This piece was originally published in the summer edition of Coast Life magazine.
As we head into a summer predicted to be one of the driest on record, I find myself wondering whatever happened to fire season. Remember fire season? Th at was a regular event back in the 1950s. Fire season meant you couldn’t set foot in the woods at all. Not only parks (which there were none of in those peachy times anyway) but just regular woods. I don’t think it was only because I lived in a logging camp on Nelson Island—as far as I know it applied all over the coast.
I remember being told it was because you could start a fi re by knocking two sparky rocks together with your stinky summer running shoes. There was also speculation some fires were started spontaneously by fragments of broken coke bottle acting like rogue magnifying glasses. We were given to understand the tinder was so toasty you could ignite it with a hard look.
Even later when I was relocated to the bustling metropolis of Pender Harbour, during July and August us kids were instilled with a terror of doing anything that could start a fire. No target practice, even with a BB gun.
Those who relied on wood-or-oil-fired cookstoves (many in those days) had to rig fi enmesh screens atop their chimneys. All machines, those few allowed to operate, had to affix spark catchers on their exhausts.
Firefighting equipment was everywhere. At our camp there was a rack of fire tools alongside the cookhouse. Mattocks, shovels, buckets, backmounted water squirters called “pisstanks,” reels of hose, Wajax pumps, strange water pails with bulged-out bottoms so if you set them down they’d tip over. This was so they were no good for anything but passing hand to-hand in bucket brigades. It was a major crime to borrow one of these buckets to bail the boat.
All fire tools were painted bright red so if you cheated and snuck a fire shovel to dig spuds you’d be caught red-handed.
That was another thing. There were fire police in those days. They were called “The Forestry” and were members of that once noble institution called the BC Forest Service. The Forestry had a big Ranger Station in the middle of Madeira Park with two houses, a big garage full of Series 1 Land Rovers, a barn full of firef ghting equipment, and a dock with couple of shipshape boats bristling with fire tools.
There was another Ranger Station in Sechelt and another in Powell River. Every B.C. town of any size had one, with spiffy green and white buildings and manicured lawns.
The Forestry guys wore khaki uniforms and were everywhere checking fire-tool displays and pouncing on the tiniest puff of smoke in their Land Rovers. They also maintained a network of fire lookouts on local mountaintops staff ed during fire season by beady-eyed hermits with powerful binoculars and radiotelephones, also looking for puffs of smoke.
And if they did see one? It was all hands on deck. The forest ranger would head for the beer parlour, showing his badge to unwary patrons and conscripting all able-bodied men to head into the woods with mattocks and pisstanks to jump on the fire before it got away. Teachers, storekeepers, layabouts—everybody who could swing a Pulaski was activated.
You don’t need a degree to run a pisstank. Anybody who owned a bulldozer or useful piece of equipment (excavators had not been invented yet) was also conscripted to help in the fi ght. Failing to obey got you six months in jail.
Under normal soggy conditions, our coastal rainforest is much more fire-resistant than the pine forests of the Interior. But dry it out enough and it becomes positively explosive. I just wonder what happened to our formerly ingrained consciousness of this fact.
There is no such thing as fire season anymore. Tourists without a clue about fire are invited to cavort in the woods in the driest months. Parks never close. I was finding cigarette butts on the trails in Francis Point park right through the extreme danger period last year. There were at least three roadside fires on the Sunshine Coast Highway caused by cool dudes throwing butts out car windows and I had to politely ask a neighbour to extinguish a bonfire that was shooting sparks up into tinder-dry trees. His own trees.
Smokey the bear has given up and retired to his cave. The old Forestry station in Madeira Park has been converted into a music school. Cue Nero fiddling.
Only certified professionals are allowed to fight forest fires now, and there are so few of them the government thinks it has to fly in extras from Mexico and Australia. And each year galloping climate change sets a new record for acres of forest lost to fire, homes burnt and whole towns like Barriere and Lytton destroyed.
Time to bring back fire season.
