Young Men, Old Men, and Fire – From Bill Bell to Bud Moore to Bob Mutch – by Stephen J. Pyne
Interlude: Young men, old men, and fire
“You picture the mountainside as sides of an amphitheater crowded with admirers, among whom always is your father, who fought fires in his time…”
– Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
From Bill Bell to Bud Moore
“[Bud Moore] and I soon discovered that both of us had worked in the Lochsa when we were boys and when the Lochsa was thought to be accessible only to the best men in the woods.”
– Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
In 1930, as Bertrand Russell readied for publication his speculations about a human future driven by applied science, he inserted a counter observation from the long past. At issue was the concept of “state of nature.” The view that “man should live according to nature” was a conception that is “continually recurring throughout the ages,” he intoned, “though always with a different connotation.” In practice, he concluded, “return to nature” meant the conditions that the writer knew in his youth. That same year a 12-year-old Bud Moore, on a solitary trek, crested the Bitterroot Mountains and looked across the landscape of the Lochsa Valley. It was a panorama that became a vision that evolved into an epiphany. The Lochsa would inform his life.[i]
Bud Moore saw his first fire when he was six. His father extinguished a nearby snag kindled by lightning and was paid by the Forest Service. Young Bud fought his first fire four years after his defining Lochsa trek. He imagined rangers like the celebrated Bill Bell as the logical successors to the free-spirited mountain men he admired as a youth. It was a way to live within the wild. The Forest Service had a founding legend, a comaraderie, and a code based on toughness with a call to duty that made its rangers the offspring of the western hero. All this showed itself most spectacularly in their astonishing fight against wildfire.
In 1928 he was hired to work on the Powell District, mostly trail and telephone line maintenance, and of course on fires whenever they popped up. Smokechasing was a mainstay of life on the Lochsa. He met many of the legends of the Northern Rockies – Bill Bell, of course; but also Ed MacKay of the Powell, Elers Koch, Major Evan Kelly. They were backcountry and fire men all. He was on the line during the big Selway fires of 1934. When World War II broke out, MacKay and Kelly recruited him to help with the guayule project in Southern California. While there Moore enlisted with the Marines, where he found himself again fighting fire at Camp Pendleton before heading to the Pacific. When the war ended, he returned to the Forest Service with a war-service appointment, and was assigned as an alternate ranger to the Powell, where he mostly fought fire.
Bud Moore was an American type, the self-educated boy from the frontier whose grit, talent, and instincts allowed him to rise through the ranks. His stroke of fortune came when, soon after his return, he was “grandfathered” into a “professional” appointment as an assistant ranger without the expected education. He oversaw the postwar development of the northern Lochsa. Then he joined the committee of inquiry that looked at the string of tragedy fires in Southern California, in which he returned to his Marine Corps training and restated the Corps standing orders into the 10 Standard Firefighting Orders. He went to the Washington Office as an assistant training officer, became more fully involved with fire (which is where most of the training belonged), and joined the National Fire Coordination Study that surveyed the American fire scene for the Office of Civil Defense. In 1967, as big fires swept the Northern Rockies, Moore reviewed the scene for the national office and reaffirmed the value of initial attack. Soon afterwards he became deputy national Director of Fire Control, and then director. Finally, yearning for the homeland of his youth, he returned to Missoula as fire director for Region One. When he retired in 1974 he probably knew as much about fire across the country, and from the ground up, as anyone in the USFS.
In his final tour he appreciated that the old ways couldn’t continue. He distrusted the analogy of firefighting to battle; he knew the difference, disliked the Marine Corps’ singularity of focus and reductionism of everything to the single task at hand, which might work on a battleground but could only fail in complex landscapes. He recognized that fire couldn’t be stopped and that in many settings more fire not less was needed. What tipped the scale was the Wilderness Act. He harked back to his youth and that epiphany on the Bitterroots and decided that “nothing is more needed in wilderness than fire,” certainly in the Northern Rockies.
Perhaps, too, he saw the restoration of a natural process as partial redemption for what he had done as ranger on the Powell District, for he had helped introduce the toxic worms that had eaten into the wild apple of the Lochsa. When a spruce budworm epidemic broke out, the proposed remedy was wholesale logging; so he watched bulldozers achieve for timber companies what the Nez Perce, Army engineers, and railroad magnates had failed to do: open the Lochsa Valley to active exploitation. It was one thing to hunt lynx and marten along traplines accessible only to snowshoes. It was something else to push unstable slopes into once-clear trout streams and fell whole hillsides. When the axe failed to keep up with the insects, the agency turned to DDT. Throughout, the Forest Service continued, at enormous labor, to fight fires. In the postwar era aircraft became an indispensable part of its armory as fire officers sought to reach ever more remote fires sooner and with ever greater power. The aerial firefight was the mechanical equivalent to those dozer roads crashing through the wilderness.
Bud Moore had begun to doubt. Perhaps fires were no different than free-ranging grizzlies or wolves, and the countryside was the worse for their absence. Besides, after 60 years of attempted suppression, and 35 years since the 10 am policy had been promulgated in large measure to control the big burns of the Rockies, the policy had failed. It was expensive, dangerous, and self-defeating. The fires would come. The more they were held off, the worse their sweep when they eventually kindled. He had spent his entire life fighting fires, and still they came. It seemed the agency might be destroying what it sought to save. Maybe fire was not an enemy to be annihilated but a storm of nature to be accommodated and weathered like blizzards and droughts. When the wilderness movement arrived, Moore felt a kinship with its ideals. The upshot was the White Cap Project, chartered in 1970 for the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness; it received its first natural fire in 1972. Two years later the Forest Service officially retitled its Division of Fire Control as the Division of Fire Management. It was time, Bud Moore decided, to retire.
In New England, when you wish to proclaim your status and retire in the style of the countryside, you buy a colonial farmhouse. In the South, you buy a plantation. In Texas, a ranch. In the Rockies, you get a cabin. Bud Moore did one better. He built his out of logs by hand, returning to the world he had known as a youth. He then turned his vision into a philosophy of land ethics. He sought to replace the timber cruising that had ripped open the Bitterroots with “eco-cruising.” He wrote a book. He became for a new generation what Bill Bell had been in his own youth, the beau ideal of the ranger. He was the man the next cohort looked to for insight and approbation. And while the University of Montana awarded him an honorary doctorate, a triumph for a man whose schooling had ended in the eighth grade, probably the greater pleasure came when the White Cap Five convened around a campfire on Cooper’s Flat in early September, 2002 for the 30th anniversary of fire’s reintroduction to the greater Lochsa.
The restoration had been, in the deepest sense, an ethical act, and it had been one designed to pass the torch from one generation to another. It was not only about the wild but about initiating the young into it. “To me,” Bud Moore confirmed at his retirement, “most of all the Forest Service is the eager uncertainty of young men and women as they confront an old pro at their first job in the woods.”[ii]
From Bud Moore to Bob Mutch
“Could you expect less from a boy who grew up in the woods and grew old as a schoolteacher and so spent most of his life staying close to the young who are elite and select and, by definition, often in trouble? I came to Mann Gulch expecting to catch glimpses of them as far as they could go. That’s why I came.”
– Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
It’s a long way, in more than geography, from Cleveland, Ohio to Paradise Guard Station in the Selway country. But it’s a leap Bob Mutch made first in his mind as a boy, then as a smokejumper, and finally as lead scientist on the White Cap Project. What imprinted on his childhood memory were the woods around that gritty city. What initiated him into his mature years were wildfires in the Northern Rockies. They merged, as they had for Bud Moore, into an epiphany that became an ethos.
From Cleveland suburbs Bob went to Albion College and decided he wanted to be a forester. In 1953, at the age of 19, he joined a blister rust crew at St Maries, Idaho, close to ground zero of the Great Fires of 1910, and it was fire that “rescued” him from a grueling summer of plucking Ribes like gooseberry along endless transects. That first fire demanded a long hike into the Salmon River country and concluded with a magnificent panorama. He tasted his first coffee, served by logging crews impressed for fireline duty. He met some smokejumpers from Missoula. The next year he joined them – a member of the first class in the new Aerial Fire Depot, which President Eisenhower dedicated that September. His two years on the cadre were slow but Bob made his first jump, the Ballinger Point fire, in the Selway-Bitterroot primitive area. He was hooked. He enrolled at the University of Montana for a graduate degree in forestry.
He moved into research. He worked at the Priest River Experiment Station – Harry Gisborne’s stomping grounds – and when the Missoula lab opened in 1960, he was among its first hires. Meanwhile, he remained active in making knowledge relevant to fire protection by serving as a fire behavior officer on an overhead crew. But the sense gnawed at him that something was missing, that the era of fighting every fire everywhere and of ramping up research to help fight them and even (among one of the founding objectives of the Missoula lab) trying to suppress lightning in order to stop ignitions, could not continue. Something was fundamentally out of alignment.
His personal annus mirabilis came in 1970. He published in Ecology an article – his most famous – that reversed the usual conception of fire adaptation. The Mutch hypothesis argued that plants not only adapt to protect themselves from fire, but some can be seen to promote fire; that flammability, paradoxically, can confer selective advantage to those plants better adapted to recover from them. The subtext was, fire is not just something out in nature like ice storms or floods against which species must shield themselves, but something that has emerged out of a long co-evolution to which plants themselves contributed. Fire was not simply the outcome of climate and fuels but expressed complex biological processes. The upshot was, suppressing fire is not only unnatural but disruptive to precisely those species that have most accommodated it. At the same time, Bob saw a flyer at the lab soliciting a “wilderness planner” for an experiment in natural fire management. His application went to Bud Moore, by that time Region One director of Fire Control. Bob Mutch joined Dave Aldrich to create the plans behind the White Cap Project that would begin restoring fire to biotas that needed it. If insights were meaningful, they had to find expression on the ground.
The two men traveled to Sequoia-Kings Canyon National Park to see firsthand the earliest trials of letting fires burn. In 1971 they joined Moore, Bill Worf, and Orville Daniels – what became known later as the White Cap Five – on a trek into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness to discuss their conceptions on site. The following summer the program got approval as an exception to the 10 am policy; the next day the Bad Luck fire provided nature’s imprimatur; a year later the Fitz Creek fire blew up, tested ideas and resolve, and confirmed the program. The year following, having completed what he regarded as his life’s task, Bud Moore retired. In 1977 when fire research sought to relocate him to the Riverside lab, Bob balked, and instead transferred to the fire staff of the Lolo National Forest. When, the next year, the Forest Service officially renounced the 10 am policy, he was in a position to advise that fire-rich forest with fresh plans. He was where he wanted to be, the place that most melded head, heart, and hands.
When he left, he traded the Bitterroots for the world. In 1986 he accepted an assignment in the Washington Office as the first program manager for the Disaster Assistance Support Program through which the Forest Service satisfied requests from the State Department. He became, in effect, America’s IC for responding to fire and other emergency requests throughout the world; but it was, as Moore’s first WO assignment had been, an educational as much as an operational mission. For five years he set up train-the-trainer programs, oversaw specialists to help control locusts, counter famines, respond to hurricanes, and of course cope with wildfires; fire specialists or equipment went to Latin America, China, and even the Galapagos. In 1988 he self-deployed to the Yellowstone bust, effectively bringing the world home. Throughout, he was once again translating knowledge into practice. He continued for five years, then recycled back to the Missoula lab as a specialist in technology transfer. From time to time that included overseas assignments.
It was in Brazil in 1994 that it all came together. Suddenly, while drinking beer with a Brazilian bombeiro, he had another epiphany that he believed “could also appear as [his] epitaph.” His life’s purpose could be summed up in six words: “finding harmony among people and ecosystems.” That meant putting fire back where it belonged; stopping fire where it didn’t; and keeping those who managed fire safe. The discovery brought “a sense of closure and satisfaction” to his career. Although the terms had morphed – “land” had become “ecosystems,” and “technology transfer” had replaced “passing along what you know” – the sentiment was nonetheless interchangeable with Bud Moore’s vision, or with Russell’s. It conveyed both a mission and a morality. That year Bob Mutch retired.
He remained active, opening up a consultancy, accepting assignments from the World Bank and FAO that took him to Bulgaria, Ethiopia, India, Mongolia, and (many times) to Brazil. He spoke often at training sessions and conferences. But his most fulfilling moment, hands down, across his 59-year career in fire was his work in the White Cap where he harmonized, at least in principle, people and ecosystems. Before retiring he bought land outside in the West Fork and built a cabin. In 2002 he joined the White Cap Five for a 30th anniversary of the Bad Luck fire. Still able to do so, he returned a decade later for the 40th. By then, the torch had passed beyond the West Fork.
Beyond 40
“It is a great privilege to possess the friendship of a young man who is as good or better than you at what you intended to be when you were his age…It is as if old age fortuitously had enriched your life by letting you live two lives, the life you finally chose to live and a working copy of the one you started out to live.
– Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
That a man might treasure the moment of his initiation into manhood is common enough, especially if it involves a hard physical trial, and there is little novel if he should identify it with a place, particularly one as overpowering as the Selway-Bitterroots that can boost a routine coming-of-age saga into a vision-quest. That it might crystallize into a code for living is less typical, but far from rare. What Bud Moore and Bob Mutch and uncounted others experienced has counterparts elsewhere throughout the fire community and beyond.
What distinguishes the Northern Rockies is not the individual moment of revelation but its transfer across generations. Only the South with its tradition of handing down burning from parent to child has a comparable social character. Its inter-generational theme (even across cultures) may be the most unusual feature of the Lochsa story and of fire in the Northern Rockies generally. It reverberates in campfire stories, memoirs, and ceremony; and it inscribes an interlinear text in the region’s most prominent fire writer, Norman Maclean. “USFS, 1919,” one of the tales in A River Runs Through It, is his coming of age story under the gaze of Bill Bell. Young Men and Fire, his mediation about the 1949 Mann Gulch tragedy is about old men as well as young, and the connections between them as the young man ages, and the aged author tries to explain something about the universe. The book opens with Maclean’s youth, then seeks to rescue the memory of the youths lost at Mann Gulch, and throughout accents his relationship with Laird Robinson as they pull each other along, one relying on the wisdom of more than his Biblically allotted six-score-and-ten years and the other on the residual vitality of youth. The cycle of fire in the Northern Rockies involves generations of people as much as scorched conifers.
Often the hand-over occurs within families. The federal land agencies have long displayed a quasi-caste quality akin to military families in which children, having grown up on bases, follow their parents’ career. The record of second- or third-generation fire officers is striking. It may be that the region’s generational theme will become still more genealogical, particularly after the Forest Service underwent a wrenching court-mandated demographic shift as a result of the 1981 consent agreement that brought in large numbers of minorities, notably women. The agency had to find new ways to move people rapidly through the ranks; the newcomers were often older, better educated, and not drawn from traditional or common pools of experience; they could not wait for the inherited processes of initiation. The saying in Region One used to be, Until you’d been on a hundred fires, you kept your mouth shut. That would not be possible with the volume of workforce turnover. Instead, continuity may come through family lines rather than bureaucratic ones.
Maybe, or maybe not. For a hundred years, however, the lore of the Lochsa has passed from old to young. In 1971 Bob Mutch began taking his children, Dale, Brian, and Linda, with him when he backpacked into the SBW. His daughter, Linda, was 10 when she first trekked with him. Growing up she studied fire, worked summers on fire crews when she went to college, worked two seasons on fire-related projects for the Park Service in Alaska and then in Sequoia-Kings Canyon’s Big Trees before migrating into wilderness inventory and monitoring. At the 30th anniversary of the Bad Luck fire, she spoke about how the trails taken in the White Cap had become a career path. And when in the summer of 2012 the Salamander fire free-burned on the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Bud Moore’s son, Bill, was a volunteer staffing the Salmon Mountain Lookout to report its movements.
Steve Pyne
August 2012
Acknowledgements: I need to thank Bob Mutch for sharing his career during a long conversation and for graciously allowing me to poach on his own literary plans to describe his experiences in the SBW.
[i] Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (W.W. Norton, 1931), pp. 101-102; Bud Moore, The Lochsa Story. Land Ethics in the Bitterroot Mountains (Mountain Press, 1996), pp. 3-12. Other information on Moore also from two oral histories, one by USFS for “The Greatest Good” and one by Jamie Lewis, for the Forest History Society, both available through the Forest History Society.
[ii] William R. Moore, “Towards the Future… Land, People, and Fire,” Fire Management 35(4) (Summer 1974), p.5.
Last Updated on Saturday, 22 February 2014 17:23
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