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By Root 511 0

As they draw closer, they rise slowly to my waist, then my chest, before at last reaching an invisible, crucial point, some precisely correct combination of wind and heat and fuel; the fires inhale, smoke and air sweeping up between them as into a chimney. In seconds the flames triple in height, roaring overhead. I feel instantly sunburned. There’s a sound like a thousand thin glass rods shattering, as the stiff cells in the grassy stalks explode. The wind had been blowing smoke into my face, but now air passes me, in a rush, from behind. It’s like a wave drawing water into itself before crashing forward, a sensation so familiar from bodysurfing that I recoil, instinctively expecting a massive blowing back of flame. But the fires hold behind the wind they’ve shifted. Hawks wheel beside the scorching thermal; behind me fire tornadoes dance, sassy whirlwinds of smoke and dust that spit along the burned ground at skipping-stone cadence, pulling black ash swirling up their chutes.

The fires meet with a roar; their lines shift, again moving with the prevailing wind, a bright, hundred-yard-long line stalking through dead grasses. I imagine prairie chickens fleeing from the burn like ghosts, their flight among the fastest of all birds. I run far up a slope and then down, behind the fire now, following it on the black, smoking ground. The smoke from the main blaze is black and gray, orange and yellow. It is towers and curtains, and it pours before the sun, so thickly that when I snap a photo the flash goes off.

I had thought that with the fire so high the ground behind it would be like a forest floor after a fire—glowing, blanketed with embers, surely unbearably hot. But, in fact, the only thing that keeps me from approaching closer to the burn is the heat off the ten-foot flames. The grasses burn too quickly to warm the ground even slightly; the potash cools almost as soon as the fire is gone. I creep closer, until I have to hold a hand to shield my eyebrows. Even so close to the blaze, the ground is cool enough for me to place a palm flat against the earth; the grass stubs are scratchy as a two-day beard.

Around me ribbons of smoke trail up from still-burning clumps of grass, and from tufts twisted into wicks like volcanoes. Sometimes I see what look like glowing orange snakes that, when kicked, burst apart into dry, dead grass and sudden fire. But other than that, there is the lethal fire and then the ground it already touched and so made safe, and little or no border between them.

After an hour the flames have cleared great reaches of grass. Then I find myself in what feels like the most wildly open place I’ve ever been. I’ve been on salt flats and on the open ocean, but this is different; the speed of the transformation from impassably thick grass into clean and ashy slope leaves me exhilarated, with an uncontrollable urge to run. So I do, striding out down one hill and up the next. The ground is spongy, packed with living roots. Smoke blows into my face, and then clear air. I send a surprised hawk flying; I kick the glowing snakes. I’m alone out here, and free to do what I want, and that simple fact is oddly new to me. I’ve gotten used to the notion that you can hurt a natural landscape by so much as looking at it the wrong way. But there is nothing I can do to this land that the fire hasn’t done already. There are no trails here, or guardrails, or signposts—just the rolling, blackened land and the hawks flying, and me, on the run.

“This is savanna,” Frank says. We’re on top of a rise with grass and trees intermingled, one of the rarest prairie ecosystems. Though this kind of land impressed early explorers of Illinois like Louis Jolliet, today there are about eighty-four acres left in the state. For us, right now, it’s simply the best place to watch the remaining burn. My boot soles have melted; tonight my nose will blow black. The fire will go on for a few more days, little spots popping up around wood coals burned from the stands of trees.

“There are flowers in here that survived hundreds of years of grazing. It