The Big Burn -- Teddy Roosevelt & The Fire That Saved America by Timothy Egan, HMH '09, $27, 342 pages, ISBN #0618968415. Index, source notes, no bibliography, grouping of b&w glossy images.
Since its publication in 1993, the gold standard for writing of natural disasters -- and especially firefighting -- has been Norman MacLean's expertly-crafted Young Men and Fire.
Until now. Timothy Egan, National Book Award winner for The Worst Hard Time, has turned in an instant classic, a chronicle of a 1910 perfect storm of fires in the Pacific Northwest whose devastation led to the creation of the National Forest Service. If you feel yourself gasping for breath in reading it, it's because Egan has transported you to the main street of tiny Wallace, Idaho, as you keep one eye on the incandescent blaze creeping towards you and the other on the train station, marking your family's only possible route away from annihilation.
Central to the action is Gifford Pinchot, a little-known environmentalist ahead of his time and intimate of Teddy Roosevelt, who named him the first head of the National Forest Service. Pinchot went on to serve two terms as governor of Pennsylvania. But in later life, when one addressed him as "Governor," he told them in all seriousness that he preferred the label "Forester."
The scope of Egan's book ranges from the 1910 Bitterroot Mountains fire, which swept through Idaho, Montana and Washington, to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Teddy Roosevelt became known as the "conservation president" for his purchase and preservation of millions of acres of Western land, FDR advanced the cause of conservation during the Great Depression, largely through the work of his Civilian Conservation Corps.
Some things time doesn't change, like the persistence of greed. While robber barons fought the preservation of national forests in 1910, wishing to use them for profit-generating clapboards and railroad ties, industrial interests followed the same impulse in the 1930s and even to the present day.
Early conservationists failed to realize the cleansing effect fire has on a forest ecosystem. In an impulse of man taming nature, they sought to eradicate forest fires, only to find themselves largely overwhelmed by forces larger than they. Egan describes graphically how early forest rangers emptied the jails, if necessary, to amass enough men to hose down buildings, dig trenches, and set "backfires," placing fire in the path of an advancing blaze to consume its fuel of tinder and, hopefully but not usually, stop the fire in its tracks.
Egan is at his best in profiling such players as Teddy Roosevelt and the memorable Gifford Pinchot, born to wealth, which let him pursue his passion for conservation. Movingly, the author describes Pinchot's engagement to Laura, the love of his life, only to lose her at 28 to tuberculosis. Yet, it seems, Gifford didn't really lose her. For the next 20 years, the man who would become governor of Pennsylvania spent every night with his beloved, conjuring up her vivid image, even marrying her in death, and she was his most trusted adviser, until one day when she simply faded from his view.
One wishes we'd see more of Pinchot, the father of the national forests, during the Bitteroot Mountain fires, which are recounted with a sense of chaos borne of nature overcoming man. Instead, Egan introduces his readers to a clutch of characters -- both heroes and villains -- who populated the boom towns of the Pacific Northwest. My favorite was Pinky Adair, a 20-something, gun-toting hustler who had learned to make her own way in a man's world.
Egan's writing sings, for the most part, yet every now and then he seems to be playing to the panel of judges overseeing next season's literary awards. That said, don't be surprised to see The Big Burn among them.
