In the night . . . in the dark . . . things are brewing

It always comes just when you've let your mind wander. Outside the dark windows, the wind howled. I could hear aspen leaves pinging against the window screen and the dock grinding against its moorings out in the roiling bay. Occasionally, a distant creak and crash came from somewhere deep in the forest. The power flickered once . . . twice . . . three times, then prevailed. I re-queued the DVD, pulled at my ball of yarn and started another row of knitting. Nothing bad was going to happen. Not tonight.

But the phone rang at a time all too late and the wrong day (Friday) for it to be a friendly "check-in." And just as I said "hello?", Andy's emergency pager went off. So while I took a message from our neighbor that a tree had tipped into a live electric line down the road and nothing could be done to extinguish the small fire until the electric company came (from 70+ miles away) to switch off the power and would Andy come and help turn on the wildland fire sprinkler systems around the bay, Andy was wriggling into his fire gear. And suddenly, I was switching my pajama bottoms for real pants, shoving my feet into tired sneakers and running down the gravel road, the flashlight throwing a jiggling white light out into the darkness in front of us.

I should have known that a morning that dawned red could only mean calamity. But the unease I felt rising to a reddish orange glow in the northern sky dissipated as the day wore on, even as the wind kicked up. It was a red-flag day for the fire danger and the local agencies had banned fires of any nature. Not even charcoal grills were allowed. Water levels were so low that our "floating" dock sat on the lake's bottom and the dying grass and leaves in the woods crackled underfoot.

I left the flashlight with Andy and returned to cabin after it became apparent that my biggest contribution to the firefighting effort would be to stay out of the way. To the moan of approaching sirens, I crouched beneath the porch, fiddling with our own sprinkler pump. When I filled bottles of water from the lake shore for the pump's reservoir, the wind blew so hard that it flipped the bottom of my flimsy button-up shirt up over my chest and twisted the shirt around me.

The smoking tree burnt a 10'x10' patch under the power line before the electricity was shut off and the fire department could extinguish it. By the time I walked over with a thermos of coffee for the quickly fading volunteer crew, it was nearly midnight. Under the flashing glow of red emergency vehicle lights, I watched the firefighters rolling hoses and packing away chainsaws.

The wind still buffeted the cabin when I finally rustled under the covers. But as I listened to the floor boards creak and Andy toss and turn next to me, I tried to lull myself back into that sense of security I'd had earlier in the evening.

Nothing bad was going to happen. Not tonight.

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Smoke Gets in My Eyes

When I'm at a campfire, it seems like no matter where I sit, I always end up with smoke blowing straight in my face. Sometimes my life feels like that too. There's always smoke in my life, coming from somewhere.

Although we had lovely damp summer which kept wildfire danger at bay, we've now gone for several weeks without any significant rainfall. Recently, the extremely dry weather's been paired with high winds which is bad news Smokey bears for a small wildfire that's been smoldering on the far side of the national forest we live in. The fire that was 11,000 acres yesterday morning is now 60,000+ acres at the very smallest. A mandatory evacuation been instated for residential areas in the fire's path and wilderness crews have spend the last couple days evacuating Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness visitors out of the woods in effected areas.

The fire may be 30 miles off, but depending on how the wind blows, we've been getting pretty smoked out.  Yesterday at noon, the smoke masked the sun casting the world in an unnatural hazy orange glow.  As the wind howled past the windows, little bits of black ash blew through the window cracks onto the museum exhibits. The fire produced its own severe thunderstorm system yesterday afternoon, creating cloud to ground lightning and a downpour that dropped both raindrops and burnt pine needles in the area where Andy works.

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Smoke! Fire!!

Despite losing our leaves what seems like a long time ago, we've been having a knock-out October in these parts. The nip in the air has been perfectly complimented by bright blue skies and just the slightest breezes. (Of course, we're all worried about the decided lack of rain as the lake levels get lower and lower, but that's another topic for another day.) And all that beautiful weather translates into smoke in the air.

We live on a small pocket of private land in a national forest. As you head up the road towards the cabin, the rolling hills of mixed forest that dominate alongside Lake Superior start to fade into granite outcroppings as you approach the very southern edge of the Boreal forest. This is a landscape that's been shaped by fire for centuries, if not millenia and as a result, one of the prime ways the local forestry agency keeps the forest healthy is by lighting control burns we know as "prescribed burns."

Prescribed burns are meant to be a fairly routine procedure around here, but pulling off what is essentially a controlled forest fire is kind of tricky business. On top of needing very particular weather conditions to pull off the burns, funding can often be a roadblock since the burns are controlled by a federal agency. But all the pieces of the puzzles have somehow miraculously fit together this fall and last week, a (very) large plume of smoke appeared on the south edge of our lake from a prescribed burn, several thousand acres in size, that had been lit about 15 miles southwest from the cabin. For the past week and a half, the air's often filled with the smell of campfire. The smoke in the air can make the setting sun look a bit like a candled egg.

It can be funny to think that a bit of smoke in the air is probably one of the most natural things to smell up here on a fall day. Beyond the wood that heats so many of our homes or roasts our marshmallows, we tend to think of fire only in destructive terms. A large part of my summer was spent talking with people who had just seen the evidence of our 2007 wildfire for the first time. Fire often doesn't look real great and we forget its functionality. I just read in The Secrets of Wildflowers that Native Americans used fires to in the eastern part of the United States for agricultural purposes for hundreds of years before the Europeans showed up.Fire is a powerful tool if we use it correctly and Mother Nature's ability to recover so spectacularly after a fire should be considered miraculous, in my opinion.

Andy's been part of the volunteer fire department for the last couple years. Today he's helping out with the prescribed burns, mostly being available in case one of the fires creeps out of its designated boundaries and makes a run for a residential area. Both Andy and I grew up with forest fires being treated as a necessary reality of life in the woods. To us, the smoke doesn't signal distress, but something exciting that helps our forest grow strong.

After all, it's just a bit of smoke in the air.

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