On Fire Lines in the West

How these real and invisible lines might inform us

October marks a season of rest on a dryland wheat farm: the harvest is in, the farm equipment has been cleaned and put away, and the new crop of wheat has been planted (once or twice, depending on how the fall rains went). The sprouted wheat goes through an overwintering process called vernalization. Not only is this soft, white wheat bred to withstand winter, but it needs the snow and that period of dormancy to sprout a head in the spring.

So October is the beginning of a dryland farmer’s off season, unless they also run cattle, which many small family farms do to survive. For farmers only growing wheat, this month is one to settle in, to gamble the best time to sell your crop and get to work on personal projects like winterizing the farm.

My father, in his late 60s, has been retired from farming for over a year now, but he still operates by those seasonal rhythms. This month, that meant harvesting the last vegetables of his garden, a project he turned his decades-long farming knowledge toward in retirement so he could still complain about the weather.

He monitored a small pumpkin patch he planted for his grandkids with the same scrutiny he used to walk a row of wheat. He invited us back from the city when the pumpkins were ready. Never one to sit idle, he had cut every spiny bit of leaf and stem before we arrived so my kids might walk freely between the pumpkins. (One type of love I’ve learned: preparing the way for others.)

I stood in the garden and sipped coffee, watching my parents watch my kids swoon over the biggest pumpkins, and the smallest ones, and the green and pink tie-dye splits that had emerged from cross-pollination.

And then I thought harder about how this beautiful space, this garden, had been planted in a fire line. It was not something that existed when I was a kid.

When the fire department came down the driveway in 2015 to tell my parents there was a fire burning up the canyon behind them, my dad jumped on his tractor. He headed down a county road to plow a line between the sagebrush and the straw he knew would light like tinder. The fire department wouldn’t—couldn’t?—make a line, because we lived on the boundary of Grant and Douglas Counties and the fire was still in the next county’s jurisdiction. Or maybe the firemen saw that my dad had it handled; a tractor’s plow was a damn efficient way to make a fire line, after all. Either way, the experience added to my dad’s concept of the government as a mostly useless entity in rural places.

In the following years, my dad marked the lack of snow, the way the wheat suffered, the fires that surrounded our flat plateau every summer. He decided to plow a permanent fire line around the farmhouse, creating a 30-foot rift (the width of a plow) between the wheat we needed to live by and the place we called home.

At first, the fire line felt like a chasm. I’d grown up barefoot on that farm, accustomed to the way the swaying wheat heads met our farmhouse yard. But the wind hard-packed the dirt and we used it as a new way to walk the perimeter of the place, strolling easily around the pine, apple and ash trees my grandparents had planted, the farm junkyard, the small grain bins that stored seed wheat, the bit of land my father had been paid to plant with native bushes and grass.

The fact that we planted a garden in the fire strip said a lot about our relationship to the threat of fire: it was the new normal in the west. Our baselines had shifted, and we were learning to adapt when climate change and management issues had invited fire to our doorstep. It was easy to forget that a fire line was unnecessary as recently as 2012, when I married in August with no worry of smoke clouding the ceremony.

The fires aren’t gone, even though we had a pretty light season this year (the Chelan/Wenatchee area aside), and the fires remain in my writing because they have to. I’ve camped and hiked through forest burnout on my family’s favorite trails in the Cascades, pine canopies gone, undergrowth replaced by bright pink fireweed. We understand that those trails will be hotter. We bring more sunscreen and water when we hike. But I’m afraid of forgetting that it shouldn’t be that way. Of just seeing a garden and not a fire line.

I have a new essay titled “How to Love a Burning West” that I’ve been shopping out to publications. And that’s an ongoing question: how do we best love a place where fire lines are the new norm? I’m not the only one writing about this, about the fires; writers watch the canaries in the metaphorical coal mine, like farmers do, like anyone who pays attention to the natural world does.

This summer, in the magazine I edit, a writer interviewed a wildlands firefighter to ask about his experience on the front lines. I learned about the “fire bugs” and other natural hazards that follow flames, how firefighters strategize base camps, and how multiple jurisdictions work across government lines when they fight the really big fires together. I’ve been thinking of the way these lines remain, physical and political, even when the fire season winds down.

What should we mark and hold onto in October, when we begin to hope for snow, like the wheat, because we know we need it for next summer? How might these lines inform us through federal budget cuts to land management, and government shutdowns, and so much else? How could we work together across these lines? How might we prepare a path forward for others, for our kids, to love a place going to smoke?

Maybe it’s by remembering that in the west, even when we plant gardens, it’s on the bones of loss.