The question from a fifth-grader sparked a memory.
I was at Green Pines Elementary School speaking to my daughter’s class and others in her grade about writing and journalism, and one of her classmates wanted to know if I had ever covered a dangerous story. came to mind.
It was the summer of 1996, and a campfire in the Pike National Forest had grown out of control in the mountains southwest of Denver. I was editor of a group of weekly newspapers in the area. Driving home from a barbecue at a friend’s house, I saw the huge plume of smoke. I grabbed my notebooks and a camera, stopped at the store to buy extra film and drove straight for it.
For the next few days, more than 12,000 acres burned, at the time, one of the largest wildfires in Colorado history. Now it’s barely a blip on the radar screen. Waldo Canyon. West Fork. High Park, and, topping them all at 137,000 acres, in 2002.
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None of them come close to what is happening in California today.
At least 40 in the 15 wildfires devouring a swath of terrain now more than 200,000 acres wide. Thousands of homes have burned to the ground. Entire neighborhoods have been lost in the city of Santa Rosa. Hundreds of people are missing. The death toll is sure to rise.
The fires were fueled by California’s historic drought — which officially ended last year — and record heat this summer, the warmest in 100 years, and unusually high October winds.
It was climate change in action.
But it was more than that.
Back when the Buffalo Creek fire was burning, I knew a crusty old fire chief named Bob Schneider. Climate change wasn’t in his vocabulary. But he would show up at zoning meetings constantly testifying against new developments, built deeper and deeper into the foothills, on steep mountainsides where man was not intended to live. He would warn of the big fires to come and be dismissed as an agent of gloom standing in the way of progress.
The homes went up. They got bigger and bigger.
The story was the same in Colorado and California, and all over the West.
In some ways, it is not much different than the story in Missouri, and in other places in the Midwest as we continue to challenge Mother Nature’s penchant for flooding.
Developers come to city councils promising riches, if only they can build on cheap flood plain land. Compliant public officials give in to their requests, building up levees — Howard’s Bend and Monarch come to mind — and, indeed, the riches come, for a select few, at least.
Decades after the Missouri River covered the Gumbo Bottoms that didn’t recede for days, the newly named Chesterfield Valley is a glittering tribute to the fallacy that Man can defy Mother.
Mother always wins.
Today, she’s angry as she whips up winds that carry the fury of fire through multiple mountainous valleys in what was once a California paradise. The southeastern U.S., from Houston to the Florida Keys, is still picking itself up after a record hurricane season wreaked havoc. And Puerto Rico. My, how quickly our minds have left our compatriots behind there, where a majority of the country still lacks electricity and water.
On the third or fourth day of the Buffalo Creek Fire, the local chief let me tag along in the back of an ambulance on a ride through the burned out forest to take supplies to some of the “hot shot†firefighters who had been dropped by helicopter deep in the forest. As we drove past a dusky landscape of a once-dense forest turned to matchsticks, we passed a solitary log cabin, standing unscathed like an oasis in a sea of gray ash. That homeowner had followed the advice of men like Schneider, clearing out the forest around his home, keeping the yard clear of brush.
He respected Mother Nature more than he defied her, and he won, at least until the record rains that came after the Buffalo Creek fire turned the now unprotected land into massive mudslides that destroyed that which the fire had spared.
In time, if we learn from the error of our ways, 2017 will go down as the year Americans tamed their insatiable desire to develop every piece of land, no matter how close to the river, how high atop the mountain, how beautiful the ocean view. The “big ones†have come all at once. The death toll is rising. What will we do when the final body count is known?