Spinal Fire Scientia Est Potentia

Northern Fire
By John Kedrowski

A few years ago I was paddling slowly on a rather large lake at the end of the Fernberg trail. Snowbank lake looked like as if a god-sized ice cream scooper had served up some solid rock. It was big deep and round with none of the typical islands that usually dot BWCA lakes. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is strung like necklaces of blue green pearls all over the top of Minnesota and through the entire Canadian Shield. It was the fifth day of a seven day trip and we were paddling fast to get out of the woods.

It was an unseasonably hot day in June. In the shade the temperatures was a hundred degrees. The water near the surface of the lake was a tepid green bath. The rocks near the shore were striped with layers of displaced algae as the water in which it lived evaporated. Whitish gray, rocky outcroppings stuck above the green canopy of the layered forest like a crowd of balding pates. They baked in the sun becoming uncomfortable for bare feet.

I dipped my hand into the primordial warmth of the lake to wash a sun-bronzed hand and I happened to catch the reflection of the forest fire. It flared like a hungry red worm rolling over the northern shore of Snowbank Lake. For nearly the entire day we could see the thick black smoke rising into the sky, west of us. And even though it was miles off, those in our group consciously felt the presence of the fire. It hovered in our olfactory glands and wafted on the wind.

The US Forest Service gave specific directions to all BWCA campers should a fire overtake your group while on trail. Paddle out to the middle of a lake and wait it out, then portage when it had passed. When we finally got to the southwest shore of Snowbank and actually saw the fire burning across the lake. It was a penitent feeling, the weekneed awe we felt turned our insides to water.

The wind was gently puffing out of the northwest and it carried lazy hot ashflakes on its back. It covered our bulky green Duluth packs and created a gray pasty slurry in the bottom of our aluminum Grumman’s. Even from all of the way across the lake you could see the flash of a brutally dry balsam fir engulfed in flame.

A forest fire moves in an arc. It is like a gargantuan flaming orange worm rolling lengthwise crushing everything underneath. As the fire worm rolled by, it touched the greenish Christmas tree and seemed to light all of its brown, water deprived, needles all at once. For a second there was an orange flash as the fire climbed to the top of the tree almost gleefully. It burned bright like wooden magnesium and then it glowed low and incandescent like a dying firework. The sound it made was an implosive whoosh. You felt it more then heard it.

We neared shore. The Fernberg and safety was ahead. Resort owners stood on their docks. No doubt a client or two was packing their bags. They looked across the lake with a very Minnesotan gesture; hand hovered over the eyes to shield, back straight, and the other hand in the pocket. Some just shook their heads. If the fire jumped across the lake, they would lose their entire livelihoods. We knew there were fire crews over there. Their experience and dedication to fighting fires was renown in the Northlands. But that fire did not look as if it wanted to be stopped. No fire did. At the head of the arc, it moved and dodged here and there like a star football running back. In the back, it rolled like three hundred pound linebackers over computer geeks.

It would roll over us if it had the chance. There was an open corridor, between Moose lake and Snowbank that led right around to the populated side of the lake. The firefighters where building their fire lines there. You could hear the chainsaws whirring like giant mosquitoes. They felled trees like swords in a medieval battle. Every now and then an explosion echoed, like an artillery blast. A hundred yards of blasting line made quick fire lines.

We landed our canoes at a concrete slab boat landing. The scrabbling that followed to off load the gear temporarily stopped when the din of a C-130 became a roar. The giant plane, most likely scrambled one hundred miles away in Duluth, whooshed low and opened its bay. Thousands of gallons of water poured out ahead of the fire lines in pseudo-bombing run.

By that time the action was beginning to desensitize us. We stared dully at the escalating battle like refugees. Our scant summer clothing was wet and ash dirtied and our faces were streaked bronze in places the sweat had broken the gray pallor. I remember staring at the fire and thinking. How could this have started? Did someone let their campfire get out of control? There was supposed to be a fire ban. Did some careless smoker flick their cigarette butt into a pile of dry tinder? Hell the entire forest was dry tinder. Does it really matter?

Minnesotans do not normally show their emotions strongly. A headshake to them is like a shout for most. There was an old man watching us load up from a cabin dock that was only fifty yards away from the landing. There was no temperature that was too hot for him to take off his pants and flannel cap. He was a local tried and true, lived here all his life and by golly he was going to die here if you heard him tell it. Long years of sun had etched his face with wrinkles. Today, those wrinkles were canyons of fear.

*****

Living in Minnesota, one becomes accustomed to various natural disasters. Sure it is not as bad a Earth Quake Central in California, Tornado Alley in Oklahoma, or Hurricane Way in Florida, but I have seen my share of bad mid-western storms all the way back to my earliest recollections. When I was four, a class four tornado touched down and ripped apart our quiet little neighborhood in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I remember it as a big black snake the gods must have been trying to strangle in a greenish black fist. Its tail lashed on the ground turning houses into toothpicks and sucking the pavement right off the street. We saw a church roll down our street, tossed like a dice in a crap shoot, a real holy roller. My dad grabbed me and threw me in the cellar. They he layed on top of me and my baby brother, protecting us with his body should the house fall in.

That time, the tornado miraculously missed out house. Another time I was not so lucky.

On Lake of the Woods, my grandpa, a relative and me were having a phenomenal day of walleye fishing. The sky turned from a dull gray, to slate, and then to roiling green. I turned to my grandfather and asked if it was still safe to be out on the water and brilliant white lighting cut across the sky punctuating my question with an answer. In response, he fired up the motor and sped off over the big lake. We could see a wall of grayish white thrashing its way across the lake toward us and knew we would never make it back in time. It engulfed us and the water and hail beat as if trying to drive through the metal of our boat. The wind whipped up some eight foot waves that stood over our boat like great green frothy giants.

My grandpa was like a blind Captain Ahab though. The sixty-foot waves he braved on the Atlantic of the coast of Normandy prepared him well. Even when the water snatched his glasses right from his face, he was as calm as a summer pond with cicadas droning above it. He only asked a trembling boy to help him see. His bulk was reassuring in the chaos and I put aside my fear to help. Even when the waterspouts dropped and pirouetted around each other and threatened to sashay down with our boat, I only pointed to a sheltered lee of an island and held on to my grandpa’s thick arm.

And those are two experiences of many that I could share. Though I must say that most Minnesotans are not as foolhardy as myself. The point is that Minnesotans are used to hardship. In past winters we have seen storms drop three feet of snow and temperatures that drop past the point where the Celsius and Fahrenheit scale are equal, about minus forty four. (And that is without windchill) Minnesota is truly a land of extremes with its hundred and fifty degree extreme temperature spread from summer to winter.

Tornadoes, straight line winds, and damaging hail visit in the spring, summer, and fall like unruly relatives. Even the dreaded class five twister, with its three hundred mile an hour winds and mile wide base, has crashed through our locals. So, when we have a forest fire up in the Northlands, we Minnesotans are prepared for it. The U.S. Forest Service, the American Red Cross, and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources has on call units of fire fighters trained to delve into the wooden front, ready to put these terrible conflagrations where ever they appear in Minnesota.

The Great Hinkley Fire in the 1890’s taught us a lesson that cost over four hundred lives. In those days, Hinkley, on the border of the northern pine biome and the big hardwoods to the south, was a central logging community. The summer it occurred was hot and dry, one of the driest on record. It was said that you could walk over the baked soil and watch the puffs of gray dust form a choking cloud around your feet.

The Native Americans in the area warned the settlers of the fires that they knew swept through the area in conditions like these. For generations, when things got this dry, they packed up their teepees and moved. This was not possible for the settlers though. Their homes were of a more permanent nature. They had “private property” a concept that the “dirty redskins” didn’t understand.

No one knows how the fire started, but when it caught the piles of brush and stripped branches left to rot in the clear cut scars… “it burned with all the power of Hell.” Creating its own windstorm with the intensity of its heat, like an Atlantic hurricane feeding itself, the fire became a malevolent entity. It burned across the land uncontrollably, a vivacious reminder of what happens when man meddles with nature. Forty men, women and children thought to run from the blaze and hide in a nearby pond, but the tinder dry summer air had sucked the moisture vampirishly leaving nothing but a crinkled up, muddy, cattail marsh. Uncaring and unfeeling, the fire burned vegetation and humanity. Fire does not discriminate.

Now, when you go to Hinkley, there is a museum that remembers this tragedy. And even with the passage of over a hundred years, that fire stands out in Minnesota history as one of its single most destructive events in terms of land destroyed and lives lost.

Could it happen again? As man encroaches into the northern forests, a definitive front is forming and sometimes the line between life and disaster is dangerously fuzzy.

*****

To answer the above question, one must first travel to the front itself and examine the environment itself. Despite the lush, thick forests or the Northlands, northern Minnesota is a relatively infertile place. Ten thousand years ago, the glaciers were in full retreat through this area. They covered the land they had worked so hard to pulverize and scrape clean with only a thin veneer of unconsolidated material. In geomorphology this soil is called till and it is like a not so well mixed stew of clay, sand and gravel: with a few boulders strewn into the mix like black olives dotting the top of a pizza.

In this dirt grows the forests that are so important to the entire tourism industry. Able to withstand the incredible temperature difference between summer and winter, the species here are some of the hardiest in the world. The pines thrive in this type of setting, setting up climax communities that produce individuals with trunks that are nearly five feet in diameter. These were the trees that were prized by the sawmills years ago for their long and straight wood as well as the soft and easily workable nature of it. Hundreds of years ago, before the coming of Europeans to the area, these great trees covered vast areas with their majestic heights.

Now, even in “wild” Northern Minnesota, that is nearly gone.

When you drive west out of Ely on the Echo Trail, the hand of man is readily apparent in the woods. Stands of white barked birch and aspen dominate many areas in thick swaths. In those areas, logging has removed most of the climax community species and allowed other, faster growing species to take their place. Many of these species are shrub like and leafy. They weave an almost impenetrable stunted mat in some places as they struggle for the limited light.

Stands of Jack pine are also extremely prevalent. This tree, not as valued by the loggers for its twisted and knotty wood, was left relatively untouched. Its thin branches are laden with hard waxy closed cones and lots of light is able to penetrate, giving shrubs and smaller trees like the paper birch and quaking aspen opportunities to grow.

Nature is not generous in this fashion, though. In this one example, the Jack Pines secret can be revealed just by walking among them. When you pull piece of bark off one of these trees, it is dry and crusty. It crumbles easily in the fingers and the pieces have an oily feel. Put the bark pieces to flame and it flares incandescently, like a tungsten light bulb.

This tree is a living torch.

It waits patiently, cordially inviting its neighbors to crowd around under it, building a pile of biomass for just the right conditions. When the air turns dry, the sap in these trees start to run and a naturally produced hydrocarbon is produced. That pine smell, that folk love to put in their candles to remind them of the north woods, is actually a highly flammable chemical derivative of kerosene. Some of these candles have even been known to actually burst into flames themselves! Imagine what the tree does!

Anyway, as the sap runs through the tree and evaporates in the leafy bark, it leaves the non-miscible flammable chemicals behind. Eventually, the older the tree gets and the longer the period without fire, enough of hydrocarbons have collected in the bark to actually cause the tree to explode into flames. When lightning does strike a fire, in a natural situation, the tree catches it like Ahmad Rashad on a game winning Hail Mary pass. It quickly passes it in a mercurial game of hot potato. The competitors, so graciously invited underneath the boughs of the Jack, soon catch from the intense heat and suddenly the entire stand is blazing like the end of the world.

This is known in forestry as a “Pyrophilic”, or “fire loving” event. As the fire rushes up the tar paper bark of the Jack pine, it drops the cones that dot its branches. These cones open in the heat and find themselves spreading their seeds in soil fertilized by all of the plants that were so recently invited. Meanwhile, the original Jack is relatively untouched. Its bark catches fire and burns so fast it is like dipping a finger in water and brushing it against a hot skillet. You hear a little sizzle but feel very little heat.

The north woods was constructed off of this method of propagation. Looking around, many other types of trees share this beautifully destructive quality. The paper birch, with its peeling feathery white bark is even a favorite among campers because of the wet or dry flammability of its bark and wood. Much of the same chemicals exist in it that exist in the pines. Even the majestic Red or Norway Pine has this same kind of flammable bark. In evolutionary terms, this kind of characteristic sharing means the trait is effective and will continue to be effective in the future.

What does this mean for the future of communities in the North woods? Is the seeker of solace and solitude in Nature putting themselves at risk? People homes and businesses are being built right underneath trees that would love nothing more then to explode into flames and humans, in there effort to preserve themselves are doing all they can to stave off this destruction. This is the nature of the silent conflict that occurs every summer in the North Woods.

*****

Ely, Minnesota, is one of the many communities that lives on the Northern front. If you look on a map, Minnesota Highway 1 and 169 form the top of a right triangle that pushes deep into the boreal forests like a thrust in a battle. The town of four thousand, quadruples in the summer, seething with pleasure seeking tourists and summer home owning folk escaping from the rigors of city life.

The metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul is only a six hour drive away, making it a good bet for a weekend getaway. Most of the lakes easily accessible from the road, not in BWCA wilderness, are dotted with wooden lots, large multi-roomed log cabins with giant bay windows, and huge mortgage payments. Lake side land prices, even in a place remote like Ely approach the lofty ranges only afforded by the rich who used to only live around famed Gull Lake Chain in Brainerd. There is a lot of money in the Ely area and it is growing exponentially every day from the commerce created by its very earthy tangible beauty.

I remember walking the main drag in Ely, as I had done for the past six summers that I lived up there. I worked at a summer camp that helped families with excursions into this paradise, because I have always been interested in educating other to the beauty of Nature that so entrances me. The sun was high in the sky and a few cotton ball clouds floated in the air forming and reforming in the dry air currents.

Outfitters, cafes, pubs, bait shops, restaurants, and novelty stores line the main streets off of MN Highway 169 for a few blocks. They provide a buffer for the quiet neighborhoods that exist under the shaded wooden lots in the towns interiors. The residents of the town claim they like it that way. It contains the out-of-towners like rats in maze that are content to stay close to the food pellets.

If you looked around and listened in this section of Ely, you would swear that everyone was Finnish. Talk of the sauna, pronounced Sou-na, is quite prevalent. Truth is, the people from Ely, besides those who already live here, come from everywhere; Finland, Germany, Poland, Sweden, even Kansas. The saunas are just convenient and fun places to socialize and get clean. In America, where traditions are borrowed from all peoples, even remote Ely, is not to different in that aspects.

In other aspects it is very different.

For instance if you look, right, down the street from the Chocolate Moose, the road leads to an old iron pit mine. Back in the hay days of the Iron Range, the Vermillion Iron Belt was very productive for the high grade ore it turned out. In fact, the entire rock unit exemplifies a unique nature of the town. It is a sedimentary rock unit that is shaped like a lens. What is strange about it is that it is surrounded by igneous rocks on all sides. One would have to ask then, what kind of depositional environment left that hunk of heavy rock there?

The answer is kind of a neat parable into the beginnings of Ely as a community. Nearly a billion years ago, when the atmosphere was young and un-oxygenated, a shallow sea covered this area. The only life in the area was a particular type of algae that used iron as a catalyst to fix carbon dioxide in a process designed to create energy for itself. The waste products, oxygen and the iron, were dissolved into the brine water. Eventually, as the sea grew more and more oxygenated, the oxygen molecules started to displace the iron molecules in the solution, causing those heavy suckers to precipitate out and fall to the bottom. The mud and iron mixture that covered the bottom of the sea became the much sought after hematite and magnetite. When the glaciers scoured over the area and took away any of the sandstones and limestones that might have survived from this ancient time, it bypassed this thick, heavy, dense rock lens because it was too heavy to scrape away. The only evidence now that we have that there even was a sea is the metamorphosed remnants of ancient lava pillows that surround this rock unit. This rock is the famous Ely Greenstone.

In a way this describes Ely well. It, also, is just too tough to “scrape” away. The residents of Ely will tell you to bring on the cold, bring on the heat. They love it. To them it is the wild essence of why they either lived here all their lives or escaped here from more “civilized” areas. Yes, Ely is a community that is hard to scrape away, but can it burn away? That was the essence of the question that I carried in my head as I headed into town on Wednesday afternoon day off.

My destination was the Northern Grounds. A pretty large, by northern Minnesota standards, coffee shop only a block down from Ely’s premier restaurant and tourist trap, Piragis outfitter and the Chocolate Moose. I was meeting an old friend that I had met years ago as a boy scout at Charles L. Sommers High Adventure base. He was a Frenchman named Claude Latreaux, and the ex-boy scout guide had now metamorphosed into a back country fire fighter.

Now, I didn’t need Claude to tell me that in the recent past forest fires had threatened Ely and its surrounding communities. Hell, I could tell just by looking on the drive up highway 169 to Ely. About twenty miles south of Ely is a pair small towns called Tower and Soudan. They are just east off of huge, rocky, island dotted, Lake Vermilion. Both of them are quiet towns, nestled in the arms of the North Woods, like two lost sleeping children. It is also one of the ore communities that is hard to scrape away. In fact, the deepest pit mine in Minnesota exists in Soudan. It was dug deep in the side of a hill and some of the highest iron content ore in the state came out of that mine. There is still plenty ore down there too, except the cost of mining that high grade, deep, ore is just too expensive when low grade taconite can be plucked off the surface with bulldozers. Too bad this method leaves nasty looking scars in the earth that coagulate with water and finally scab over into lakes.

Even in the North Woods, the decadent philosophy of the “Easiest Means To An End” is followed. An Indian Reservation rests on Pike Bay, just outside of town, just as it did in the Range days. Except that now a rather large casino replaces some of the lost business the ore used to bring. Whether this, too, is just another “Easiest Means To An End” is another story though.

Anyway, traveling a short way out of town one begins to see swaths of open areas overgrown with green bushy primary succession shrubs. Old burned out aspen trunks stick above this green morass like the blackened grasping fingers of burned corpses. They are sparse though, like a pre-pubescent boy’s stubble. Only the largest trees’ trunks survived this blaze.

In the early 1990’s the Tower fire burned something like thirty thousand acres. Smoke from it could be seen on the horizon as far south as St. Cloud, almost two hundred a fifty miles away. The fire burned through residential areas and wild areas alike. It gobbled up houses just as easily as it did trees. All in all, nearly thirty homes were destroyed and more then twice that threatened. The Tower Fire is considered a “special case” in Minnesota fire history because it actually closed the highway between Ely and it. This left only Highway 1 as the sole exit from the community.

Take this fire in half of its magnitude and place it diagonally twenty miles north, and it easily blocks both exits out of Ely.

When you talk to someone like Claude Latreaux, though, he would tell you that his job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Claude is a full fledged warrior in the battle of Ely against the North Woods. He is muscularly thin at thirty five, with a medium build, and calculating blue eyes. Long, shoulder blade length, black hair streaked with gray is tied back with a leather cord to rest between his shoulders. A bluff featured face sports a quick smile and sailor’s tongue.

We met at the coffee shop and sat down in the outside gazebo with a couple of tall malty Mooseheads (go figure, beer at a coffee shop? It is Ely after all). A pair of Carhart canvas pants was cinched around his waist with a piece of thick rope and a white Fruit of the Loom tank top was tucked under a flannel shirt tied around his waist. His heavy boots clunked loudly as he walked up with both of our beers. We talked for a while about old times, then moved on to new times. The sun drifted slowly through the blue sky as we spoke. Another round of Mooseheads found their way in front of us, courtesy of me. Finally we found our way back to our conversation topic.

“I got your phone call and I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to you about this,” Claude said. His voice was a thick rolling bass that was sprinkled with a little French lilt like a lightly seasoned soup. It reminded me of the Voyageurs that made this area famous with its fur trade hundreds of years ago. I remembered the substance of our phone conversation a week ago in which I asked him to outline the fire danger in Ely for me. He told me that unless I had a few hours, we better meet on my day off, hence my trip into town from my wonderful, but poorly paid, camp job.

“Why’s that, Claude?” I asked innocently.

“Because I knew you as a kid and even then you were too smart for your own good. Now you’re a full fledged college boy and you’ll probably have one of your college boy scientific explanations for this fire shit. Well I tell you what, there are a lot of scientists who say a lot of things about it and If they would just pull their posteriors off their heads for a second and look at it from our (the firefighters) perspective, they would see something completely different.”

“I skipped most of classes in Head up the Ass 101, Claude, its probably safe to talk to me.”

“We’ll just have to see about that,” Claude joked and chuckled richly. Then his smile faded and his blue eyes froze with seriousness. “Sometimes, these up and up folks from the universities really don’t know what their doing. I tell you what, by putting out every little fire in the area, all we are doing is making it possible for an even bigger fire to sweep through the same area.”

“Is it because of the brush and the thickets that are growing non-stop under the jacks and reds?” I asked.

“You damned right. All we got now are these groves of stunted balsams, aspens, and birch. It screams one word to me, kindling. Hey John, you remember building campfires as a Boy scout?”

“I thought I was asking the questions here,” I said with a half smile, but then I nodded my head in affirmation. I remembered sitting with a camp counselor and my dad in a nice wide open clearing studiously enamored in a lesson on teepee, log cabin, and lean two style campfires. A tungsten filament went off in my head and I bit onto Claude’s analogy like a hungry bass. “The jacks and reds bark is the tinder, the brush is the kindling, and the trees themselves are the fuel.”

“Well, it’s a pretty good formula,” Claude remarked, “and for the last fifty years, all we’ve been doing is stoking a bonfire. You’ve got these rich people on the lakes, living their escapist dreams and none of them take the time to cut the brush away from their houses. Might as well pour gas on it and flick the match, because that dry stuff really likes to go.”

“So, would you say there is more danger in these residential areas because of this tendency?” I asked.

“Its not really a question on increased danger, John. The risk is the same everywhere after fifty years of fire suppression. This area likes to burn. It needs to burn. The jacks and reds and birches all need fire to reproduce. And each year, we put out countless little fires that would fix this need. Well, every year that goes buy that fire doesn’t touch this area, the danger gets greater and greater.”

“So what your saying is that whether a guy has his yard full of brush or if the wilderness chock full of kindling, it doesn’t really matter. The public cannot abide having any part of its pristine wilderness areas burn even though it may be good for it.”

“Head up the Ass I tell you,” Claude said, draining the last of his golden brown brew. Then he smiled brightly toothily and said, “I get paid to put out fires only to create opportunities for new fires. Hey, at least my job will always be in demand.”

*****

In Minnesota, this type of scenario is nothing new. Humans against Nature, against the wisdom of science, for the ultimate purpose of making a few dollars. And for the most part, Nature is readily compliant with this. She lets herself be pushed around and bent in certain ways, but, always she is there and sometimes her reminders are quite poignant, not to mention violent. What we so often fail to understand is that when we push in one area, she pulls in another. We seem to be making headway only to discover that in fact we are the losers.

A perfect example of this is the Red River of the North, which flows north out of Lake Traverse Impoundment. It goes through the Fargo Moorhead area, passed the North Dakotan city of Grand Forks and its eastern neighbor, and finally into Canada. In many ways, this river mimics the great Mississippi farther down south, except that this river flows north and that adds additional problems.

The first thing that you notice when you drive through this area is the extreme flatness of the region. Glacial Lake Agassiz did much to level the field with its huge lake bed at the end of the last glaciation thousands of years ago, but as you near the river the old shorelines disappear and the flatness is of a more fluvial nature. It is a flood plain, in some places twenty miles wide.

Now, before we get into the direct natural confrontation that occurred, I want the reader to imagine something. Picture in your mind a river that has swelled its banks and flooded a miles worth of land on either side. Now picture five miles of flood. Ten. To even attempt to imagine twenty, one would be imagining enough water to bring Noah to mind.

Now, think about how heavy water is. One liter of water weighs one kilogram, or about two and a quarter pounds for people not handy with the metric system. So, one thousand liters of water fit into one cubic meter of space. This much water then weighs more then a car, or about two thousand two hundred pounds. There are about one million square meters per square kilometer (which is a little over a half mile squared). If water stacked up a meter deep over just one square kilometer the weight of that water would be about two billion two hundred millions pounds. And that is only one square kilometer! Imagine if ten flooded. Twenty? How about a hundred?

Well, a few years back, after a particularly heavy snow season, a spring thaw sprang upon the region like turning on a light switch. The multiple feet of snow on the ground melted and the ice took off down the river like flume logs. Lake Traverse Reservoir filled like a catch pan under a waterfall and the Army Corps of Engineers’ was forced to either open the dam or have it washed away in the rising flood.

This was only one problem in a list of problems though and all of them added to create a deadly stew. Water draining from the rest of the valley had already raised the level of the river to way past flood stage and the ice had piled so thickly in the North, where the river remained frozen, that it had effectively dammed it. When the Corps opened the gates of the Dam, they not only broke the camels back, they washed it away be releasing a nearly forty foot high wall of water!

Almost a thousand square kilometers flooded the Red River valley. This was enough water for the federal government to declare the area a disaster area. Hydrologists normally use phrases like “Twenty year flood” “Fifty year flood” and “Hundred year flood” to describe the statistical frequency of those events. The larger the number, the less frequent the vent happens and the worse the event is. Well the scientists called this was a “Five Hundred Year Flood!” The Army Corp of Engineers never expected this much water to come down the Red. Their “control” structures were more designed for the twenty year flood. They had no choice when they opened the dam. It was either that or let it wash out and have the entire hundred thousand acres of Lake Traverse crash down the populace also.

Communities up and down the Red were evacuated. Thousands of homes were destroyed, and billions of dollars in damage was done in this very elemental battle against nature. I remember it well, for in this instance, I was a soldier in the battle. I remember standing on a street in East Grand Forks, looking up a thirty foot dyke and watching water lap over the edge. I found myself thinking, as I was passing a sand bag, “my god, there is thirty feet of water above me waiting to crash down on my head!”

Defense plans for the city were simple. Sandbag the dykes higher, protect the bridges, and keep the small creek within its banks. All three of those places were weak points because of the lowering done on the dykes and all three of the points would be assaulted in this battle.

Mother Nature was laying siege to this city in a very medieval sense. The river piled up against the dykes like an army at the city walls. Nature even had her own tunnel diggers. The ground was super saturated and the sewer systems full of melt water that had seeped in. As the water rose more pushed its way into the underground aquifer causing the sewers to actually flow backwards. Brown fountains of raw sewage began to bubble in every floor level drain in the town. Soon basements overflowed onto the streets and carried an ungodly stench through the city.

Later that day, the national guard had us sandbagging near a bridge. Just as we finished and they were cheering us on for our good work, I heard something that sounded like an explosion. There was constant roar, like 747 passing over a house and people were shouting. I ran down the top of the dyke with some other volunteers and found myself staring at what is known in Louisiana as a “Cravasse.” The water had broken through the sandbag wall and through the dyke in a roaring jet. Ninety pound sandbars were being thrown by the water as if they were feathers.

The city was lost and retreat was in full, evacuation of the entire flood plain was called.

I drove home after that, because there was nothing left for me to do. Watching the rest on the television, I saw the downtown area, flooded up to its second story. Fires passed from building to building like a true sacking. People watched sullenly as their homes and livelihoods went under. I started to think to myself, for all of the money that we spent, all of the defenses that were constructed, all we did was make this flood worse. The dykes channeled the river’s flow and piled it up instead of letting it spread out. This increased its destructive power at least a thousand fold for instead of having a foot or two of water, we had forty. With water being the great equalizer, as in it always seeking to find the lowest level, was it wise to build those dykes to thirty feet and pile that much of it up?

The same can be said for fire suppression. Should we let these forest fires burn? Are we just tempting Mother Nature to throw one of her curveball “five hundred year” events at us? Unfortunately, on the Ely front, Nature has already played her cards on this issue and the stakes have definitely been raised.

*****

Very purposefully, on my part as the writer, I have left most of the dates in describing these events. This is because I wanted to portray the nature of these extreme phenomenon that change the shape of our world. You see, change usually creeps along like a slug over an infinite stair case. When it gets to the end of the stair, it plummets quickly and then returns to the speed it was moving before, though its direction may have changed.

In a way, it is very evolutionary, in the biological and physical sense. These seeming disasters, when one steps back and looks as the billions of years of geologic time, can almost be seen as an infinite staircase, with infinite steps to change the direction of the slug. By leaving out the dates I wanted to portray the constancy of such events. They have always happened and they will always continue to happen, which is something that humans tend to quickly forget.

For instance, people who build on the slopes of a volcano are not thinking that sometime in the future two thousand degree lava will pour out of the mountain and bury the house that they just built. They are thinking about what a wonderful view living on the volcano provides. There are also people who build their houses in mountain canyons where dry streambeds stretch from wall to wall, are not thinking that someday that bed will carry that much water. They too, are concerned with the view.

Just as in Ely. The people did not build their houses there with the thoughts in there mind that sometime in the future, this will all burn away. They built up there in the beautiful North Woods for the environment. The risks involved, far outweigh the benefits received and in this way, the natural aesthetic part of me agrees.

The part that disagrees with me, no matter how much I would like it not too, kind of like bad indigestion, is the impact of society my decision will cause people. When my house is flooded out because I built on a flood plain, is it fair for others to pay, in the form of insurance premiums, for my decision to built there? If you answer yes, put this in terms of smoking. Is it fair that my money supports those who choose to smoke cigarettes even though the danger to life and limb is well publicized? Both issues operate with the same philosophy, except that now the danger of the risk is disregarded entirely because the consequences never truly are paid in full.

Society pays for a lack of foresight and the people have become comfortable and sleepy with it. They will not be prepared when the wild animal crawls into their beds.

*****

A rather large black mark against any conflict with Nature is the fact that Nature has nearly infinite time and it could be said, infinite patience. Mother Nature can wait for that pot of stew to stir and for exactly the right conditions to come bubbling to the surface (and sometimes, inadvertently, humans themselves stir the pot and the results are like a kid playing with matches). When this happens, incidents that seem improbable in their violence occur.

This summer, for instance, like many of the summers in the past, I worked at a rather wonderful family camp on the shores of Burntside lake, about sixteen miles northwest of Ely. The day was July fourth and I was anticipated the fireworks of that day. The air is so clear up there that you can see them from a rocky point in camp, looking over the lake. Unfortunately, when I woke up though, the skies were leaden, heavy, and gray.

It was early and I could already feel the humidity. In my morning martial arts class, a normally brisk workout, turned sweaty and sticky as if someone had dumped buckets of water on our heads. The day progressed through breakfast and became unspeakably hot. It was the first day of formal camp for the families and we had to go over equipment procedures in the afternoon.

My boss asked me if I would like to do the kayak and I said, sure, what the hell. It would be nice to strip down to my swim suit and splash around. I grabbed the smallest kayak. It was built for one person, fat, and green. We called it the pickle because it was exactly what it looked like.

Once in the pickle, I paddled down the shoreline to the other beach. I professionally did the demo with my normal pedagogic flair and paddled the pickle back to the kayak rack. That was when I noticed the thick black clouds descending from the west. Roiling and slightly green, they reflected upward in the mirror still lake. It was a beautiful and somewhat terrifying sight. I felt that penitent feeling again. The kayak clunked against the shore nervelessly. A chill wind rippled the water and my skin, temporarily cutting the stifling humidity. I’m really going to be in a pickle if I don’t get the hell off the water soon, I thought to myself.

I ran back to the staff lodging for a meeting where we would plan the week. I was walking down a hard packed dirt road, when those green clouds rolled horizontally through the sky like a lightning filled steam roller. The first blast of wind that struck, tore at my clothes and nearly knocked me from my feet. Crashes in the forest told me that trees had been snapped like twigs. And from the volume of the thuds, some of them were big.

Running now, my penitence turning to straight out fear, I bounded down the road, with the force of adrenaline pumping my legs for me. A big fat aspen creaked and turned into splinters about twenty feet up. The top crashed the road in front of me about twenty feet ahead. It had barely stopped rolling before I jumped over it and turned the corner up the trail to the staff house.

The sounds of trees snapping and crashing filled the whooshing air like large cymbals in an orchestra. Behind me, an entire field of dominoes was falling and I was an ant running for my life. I reached the door to the staff cabin basement and I realized that I had ran right under a tree that was in the process of falling. Some of my fellow staff members were huddled around a candle, looking frighteningly calm. My fear stalled mind broke open like an egg left in the sun for too long.

“Oh my god, the people…” I said.

“You are not going back out there are you?” one of the staff said, her voice resolved with steel to stop me if I said yes.

“Of course not,” I snapped, somewhat irritated, “If I go down, that’s one less hand we’ve got to help out when this thing blows over.”

I walked over to the window, to make myself stop from pacing. Nerves were raw enough without me honing my agitation on them. More trees went down in the forest and howling of the wind increased. I could only stand in awe as Nature dismantled the forest outside.

*****

In camp, trees had stacked themselves in places, that the piles stood twenty feet high. Sixteen miles of the road to Ely was blocked and had to be cut free, so our camp sent out a work crew complete with strong backs and chainsaws. All of us were surprised and extremely grateful, for no one had been seriously hurt by the flying debris even though there were nearly two hundred people condensed into this one area.

The power was out and the whir of a gasoline generator saved all of the food in the dining hall refrigerators from spoiling. I armed myself with a spray can and a team of people as we criss-crossed the woods, marking trees near trails that were ready to come down at the slightest provocation. The loggers of old called these “Widow Makers” for obvious reasons.

Later that day, the road broke open and a flood of information poured in. None of us was prepared to hear it. Mother Nature plopped herself down in the North Woods and made herself a snow angel. When she left, three hundred thousand acres of trees were flattened in a swath that began at Burntside lake and ended somewhere out in Lake Superior. Reports all of the way from Isle Royale National park trickled in reporting of down trees and blocked trails.

Over twenty people were evacuated by helicopter or float plane with serious injuries in the BWCA. Falling trees had crushed tents, canoes, legs and arms alike. Miraculously though, no one was killed. My limbs ached and an old back injury throbbed dully thanks to a few Aleve. A few of us die harders in camp were determined to go and see the fireworks in Ely. The town, knowing the show must go on, had put out word that the fireworks would be launched in the park by the old mine pit.

In the car, I witness tree after tree fallen across power lines. Swaths of trees were down in the forest like giant footprints in stiff grass. I found myself thinking of chaos and all of the small things that can happen. Small things that turn into big things later. Storms like these, were they intensified by global warming or did the proverbial butterfly just flap its wings in India? I wanted to know why? I wanted to know what now?

Our group met at the top of a big hill in Ely at the house of our wonderful forty plus year old local camp counselor. Larry Houghton is a large, jovial man. Muscularly built with a clean shaven head to hide male pattern baldness, he resembled so many of the rocky knobs in the forest that hadn’t even shuddered in that storm. I gravitated toward that strength. In my mind fallen trees were everywhere and their snapped off trunks still quivered with remembrance.

Earthy and wise, he patted me on the back brushing off the gathering mosquitoes as the first firework exploded into a falling flaming flower. It thundered in the air and everyone flinched. In the distance, Nature echoed. Lightning arched through the sky with an accompanying boom. The product of the violent mixing that had occurred.

“You did well, John. We all did. Now just relax,” Larry said with a smile. His voice still carried a Kansas twang. Six years of good living in the North Woods had not stripped him of his roots.

“I can’t,” I whispered. Lightning was going off in the distance, shattering the night sky at the same time the fireworks were flaring and booming in the night. Larry looked at me concerned. I explained, “Humans,” I pointed to the fireworks, “and Nature,” the lightning, “they are fighting. I don’t know why.”

“We push the frontier, John. Its what humans have always done. God does this to remind us to give Nature a little bit of elbow room,” Larry said, an orange fire flower flared in the sky and reflected in his glasses. It did not look sinister though. Somber? Did he already know?

“You know what’s going to happen when all of those trees dry out don’t you?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Larry replied.

Somber indeed.

We both knew the truth. In the forest that both of us loved so much, swaths of trees that love to catch fire were down over fifty years of fire suppressed brush. When they dried, things would get mighty hot around this place. Ely suddenly seemed precarious. The tension became precipitous. Mother Nature had just laid a three hundred thousand acre campfire.