End Times ain't in my personal theology -- but these days it's damn sure trying to get in.

 

I grew up in the Mountain West -- and wherever my migratory trail has taken me, the Real West is always Home in the deepest and highest ways.  It's extremely tough to watch the hideous destruction of timber presently underway in a number of the Western states where, in the always dry climes, it takes literally ages -- a few hundred years in most cases -- for yellow and pinon pines, spruce, fir, cedars, and junipers to grow to maturity.

 

Well under the legal age of 18, I became involved in fire control for the U.S. Forest Service out of my home town of Flagstaff, Arizona -- direct fire fighting and later fire lookout/radio work -- and did that for several summers beginning in 1950 and continuing in intermittent fashion into 1960.

 

Some of these horrors of contemporary times are the biggest fires of which I've ever heard.  While the standard explanations -- e.g., slow accumulation of ground brush and lumbering slash over many years of "over protection" -- have some merit, there are now obviously extraordinary climate factors: super-hot temperatures, extremely high and forceful winds -- winds unusually consistent in nature; weeks-early dry lightning (lightning without accompanying rain).

 

It's very difficult indeed for me to see how anyone, in this fire context, could dispute the significant involvement of some climate change factors.

 

In situations like this, people are often hired off the streets to fight fire.  Some do it well and some don't.  In the summer of 1956, I was on a very large fire in yellow pine timber, a "burn" of about 9,000 acres as it turned out, in the Sitgreaves National Forest of Northern Arizona.  I was working building fire line with a Pulaski -- axe/hoe combo -- and had a gallon canteen of water for personal drinking.  Most of the 20 guys on my crew were "greenhorns" from the streets of Winslow.  Suddenly as I worked along, with a huge approaching wall of fire coming fast upon us, I looked around and realized my crew mates had all deserted, leaving me totally alone.  Spot fires -- from windblown sparks -- were developing all about me.  I had heavy logging boots, Levi pants and shirt, and my trusty Stetson hat, and, somewhat singed for sure, I barely escaped with my life and my Pulaski and canteen. When I saw some of the deserters on a far back logging road, several accusatory terms came to mind, but I settled on calling them all "jelly beans" -- an especially vile term in rural Arizona.  Most of them left the fire but I continued with another crew that was rushed in pronto -- and eventually we all stopped the inferno.

 

Anyway, just some inescapable thoughts. Fires are starting here in Idaho and, 'way up where we live right adjacent to Bureau of Land Management and Caribou National Forest lands, we're certainly on high alert.  Our firefighting webpage is  http://hunterbear.org/forest_fires_in_the_west.htm   For my award winning short story, The Destroyers, focusing on virulent racial prejudice in the context of a very large Northern Arizona forest fire, first published in 1960 and reprinted several times since in this country and abroad:  http://hunterbear.org/the%20short%20story.htm  The story is based on my second forest fire in the summer of 1950.  I was on its fire lines and then, when a bull cook was needed in camp, I was shifted into that role where the story events occurred.

 

Hunter Gray [Hunter Bear]

 

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org
(much social justice material)
 
See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded and with more photos in June, 2012.)
 
For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI --
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63.
http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm
 
And see - Elder Recognition Award
(Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Story Tellers:
http://hunterbear.org/elder_recognition_award_for_2005.htm