“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”—Physicist Robert Oppenheimer quoting Hindu scripture on witnessing detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945.
During cool days of late summer, when I’m fairly confident the Illinois River will not rise appreciably for several weeks, I begin to gather driftwood that has accumulated on the Quiver Lake shoreline and stack it into piles. (Without doing this once in a while, the lakefront would eventually become nearly buried in debris from the flooding river.) Then in a few weeks, on a breezy, warmish day, after the wood has had a chance to dry out, I’ll light the piles, which quickly grow into infernos that make short work of the dry cottonwood branches.
Soon, enough heat has built up to light the larger logs. Once a deep core of intensely hot embers has been established, just about anything thrown onto the flames ignites without delay and is readily consumed. But manipulating the fire so that everything burns requires more than haphazardly heaving on branches and big logs. Even so, at this stage, it’s difficult even to get near the blaze to shift the direction of burning or add more wood in just the right place.
Woody debris floating toward our lakeshore during an
Illinois River flood.
Burning piles of driftwood at Quiver Lake, Mason Co., Illinois
The bonfires can get as large as I allow, conflagrations roaring four or five feet high before I stop adding fuel, lest the canopies of nearby trees ignite. And I’ve planned these fires with wide, clear buffers so the flames cannot spread, no matter how high they reach. These techniques I learned while leading controlled burns on woodlands and prairies, experiences I often reflect upon.
On warm fall days with a good breeze, I have seen prairie grasses like big bluestem light up like gasoline, flames moving across the landscape with the wind, easily reaching to my height, and advancing to a line of backfire that was earlier set burning against the wind; the two lines of moving flames eventually meet in a dramatic crescendo, but then quickly die, smoldering blackness in their wake.
One of those prairie fires stands out in my memory for a frightening reason: the local winds and topography combined in just the right set of conditions to produce a tall, swirling vortex of smoke and blowing embers; I watched helpless in awe as the tornadic column grew in height and intensity; then it began emitting a loud rumbling sound, very much like a freight train or jet engine, and flames started shooting upward within the vortex itself. Did I see the face of the Devil in those hideously beautiful rising flames? What have I unleashed? I asked myself. Of this monster, I had no control, but it was slowly moving toward the backfire, which had left behind a wide, blackened, burned-off area only minutes before. When the fire tornado moved over the black area it quickly died, just as if an invisible plug had been pulled. The beast vanquished.
Such elemental power in those flames, begun with a single match, controlled with pre-planning, and, once in motion, chaotic as any wildfire—for a short time at least. But these days that type of activity has been left far behind me, after retiring and then moving into town, leaving behind the small prairie that I planted and tended for two decades. I miss the excitement of those burns, but not the anxiety and midnight dreams of fires out of control. These days I prefer a tame fire pit in the back yard, burning twigs that fall from the few trees around our town lot.
The author and his wife conducting a controlled burn at
their former Mason County home.
A line of moving flames across the prairie.
At the same time, there is a commonality to all of these fires, no matter the size, something primitive: that of watching the motion of how, from the smallest leaf to the largest log, it is all consumed; feeling the heat of flames on cold days; feeding more fuel to keep it going, and scrounging up more when necessary; the sweet smell of wood smoke. For all of our technological advances, it is unlikely that the task of keeping a campfire burning has changed at all since someone once discovered that fire could be contained and made to serve a master. No other creature has learned to do this; it sets us apart as a species, very far apart, in fact.
We can place another piece of wood on a burning stack, travel the solar system, or blow up the world. Just what, I sometimes wonder, have we unleashed?
[Click on this link to see and learn about fire tornados.]