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Ruth Anne Olson
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The author and her husband built a new cabin on the land unfortunately cleared by the fire.
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Courtesy Ruth Anne Olson
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Ruth Anne Olson
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Trees around the author’s lakeshore property burned from a root-following fire ignited below ground from heated metal of a fire ring.
This story won the 2011 Gold Award for Best Essay from the International Regional Magazine Association.
We sat on the bedrock of Lake Superior’s Minnesota shore as evening softened the explosive sounds of its waves. Our campfire was out; the air grew still.
In the years since Tony and I became legal stewards of this land, we’d camped in sun and snow – at times with family and friends, more often alone. Now as the sun slipped toward the horizon, we were, without knowing, enjoying for the last time the familiar glen around our campsite.
Before us were the trio of slender firs we called the Three Sisters and the sagging trunk of a mountain ash dubbed the Bridge of Sighs. So, too, the giant birch where we took refuge from a thunderstorm on our first trip here, the regal spruce on the edge of our splitting yard and near our tent the tiny birch, whose growth I’d nurtured and protected, now standing 10 feet tall. Among them, we were immersed in memories and miracles of growth.
Our journal entry shows this to be a trip like many others. Three days earlier, we’d driven the familiar five-hour journey from Minneapolis. The sky was cloudy and the air thick with fog when we arrived. By suppertime, we were hot and sweaty from sawing (with hand tools, as always) and hauling wood from a balsam lying across our Trail of Notable Trees. We built a campfire in our protective ring anchored on bare bedrock.
Knowing fire threats abound throughout this Arrowhead region, we kept our fire low, maintained a clear space in all directions and remained alert for errant sparks. We were always careful with fire.
The weekend had offered its usual share of natural pleasures. Jupiter shone one night so bright as to cast a path of sparkling jewels across the water. Before dawn the next day, lightning flickered to the south across this largest lake in the world, back-lighting thunderclouds far to the east. Cormorants navigated their large black bodies, skimming close to the water, and an eared grebe rode the waves. One afternoon Tony watched an immature goshawk swerve to snatch a unsuspecting yellow-rumped warbler flying among the trees.
Now it was Monday evening as we settled our camp and doused the campfire. We would forgo a fire in the morning and leave early for home. The sun set, the woods were still and the lake quiet. Before we went to bed, Tony wrote in our journal, “Despite rain a week ago, the woods are dry: yellowed moss, many fallen leaves, dried ferns, etc.”
Even as he wrote, a root no thicker than a pencil lead lay inside the dirt, resting against the outside of our sturdy fire ring. Dry from little rain and dryer still from our campfires, it lay like a fuse and eventually lit from the heat of the metal. Buried and invisible, without flame or smoke, the glowing ember moved along its host root.
Gathering strength, it burned unseen as we put things away, slept, wakened and ate our breakfast. It burned as we tied the flaps on our frame packs and looked toward the lake to say goodbye. It burned as we hiked out, leaving the woods quiet and alone.
The stage across which the heat crept is one of the most ancient in the world. Formed by more than 1 billion years of fire and ice, decaying plants and animals have ever-so-slowly built on top of hard unforgiving volcanic rock, a thin and flammable layer of soil called duff. Flowers, moss, fern and tall trees are all anchored and sustained in this cover that is often thinner than a warm winter blanket.
Now this layer burned. Kept low by days of heavy moist air, the fire moved within the intertwining mass of roots and decaying vegetation. The kitchen birch toppled to the ground, its branches intact, the base of its tiny trunk sealed like the stump of an amputee’s arm. A towering spruce, sprouted from a seed at the beginning of World War I, was brought to its knees. Up sparse lines of dirt that laced 3-foot-high rock faces, heat changed gray-blue basalt to a grainy pink – permanent evidence of fire. Across beds of springy moss and scattered twigs, fire scrubbed the once-beautiful nuance of color and texture and left surfaces of hard, cold stone.
Day after day, trees toppled. Some may have fallen with a crash; more likely they came down with a slow settling sigh as their feet turned to ash, their stability severed. Maybe nothing fell for hours until a rising wind toppled them in number. Or would a panoramic camera have caught constant movement: Here a few alder stems and a birch seedling, there a tall mountain ash descending slowly before also bringing down a nearby balsam tottering unsteadily on its now-weakened roots. Trunks, branches, leaves and cones all fell in a muddle of directions and layers, tangled among one another like green-clad dancers collapsed on stage.
Still the fire moved. A weakened strand stumbled to the north, likely losing energy when faced with a 4-foot boulder defining one end of the splitting yard. Over rocks, into a gully, flames flickered along the ground, burning roots and consuming duff.
Eleven long days after our last campfire, neighbor Bob Lundsten took his small fishing boat onto Lake Superior and saw a heavy blackened column. He sped across the water to investigate, but the smoke, probably from the flash torching of a birch’s outer bark, quickly disappeared and he relaxed. Heavy surf kept him from fishing for several days before he was able to put his boat in the lake once again. This time as he passed our land, he saw flames flickering on the ground. Knowing then that something was wrong, he sped to his car and hurried to the nearest phone to raise alarm. He raced to our property and, still in his hip waders, stumbled through the woods to our campsite. Emerging from the trees, he froze at the sight of flames moving along a thick root under our storage shed, then cried out with relief when two men packing portable water tanks rounded the corner from the trail.
“Another 15 minutes,” they guessed, before the dry wooden walls of the shed would have caught fire. A fire official later assessed that, lacking pumping capacity to extinguish even a small flaming building, “the whole hillside would have burned.”
Government crews and local volunteer firefighters arrived with pumps and hose, and for five hours drew from the ancient waters of the lake. Before heading home, they organized daily inspections for the next week. That evening Bob phoned us and with disbelief we heard the story. Stunned by the enormity of the fire’s slow destructive force, we felt waves of grief tempered by amazement at the magnitude of what could have happened without the combination of luck and skill.
It was a week before we could set out to the Arrowhead; we were numbed by what we found. We wandered among fallen trees, blackened ground and ribbons of orange tape marking hot spots doused with special care. We marveled at the extraordinary respect the firefighters had brought to their work – our trail through the woods unsullied by their heavy equipment, lumber pulled loose from the shed stacked neatly nearby.
For two weeks we sawed, clipped, chopped and hauled using our small arsenal of hand tools. The first night I dreamed something terrible happened to my mother and I was responsible. The same night Tony dreamed a deer was dying on our porch. Sometimes we became so engaged in the sweat and muscle of our effort that we forgot what caused its necessity, only to feel a new jolt of grief and shock when we stood and glanced about.
Each day the area looked worse as sawing and organizing the jumble of fallen trees laid bare the black, dry and seemingly lifeless dirt beneath. Tony suggested we clip balsam boughs and spread them on the ground. It was a ridiculous notion, but we spent hours clipping away, rewarded by a bright green, though temporary, carpet. A week passed before either of us suggested building a campfire in the gathering cold of autumn.
Eventually our clean-up vacation ended. The knots in our stomachs remained, but hard work had loosened their grip. We began to talk of the future, to wonder aloud about building a cabin on the land where, sadly, the major work of site clearance was now complete.
Years later we read our journals chronicling our visits to the solitude of Lake Superior’s shores and found an entry written as we first carved out our campsite, decades earlier: “September 19, 1983. Carried down sand and gravel from the road to insert a barrier between fire-ring hearth and the surrounding humus soil, which scorches and even threatens to burn. We shall have to take care.”
Now more years have passed. Fireweed, raspberries and beds of tall grass were the first to fill our sadly barren ground; aspen, balsam and birch soon followed. We’ve built a roomy but rustic cabin. Without plumbing, we still dip water from the lake. Warmed by our own handcut logs, our new-found comfort permits extended winter visits to become regular events. In September ’09 heavy winds toppled hundreds of our tallest, healthiest trees, causing us once again to shake our heads in rue-filled wonder. Love of a wild place requires exercise of stewardship and acceptance of what one cannot control. The challenges and rewards continue.
Ruth Anne Olson is a retired educator who grew up on an Oregon dairy farm and has lived for 40 years in Minneapolis. She and her husband, Anthony Morley, first explored the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in 1975 and acquired their North Shore retreat in 1983.