Of People, Prairie Fires and Primeval Instincts

In Illinois on relatively calm spring days you often see rising pillars of smoke in the distance. These are prairie fires or controlled burns. Habitat restoration managers conduct burns to maintain the health of the prairie, which is composed of plants adapted to fire. Most prairie plants have deep root systems and regenerate even if the plant material above ground is burned.

Prairie fires either occurred naturally in the Great Plains of the United States or were set by nomadic people seeking to clear ground, chase game or throw a little heat at the enemy, whoever that might be.

People and fire go together, you see. Today I set my own little fire in the back yard of my father's house. He lives with a caregiver and it is my job to take care of the property. I don't always get time to groom the place properly and last year a former raised garden grew thick with grass and weeds. This spring I decided to clear it to the sod. But first I had to rid the ground of all that matted grass. So I raked and pulled until I formed a twenty-yard berm of dry, thin grasses. I knew these would burn quickly.

I lit one end and the fire started to spread. I kept fire breaks between each section to maintain control. The fire crawled along at an even rate for the most part. Smoke rose and I worried the police might pay me a visit for illegal burning.My fire was both a challenge to contain and a potential race against time if someone called me in for illegal burning. But it went fast. Orange flames chewed away at the thin grass. Pretty soon a black, smoking layer of ash covered the ground. I raked and prodded it back into flames. In all, the whole process took 15 minutes.

I know: In some respects this fire was not an environmentally friendly thing to do. But compared to the volume of flame and smoke I'd seen earlier that day emanating from the prairie down at Fermi Lab that covers 1000 acres and resulting in huge amounts of smoke and carbon pouring into the air, my little fire was nothing.

The macho next door neighbor found it amusing. He strolled over smoking a big fat cigar. "This is probably illegal," I said aloud. "Yup," he counseled. "So ya better hurry." Then he puffed his fat cigar and grinned. Welcome to America.

When it was all said and done, I saved a lot of stupid effort by burning those grasses. Stuffing landscape debris into bags to be carried off by a fuel-powered truck does not make much sense. Fortunately no one in the neighborhood called to complain about the smoke. Probably they knew I was just trying to get an out of control landscape under control.

But I could not help thinking about how that little fire attracted the neighbor with his cigar. This was a real bonding moment. I'd talked to him earlier and he was a little cool to my conversation, like I was prying into his business or something. But fire! Now that's a hot topic and amusing to watch. Plus I was showing some independent spirit by setting fire to the yard without the city's permission. All men seem to appreciate the libertarian spirit of playing with real fire. That's because most men know it could easily get out of control. Then things can get really interesting. So the neighbor was probably curious about how much I knew about fire, and secretly wondered whether it would burn down his fence. That did not happen. The wind was blowing away from his fence. Do you think I'm crazy?

I do recall a prairie fire--in fact a couple of them--that got out of control. Once during college our field biology class was asked to burn the campus prairie and a gust of wind threw the fire into a stand of pines planted by the college president. They went up like matchsticks.

I was also assigned to duty as a water sprayer at a prairie burn near my home in Illinois. My high school biology teacher and I watched the approaching fire with calm interest until it took a sudden turn and raced straight at us. "Get into the ditch!" he warned. So we dove into a wet culvert and the fire passed overhead, sucking air as it went. That same teacher died of a heart attack while conducting a prairie burn 10 years later. He fell dead in the path of an approaching fire and it burned right over him. At his funeral several close friends gathered and said of the incident, "How apropos. He died doing what he loved."

If you have never seen a prairie burn, let me describe it to you. The flames start small and turn the ground black in jagged lines. When fire reaches a section of prairie thick with grasses, flames shoot up and the air above them writhes from the heat. Light seems to bend above the prairie as heat and smoke and flames twirl and twist. If a prairie fire hits a dead tree in its path, flames will often shoot up inside the trunk and turn the tree into a giant cigarette. Sometimes the tree smokes and flames for days afterward.

Habitat restoration managers take peculiar pride in a "good burn," which leaves the landscape seemingly desolate and black. Prairie burns take out "bad" plants that are not adapted against fire. Trees such as bur oaks evolved thick, corky bark to enable them to withstand hot prairie fires. Prairie plants such as big and little bluestem, Indian grass and others willingly sacrifice their upper portions to throw charred nutrients back into the ground as fertilizer. A prairie fire often moves so quickly that spring ice at ground level does not even melt. I've seen it.

With this natural rhythm so strongly played out for millennia, and around the world, it is safe to say that people evolved along with fire. Predators (including humans) know that distressed animals can be found in advance of a prairie fire, and often in its lurch, too. The killing power of fire changes the predator and prey dynamic profoundly.

One can also imagine that this attraction, this idea that killing fire creates opportunity, was probably shared by competing troupes of early hominids. One can imagine two tribes standing at the edge of vast grassland after a prairie fire. Suddenly the two competing tribes see each other across the black ground. What strange visions this might have raised. Viewed through the heat of a waning, smoky fire, could other humans or early hominids have looked like ghosts or spirits?

It is reported that the Blackfeet Indians got their name after wandering across a burned prairie only to meet another tribe who mockingly bestowed the name upon them. Fire and all it wreaks is an unforgiving critic of ownership and expectations. I shared in that aggressive spirit of fire in some small way as I burned those grasses in my father's back yard. Our primeval instincts follow the twisting instincts of fire, hoping in some way to see some wild part of ourselves flickering into the sky.

Give some people a match and they discover the entire arc of human history.