I haven’t suffered much from allergies in my life. When I was in my twenties, I went through allergy testing and a series of desensitization treatments. I learned to take the regular shots and my body reacted well to the treatment. Since those days I have not suffered from allergies. But I have been sneezing a lot in the last week or so and my eyes have been watery. There is just a lot of smoke in the air around here.

The news from the big fires in the Nebraska panhandle that spread into South Dakota was good yesterday. Crews were making good progress. With over 120 square miles charred, it shouldn’t surprise us that there has been a bit of smoke in the air. The prevailing winds, however, blow most of that smoke away from us.

I went out to do a few chores last evening and noticed that the sky was filled with smoke and then I heard the distinctive sound of the engines of a heavy air tanker. The plane was heading southwest, but was a ways north of our place, which meant that depending on the distance to the fire, it could be directly west of us.

The smoke last evening was from a new fire that has been named Kinney. According to the incident information system, the fire is at least 100 acres in size and is burning about 7 miles NE of Newcastle, WY. The next update isn’t expected for another 5 hours. It is hard to tell what is going on in the middle of the night.

According to the update posted at about midnight last night, there were two heavy tankers and one Type 3 helicopter working with the ground crews. We’re lucky to have the tankers available. It must mean that crews are gaining confidence with the Nebraska fires.

But it was a night to shut the windows to keep the smoke on the outside of the house. I’m not much for sleeping with the windows closed. Everything sounds different, and I kept one window near the bed open a couple of inches just because I prefer it that way. As the temperatures dropped, the smoke settled down and there is very little, if any, smoke smell in the air this morning.

Those of us who live in and near the forest have to adjust to a new reality. The forest is stressed from years of drought and waves of insects. Years of aggressive fire fighting have resulted in excessive fuel load build up in the forests and no one is sure how many big fires there will be before some sense of balance is restored.

A lot of people enjoy living in the woods and have built houses in places that make them vulnerable to wildfire. I fear that more homes will be lost in the future.

For the most part, we in the hills have been fortunate when it comes to fire. We haven’t had the big fire that takes out a lot of homes like those that have occurred in Colorado and other states. But when I drive through the hills I can see areas where the threat is great and know that such a fire could occur.

Wildfires are not unique to the American West. Firefighters are continuing to mop up pockets of fire in Spain where homes where thousands were evacuated as blazes along the Costa del Sol ravaged, killing one person and leaving many displaced.

And the headlines report that thousands have been left homeless after a fire swept through a slum area in Sao Paulo, Brazil. A fire in a fireworks factory in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has killed at least 31 and sent at least 20 to the hospital.

Fire is a powerful and destructive force.

It is also a part of the natural processes in the forest. Long before humans battled fires in forests, lightning sparked blazes, some of which grew to great sizes. There are reports of the plains being filled with smoke as fires ravaged Rocky Mountain Forests in the years before there was any type of formal fire management. Some years were worse than others. In the early days of the US Forest Service, 1910 was an especially bad year for fires in the west and it caused a shift in Forest Service policies and priorities. The shift, it turns out, was based in a misunderstanding of the role of fire in healthy forests, but it is easy to imagine how fires became such a concern. It is terrifying to see the power and force of fire as it travels through the forest.

I’ve made a sort of informal study of Yellowstone National Park since the big fires in 1988 and 1989. I’ve returned frequently to watch the forest as it recovers. Initially it appeared that the devastation was total, but the fire had really created a mosaic of different burn patterns, sparing some trees while burning so hot that the soil was temporarily sterilized in some places. The recovery was a mosaic as well, with some places showing lush growth within months and other areas taking longer for the hillsides to turn green. Some places that were thick with lodgepole pines are now meadows. Some hillsides that had fewer trees now have clusters of Douglas Fir trees that are taller than I.

The reality is that the recovery of the forest after a fire is a long-term process, and we are short-term witnesses. We are only around to witness a few decades. The life cycles in the forest take centuries. That means that forest management policy has to find a way to transcend partisan political processes, which tend to run in two- and four-year cycles. The management of the Forest Service changes far more frequently than is optimal for a long-term view.

But the forests are resilient. They have endured millennia of weather cycles and they will endure the cycles of human politics. They will even recover from gross mismanagement, but that will take time.

So we watch and we sniff the air frequently and we know that we do not have all of the answers. We are still learning and it is evident that there is yet much to learn.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.