Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [21]
—MARY NEWTON FOOTE HENDERSON, Practical Cooking and Dinner Giving, 1877
On such a windy day, the only safe course is to begin the burn very, very slowly, and Frank keeps his promise not to hurry. He carries a drip can, which is like a combination oilcan and blowtorch, and with the pull of a trigger drips a burning diesel blend onto the dry grass. I join Chris, one of the Amish teens, in an ATV equipped with spray bottles (and, I notice—feeling like an insider—a steering wheel). The others follow Frank as he begins setting a long, narrow fire beside the road, downwind from the three hundred acres he intends to set on fire today. The wind is so strong that the smoke stays plastered to the ground for perhaps ten feet before finally rising and unraveling like a flag left too long in a gale.
What would happen if the wind changed? “It’s happened before,” Chris says. “Frank’d have to just get on the four-wheeler and try to circle around as fast as it would go, setting the fire behind him the whole way.” As it is, the fire creeps slowly downslope and into the wind, kept from spreading by the sprayers on the tractor and in the hands of the Amish. It will take hours to burn a firebreak thirty feet across and maybe a mile long, big enough that the fire can then have its way with the land.
I realize there’s no chance I’m making my flight home. In the scant twenty minutes it takes to change my ticket, the wind begins to shift, sending a black band of burning far to the south. If it gets too far and the wind shifts again, the fire could shoot down and across the bottom of the grassy bowl with enough force to jump the road. Frank is worried, returning to that first state of almost eerie concentration. “It’s tenuous right now.” He pulls up some of the dry grass that’s been pressed flat beside the road, waits for it to burn in a quick flash, then pulls up another beside it. He hands me one of the rakes and takes off on his four-wheeler, wanting to be sure he has enough fuel in the drip can to set the long fire he’ll need if this one gets out of control.
My first couple of efforts smoke and die. “He makes it look easy,” I say to Chris. Then I see that Chris makes it look easy, too; in fact, I’m probably the only person within a hundred miles who really stinks at this. But I eventually improve, and soon we’re moving at a pretty good pace, extending the fire line about ten feet per minute.
As I work, I think back to my talk with Frank, finding it difficult to pinpoint how he felt about the utter transformation of the land. He was visibly angered by bureaucratic cynicism, which he thought led to the failure of programs meant to bring back some of what we lost by transforming the land. But when he talked about development, about the incredible capacity of riverboats and barges compared with trains, there was a genuine excitement in his voice, an enthusiasm about the ability to do.
Twain once wrote scornfully that seeing humanity as the pinnacle of Creation was like imagining that the Eiffel Tower had been built to hold up the skin of paint covering its tip. I doubt Frank would make that mistake. “We owe the wildlife,” he’d said. “And we owe the landscape for the benefits we’ve had from it.” Maybe that was the key; he didn’t think it was wrong to take from the land, only to see nothing in what it gives but the product of our own hands. Soon I have a chance to watch him put that balance into practice—the winds fade and turn back to a safe course. Frank heads for the opposite ridge, drip can in hand, and begins burning in earnest.
There is one fire; there are many fires. They break and split and merge, running red up slopes, filling the sky with smoke. As long as I stay on burned ground, it’s safe. Now the fire is approaching from two directions, each blaze about knee-high.