PRAIRIE FIRE AROUND BROWNING !

http://www.krtv.com/news/multiple-fires-burning-in-near-browning/

What shall I write about on my blog, I asked myself, reaching my nightgowned arm out for the newspaper, and the answer was on the front page. “Prairie fires surround Browning, Montana.” The town was not evacuated but Cut Bank Boarding School was, Big Sky Hutterite Colony was, and the highways in and out were closed except over the mountains to the West. The Valier volunteer fire department was up there helping alongside others.

In the Sixties the dumpground a couple of miles east of town often caught on fire and sometimes escaped into the fields. Bob said many times he fought fire alongside other townspeople, whipping it with burlap bags. Once he looked up and discovered he was at the town limits. Today the dump is tightly regulated (not even there anymore, though people still speak of the dumpground road) and monitored to prevent fire.

For the Old People, the Nitzitahpi, fire was one of the most terrifying things, but usually happened in spring when lightning was striking the prairie. They could strike camp and be on the move in a very short time, but fire driven by wind can outstrip a modern vehicle.

The fire on the east side of town was started by “modern lightning,” a power pole thrown down by the wind so that the shorting, sparking, broken wire turned arsonist. If you’ve seen these broken wires, they can thrash like snakes, but some lie silent until their lethal ends are touched. The origins of the other fires are not known yet.

Spectacular news stories about torched cars in LA? They could turn some people to snakes. Wild quasi-religious tales of apocalypse seize whole groups in poisoned jaws. Boarding school? In some minds not modern shelter for homeless kids but 19th century penitentiaries where children were victimized. Hutterite colony? Not peaceful self-contained and hard-working community but strangers, aliens, German-speakers. The story will come out now, both the true one and the fermented insane ones that are dormant in the earth like anthrax. Stories of narrow escapes, stories of ghosts, stories of lost family homes, but hopefully no stories of deaths.

Montana is an ecology that has included fire and wind as much as geology and grass. Not quite as fire-swept as Australia where the eucalyptus explode in flames from the kindled bark shreddings at their foot and the giddy koalas are burned in their tree forks. But often enough to clear any forest upstart enough to grow in the rain shadow of the Rockies. Once the atmosphere of the planet was changed -- so slowly, so gradually, that if humans had been there they would have denied it -- so mammal-friendly with the new high-oxygen gas ratio -- then fire was everywhere. Even far to the north the tundra smoldered under the snow and ice.

The Blackfeet used to burn the prairie on purpose, renewing the grass (grass is underground, the original Underground Culture) and driving the game along to a more convenient hunting ground. Maybe frustrating enemies with a wall of fire that scrawled smoke into the sky. Some say that’s why Siksika are called “black feet” -- from walking on burnt ground. There was a Sioux group called Brulé. ('burned,' the French translation of Sichángχu, `Burnt Thighs,' their own name, of indefinite origin). One story is that a small group of warriors was trapped by fire but survived by pulling their buffalo robes over them, like the “space blanket” portable emergency shelters modern firefighters use. The hot ground burned the bare thighs of the warriors.

Today the Blackfeet “Hotshot” fire fighters are famous for their fearless intervention in forest fires. Yellow reflective fire-resistant suits with hard hats armor them against all but “widow makers,” fire-weakened trees that fall suddenly and anywhere. Ironically, what is worse than a high-fire danger year is a no-fire year, because Hot Shots make their winter grub money in the summer. No fire, no money, no shoes for baby.

The news sources had no trouble finding the proper officials this time:

Bruce Running Crane, an investigator with the wild land fire department for the Blackfeet Tribe; Wayne Smith, tribal spokesman; Blackfeet Law Enforcement Chief Greg Gilham; Shannon Augare, state legislator; Darrell Norman, sentinel. Fifty years ago no one in Great Falls would have known about the fires until maybe the Cut Bank paper told them. This time there was a “cloud of witnesses” sending digital photos, personal accounts. This time there were Twitter and Facebook prayers for the people who were in danger. The Tribal Offices are open as a refuge. A plan was in place, prompted by Homeland Security concerns.

I remember the night the old Tribal Offices burned in the Sixties where now Phoebe Magee and others live along Willow Creek in a grove of cottonwood trees, a pleasant place, just upstream of the crossing into Government Square. In those days they blew the fire siren on the watertower and we all turned out. (Nowadays no siren blows, just the pocket cell phones in firefighter bedrooms activated by an automated phone calling system. But what if that system is interdicted by fire?)

Flames leapt in the air among the high old trees, shriveling back leaves, withering them in the heat before briefly burning. No light except car headlights. People crowded in the smoky dark, just silhouettes. Much shouting and torrents of water reaching out for the building. I can’t remember the actual building, just the showers of sparks when it collapsed in on itself.

I was standing next to Sophie and Bert Fitzgerald. “Let’s go make coffee and sandwiches for the fire fighters,” they said, and took me along. In a while we were back, but the fire had ended. Wooden buildings are quickly consumed. There was only a velvet black space in the indigo night. Bert and Sophie took the sandwiches down to the jail for the inmates, who were always hungry. I went home to bed. A few years later the Fitzgeralds were killed in their sleep by carbon monoxide when their furnace chimney was clogged by snow.

No one escapes alive and yet life goes on. In the photos the prairie is a spectacular conflagration, looking like the campfires of an army. We grieve and take precautions and do our best, but when a great wind comes, our poles and wires cannot stand against it. We had all been remarking about the mildness of this warm, windy, snowless winter and all the time it was lying in wait.