Guest Post: Caroline Starr Rose on The Burning Season
Stephen Pyne’s article in Scientific American compels and informs but it’s also surprisingly lyrical.
“Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know of. Earth has fire because it has life.”
Fire, Pyne says, is like a virus—not truly living but needing the living world to spread by contagion. We humans provided the one thing that naturally occurring fire does not have—ignition. And so it happens, he suggests, that we have created a new kind of earth, a planet on fire in a time he dubs the Pyrocene.
One thing writers do is bear witness. My dear friend and colleague Caroline Starr Rose has done just that, with her middle grade novel, The Burning Season. I asked Caroline to tell me about its landscape and how it shaped the story of her young protagonist, Opal. Here is what she wrote:
My newest verse novel, The Burning Season, is set in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness, which in 1924 was designated the first wilderness area in the world. Once home to the Cochise, the Mollogon, and most recently the Apache peoples, this rugged land almost three times the size of New York City is nestled inside the 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest. It is also home to my twelve-year-old protagonist, Opal Halloway, who’s been raised in a fire tower.
This poem (which didn’t make the book’s final cut) is a good glimpse of Opal’s part of the wilderness and her deep love for it:
Gran Says
some people are surprised to learn
our mountain,
which gathers feet of snow
can sometimes be in want of rain.
She says most people think
land must only be one thing,
hills or plains,
oceanside or cityscape,
not forests that run to desert slopes
with flat-topped mesas and alpine springs,
not the living, changing beauty
that is the Gila Wilderness.
As if this place
could be contained
in one small word,
as if
a whole world
weren’t present
on this mountainside.
Since the beginning of time, fire has also made its home in the Gila. Native peoples used fire management techniques such as controlled, or prescribed, burns (planned fires to clear overgrown vegetation) to care for the land. Over 100 years ago, the US Forest Service built fire towers in the Gila National Forest and Wilderness to protect the land from wildfire. Ten are still in operation today.
But as cataclysmic as fire can be, the Gila is fire-dependent. “This landscape requires periodic fire which helps reduce hazardous fuels, protect human communities from extreme fires, minimize the spread of pests and disease, provide forage for game, recycle nutrients back to the soil, and promote the growth of trees, wildflowers, and other plants,” the Gila National Forest Office of Public Affairs states.
Fire brings destruction and regeneration, heartache and healing. Fire is a key part of Opal’s world. In these times of drought and climate change, it’s becoming a regular part of our world, too. May we learn to respect fire’s power and place. May we learn to care for our land and ourselves alongside wildfires.
I love seeing outtakes that didn’t make it into a final edited work, and this one’s a gift, settling as it does right into the novel’s landscape and into its long relationship with fire. Against the backdrop of the fire tower she has learned to call home, Opal finds herself responsible for far more than most young people are ever called upon to take on. When the advancing fire threatens the place itself, as well as Opal, her mother, and her grandmother, the web of knowledge that connects people to the land becomes at once more tenuous and ever more important.
