Photo Essay: Texture of a Burn
Some up-close looks at changes brought by forest fire
This piece is part of Unsettling’s “Prepping for Fire Season” series. See also the short series introduction and “Through the Smoke, A Clearing.”
“I wish I had been able to visit there before it burned.” These are the times we live in, that such statements are easily overheard. We might even say them ourselves. There’s a trick we play with such words, though. For we often mean something more like, “I wish I had been able to visit before it was gone.” We thus not only presume a more preferable state of being for that given place—we want to visit and know it as others before us did—but, because we cannot, we let ourselves believe it is no longer there at all. “Before it burned” is often performative, erasing the place in question. “I guess I’ll never hike through that forest, it burned down last year.”
Those who want to challenge negative conceptions of wildfire as purely a destructive force sometimes meet such statements with their own acts of erasure. To ease the sense of loss, we may speak about recovery, about how the place will return. We may emphasize that fire is required for some species to continue growing at all, the potential of their seeds locked away until touched by flame. (The latter point is true, of course, though not always true for some of today’s hottest fires.) The erasure here is of the change that’s plain as day for all of us to see. The forests and places we love are not gone away, set to come back just as they were at some future time. No, they are altered—often dramatically so—but still here.
How do we continue to hold these lands, changed though they are? Can we tell stories about these places without exaggerations of total loss or neat bow-tie endings of complete restoration?
How do we, as I asked last fall, “look loss straight in the face”?
In recent years, I’ve been taking that challenge literally, and finding ways to look at the change wrought by fire more directly and closely than I once did. As a long-distance hiker, I’ve had an above-average number of encounters with the aftermath of wildfire on different kinds of landscapes. While it is sometimes tempting to quickly pass through the scars of a burn, to do so can reinforce notions that the places around the trail “aren’t really there” until they’re restored and green again. So instead, I’ve been opting to slow down in those areas touched by fire, to look more carefully, and to see if I can perceive not just what is absent, but what is present.
What I’ve found is that there’s a surprising world of beauty in the details and textures of a burn. I thought I would share some of the results of my own personal exercises, (absolutely) amateur photographer though I may be. Right next to those new shapes and colors, though, are the marks of real destruction: rocks burned so hot they cleaved in two; scorched soil; acres of dead trees. So I surely do not mean to suggest that there is no loss. I do think, however, that we sometimes see only loss, when what sits before us is not just loss, but change.
To slow down and look are good first steps in staying in relationship to our world as it undergoes transformation. I hope this small set of images helps you do that just a little.
Photos in this collection are from three locations: near the Mogollon Rim off the Arizona Trail (homeland of the Pueblo people, Hohokum, Hopi, and Western Apache), on the small site of an especially hot burn; further north, on the site of a slight burn on the eastern side of Aaloosaktukwi or Dookʼoʼoosłííd (otherwise known as Humphrey’s Peak); and on the south side of the Columbia River Gorge (territory of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, as well as the Cascades and Cowlitz), in various sites impacted by the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire.
These photos are beautiful.