13
WHAT I REMEMBER CLEARLY next is standing again in front of the painting of Gisborne at the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory. I have no trouble remembering back a few steps in order to explain how I got there. For a second time I had entered the lobby of the lab and again had found no one at the information desk, but by going down the equally empty hall I finally discovered an open door and was told in a somewhat dreamlike way that the two mathematicians were at a conference, in Ogden, Utah, as I remember, and the man who told me this sounded as if he were off somewhere else too. I was to discover later that being away at a conference is a basic characteristic of mathematicians wherever you find them. A lot of men have to have two places to work, one a very different place from the other. When you go into the Regional Headquarters of the Forest Service in Missoula looking for someone you need to see, you will often find that he has suddenly left to fight a forest fire in Idaho. In the Forest Service it seems as if somewhere in nature it is written, “Woe to that man who has only one place to work.” In fact, that seems to be a fairly general commandment and a fairly good one to follow.
Back in the empty lobby I noticed clearly for the first time a conference table, but I didn’t realize immediately that Laird and I would soon be occupying it for long periods of time. Then, recalling the painting of Gisborne, I went up the stairs to see it on the first landing, and to my surprise again Gisborne looked almost the way I thought he would, even though I was to be told later that Gisborne’s eyes had been blue instead of the brown the painter chose to paint them. But whoever painted and positioned him knew how in essence he should be represented—as an observer, and one who believed you weren’t alive unless you were one too. Appropriately, he is painted full-faced, looking straight at you and looking as if looking were his business: sharp face, sharp nose, and sharp eyes (whichever color), very concentrated and aware of his powers of concentration and of how much yours could be improved.
I was glad to spend some of this day with Gisborne and the painting. Gisborne through his death kept me connected with Mann Gulch and the job I should be doing; he could connect me with the main lines of early scientific knowledge about wildfires, since he was the most important pioneer in developing the science of fire behavior. Some of these early lines of knowledge should connect ahead with knowledge about fire spread that in part resulted from the Mann Gulch fire, and some of this expanding knowledge should help to lead me to the mathematicians who I hoped would return me to Mann Gulch with a modern and exact account of the Smokejumpers’ great tragedy. It would be enclosing the Mann Gulch fire in a circle of explanation.
I stood on the stair landing until I realized that the silence of the Fire Lab was being disturbed by footsteps coming down from the second floor. Actually, the footsteps and I were both glad to see each other at the landing. I was glad just then to see anybody, and, as it turned out, he was glad to see someone looking at Gisborne.
“I was a student of his,” he said as he passed me.
“No?” I said in the form of a question. The “No?” in the form of a question stood for a whole bunch of things I wasn’t able to utter offhand, like “You must be kidding,” “Have you time for a little talk with me?” “Don’t go away yet.” All he said to my “No” with a question mark was “Yes.”
So I met Arthur P. Brackebusch, who turned out to be not only a former student of Gisborne’s but a former director of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory. The universe only some of the time seems to be trying to prevent any discovery about it. In fact, the former director of the lab has always been gracious to me when I find him and besides I had caught him in a lull in life when he had a few moments to talk. He had been sick and had been advised to drop his full-time duties and retire to California, but not wanting to live in California he had hunted around until he found a doctor who told him California would be bad for his health. In Montana there are two kinds of doctors—those who tell you you should move to California for your health and those who tell you that you will die if you do; so Brackebusch didn’t have to hunt long to get the advice he wanted. He said he would be glad to talk to me the next morning, and when I warned him that after talking to someone about a story I would need still another session with him to say back to him what I thought we both had said, he replied that would be okay, he was sure I wouldn’t conflict with any medical advice he had received.
What follows, then, I said back to the former director of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory before I wrote it, and after I wrote it he read it. I am grateful.
It was natural enough that Brackebusch and I almost immediately started talking about Gisborne—he was what we had in common. To my admiration for the way Gisborne had died, I soon added a good deal of knowledge of his life. I even knew some things about Gisborne that Brackebusch didn’t know, things coming chiefly from Jansson’s private insurance report on Gisborne’s death, which included his last thirty-seven “rest stops.” Gisborne was such a striking personality that we couldn’t help being carried off into the colorful corners of his life, but Brackebusch understood, really without my telling him, that Gisborne and the science he had developed belonged in this story primarily because of the light they might shed on the Mann Gulch fire.
Although Gisborne became a model of the scientific observer and speculator at work in the woods, there was nearly always some very practical end to his scientific speculations. Ultimately, most of his projects aimed to save from fire as many board feet of lumber as possible. More specifically, most of his projects, directly or indirectly, were designed to predict the behavior of forest fires even before they got started and certainly afterwards. Even more specifically, most of these were studies to predict the rate of fire spread and its intensity measured in Btu’s.
Insofar as a date can be assigned to a beginning of a science, 1922 is generally taken as the beginning of the modern scientific study of fire behavior, for it was then that Harry Gisborne was appointed forest examiner at an annual salary of $1,920 and assigned to the Priest River Experiment Station in northern Idaho as its director. The reasons leading to the Forest Service’s establishment of this great experiment station clearly point out the aims and directions of early Forest Service research, directions which would never have led Gisborne to his death in Mann Gulch. The station was located on a piece of land near Priest River because all the major trees of the Northwest grew on it and in roughly the same proportions as on representative Northwest logging land, and because in addition it included burned-over areas upon which experimental trees could be planted, in other words, because it would make a fine tree nursery and because up to this time the major, almost the sole, field of governmental forestry research had been silviculture—in fact, research in the early Forest Service was located in what was called the Department of Silvics. That was the name of the game then, and perhaps oddly the fire year of all fire years, 1910, did less to promote the awaiting science of fire behavior than to intensify the traditional search for better varieties of trees to reforest a burned-over area large enough to make it eligible for statehood.
But when Gisborne came to Priest River, he was far more interested in climbing the “Weather Tree” than in planting seedlings in the nursery, an interest signifying a coming change in the direction of Forest Service research toward what was to be called the science of fire behavior. The “Weather Tree” was a 150-foot larch, limbed near the top, with platforms on the way up which could be reached by steel hand- spikes. As one of his scientific friends said, Gis just loved to shinny up that tree, and only doctor’s orders finally stopped him, not even handspikes pulling out as the tree started to rot. On the way to the top Gisborne was interested in the behavior of the wind at different elevations and in different densities of branches. At the top were a recording anemometer, a wind vane, and a sunshine-duration transmitter, all wired to an old battery in the office, there being no electricity as yet at the station. With this primitive equipment, Gisborne was pursuing one of his major scientific a
ims—predicting the behavior of a forest fire. This pursuit resulted in what has become one of the most practically useful contributions to the study of fire control, the National Fire Danger Rating System, first put into operation in 1934. To keep this system in mind will help to lead us from Gisborne and the early science of fire behavior to the modern mathematicians and their fuel models and then back again to Mann Gulch.
A simplified expression of the results of this very complicated system can often be seen when one enters a National Forest. There on the roadside will be a big Forest Service sign giving the motorist the latest score on fire danger. The one on my roadside reads FIRE DANGER RATING on the top line and TODAY! on the bottom. In between goes a removable sign that a Forest Service guard is supposed to change according to fire conditions ranging from EXTREME, HIGH, MODERATE, LOW, and so on, presumably to NONE. But near my cabin for some reason or other the fire danger never gets lower than MODERATE and in August gets stuck on HIGH for days at a time, presumably because the Forest Service guard who is supposed to change it once in a while gets stuck on an emergency fire crew, and I have never seen it on LOW. Another ultimately simplified expression of this complicated system was used earlier in this story when it was said that on the day the Mann Gulch fire “blew,” the fire danger rating in Helena was 74 out of a possible 100. That is “Danger” and lots of it.
As we shall discover when we find our mathematicians, the Fire Danger Rating System continues to attract the attention of some of the finest scientists engaged in the study of fire. The practical uses to which it can be applied are constantly extended and the accuracy and significance of its results constantly improved, since the results depend upon the close observation of complicated fire factors—temperature, fuel, humidity, grade of slope, and wind velocity—followed by the quantification of them by computers. When we talk about quantifying fire factors with a computer, we are getting closer to the mathematicians we haven’t caught up with yet.
You can get some notion of the amount of scientific work needed to make the whole system function by trying to imagine the amount of study (and equipment) it took to make possible just the statement that “a fire burning on level ground (1 to 5 percent) will spread twice as fast when it reaches a 30 percent slope. The rate of speed will double again as the slope reaches 55 percent.” It sounds as though somewhere around there is a computer on the side of a wind tunnel.
Gisborne seemed always to take the opposite side of whatever side you just thought he was on. He liked the spectacular and showy as well as the practical, and even wore classy leather puttees in the woods. One of his many-colored interests that brought him to Mann Gulch was lightning, and lightning was the cause of Mann Gulch’s great fire. Gisborne liked lightning, as he liked crawling up tall trees to measure the wind, partly because he was a pioneer scientist and partly because he was flashy but partly because he was the son of a sawmill owner and wanted results that could be expressed in board feet. There had to be a childlike wonder in his interest in lightning and even in the difference between red and white lightning, but he was the one who more or less settled the question of whether it was red or white lightning which started forest fires; he settled it in favor of red. So even in this instance his overriding interest was knowledge that could predict the behavior of fires—in the case of lightning, careful observations which, when correlated mathematically, would let the lookouts and dispatchers know when to expect severe lightning storms and where in the mountains and at what time of day they would most likely strike.
Still another of Gisborne’s major interests was the development of machinery that would either improve the observation of fire conditions or correlate observations more accurately and rapidly into predictions as to what a fire would do. He liked machinery the way a sawmill operator does, knowing his life depends upon it, and he liked it with extra tenderness because to him a machine that worked was a work of art. He became especially interested in building a tunnel for burning fires under carefully controlled influences of wind, fuel, and other factors. Important as the Priest River Experiment Station was in the development of the study of fire, it had great shortcomings that Gisborne resented for limiting his investigations. His “Weather Tree” had its points and was even something of a sporting proposition, but it offered almost no opportunities to observe fire factors under controlled conditions. It is also likely that the increasing seriousness of his heart ailment made the development of a fire tunnel even more imperative. When he received doctor’s orders never to climb his “Weather Tree” again, he said, “What are you telling me? To quit?” Quit, of course, he never did. It is not even clear how closely he obeyed orders, but it is clear that before his death he had built a fire tunnel in the basement under his office at Regional Headquarters in the Federal Building in Missoula. The room had a separate chimney for dispelling smoke from his experimental fires. The great wind tunnels in the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory fulfill almost exactly Gisborne’s own requirements for a tunnel. When we finally found the mathematicians at home, there were two wind tunnels in their laboratory with computers on their sides to record instantly any change in a fire’s intensity and rate of spread. The whole setup is a lot fancier than Gisborne’s ever was, but it is certainly something he dreamed of. And he probably dreamed in a misty way of something like the great Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, which houses as just one of its projects the mathematicians and their study of mathematical models of fuels.
The Northern Forest Fire Laboratory was built in 1960. In fact, the three fire research laboratories of the Forest Service were authorized and built at approximately the same time and, appropriately, in three of the country’s greatest timber-producing regions: the South and East (in Macon, Georgia, 1959), the Northwest (in Missoula, Montana, 1960), and the Southwest (in Riverside, California, 1962). All three laboratories work on problems of national importance, but each also specializes in research problems particular to its region. So the lab serving the South and the East originally was to concentrate on problems pertaining to hardwoods; the lab in Missoula on problems connected with lightning fires and fires in rough terrain; and the lab in California on fires that explode in chaparral and semi-arid country, or, as it was then more elegantly phrased, in a “Mediterranean environment.”
The original aims of the research laboratories in California and Georgia have changed considerably through the years, but the two aims of the laboratory in Missoula remain basically the same—to study lightning fires and fires in rough terrain. These are two problems that Gisborne had made central to the study of fire behavior.
Brackebusch and other old foresters scientifically inclined believe that the death of Gisborne slowed down, at least in the short run, the advance of the science of fire behavior and the arrival of the three Forest Service research centers. In addition, the efforts of some of those in the Forest Service to bury the Mann Gulch fire in a lonely, unattended graveyard in a lonely canyon, and thus to subdue the good effects it might have had, for many years were fairly successful. Even nature seems to have supported the silence. After the burial of the Mann Gulch fire came a succession of what the Forest Service calls “good fire years,” years in which there were fewer than usual fires and fewer fatal fires having to be buried. For a time the forests themselves seemingly wished that nothing more be said about sad subjects, and the universe, having frightened even itself, seemingly participated in a conspiracy to conceal its own terror.
But sure enough, then came bad years. It may not be a fixed rule but it is certainly a convention of public tragedy that it must repeat itself if it is to make a cry loud enough for something good to come of it. As for tragedy, the universe likes encores to its catastrophes and does not have to be coaxed long to repeat them. The bad fire years were a little less than a decade in coming, the climax being in 1957. To make matters worse, California was hardest hit, and when California suffers, it takes politicians to cure it.
The three labs became a story and a fact, both at the
same time, because of a few politicians, two to be exact. In this respect, at least, politicians are like Smokejumpers—no fewer than two drop on a fire, and many bills are cosponsored. So it also seems in drama—two big characters are the basic minimum number. In fact, I once saw a play in which from beginning to end only two characters appeared onstage. Of course, they used the telephone a lot to talk to other characters offstage, but so do politicians.
In 1957, Richard B. Russell was senior senator from Georgia, which he had represented since 1933. Having been a member of the Senate for nearly a quarter of a century, he was one of its most influential members and a member of one of its most influential committees, the Appropriations Committee, which starts money off in the direction it is going to be spent. In fundamental ways government is as simple as determining where money is to be spent, and Georgia is a logging state with a lot of trees that can catch fire.
In 1957, Mike Mansfield had been a member of the Senate for five years after having served as a member of the House of Representatives from the 78th through the 82d Congress. Mansfield went on to become majority leader of the Senate, a position which he made into one of the most influential in the operation of our government and which he retained until his retirement from the Senate. After his retirement he was appointed ambassador to Japan by President Carter, a post he was later asked to retain by an administration bloodthirsty with Born Again Republicans. Few politicians in modern times have been more respected than the senator from Montana for their knowledge of our national government and for quiet, judicious exercise of power in influencing its direction.