CAMP FIRES
“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.
[Illustration: NESSMUK RANGE.]
[Illustration: SMALL COOK FIRE.]
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.