Dirt Work by Christine Byl Page B

fire will always be the enemy to be vanquished, not a necessary part of ecosystem health. Smoky the Bear can’t be part of the problem, right?
    In spite of the media and politics fanning the flames, the smoke eventually goes out. Enough crews on the ground, a rainy spell that raises relative humidity and dampens fuels, or the inevitable September frost puts an end to the burning season. After fire camps pull up stakes and the fat paycheck’s been spent on a new truck or a plane ticket or last year’s bills, the ash begins to work its way into the soil. Charred stumps smoke and underground roots cradle fire’s warmth. Lodgepole pines incorporate the chemistry of ignition into their reproductive ritual, some cones opening to spread seeds only under extreme temperatures. By the following summer, morels will peek out of the ground. Fireweed leads the flower brigade, and in two years, a burn is laced with green plants that draw ungulates to forage.
    The talking heads call the blackened landscape of a very hot fire a “holocaust,” a “ruin,” and people watching TV say, What a shame. Which it is, and it isn’t. On one hand, this landscape has burned and bloomed for centuries without spokespersons or contingency plans, and really, what lies ruined? Our fragile illusion of control, mostly, which needs a good drubbing. On the other hand, forests are different than they were even ten years ago. Climate change has had documented effects on tree mortality, temperatures, increased lightning strikes, snowpack depth, and snowmelt timing, all of which create imbalance. Fires burn longer and hotter and more frequently than ever. Because of us. There is the shame.
    Forest fires strike a chord in part because they force us to confront a fierce Mother Nature, with everything at stake that matters: work, shelter, money, ruin, ego, remorse, power. And also, somewhere in there, love. Love for forests, and for the creatures that live in them, and love for trees, especially the green-needled Christmas-y kind, strung with glittering symbols we don’t even realize we’ve asked them to bear.
    How many forms of dirt are there? Loam, clay, muck, dust, grime, loess, fill, mud, silt, grit, soil. Language seems most perfect this elemental. When beneath the single syllable, there is bedrock.
    Larch trees grow all over western Montana, from Yellowstone to the Canadian border, bristling the west side of the divide like a five o’clock shadow. They are dense in the North Fork, growing small on the mountains in twisted subalpine form, or in forested valleys, clumped in old-growth groves. The western larch, cousin to the eastern tamarack, is a deciduous conifer, a tree in the pine family that sheds its needles every year and grows new ones the following. In summer, to the unknowing eye, it looks like any evergreen, its brushy branches and elliptical cones blending in amid the Engelmann spruce and Douglas-fir. But closer inspection reveals the larch’s distinctive needles clustered on twigs, a vibrant, almost neon-green compared with the duller needles of other trees. Larch feels most singular in autumn, when it shucks its evergreen guise and the needles turn yellow-orange over the course of September and October. A hillside of larch in late fall is a spectacle, trees lighting hills in wavy colored swaths like the aurora borealis gone to ground.
    The larch is a well-loved tree in the North Fork. Aside from its autumnal beauty and the brilliant green it lends the summer canopy, it thrives in cold climates, burns hotter in the woodstove than many conifers, makes decent timber for building, and better survives the frequent fires that clear out junk pine and brush from the understory. Also, larch has personality. Its slender branches ringing a one-hundred-foot trunk look, I swear, joyful, silhouetted against sky. The needles bristle, standing at attention like they’ve been shocked and the tree’s aura is at