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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
The drive east from Portland, over Mount Hood to Sisters, 160 miles away, is essentially a journey from green, fecund lushness into a tinder box. You ride up through the rain shadow of the Cascades, and then, soon after you begin rolling down the east flank of Hood, the grass by the roadside becomes tawny and wispy. The smell of sage is pungent, and the woods are piled with the downed trunks of spindly, brittle dead trees. Here and there you see stands of completely charred forests: naked black trees straight and limbless as telephone poles.
Like much of the American West, Oregon has felt the ill effects of Smokey Bear and his 50-plus year campaign to tame nature and its inevitable wildfires. Though the Forest Service now manages "controlled burns," many long-suppressed blazes are erupting with a coiled vengeance. Hundreds of thousands of forested acres have burned in Oregon over the past five years. House Bill 1904, co-sponsored by Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., is a direct response to what he calls "catastrophic wildfires." It's also a sort of litmus test in ever-evolving Central Oregon.
The region, which encompasses Bend, population 52,000, and six or eight much smaller burghs scattered across the western fringe of Oregon's expansive high desert, is emblematic of the new American West, where, mountain bikers, vegans and tourists commingle with rock-ribbed loggers and ranchers. It's a region where the ham and eggs breakfast has been supplanted, in large part, by fresh bagels and cappuccino. The residents get along, mostly; they tend to refrain from frothing on political matters. But a plain fact is that the old stalwarts generally regard HB 1904 as a cool breeze of common sense. The newcomers and their allies tend to see the bill as a manifesto for butchery. They're hoping to find a cigarette lighter with a "W" on it.
Hoping against hope, maybe. Forest arson is a damnably difficult crime to trace. There are no witnesses, typically, and the evidence burns. Ron Pugh, who also serves as an investigator for Central Oregon's Arson Task Force, estimates that his group catches fire starters "less than 5 percent of the time," and he notes that the Booth fire may prove uncommonly tough. The wind has shifted over the ignition point two or three times and the evidence, if such exists, has been quite thoroughly cooked and recooked.
Once I pulled into Sisters, population 1,080, and became acclimated to the smoky haze hanging in the cloudless sky there, I had little choice but to begin my digging at the local organic bakery/cafe, a place called Angeline's. I bought a gluten-free muffin and then wandered back to the green grass of the patio and spoke with the members of a Sisters band called the Blue D'Arts, who were setting up to play an evening of acoustic folk.
"You'd think it wouldn't be possible," said the D'Arts' lanky guitarist Dennis McGregor, "that Bush would start a fire just to be expedient. Would he really that be that deceptive, that cruel? Yeah, that's how he does everything -- the election, for instance."
An hour or so later, McGregor was inciting the crowd. "Was it a brush fire or a Bush fire?" he crowed from the stage. "Who started the fire?"
"Bush!" The response was unanimous, and rather spirited. Angeline's has a beer and wine license. By dusk, in fact, there were about 50 people sipping away in the cool evening air. I wandered among them. Several folks spoke of seeing three Marine One helicopters flying over the now-burnt areas early on the afternoon of Aug. 19. "They were flying so low, it was scary," bartender Karly Lusby told me.
Up the street at a bar called Bronco Billy's, a somewhat schnookered source, speaking on the promise that he would remain anonymous, told me that a Forest Service lookout spoke of the copters over his radio -- and then heard his boss say, "You didn't see that." The story echoed something I'd read in an e-mail Russ Taylor forwarded to me -- an anonymous note about a "guy ... working in the woods" who suddenly found his cell phone inoperable, the signal scrambled, as the copters flew overhead.
I wanted something a little more solid, so I went back to Angeline's and spoke to co-owner Henry Rhett, who, I'd been told, had the skinny on some timing devices supposedly found near the spot where the Booth fire began. "I feel sheepish even mentioning it," he told me, "because what I heard was like fifth-hand."
