A Prairie Journal ™
Spring-Summer 2009
A Good Burn
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It was the circling movement of the high-flying hawks that first caught my attention. There were a lot of them, and I recalled the collective name for a group of hawks: a “kettle.” The swirling, overhead mass of predators did summon up a remarkable resemblance to the convection patterns of the water boiling in the titanium pot for my coffee this morning. Then I became aware of the faint but not unpleasant acrid smell of smoke, like leaves burning, familiar to the nostrils of my childhood and even now summoning memories of a time long ago in a land far away. It was the faint tinge of smoke blowing across the trail that grew to a mist and then to a fog and sparked a similar growth in my understanding. By the time I saw the flames from the burning grass, I knew what was happening. The prairie was burning!
The arsonists were in plain view, their faces masked with scarves and bandanas making them seem like pyrophilic bank robbers, their drip cans leaving a trail of liquid fire along the upwind edge of the grassland. The bright red of the flames reflected the color of the parked fire truck, which in turn conveyed the official approval of the municipality to the stewards of the prairie to continue the natural cycle of fire and renewal. I paused and leaned on my hiking poles to contemplate the scene.
Fire and smoke were reducing brittle stalks of vegetation to ash and char. A cycle as immemorial and repetitive as the prairie itself and upon which it depends for its survival. Death and ashes, rebirth and life, the cycle of spring and autumn, winter and summer. A dry and brown phoenix turning into fire and ash to arise newborn in the moist and green spring. The flames crackled as they spread fiery tongues among the carefully delineated segment of the prairie that the stewards had allotted for destructive renewal this year. “A good burn” cried one steward to the others, as he assessed the heat and the speed of the flames – enough to turn the prairie black but not enough to damage the thick bark of the few oaks that had endured and survived this process before.
These repetitive fires may have at one time been generated by natural lightening strikes, but they had been continued and formalized by the Native Americans who drove their bison prey before the fire and smoke to their deaths by awaiting hunters or over convenient cliffs, sustaining mankind in his own cycle of fire, death, life and rebirth. A fiery ritual so formalized that now the very existence of the prairie depended on it. I gazed at the pattern of the flames and saw again the recalled images of my childhood in the memory of the turf fire flames of my familial hearth.
It happened so suddenly that at first I did not realize what was going on. I had forgotten the hawks and why they, like me, were so attracted to the burning prairie. A hawk dropped from its lofty spy-circle, so fast that I hardly saw it until the hunter resolved itself into a mass of struggling feathers on the ground, a kettle boiling upon the fire of the prairie, emerging in seconds with its prey grasped in hooked claws. I could see the snake still wiggling and struggling in its fruitless efforts to escape as the raptor disappeared on slow and steady, majestic wing beats. The prairie burn had brought a more immediate cycle of death and survival than the slower cycle of my reflective year.
The burn had provided good feeding for the hawks. The necessary destruction of dried and brittle stalks had suddenly and calamitously deprived the snake of his needed cover from the prying eyes of the hawk, his useless camouflage exposed against a black and burnt background. Nature “red in tooth and claw” had worked its own drama in one act.
I turned my back to the smoke and hiked on. Had anyone considered the fate of the snake before burning the prairie? The municipality of the good citizens had considered the annual perfusion of the prairie wildflowers when they signed the “Permission to Burn” request by the stewards. Had the stewards been aware of the danger to the snake as they dripped their line of fire across the dry brush? How fast can a snake move? How fast does the flame need to spread to ensure a good burn? Do the calculations of humidity and wind speed that drive the decision to burn also consider the reaction time of a cold-blooded snake? The hawks knew the answer. The kettle was already boiling for the elegant repast that the good burn would provide. Dinner was served.
How can we resolve these conflicts of rights? The right of the prairie to sustain and renew itself by fire? The right of the snake to the cover necessary to hide himself? The right of the hawk to feed itself and its young? The interjection of the Promethean prairie stewards into the circle of nature with their dripping fire cans – by whose authority? By what balance do we measure our interference in the affairs of nature?
The slaughter of animals so that trophy hunters can create “objects of art” would not, I believe, be approved by anyone who believes that nature is entitled to our respect. But what of other similar actions, such as fly-fishing, to name one? The fisherman sees it as a contest of skill against the instincts of the fish. By what scale, though, is the pain to the fish balanced against the angler’s pleasure of the catch? Even if the fish is released, do we blithely balance the scale by claiming that the end justifies the means? By what scale should such life and death decisions be measured? And what of burning the prairie? Does the overall good balance the inevitable pain and death?
I don’t know what caused me to look down at the trailside ground cover of brown and dried grass, but I noticed a difference in the pattern of the colors. It was another snake nestled unmoving in the duff. I don’t have a good eye for picking out a concealed creature, so I can’t tell what drew me to the obscure, coiled snake. There was something hauntingly familiar, though, in the twists of its herpetic form that struck an echo in my memory.
As I walked and thought about it, I realized that the curled snake reminded me of the coiled spirals that the ancient Celtic people of my homeland used to engrave on the stones of their burial places, These ancient symbols have been reproduced and elaborated into the interlocking and interweaving forms of the “headless snakes” of Celtic artworks that Medieval monks used to decorate their manuscripts, achieving its highest form in the Book of Kells. The endless interlocking twists of the knot were the symbolic Celtic expression of their belief that all things are intertwined – there is no end, nor beginning, no head and no tail, all things lead to all things, and every journey returns to its beginning. To a people who began their new year on the first night of November, who saw the coming of the dark of the dead winter as the promise of the coming light of renewed spring, everything is interdependent.
The fire that provides the cover that the snake relies on for his protection and life is the same fire that exposes him to the hawk and to his death. Man kills the thing he loves – and by doing so maintains its existence and his love for it.
It was a good burn.
Copyright 2009. John Barrett. All rights reserved.