Heat (11 page)

Before the Spanish Ranch fire, Ed Marty, one of the men who died on Sycamore Ridge, made occasional public appearances dressed as Smokey the Bear, more properly and officially called Smokey Bear, an icon with a first and last name. “Only you can prevent forest fires,” the bear said, on thousands of posters, echoing Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the United States Forest Service, who once wrote, “Forest fires are preventable.”

Pinchot was writing just after the Big Burn of 1910. The nation was focused on wildfires. Pinchot pleaded for funds to support fire towers. “It is a good thing for us to remember at this time that nearly all or quite all of the loss, suffering and death the fires have caused was wholly unnecessary,” Pinchot wrote.

Pinchot also kept up a running dialogue with the spirit of his dead fiancée for decades, imagining her alive and well, in the room with him.

Smokey Bear came after Pinchot’s reign. In 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine shelled the California coastline west of the Spanish Ranch Fire and north of Santa Barbara. Justifiably, people worried that shelling could ignite wildfires. The Forest Service established a wartime advertising program with posters and slogans: “Forest Fires Aid the Enemy” and “Our Carelessness, Their Secret Weapon.” That same year, Disney came out with
Bambi
. Viewers saw Bambi smelling smoke. They saw Bambi flee from the flames. Bambi—the cartoon fawn, not the movie—was loaned to the Forest Service for one year to be used in a fire prevention campaign. When that year ended, the Forest Service had to switch cartoon characters. They came up with Smokey, originally naked but for his hat, eventually morphing into a beer-bellied, jeans-wearing bear, hat still intact, with suspenders and, quite often, a shovel.

Edward Abbey, author of
Desert Solitaire
and enduring symbol for the environmental movement, spent summers working in fire towers. Abbey, like most writers apparently starved for cash, found it convenient to let the government pay his expenses for the summer. “We are being paid a generous wage,” he wrote, “to stay awake for at least eight hours a day.” The wage was $3.25 an hour. Abbey sat in his tower, staring across the treetops, hoping to spot a fire, reading Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, first published in 1621.

Abbey saw neither smoke nor flames. “If that idiot Smokey the Bear had his way,” Abbey wrote, “all us firefighters would starve to death.” And this: “When Smokey Bear says that only
You
can prevent forest fires, Smokey is speaking an untruth.” Although Abbey was convinced that lightning ignites 90 percent of western forest fires, statistics lend at least some credibility to the idiot bear, showing that half or more of wildland fires are human caused.

But Abbey, a writer and activist, would have understood the bear’s need for an ardent message. No iconic fire prevention bear could say something closer to the truth, like, “Only you can prevent
some
forest fires.”

The bear exaggerated a bit but in so doing became, to all appearances, immortal. Unlike Abbey, the bear’s name is protected by law. Also unlike Abbey, it is possible to buy a stuffed toy version of Smokey. A portion of the price of a stuffed Smokey goes to firefighting.

Ed Marty, before he died on Sycamore Ridge at Spanish Ranch, dressed up in his Smokey Bear suit and convinced parents and children that they should not toss cigarette butts out the car window or play with matches. Ed Marty was less beer-
​bellied
than the cartoon bear, more barrel-chested, but his shoulders slumped forward slightly, and his eyes looked downward at the pavement. Wrapped in the bear suit, he appeared to be hot.

The fire that killed Ed Marty and Scott Cox and their colleagues, it turns out, was human caused. State employees were clearing grass along the road when a mower blade sparked against a rock. What was their purpose in clearing the grass along a remote stretch of two-lane highway? They were clearing grass to reduce the risk of fire.

When Scott Cox ran through the flames of the Spanish Ranch Fire, burning 60 percent of his body, he entered a new world, a world of pain in which he would live for the next 202 days. He was not alone in the world of fire-caused pain followed by death. In a typical year, more than three thousand Americans die in fires. For the most part, they are burned in house fires.

When people burn—when they are engulfed by heat and in contact with flames—they may or may not feel immediate pain. A person on fire is likely a person one step removed from panic or, more likely, entirely immersed in panic. The adrenalin load of a person on fire might kill a small dog.

There is also what has been called Wall’s theory, or the gate control theory of pain. As a matter of coping, as a matter of survival, the perception of pain is modified by the brain. In a sense, the brain sends out signals saying, “This is too much,” and the signals from melting skin and hair and hot gases making contact with the trachea are toned down. The brain controls the pain.

And there is this terrifying reality of the pain of burns: bad burns destroy nerve endplates. Heat melts the skin and dries it and the tissue beneath it. Then heat consumes flesh as if it were firewood. The receiving end of the sensory cells becomes fuel. Third-degree burns—what are increasingly called full thickness burns, burns that extend into the subcutaneous fat and muscle—take the top layer of skin and the lower layer of skin and the hair follicles and the nerve endplates, leaving behind charred meat. The fire takes with it the ability to sense pain at the very locations where the pain should be most severe. Instead the victim feels pain from the adjacent tissue, less burned and with nerve endplates intact.

Clothes and tissue continue to roast even after the fire is gone. Responders cut away hot clothing and try to cool burned flesh. The heat from clothes that have melted to the victim and the heat from the burned tissue move deeper into unburned tissue, into the body.

As the adrenalin wears off, the victim reacts to the pain. The pain comes not from the worst burns, where the neural endplates are gone, but from the surrounding areas. Morphine is administered, or pethidine, or fentanyl, or nalbuphine, along with tranquilizers.

From a New York City firefighter, after being trapped in a burning building: “Morphine does the job. You don’t feel the pain. But I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. While I was taking the morphine those two weeks, I created a whole world inside my head. It was part reality and part hallucination. Some parts were terribly frightening. What was happening in my head wasn’t pleasant at all.”

The skin is gone. Without it, bodily fluids weep. A vein is found, and fluids are pumped in.

Skin, intact, acts to regulate the body’s temperature. Skin, gone, cannot regulate the body’s temperature. The victim, badly burned, shivers or is too hot.

Dead tissue is cut away. In places, it is scrubbed away.

The victim is wrapped in bandages. Bandages trap heat. The victim is moved to a temperature-controlled bed.

Over time, the neural endplates grow back. They sense the damage. They send pain signals to the brain.

Burn victims often experience hyperalgesia. Literally, to suffer hyperalgesia is to be in exceeding pain. But it is more than that. It is an increased sensitivity to pain. It is the sensation of pain in response to the merest touch, to the slightest vibration. It is the sensation of pain in the absence of an obvious cause of pain.

From Silas Weir Mitchell’s 1872 book
Injuries of Nerves and Their Consequences
:

Bad burns affect more than just the tissue that has burned. They affect the organs. They have a systemic effect that must be overcome.

From a 1943 article in which three doctors summarized their experience with sixty-one cases of fatal burns: “This concerns not only the local skin and adjacent structures, but also such distant organs as lungs, lymph nodes, adrenals, kidneys, liver, and the gastro-intestinal tract.” In the badly burned, for reasons that are not always clear, organs that were not damaged by the heat itself begin to fail.

The article includes a table with sixty-one entries. One column is labeled “Clinical Notes.”

Clinical notes for entry number 1, a three-year-old: “Vomiting, convulsions, high temperature.”

From entry 10, a four-year-old: “Peripheral circulation failed.”

From entry 30, a nine-year-old: “Vomiting blood, delirious, coma, toxemia.”

Commonalities emerge: twitching, convulsions, fever, and toxemia. Occasionally there is more detail. Entry 16 reports a temperature of 107 degrees, entry 18 reports a temperature of 108 degrees, and entry 48 reports a temperature of 106 degrees.

With entry 51, regarding a five-month-old baby, there is an inexplicable note: “Fried pancakes to chest.”

The changes to the body introduce challenges to the administration of painkillers. In some patients, the metabolism of certain drugs changes as the body deals with its burns. Changes in blood flow change the way that drugs are delivered to the body. The liver may process certain drugs more slowly than it would in the unburned. The fire, gone now, affects the effectiveness of drugs in the badly burned.

In the privacy of my hotel room, I light my candle. I consider once again holding my palm to the flame, this time with the burned in mind, in an effort to better understand their experiences. But I cannot do it. To do it now would be to disrespect the pain of the truly burned. Ashamed, I extinguish the flame and spend thirty minutes trying to imagine the pain of the truly burned. I cannot, and for that I am grateful.

With the firefighter, I drive over two-lane highways surrounded by chaparral, surrounded by fuel. Clouds gather and thicken. Rain falls. We turn onto a dirt road and encounter a sign on a gate: “Area closed for public safety and watershed recovery due to damage from recent wildfires.” The firefighter opens the gate, and we pass through onto the La Brea Fire site, burned six months before.

The truck slips in the mud as we move uphill. On a hilltop, we stand in the rain and look across a landscape that had been chaparral and will become, again, chaparral. Now it is bare earth and rock and scattered skeletons of shrubs set against a backdrop of rugged hills, almost as barren as Death Valley. But here and there new growth emerges. Specks of green show.

The view is more or less the same on both sides of the road. The fire jumped the road.

Ignition was somewhere out in those hills. It started with a cookstove at a camp used by marijuana growers. Something like ninety thousand acres burned, an area a hundred times the size of Central Park, ten times the size of Santa Barbara’s Jesusita Fire. The response included 901 personnel on-site. Some would have been driving bulldozers. Others would have been swinging pulaskies. Still others would have been driving buses and filling out paperwork and operating radios and washing dishes.