The 15%

By Michael H. Kew

85 percent—the sudden campfire in my nose borne of unnatural fact. Scarlet dawn and dusk, the toxic haze creating a new memory of stars. Of white-wine joys and grilled steelhead atop my Port Orford cedar deck under the clear arena of July's Milky Way. Of serene sundowns with thrushes and nighthawks and cameos of cougar. Of the windless New Moon night limbo and its intense silence that will always easily spark my infinity of thought.

Just 15 percent of American infernos occur naturally. Here in southwest Oregon, innocent dry lightning spawned the Chetco Bar Fire in steep wilds 18 miles from my barbecue on July 15, 2017. Exactly six years before an idiot shot at Tannerite exploding rifle targets and spawned the Flat Fire at dusty Oak Flat Campground 30 miles from my barbecue on July 15, 2023. Nearby Agness (pop. "small") town weather gauge that afternoon peaked at 98°F. Humidity 22 percent. Wind gusting 26 mph from the northeast. No rain in two months.

Exploding targets?

Brilliant.

We marvel at the permanence of human stupidity.

Oak Flat is a diamond in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest rough at the conflux of the Illinois and Rogue rivers an hour east of Gold Beach. Swelling toward 26,000 acres, the new blaze maintains creep to torch remote woods and prairies in a zone known lately for megafires, namely the 100,000-acre Silver (lightning, August 30, 1987), the 500,000-acre Biscuit (lightning, July 13, 2002), the 192,000-acre Chetco Bar, and the 175,000-acre Klondike (lightning, July 15, 2018). The Flat is occupying/recycling the revegetated burn scars of the Biscuit and the Klondike, zapping hopeful young stands of tanoak, madrone, chinquapin, pine, fir, manzanita, and oh-so-holy Port Orford cedar.

Chamaecyparis lawsoniana here is acutely native—from Florence, Oregon, to Ferndale, California. Less than 300 miles. The mountains of counties Coos and Curry (where I live) are home to the largest and oldest (+/- 350 years) trees. Today's greatest known specimen—27 miles east of Port Orford itself—is 229 feet tall and 12 feet wide. Observable are stumps 20 feet wide.

lawsoniana is per Charles Lawson, the botanic Scot who circa 19th century led the tree into worldwide horticulture. Its wood is strong, aromatic, and fine-grained. It resists fire, decay, and insect damage. Here at Purpledeneye I have used it to build gates, fencing, furniture, shelving, boardwalks, stairs, decks. The wealthy use it to build entire homes. The Japanese use it for shrines and coffins. It is considered to be the American West's rarest and most valuable softwood—a relatively boutique and scarce species, uncultivated commercially. Most of its native range has been usurped by Douglas fir plantations.

In 1923 a potent Asian pathogen (Phytophthora lateralis) was found on the roots of some ornamental Port Orford cedar seedlings at a nursery in Seattle. Slowly P. lateralis slipped south via water (zoospores) and humans (dirt on shoes, tires, logging equipment, etc.) before ultimately finding the Coos County mother lode in 1952. Though not extinctionist, for the tree's overall survival the disease remains a deep and dire barb.

Fire too. We light 85 percent of them when and where nature normally will not, extending the West's season from a historical average of three months to six. Our careless campfires, debris piles, machine mishaps, downed power lines, cigarettes, arson, gunshots, fireworks, prescribed burns, exploding targets—unlike summer thunderstorms which often come with rain or light winds and are relatively rare.

Here in most Julys, the aforementions of lightning and stupidity are not rare. Rare is fine surf. Not rare is the finery of Port Orford cedar lumber produced three miles north of Gold Beach and 20 miles southwest of Oak Flat. This is Metcalf Sawmill—snug in the fire's bullseye should it jump the Rogue River and if and when the dry northeasterlies resume.

Recent studies have confirmed that human-caused blazes almost always start in these periods of severe fire weather—hot dry windy antecedent. As with the Flat, there's explosive growth in the first few days, quickly torching thousands of acres and killing nearly four times the number of trees than a slow-moving lightning fire might.

But coastally the wind giveth and the wind taketh. Offshore always swings onshore, scouring quickly the beach skies clean back to a glowing blue, the Sun again crystal—the fire a ghost, menacing afar. Like it never happened.

Wave-starved I wheel north for 30 miles along damp unburnable spruce coast cliffs which descend to flaxen grass and buildings and the estuary burg of Gold Beach. The Rogue's mouth is jammed with fishing boats angling for steelhead and chinook salmon.

The south jetty—no surf but virgin blue windbrushed conditions. Seals and pelicans bob near shore. North jetty—small surf but chopped and shapeless. I drive on.

Two-lane Highway 101 separates Metcalf's from a strip of forest and a hidden whitesand eden not known for its waves. I peer through the blufftop boughs. Barley Beach—Otter Point—also small, chopped, shapeless. No surfing today.

Unfortunately the wee seaside mill is closed. A visit there is aromatherapy—to be enveloped by Port Orford cedar logs and sawdust—a blessing.

A blessing for us too that some of the biggest trees—mostly dead via P. lateralis—remain vertical. Recall the Shrader Old-Growth Grove. Five years since I'd last walked it. Thoroughly magical ancient island 1,200 feet up in the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest 13 miles northeast of Gold Beach and a few miles south of the Rogue en route to Agness and Oak Flat. Like Metcalf's—straight down from the fire should it really flare again. Its "incident base" along Jerry's Flat Road is nearly a mile's (and multimillion$') worth of firefighting assets and personnel—a pop-up emergency response village of impressive complexity that looked apocalyptic in the smokeless Sunday shine.

After piercing national forest I weave up into the riverside hills to find the trailhead carpark empty. The path is a fragrant and instant mindwarp into layers of deep time—I'd forgotten the sheer enormity of its firs, alders, and tanoaks, but in the years since my last visit the peculiar sad defeat of the old cedars had haunted me. Bark scars from flames of yore—likely lightning-caused—and, as with redwoods, the trees' thick sponginess shielded them from heavy harm. Instead that would come from a microscopic foe in dirt fecundity, fading the cedars' lush green feminine grace to bare black skeletal snags.

Fracturing the arboreal silence, Flat Fire specters speak though the urgent gnawing whir of helis whizzing upriver. Two miles east of me, the forest is "closed" to public pupils and fresh flames are galloping atop Wild Horse Ridge, three miles east of that area closure boundary. Five miles from the pure air nursing my old-growth meditations.

Fortune favors the wind, I reckon, slowing the fire and teasing it backwards, opposite this grove and Gold Beach civilization. But fortune—good or bad—is the wind itself, cyclical, flared by human ignorance, eased by the impulse of nature.

Modern human nature—slowly flaming out—is estranged from nature nearly 100 percent of the time.

Exploding targets?

Brilliant.

Look at these huge dead Port Orford cedars.

Ask yourself: What is nature 15 percent of the time?

Photo: Kew.