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PRAIRIE FIRE
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Proposal prepared 2007
Burn Executed December 2, 2009
Video Projection of Environmental Intervention
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FOREST SERVICE YEARS
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In the 1980's, I spent five seasons fighting forest fires for the U.S. Forest Service. It was not a Hot Shot crew and it was not a contract crew. Chico Max was an experiment in 80's Reaganomics. President Reagan wanted a Hot Shot crew that could do category one assignments that did not require being housed with room and board at a remote station. We were based out the Forest Service Tree Improvement Center in Chico, California. It is safe to say the crew was disliked and distrusted by some in the Hot Shot system. We were Forest Service G.S. employees taking Hot Shot assignments and we behaved like pirates with something to prove. Our superintendent kept us busy by saying yes to edgier assignments such as sometimes cutting hot-line downhill or spiking us out to spend a night on a chilly mountain with no sleeping bags. There was a lot of drugs present among the some on the crew, mostly pot, and I heard a few years after I left that the drugs were likely responsible for the Chico Max experiment being terminated.
We worked in a variety of conditions and terrains throughout California, Oregon and Washington. We did one fire in Nevada at Bordertown. My hard hat was polka-dotted with pink spots which was proof that I was close enough to the action to get bombed with retardant from the air tankers. This was a very exciting time and it made an indelible mark on my adult life. Even today, I feel a special fraternity with all firefighters. Those guys are good storytellers.
While on the fire crew I participated in many prescribed or "controlled" burns, mostly on my home forest, the Mendocino. We worked mostly around Log Springs and the more remote Cold Springs. Our job was to cut a "Fire Line", a scrape down to mineral soil, around the perimeter of the unit to be burned. These logging units were small clear cuts that were piled with left behind tree limbs or "Slash." Once the line was cut, the crew would stand watch as a helicopter would come over the ridge dangling a torch on a sling. This torch would spit napalm and we could see flaming drops falling from the sky and igniting the forest floor.
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FIRE IN AN ORCHARD
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During this time, I was sharing a farmhouse with my former art professor Lowell Jones. The house was in the orchards west of Chico and had an artistic pedigree. This is where Lowell had fabricated his pioneering solar kinetic sculptures that were commissioned by Olympia and York. In addition, it was only two doors down from a farmhouse where Jackson Pollock's family briefly lived when he was a youth.
1987 was my last season fighting fires and culminated in my welding two eight-foot tall steel armatures and lacing them with Alder logs. We harvested these Alder logs near the historic Covered Bridge in Butte Creek Canyon that was destroyed in the Camp Fire. Lowell helped me demolish a badly deteriorated shed which we piled at the base of the sculptures. With the full moon, some bottles of wine and a group of friends, we gathered at the edge of the Walnut orchard and set the sculptures on fire.
The steel on one of the armatures got too hot and collapsed early in the process, shooting out a gust of sparks. However, the second one survived late into the evening. Its charred form was exhibited in a one person show at the 1078 Gallery in Chico. Yet, I felt at the time that this event was more interesting as an experiment and would require more work. I continued to develop the idea in my journals.
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FIRE IN IOWA
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The story must fast forward to 2001. Kathy was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Northern Iowa. A public land manager found out that I had fought wildland fires and invited Kathy and me to help with a prescribed prairie burn.
Though we had done plenty of improvisation in the forest service, I had become accustomed to fairly rigorous safety procedures and adequate tools. When performing prescribed burns of logging units, we always cut a fire line. You can imagine how appalled I was when I learned that not only were we not going to cut a fire line, there was only four of us and we had more drip torches than hand tools. There was only one shovel, one functional water pump and one leaky water pump.
This was taking place at MacFarlane Park, a large prairie unit near La Porte City, Iowa. We were going to be working with the park manager, Leon Lindley. This was the first time I met Leon who could easily have been a fictional character from a Steinbeck novel. He is an expert naturalist and easily quotes poetry. Leon took us to his garage where I noticed a plastic basin with Snapping Turtle hatchlings that he said that he had hatched from eggs. I asked him where he found the eggs. He said that he had trapped a Snapping Turtle for a family barbeque and when he cleaned her, he encountered the eggs. Though he dined on the mother turtle, he carefully raised and released the hatchlings. Leon is a fascinating man.
I was to learn a lot more about the natural history and archaeology of prairie fire. Fire is integral to a healthy, biodiverse native prairie ecosystem. Without fire, the future of the Fringed Prairie Orchid or bird species such as the Bobolink would be uncertain. From the beginning, prehistoric and historic humans played a role. Though some prairie fires were the result of lightening strikes, most were purposely started by humans to check the spread of invasive Red Cedars and preserve hunting lanes. The prairie ecosystem as we know it is in fact the creation of this prehistoric human intervention. Today, fire is becoming increasingly common in most tall grass prairie management plans.
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REKINDLING AN IDEA
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It was not long before I started to think again about my 1987 Fire Sculptures. I began to visualize a series of flammable, biodegradable sculptural elements strategically placed throughout a prairie unit. As the edge of the fire moves across the unit, it would encounter and engage each sculpture and create a symbolic flash-point. This would all be captured on digital video cameras. Since the sculptures would be consumed and destroyed by the fire, the material artifact of the process would be the video which would be projected on the walls of the gallery.
In 2010 I was invited to exhibit at Drake University in Des Moines. At my first meeting with the director Heather Skeens, I showed her a watercolor rendering of wood sculptures being engaged in a prairie fire. Heather is a wonderful curator and she made me promise to produce this event for the Drake exhibit. I did not fully understand what I was saying yes to.
I began gathering wood for the sculptural elements. I saw some deadfall wood on a sandbar on the Cedar River and thought "that will get me started." I also received permission from the Nature Conservancy to harvest Red Cedar from some burn piles at the Cedar Hills Sand Prairie. I produced three sculptural elements ranging from twelve to fourteen feet tall.
On October 12, 2009 Leon Lindley and I spent the day touring the possible prairie units near La Porte City. At one point we hiked past a spot called Dinosaur Pond where we watched two Otters. I selected the prairie at the Cedar Island Unit because it had a nice view-shed and an advantageous uphill slope. Our first possible burn date was October 24. But we had an unusual autumn with heavy rain and then an untimely warming trend. Grasses that were supposed to be drying and dying were starting to grow again.
It was when I was coming to terms that the burn might not happen that we got a couple of killing frosts. We were forecast for a single fifty-degree day and we saw that we had a one-day window. On December 2, Leon orchestrated a dramatic prairie burn with the cameras rolling. The prairie ecologist Laura Walter ran a camera from side-hill. I ran my camera down inside the burn. At one point it got hot enough that I became concerned that the camera might get ruined. I pulled away but immediately got one leg of the tripod down to capture a small fire twister going past. That section of the fire exposed a perfect deer skull with antlers that had been hiding in the grasses.
The third and final sculpture to burn utilized the wood that I had gathered from the banks of the Cedar River and it created an unexpected effect. It is now clear that these lengths of wood had absorbed moisture from the river. After the grassfire passed and the sculpture smoldered, the wood emitted these beautiful ghostly balls of steam that appeared as white light.
I had made certain to dowel the wood sculptures to prevent them from immediately collapsing after the fire passed. Yet, as each burned over the course of the day, each of the sculptures crumpled into the bed of coal and ash. We were in position with my camera to capture the third and final piece falling. The burn itself was thorough and complete.
Two days later it snowed. A week later we had a significant blizzard and below zero temperatures.
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VOLUNTEERS
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I could never execute a project of this scale alone. Leon Lindley was the maestro of the burn and Laura Walter was invaluable behind the second video camera. The renowned prairie photographer Bill Witt documented the event. I also want to thank Angie Stoneman, Robert and Julie Fisher, Ryan Kurtz and Jennifer Wahl for showing up on one and a half days notice. Special thanks go to Jen Philipak, Iowa Nature Conservancy.
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