on the cover / By Malcolm Terence

Our Fire, Our Fight

A brutal burn season in Klamath country leaves locals grumbling at federal firefighting tactics

(Sept. 18, 2008)  I don’t think I’d ever seen Jim Bennett mad before this year’s fires came through his place. And Bennett is no stranger to fire. Before he retired in 1996, he’d worked 32 years as a fireman for the U.S. Forest Service on Salmon River. Fire had burned near his place in 1977. The canyon filled with brush and post-fire logging slash, then burned again in 1987. All this and Jim Bennett, the calmest man on the river, finally got angry after the out-of-town firefighters brought the latest fire down to his backyard this summer.

“The fire team isn’t here to put it out. They want to steer it around,” he grumbled. “They started the burnout at my place at the wrong time. Three o’clock on a hot afternoon is not a safe time in this drainage. They were in a hurry. They had a goal to get the line burned out up to Forks of Salmon by 1800.” (That’s 6 p.m. to ordinary clock-watchers.)

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He said the bad timing made the burnout ignition so hot that the fires breached a fireline at a water-filled ditch above his place and the crews backed down to save the structures in his small neighborhood. “They tell me, ‘You still have your house,’” he said contemptuously. It is not his usual style of speech.

Bennett is chief of the Salmon River Fire and Rescue and no stranger, he explains, to the use of fire to prevent a worse fire. His Karuk father and grandfather told him about how the Indians used to burn late in the fall until the US Forest Service banned the practice. He, himself, remembers how the cowboys used to light fires in the high country meadows when they brought down their herds of cattle in the late fall. “They all knew when to burn. When they stopped that burning, the high meadows became brushfields.”

Even before global warming ratcheted fire season up to June, when our big fires of ’77 and ’87 started late in the summer, the Salmon River community had a sort of love-hate attitude toward the out-of-town firefighters. We’ve loved the protection of our homes and resented the intentional backburning. Sometimes it is successful, and sometimes it triggers catastrophic failures.

I fought fire the first time with Bennett’s crew. First afternoon of the 1977 fires, he and two well-trained women were responding to a lightning strike down near the South Fork. I grabbed my shovel, a canteen and a hardhat, then followed them up the hill to the flames. You could do that in those days, even as an amateur.

The women glanced at me with amused smiles and started scraping fireline expertly while Bennett chainsawed fallen trees out of their path. Once I caught my breath and adjusted to the smoke, I realized that the crew worked with great aplomb, unflappable.

Midway through the ’77 fire, which was named the Hog Fire, I was getting a coffee break at the kitchen table of my landlady, Kate George. Nearly 70 years old, Kate was matriarch of the river in those days. Mid-cup, several Forest Service trucks pulled up on the county road and firefighters started piling out.

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