An Essay

The Controlled Burn

From Nursery Lessons, Book One · Shane Michelli

In the spring of 1993 I rode to Forest Hill, Louisiana with two veteran nursery managers for a seminar and a day of visiting growers. The one driving had been born and raised up there, and since we were ahead of schedule he took us off the interstate and onto the back roads, which nobody objected to. Narrow, winding, pine on both sides. Somewhere past a sign telling us we were close, we came around a curve and the whole horizon was smoke.

Then a barricade. Then a single police car, one officer, nobody else.

I was the only person in the vehicle who was alarmed. I could not understand it. There was a forest on fire a few hundred yards ahead of us and the two men in the front seat were idling at the barricade like they were waiting on a train. The officer walked up to the driver's window and explained, in the tone you would use for a road closure, that they had set the fire that morning and the wind had turned on them and they were working to get it back under control. Then he and our driver talked for several minutes about family, about the local football team, and about where we ought to eat lunch. We turned around and found another route.

At lunch I asked, over and over, why anyone would set a forest on fire on purpose.

The answer is the longleaf pine. It is the great tree of the Southern woods, straight and tall and slow, and it cannot grow up without fire. A young longleaf spends its first several years looking like a tuft of grass, going nowhere above the ground while it drives a taproot deep below it. Everything else in the woods grows faster. Left alone, the hardwoods and the brush shade the seedlings out and the forest fills with whatever is quickest. Fire clears all of that and leaves the grass stage standing, because the longleaf is built to survive what kills its competition. The men who manage those woods burn them on a schedule. They stand at the barricade while they do it.

What I had seen as a disaster, the two managers and the officer had seen as a Tuesday. They had grown up around the practice. Smoke on the horizon in spring meant that somebody was doing his job. The wind changing was not the reason you do not burn. It was the thing you plan for.

I have set a few fires since. A reorganization in a year when the numbers were fine. A product line everyone liked that was shading out the one that would carry us. Each time, somebody in the vehicle was alarmed, and each time the wind changed at some point, because it always does. What I learned on that back road is that the difference between a wildfire and a controlled burn is not whether the wind changes. It is whether someone meant to light it, knows what it is for, and is standing at the barricade calm enough to talk about lunch.

The officer was not unconcerned. He had just seen fire before.