|
The River
of Fire
By Mike Roselle
Photos Josh Mahan
|
|
Josh and I
rolled up to the Vinegar
Creek boatramp after a six-day float on the Salmon River the last day of August. Because of rumors
of
wildfire raging in the area and low water, we had had the river all to
ourselves. I’ve run the Salmon many times since 1979, and the world has
changed
a great deal over the passing years. But the Salmon stays the same.
Here in the
midst of the nation’s largest wilderness complex outside of Alaska life is unchanged, unhurried.
My first
raft trip on the
Salmon was with Dr. Doom, Sara Sturgis, Bart Kohler, Dave Foreman,
Howie Wolke,
Pete Dustard, Abe “Cosmos” and Lola Blank, Lynelle Wagner and a few
other
buckaroos. We took seventy cases of beer and a few doses of a strange
powder
that convinced Cosmos to make me the godfather of his and Lola’s soon
to be
born daughter, Rachel. I had just met
Cosmos and Lola at my 25th Birthday Party at the Simpson
House in Jackson
Hole when they
arrived unannounced, Cosmos with a screech
owl perched on his shoulder and Lola sporting a giant tarantula on her
left
breast. Lily, the spider, would also accompany us on the Salmon River but the owl found a mate in Oregon and returned voluntarily to the wild.
Because this
was most of the Staff of the newly published Earth First! Journal, this
was a
business trip. And because this was a river trip, the girl I came down
with
dumped me for a river guide with a bigger boat. Over the years, I have
come to
respect the ways a simple river trip can reorder your life. One fire
put out
and another started.
<>The forest fires, this year,
died down due to the arrival of some cool, moist weather, but one could
still
see it’s most recent impacts on the steep canyon walls: burnt stems of
Pondersosa Pines, blackened grass and bare soils, and the smell of wood
smoke.
The smoke hung low in the sky, blocking out much of the solar heat, a
natural
sun screen. One could still see a few smoldering stumps, but for the
most part
this fire season, originally predicted to be among the worst, was
fizzling out,
the nutrients of the burned pines and firs already being reabsorbed
into the
soil.
| "Ashes the size of silver dollars
floated down like deep fried snowflakes from a bacon-grease sky." |
If there is anywhere one can
grow to love and respect fire, it is here in central Idaho, in the Salmon/Selway wilderness. It
always makes me
angry when I turn on the television and hear one of the clueless
newscasters
report that so many thousands of forest acres had been “consumed” by
fire. As
the walls of the river reveal, no fire kills every tree. Few of the
most severe
forest fires achieve even a fifty percent mortality rate of the mature
trees in
the burned area. The happy survivors are visible everywhere, growing in
groves
that cling to the hillsides, along scorched ridge tops, in the bottoms
of
ravines and along the banks of the river. They are made stronger by the
loss of
competition, the dead tree trunks fall to the forest floor and
replenish and
stabilize the fragile soils. New light spurs the growth of forage for
wildlife.
This is not rocket science and I still cannot understand why the
Boneheads in
the U.S. Forest Service don’t understand this. These
obviously
healthy trees bare scars of past fires, yet the Freddies persist in
allowing
loggers to cut in burned areas arguing that the trees are dead if they
show the
faintest sign of fire damage. This is what they did up on the Lewis and
Clark
Trail last year and it is repeated in every region of the country by
our
so-called foresters.
Right: A fire
ripped through this stretch of forest on the Salmon River in late
August, claiming few trees.
Eleven
years ago, about this
same time of year, we were camped up on top of the Salmon River’s canyon rim at the site of the notorious
Cove/Mallard Timber Sales and the residence of Uncle Ramon. The
occasion was
the first ever Lowbagger Jamboree. We were celebrating the injunction
we had
gotten earlier in the day that brought logging on the Cove/Mallard, the
biggest
below-cost timber sale in the history of the nation, to a screeching
halt.
Floyd had come out to celebrate with Michael Donnelly. We had a
contingent of
non-American Greenpeace crew members of the Black Pig, a.k.a. MV
Greenpeace, who
had recently returned to Seattle
from Korea and Siberia. We also had a few Missoulians, a few
Potatoheads,
the Velcro Sheep, several kegs of beer and a vast supply of other goods
and
stores for a party of two hundred people. The problem was that we had
only
about sixty people, because crazy-assed fires were burning all over the
state,
and a really big one was about to cut us off from the road to Dixie,
the only
way out.
Ashes the
size of silver-dollars
floated down like deep fried snowflakes from a bacon-grease sky. It was
midday and the sun was nowhere to be seen. The
Velcro Sheep
played over one hundred songs and the vegans were dancing naked two
days later
when Ramon showed up, realizing that being one day late to a two day
party is
much different that being two days late to a three day party that was
supposed
to last only one day. He knew right away that he was too old to have
any hope
of catching up. Everyone else had been dipping in the Skippy Jar for
days. The
kitchen was a disaster area. There were bodies lying everywhere and we
still
had two kegs of beer. One can still see evidence of the fires of ’94 on
the
Salmon today. But at Uncle Ramon’s place up on the rim, the only
evidence of
our presence that year is a graffiti-sprayed trailer house with a
collapsed
roof and a few moldy sleeping bags that even the wood rats won’t sleep
in.
Waste-high fir trees are already sprouting through the parking area and
the
only sounds that can be heard come from the wind, a few birds and the
television sets of the Pentecostal Christians who moved in next door.
 Left: Surviving
patches of trees from the massive 2000 fires.
This
year’s Salmon River float had a crew that combines members of
last year’s
Salmon float and our epic Missouri River canoe trip. Our
redneck friends from Alabama
were excited about meeting the Good Looking Wilderness Homos, and the
Montanans
were wondering what all the fuss was about. In all, we had eight folks
from Washington D.C., but only about five-and-a-half were
actually gay. Heidi
the bicycle messenger was a definite Lowbagger, having just been
squeezed out
of her job for trying to organize her co-workers. Ned Daly was back in Missoula again; the former Alliance for the Wild Rockies organizer is now a
mucky-muck
for the Forest Stewardship Council and was mulling over whether or not
the FSC
should certify OSB. I told the SOB to stop using TMA (too many
acronyms) but
since they were already certifying paper, what was the big deal?
Anyway, not
much business got discussed on this river; flat water means lots of
paddling
and the solitude soon enveloped our entire party as we slipped into the
great
bosom of the Big Wild, united in our desire to escape civilization and
drink
beer.
As we
leave the Salmon
River amidst news
of the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the Man Without a Bioregion is entering
the second
year of his personal odyssey to discover the soul of America. It seems once again that the world has
changed. The
voice of the Earth is being loudly heard even as her defenders are
being
increasingly silenced by the media, and for the first time I feel the
real
rumblings of discontent over the treatment of our fragile planet
spreading to
new and growing audiences around the world. Like the fires on the Salmon River, the hurricanes are trying to speak to
us, and more
and more people are listening.
Certainly
we must now know
that we have to live with nature in order to survive on this planet.
And living
with nature means learning about nature. We cannot stop a fire that is
burning
and we cannot stop a hurricane in motion, but if we stop trying to
control
them, and give them room to move and fulfill their role in the
ecological
scheme of things, they will seek a balance and we both can prosper.
Fires
cannot and should not be fought, and we can only make them worse by
logging.
Hurricanes cannot be stopped, they can only be made worse by burning
more
fossil fuels, logging more forests and developing more of our coastal
wetlands
and barrier islands. To those who have continually called us nuts and
obstructionists, elitists and tree huggers, and especially to those who
say the
environmental movement is dead, can you hear the voice of nature?
Mike Roselle returned only slightly singed
from the River of Fire. Contact him at roselle@lowbagger.org.
|
Support Eco-Media
|
