  12:55

What few actual smokes I did see were mostly crowded into the 60-odd degrees of my viewpan that encompassed the Hoopa Indian Reservation way to my West-by-Northwest. That sector of arc was notably different from the rest of the forest: taller evergreen profiles, but an airier scrim of tree trunks to filter the Western light. As viewed from Ironside, the rez was always the glowing heart of every sunset. They must be doing something right in there. But early on, I was advised (never mind by whom) not to be too hasty about radioing in those fire starts. Odds were they were ad hoc controlled burns — deliberately torched by the tribal firefighters themselves according to immemorial Hoopa rites, rather than official Forest Service protocols. Such fires were technically arson, but so what? They were quickly quelled. The Hoopa were the best fire crews around: much prized by the US Forest Service on mutual aid firefights. And the ceremonies were presided over by tribal elders. So the spirits were propitiated, the forest curated, and everyone earned a little bit of overtime. Win win all the way around.

Lincoln Kaye  14:25

So those first few seasons, I luxuriated in spectacular sunrises and sunsets, the ebb and flow of diurnal shadow, and the intricate clockwork of starscapes without any light pollution. As never before, I honed a gut feel for the procession of seasons and the Zodiac parade. Even asleep in bed at night, if I happen to half open my eyes, I'd like us not be rewarded with a spray of shooting stars. Just to live in a lookout tower around the clock was a priceless privilege.

Lincoln Kaye  15:03

Well, not exactly priceless. California once had over 600 fire towers. Less than 200 of them still stand, and barely a fifth of those are still staffed — a number that declines each year, as human lookouts are supplanted by satellite and aerial surveillance. Some of the unstaffed towers though, get rented out by cash-strapped firefighting agencies as upscaled honeymoon cottages and the like.

Lincoln Kaye  15:34

My own honeymoon years seemed long gone that season. But I could at least console myself daily that I was augmenting my meager wage with several hundred dollar's worth of beauty every day. Other aesthetes after all, we're paying even bigger bucks for far lesser views. Sighting westwards down the Trinity River Gorge, I could see more and more multimillion dollar mansions further overloading the fire hazardous and increasingly yuppified urban-forest-interface. Various movie stars and hedge fund magnates were mentioned as possible tenants. So too were a few high-rolling pot lords who'd begun clearing and terracing some of the more accessible in-holding hillsides — to cash in on our incomparable Emerald Triangle terroir for the burgeoning medical marijuana industry. The lower Trinity gorge was starting to look like a nouveau riche chateau country.

Lincoln Kaye  16:42

And there I sat, with the best vista of all — but not much of a chateau to match it.

Lincoln Kaye  16:55

Living in such tight quarters, I had to quell my inner slob and keep everything shipshape. The cabin's tidy domestic arrangements came to take on the fixed predictability of cardinal viewpan landmarks in their own right: kitchen corner to the Southeast, with its propane stove and fridge; bed to the Southwest; desk, due West; solar-powered laptop, printer, two-way radio, and spotting scope, Northwest; chart library and bookshelf, due North; wine cellar and glassware, Northeast.

Lincoln Kaye  17:36

Such a cozy layout could have turned me into a kind of hermit crab: practically fused into my borrowed integument. To get out of my shell, mitigate my sedentary day job, and try to salvage my marriage, I started scouring the mountaintop for little love tokens I could bring back to Ahloong on my homestead weekends. When we were first courting back in the 1970s, I used to offer her bangles and nose gays. Now, I drove home with truckloads of neatly bucked and split firewood, and bales of sun dried cow pies. I was allowed to harvest dead and down tree trunks along the lookout road — a crucial feedstock for the woodstove that was our only winter heat source. And while Ironside manure was not quite manna from heaven, it was sure top-grade organic poop — dropped by free range cattle that roamed the mountaintop under Forest Service lease. A mother lode of premium compost for our homestead garden beds.

Lincoln Kaye  18:44

As the fire season edged from spring to summer, the longer days allowed me more daylight hours for this sort of foraging before and after my 8am to 6pm lookout shift. Untethering from the Osborne firefighter gave me a whole new, more fluid and intimate sense of Ironside. Freed from the long view of azimuth and star charts, I could zoom in on the mountain in detail: sighting along the 24 inch length of my chainsaw bar, or even closer at the level of lilacs and mushrooms that cropped up around the cow pies, or the mealy bug colonies that swarmed for cover whenever I flipped over a nice, plush manure patty. I came to be on nodding terms with my free range bovine benefactors, as well as the local tribes of mule deer, ants, butterflies and beetles. Rattlesnakes, basking around my front doorstep, eyed me companionably, as though to signal that, unprovoked, they were no likelier to sink teeth into me than I'd be to chomp into them. Occasionally, I'd startle a black bear in a forest clearing. With a dyspeptic grunt, he'd just plomp back down in the meadow and calmly resume his blackberry feast.

Lincoln Kaye  20:25

Human fauna too put in occasional cameo appearances on the mountain top.

Lincoln Kaye  20:30

At the confluence of two rivers, Ironside is sacred to three federally recognized Indian tribes, who'd each crop up once per summer to ceremoniously chant and drum and picnic. They'd generously invite me to share their bologna sandwiches and even to take a turn with the talking stick. Forest Service engine crews would periodically show up to to replenish the lookouts' water tanks. Day tripping families brought their children to load up on Smokey Bear swag and play with the firefinder. Triathletes would now and then huff up the lookout road on BMX bikes. Once a hang gliding daredevil came to case out Ironside as a potential launchpad, but chickened out at the last moment. Forest Service botanists, entomologists, zoologists, and archaeologists happily shared their fascinating lore, when they'd drop by looking for endemic species and conservation worthy artifacts.

Lincoln Kaye  21:34

Most welcome visitor of all, though, was Ahloong — when she'd impulsively drive the 120 mile round trip to surprise me with an impromptu conjugal visit on Ironside's jolly, jouncing, government-issue spring mattress. An unexpected dividend of lookout life! Maybe there was something, after all, to her couples therapy prescription of "daylight".

Lincoln Kaye  22:00

Four idyllic fire seasons into the job, in the hopey-changey year of 2008, my internal exile was starting to feel almost embarrassingly comfortable. In early June, I opened up the lookout in a mood of giddy anticipation: sashaying the circuit of the wraparound deck to whirl my sling psychrometer like a kid on day one of summer camp

Lincoln Kaye  22:30

Day one that year started like all Ironside workdays: with a set of weather observations, wind speed and direction, fuel moisture, wet bulb, dry bulb, relative humidity and dew point. But when I phoned these stats in to Brenda, the forest meteorologist, she promptly squelched my optimism.

Lincoln Kaye  22:54

"Scary stuff" she said, "Numbers like that you don't ordinarily see until August or September, and this on top of the past three years of below normal rainfall."

Lincoln Kaye  23:06

"But didn't we just last month get drenched by our first decent rain of the year?" I asked.

Lincoln Kaye  23:12

"Yeah, sure. But it only lasted a couple of days and that too, on the heels of record heat and winds. If the trend goes on, that little cloudburst would only make for a bit more underbrush that are just dry out into an extra load of ground fire Tinder. We could be in for a wild ride."

Lincoln Kaye  23:36

Within a few weeks, her fears were borne out. Over a three day period, June 20 to 23rd, a series of thunderstorms rolled on shore into the forest — strafing the bone dry underbrush with 1000s of lightning bolts. And not just in my immediate viewpan either, but all up and down the coast: from the Bay Area deep into Oregon. Over 5000 recorded strikes in just 33 hours as I was later to learn.

Lincoln Kaye  24:08

At each storm's crescendo, all of us mountain kings and queens were under orders not to touch our Osbornes, our radios, or even the cabin floor. Rather, we were to cower on glass insulated stools or bedsteads. St. Elmo's fire flickered intermittently on Ironside's wooden catwalk railings. As soon as the lightning strikes eased up for a moment, and we could climb down from our perches, we were kept busy reporting spot fires and smokes so thick and fast that the forest headquarter dispatchers had to slow us down — to keep us from treading on each other's transmissions. Struggling to distinguish between fire start smokes versus canyon-hugging raindogs, I finally grasped the real import of the phrase "fog of war".

Lincoln Kaye  25:02

And then a new volley of lightning would hit. By the end of the three-day lightning siege, the spot fires were already starting to merge into far-reaching, intractable blazes, as local fire crews raced to outpace them.

Lincoln Kaye  25:20

When a conflagration grows too big or persistent, the firefighters can no longer be directed from local ranger stations or division headquarters. It's then proclaimed an "incident" or "complex", and it gets its own Incident Command Center or ICC, comprising an interagency team of federal, state, tribal, and private fire crews, with logistical support from independent contractors.

Lincoln Kaye  25:50

Within days, I found myself boxed in on all four sides by such complexes. These merged fires, as it turned out, raged on all summer long, right up until the onset of autumn rains — eventually consuming over 500 square miles of my viewpan. Ironside lookout soon bristled with antennae, as each ICC communications team rushed to install its own radio repeater. Battling triple digit heat, double digit winds, and single digit humidity, hand crews and bulldozers raced to scratch containment lines around the blazes. Smoke jumpers parachuted into remote road-inaccessible fire starts. Helicopters scooped giant bladders full of water, called Bambi buckets, out of the rivers and lakes to quell the flames. Bomber planes doused the fires with more water, and with bright orange chemical retardants. But then fresh firebrands would loft right over the containment lines, and updrafts would fan fire straight up the gullies and canyons of the rugged terrain.

Lincoln Kaye  27:07

These faraway fire runs cast a lurid light in the lookout as I stared up at my ceiling through insomniac nights. From my bed, I'd watch whole trees go up in flames in a matter of seconds, like incandescent lollipops on distant mountains.

Lincoln Kaye  27:26

And then, suddenly, not so distant after all. Pretty soon, the slop over from the nearby Lime complex got too close for comfort — racing from the Trinity riverbed right up the buttresses of Ironside mountain itself. My battalion commander boss ordered me out of the lookout on just 30 minutes notice. Amidst torching trees, I threaded my way down the hairpins of the lookout road and spent the night camped out on the floor of the Big Bar ranger station.

Lincoln Kaye  28:00

And even though I did manage to get back up Ironside before too long, my return turned out to be pointless. Barely a day later, a thermal inversion smothered all of Northern California and Southern Oregon in choking smoke. With planes and copters grounded, my eye in the sky blinded, and my escape route blocked by intermittent road closures, I was trapped in the lookout. In the stifling 100 degree heat, I couldn't even open a window for fear of the corrosive air.

Lincoln Kaye  28:37

It took nearly a week for the smoke to thin out enough for me to once more make out any of the landmark peaks out there in my viewpan. And when I did, the spectacle was appalling. Whole ridges burnt black. By now, through earlier foraging forays on Ironside, I'd acquired an intimate sense of what I'd come to think of as "my own mountain": an exquisitely balanced symbiotic system, a self perpetuating universe of intertwined life. But surely, each of these charred slopes a dozen miles away must have been, just a month ago, an equally exquisite and uniquely detailed mandala in its own right — and now snuffed by some lightning strikes and gales of wind. Awe, sorrow, and an almost religious sense of dread. Holy smokes indeed.

Lincoln Kaye  29:45

But my mood of reverence solemnity soon gave way to a kind of humdrum habitude as the public-private fire industrial complex dug in for the long haul. For each duly designated incident, an inter-agency ICC has sprung up practically overnight. A mini city of tents and trailers, each with its own streets, helipad, assembly hall, ER hospital, publicity agency, print shop, mess hall, bath house mechanic shop, even a prison wing for convict labor.

Lincoln Kaye  30:26

Commuting fortnightly between lookout and my homestead, I'd drop by the Iron-Alps complex ICC to pick up the latest press release, and maybe help myself to some of the boundless and ubiquitous free doughnuts. The place was always bustling in the morning as firefighters clocked in on regular shifts and marched off to the blaze like assembly line workers to a factory floor. Every two weeks would see a complete top to bottom turnover of incident staff, so as to keep all units fresh. That way, underpaid seasonal fire crews from all over the country would get a chance to rack up a lot of extra overtime and reconnect with old buddies from bygone incidents. Savvy engine captains who knew how to play the system could look forward each year to an exciting season of nationwide or even international fire tourism.

Lincoln Kaye  31:28

Incidents were cropping up all over the US, stretching resources way too thin. My Ironside viewpan, with its rugged terrain and sparse settlement, was relatively low priority compared to the populous urban-forest interfaces of Southern California and the Central Valley. Still tens of thousands of firefighters and millions of dollars of ordnance cycled through the Iron-Alps complex over an unprecedentedly long fire season. Some hand crews were flown in on charter jets. Others drove in with their engines all the way from the East Coast. Eventually, some units were even called up from Australia and New Zealand, where the winter slack season coincides with our summer fire storms.

Lincoln Kaye  32:20

In the name of privatisation, independent contractors also enjoyed a feeding frenzy: running all ancillary services from kitchens, to showers, to helicopters. Radio traffic crackled with a babel of regional accents, including strains of almost unintelligible 'strayan. Hawker stalls cropped up around the ICC perimeters selling souvenirs, which lent the little tent city something of a carnival air. Emblazoned on T-shirts in gaudy manga hues, hastily commissioned tableaux commemorated particulars of the Iron-Alps Complex: muscle bound tree fallers squaring off against flaming snags, helicopter escadrilles, hand crews rappelling down sheer cliffs, yada yada yada... Seasoned firefighters boasted closets full of such merch from past fires. I shelled out for an overpriced T-shirt celebrating the 2008 "Summer of Smoke", with a picture of a pack mule in a gas mask.

Lincoln Kaye  33:27

But the circus atmosphere gave way to a more somber tone towards the end of July, as fireline accidents claimed the lives of two firefighters: a teenage newbie and a veteran Engine Captain. And then on August 3, just at the close of my lookout shift, radio traffic suddenly went eerily quiet. It was only days later, when the dispatcher declared a solemn minute of morning that I finally learned what had happened: a charter helicopter with a contract crew of firefighters had lost altitude and crashed into a tree in route back to the ICC, killing 13.

Lincoln Kaye  34:12

In that rare minute of radio silence, I took stock of how drastically the fires had transformed my viewpan: on the one hand, where black fire scars ran right up the Ironside flank to within 100 feet of the lookout, new sprouts were already showing spring green between the scorched trunks of twisted Manzanitas. Yet at the same time, down below on Hoboken flat, the Oak trees were already taking on their fall hues — fully a month and a half earlier than usual. Presumably due to the merciless dryness and the sun-blotting smoke poll. Early onset autumn.

Lincoln Kaye  34:56

In this seasonal limbo, the 2008 fire season or Ironside lasted all the way to Halloween. Unprecedentedly long at that time, though such a duration would become routine in succeeding years. Still, I stuck it out at the lookout for several seasons more. Amassing my own modest collection of commemorative T-shirts: the Backbone and Coffin fires, the 2011 Ruth fire, the Flat and Reading fires of 2012. But by the 2015 season, I could no longer bring myself to buy such souvenirs. Those dayglo T-shirt tints seemed all wrong. To my eye that year's River and Humboldt route complexes drained, rather than enhanced, the world's color.

Lincoln Kaye  35:52

Before those mega fires, the season started off vividly enough. For openers, the Forest Service sent up a contract labor crew of chainsaw wizards, to clear overhanging limbs away from the shoulders of the lookout road. Latinos, mostly, and understandably reticent about their visa status when they turn up at the lookout after their work shift. They weren't coming up there for the pleasure of my company. Rather because the Ironside summit was the only place around where they could get cell coverage to phone home.

Lincoln Kaye  36:32

Still, they were cheerful enough, and courteous, and the nightly conclaves took on something of a party air with singing and joking. I came to look forward to the Sundays when they cook up a kettle full of menudo on the lookout stove. But these fiesta colours started to fade, after a midseason lightning bust ignited fires that would soon merge into a month-long inferno.

Lincoln Kaye  36:59

Those initial fires first presented themselves to me as an encroaching haze over JimJam ridge to the east, and Ziegler point to the west, respectively. By the time the two incidents were ready to converge right at Ironside, the sky was already blanched bone white. This go round at least, my evacuation wasn't quite so frantic. There was still time for an engine crew to come up and wrap the cabin in protective heat-deflecting mylar, in case the flames should crest the mountain and sweep right over the lookout. The scene was surreal: metallized plastic film covered "my" perfect little Parthenon of a cabin. The mylar mirrored the blank sky so perfectly as to render the building almost invisible, except for the firefighters in their bright yellow, fire-resistant Nomex uniforms — hanging mid air, as though suspended in the mirrored clouds, as they swarmed over the walls and roof to cinch down the shiny sheeting.

Lincoln Kaye  38:08

And for my part, I was issued a personal fire shelter of the same shiny sheeting: a "shake and bake" in Forest Service slang. In this cozy little cocoon, I could bundle up prone on the ground with my face buried in a wet rag, as a last ditch safety measure if trapped in the path of an onrushing blaze. And with that, I was dispatched to my new temporary posting for as long as the lookout stayed closed: Trail Boss at one of the access points for far flung fire crews working the front lines of the firefight.

Lincoln Kaye  38:46

Poised at the very end of the forests' remotest vehicle access roads, such trailheads serve as supply depots, communication nodes, and logistic hubs. At my trailhead, truck runs from the ICC (some two or three hours away) would bring in everything from saw gas to Mars bars. From there, every day, sometimes twice a day, trains of pack mules would then thread their way over 20-odd miles of torturous terrain, to bring food, fuel, gear, and meds to the frontline crews. And as trail boss, I got to sign in for these consignments, and keep an eye on the growing piles of miscellaneous materiel. But my main job was to act as concierge to a trio of muletteers: a taciturn patriarch, a middle-aged varmint, and a breezy teen. These "packers", as they were called in Forest Service jargon, were a crucial last link in the supply chain to the forward fired bases. They commanded top dollar too. Calculating the value added at every step of the way. I worked out that each bottle of Gatorade cost about $50 By the time it reached the firebase. Nevertheless, the packers' horsemanship, jack droving, hoof trimming, sawbuck saddle balancing, and veterinary field medicine know-how were all indispensable — so much so that the Forest Service has to cossett them, in defiance of regulation, with special rations: coolers full of steaks ,and cases of beer. These were invoiced respectively on the ICC manifests as "meals ready to eat" or MREs, and "packer oil". It was up to me, as trail boss, to have the packer oil well cooled in a nearby stream, and the MREs grilled to a turn when the muletteers returned for their supper around a charcoal pit.

Lincoln Kaye  40:59

In the ongoing smoky miasma, these campfires were ghostly, sepia-toned occasions — like scenes from an early Western talkie. True to that genre, dialogue was terse: in the "Yep... Nope..." Gary Cooper mode. But even so, the nights were long, and the topics far ranging. In attitude, all three packer generations at the trailhead were as nostalgically retrograde as their 19th century roadeo skill sets. They bemoaned the loss of harvestable timber: so uselessly conserved in forest lands, only to go up in smoke at last in lightning fires like these. And they scorned the human "scum", as they called them, that they glimpsed along the trail — spitting choice ethnic slurs for cartel workers from upland clandestine pot farms, as well as even some hermetic PTSD war vets, all fleeing the fires alongside the cougars, weasels, elk, deer, bears, and skunks, escaping down to the riverbeds.

Lincoln Kaye  42:22

It was from these packers too, that I first took stock of Donald Trump's launch into that year's Republican presidential primary fray. I guess I tuned it out as just too implausible when he descended his golden escalator, less than a month earlier. But now, by firelight, I heard glowing recaps of Trump's take on Mexican "rapists" and Asian "cheaters". Could this be the savior of the (ironically migrant powered) feudal order of the California ranch lands that these packers called home? Could Trump, they dared hope, really make America great again, along the lines of the 19th century Wild West Frontier? I didn't stay around to find out.

Lincoln Kaye  43:17

This kind of American Greatness left me queasy when I thought of my Ironside menudo fiestas, my Hmong neighbors at the homestead, and my Muslim colleagues in my pre-lookout days as a foreign correspondent. Now in this battered forest, surrounded by wasteful mounds of surplus ordnance, it dawned on me that internal exile might no longer be enough. 2015 was my last full season at the lookout.

Lincoln Kaye  43:52

Our eldest daughter, unnerved by our rustication was pressing us to migrate up to Canada to join her in Vancouver. Lest, in my mountain top solitude, I'd somehow managed to behead myself with a chainsaw and leave Ahloong a widow. By late October, with the River fire officially declared contained, we took the plunge and moved North. Our youngest daughter stood ready to take over the homestead, there to deliver her first son in a home birth a couple of years later. Her Hmong neighbors were wonderfully supportive, even embroidering beautiful papoose pouches for the baby. With the legalization of recreational marijuana, Hmong had bought up more and more property on our homestead hill — reconvening from their hard-pressed and far-flung diaspora to resume their immemorial livelihood: raising drugs in mountains. No need anymore for clandestine plantations on forest lands, they could now overtly set themselves up in the Emerald triangle as artisanal small holders. Wonderful, hard working farmers they turned out to be too, with fine Asian family values. Their children promptly emerged as valedictorians and Prom queens in the local schools. But the Hmong influx quickly tripled the cannabis micro farms on our hill. Such startups can't always afford to be overly eco-conscious. Irrigation sprinklers soon drained the water table, as most of the remaining Oak and evergreen forests gave way to terraced slopes, and soils doused with weed killers and rodenticides.

Lincoln Kaye  45:44

And meanwhile, the droughts worsened, the fire seasons lengthened, and the incidents swelled to magnitudes that would have seemed unimaginable back in my Ironside tenure: a total of nearly 1500 square miles in 2020; at least 1000 square miles just last year. And the fires encroached ever closer to both the homestead, and the lookout.

Lincoln Kaye  46:10

By last year, with biblical pillars of flame and smoke lingering for weeks on the horizon, our garden beds coated with ash, the air unbreathable and the well run dry, our daughter and family evacuated to the coast and decided to stay there.

Lincoln Kaye  46:36

On August 16, the Ironside cabin went up in a blaze. An amateur astronomy buddy of ours from Burnt Ranch below, trained his telescope on the mountain top and phoned us in Canada to describe the instantaneous explosion of the propane tank that proved the final coup de gras.

Lincoln Kaye  46:57

With Ironside gone, it's now time to ruefully let go of our homestead: to to stage it for sale, we've got to bland the place out — purging it of all of our accumulated eccentricities, so it looks as generically exurban as possible. Not much we can do about our already installed farragoes of ad hoc home improvement: the undulating 108 foot straw-bale garden fence, the wonky solarium-cum-potting shed, the koi pond, the goat barn, the rampart of stacked firewood. But at least we could get rid of the mounds of salvage junk we'd piled up for further, now never to be realized, whimsies is of so-called vernacular architecture.

Lincoln Kaye  47:51

Early in the fall, rainy season, when burn permits are issued, we paid one last call on Trinity County to clear out all our salvaged and now redundant treasures. We took our time driving down to treat ourselves to a romantic getaway. Much needed after a year of pandemic curbs and family tensions. There was an elegaic, septuagenarian feel to this umpteenth honeymoon of ours. Our marriage is still as avid as ever for daylight, but now as a light to be shared and leisurely cherished in the autumnally gathering dusk.

Lincoln Kaye  49:06

Once we reached the homestead though, we quit lollygagging and set ourselves to scouring the grounds for disposable flotsam. After multiple dump runs to the county transfer site, whatever was left had to go up in smoke: yard trimmings, clapped out furniture, salvaged door and window frames from that long abandoned greenhouse project. Under brooding skies, we fed blaze after blaze for most of a week. Ennervating work, but also exhilarating in its way. We became, for once, proactive agents of combustion, if only on a bonfire scale, after so many years at the receiving end of mega burns beyond our control.

Lincoln Kaye  49:54

We stood by with garden hoses and sand buckets at the ready, close enough to toast our eyelids. Oddly cathartic to feed the flames. Item by item, everything we tossed onto the pile was fleetingly recognizable, evoking an evanescent memory of how it came into our lives, before it's turned into undifferentiated embers and ash. Last to go, was our piano. Took me all day with a screwdriver, monkey wrench, splitting maul, and handsaw, to strip it down to its strung steel frame. It burnt an eerie green. Varnish? Copper cladding on the harp frame? I'd half expected a last climactic twang of the melting strings, but instead, they just sagged.

Lincoln Kaye  50:49

No matter. It had been over a decade since any music had come out of that instrument anyway. We never knew where it had lived, whether in a whore house, or a choir loft, or a genteel parlor, in the 100-odd years since it first came up here, presumably by mule train. But by the time we found it, abandoned on a backwoods roadside with a "free" sign propped on its keyboard, that piano was unplayable, held together solely by the rust. In our basement, it came to house a dynasty of Western jumping mice: a mouse pup nursery at the treble end, and a well used murine latrine down in the bass registers. A pity, admittedly, to torch this ancestral family mansion. But why beat oneself up about it? Ahloong and I had surprised ourselves with our equanimity about incinerating this mouse house, just as we had with our shrug off of the news of Ironside lookout's demise. We felt ourselves wrapped in a kind of emotional mylar: blankly reflective.

Lincoln Kaye  52:06

Wasn't each event, after all, just one more unsentimental iteration of phase change? Taking the long view, longer than any lookout azimuth, isn't the whole of creation just a deep time ramification: from ethereal big bang stardust; to galactic sunlight; to the panoply of elements and compounds; the solid state logs and cabinetry and glass and metal hardware of the lookout; the tight-wound copper of harp strings; or the shaking, baking flesh and blood of all of us transient tenants; And now, the gaseous burst of the lookout's climactic blowout; and the flickering green of this piano pyre — mere phase change, all of it.

Lincoln Kaye  53:06

And wouldn't the same karmic shrug apply equally to the gathering pace of multi-thousand acre conflagrations from one fire season to the next — just phase change on a grander scale, is all. Or so we convinced ourselves, as our piano sighed its last. Was that nihilism or realism? Or just a figment of our sheer physical and mental exhaustion after a week of burn piles?

Lincoln Kaye  53:41

Raking up the flames in the gathering dusk, we felt ourselves as auxiliary agents of entropy — sort of the opposite of Maxwell's devils. Not that this made us exactly any sort of angels, either. More like... ghosts. All the more so, as the twilight drizzle was just now phase changing into frost, soggy snow was starting to stick on our garden fence and orchard, just limning the shingles and tree branches — lending an almost ectoplasmic air to the whole homestead. And hadn't we just finished a week of parsing our little acre in detail: laminating decades of layered memories from every cranny before consigning their tangible tokens to the flames. So that now all those memories were, in a sense, disembodied: existing only in the charged and waning daylight between the two of us. And we ourselves would be disembodied soon enough. Kind of a privilege, though, to experience even a fleeting intimation of ghosthood without having to actually die quite yet. And if individual humans can do that, can whole forests, or species, or planetary epochs haunts themselves with a karmic shrug? Heedlessly and ceaselessly anyway, phase change goes on.

Mendel Skulski  55:38

This episode was written and read by Lincoln Kaye, and was produced by me, Mendel Skulski, with help from Adam Huggins.

Mendel Skulski  55:49

Another version of this story can be found, along with many others, in the pages of Fire Season II, out now at fireseason.org.

Mendel Skulski  56:02

Music in this episode was produced by Tomoko Sauvage, Benjamin Kilchhofer, Modern Biology, Christina Vantzou, Michael Harrison, John Also Bennett, Kanahuaxtli, and Thumbug

Mendel Skulski  56:19

Future ecologies is an independent production, and is supported by our community of listeners on Patreon. You can join them for as little as $1 each month, at patreon.com/futureecologies. We really appreciate it.

Mendel Skulski  56:37

Special thanks to Hsu Mei-Lang, to Brandon Hocura at Séance Centre records, to the Sitka Foundation for supporting our 4th Season, and to Liz, Amory, and all the Fire Season contributors for 2 beautiful publications.

Mendel Skulski  57:02

Okay, that's it for this one. Thanks for listening.

Mendel Skulski

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