Slapout, Oklahoma, at the intersection of a county road and a much used east-west state highway, has a population of five. The town’s name used to be Nye, but in the nineteen-fifties its residents, who were then more numerous, changed it. Locals explain that there was a store in Nye where, if you asked the owner for a particular item, he often went to look for it and came back and said, “We’re slap out of it!” How this inspired a name change no one knows. Now the store is gone, and the town consists of a single building that’s a combination gas station, truck stop, convenience mart, café, and improvised community center. In the dark of early morning, it’s jumping with truckers, oil-field workers, guys who drive the county road graders, and farmers who have been baling hay all night. A hand-lettered sign on the door reads “Please hang on to the door.” This is so the howling prairie wind won’t keep yanking it open and undoing the feeling of comfort inside.
Just to the south on the county road stands the Slapout firehouse, a metal building with three bay doors and six enormous fire trucks behind them. These vehicles, acquired from the military and the forest service, have been modified for prairie firefighting by the firemen themselves, all of whom are volunteers. Charlie Starbuck is the fire chief. He objects to being called Charles; it’s Charlie on his birth certificate. Starbuck has a drooping, Emiliano Zapata mustache and green eyes and he wears overalls, end-of-the-nose spectacles, and a rumpled Army-fatigue hat. His father was a fire chief before him. On his muscled forearms are multiple reddish burns made by sparks from welding, a regular occupation at his ranch, not far from town, as well as at the firehouse.
On the morning of March 6, 2017, Starbuck’s pager went off at ten-fifty-three and informed him that a grass fire was burning in the Mocane oil field, by County Road 141 in Beaver County, north of Slapout. Its cause was a downed power line. With three trucks and eight of his crew, he drove to the fire and saw that it had already blown up to a size where, given the conditions, he was going to need help. He called neighboring fire departments. Texas County, just to the west, sent trucks—“I will praise Texas County till the day I die,” Starbuck says. He also called Mark Goeller, the director of Oklahoma Forestry Services, who, needing a name for the fire, used Starbuck’s. Sometime afterward, Starbuck’s sister in Virginia called him to ask about the Starbuck Fire she had heard mentioned on the news. That was the first he learned of his fame.
For weeks, the National Weather Service out of Norman, Oklahoma, Amarillo, Texas, and Dodge City, Kansas, had been sending alerts. The conditions were perfect for wildfires. There had been almost no precipitation for six months; before that, however, a lot of rain had fallen, and now the plentiful prairie grasses stood up tall and tinder-dry. On some days, like this one, the winds blew at fifty-plus miles an hour, while the humidity dipped down into the single digits. An ice storm in January had damaged scores of power lines, making them more vulnerable. Often, the Weather Service alerts are mainly precautionary. But on this day the south-central Great Plains did indeed catch fire. Huge wildfires spread over the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles and in western Kansas, with a smaller burn in Colorado.
This is a part of the world where extreme weather hangs out. Meteorologists refer to the prevailing late-winter “dry line,” a phenomenon found almost nowhere else, which in this case is produced by hot, dry air from the Mexican plateau colliding with moist air moving up from the Gulf of Mexico. In March and April, if there’s an incoming storm system as a trigger, the combination of wet and dry explodes above the plains. High winds generated by the dry line contributed to some of the dust storms of the nineteen-thirties. Plowed ground on the plains blew away during those years; later, the government encouraged agriculture that returned the land to grass. The big dust storms haven’t reappeared since, but now when the winds come the grass holding the soil in place is sometimes thoroughly ready to burn.
A megafire is considered to be one that burns more than a hundred thousand acres. In Oklahoma, the total burned in the March 6th fires was seven hundred and eighty-one thousand acres. Moving northeast with the wind, the Starbuck Fire soon crossed into Kansas. Eventually, the Starbuck and other nearby fires would be given an official, bureaucratic handle, the Northwest Complex Fire, but, to the people most affected, the fires that burned six hundred and eight thousand Kansas acres are still called by the name of a fire chief in Oklahoma. In the Texas Panhandle, fires burned four hundred and eighty-two thousand acres. Seven people are thought to have died in the March 6th fires. The expanse of burned land on the south-central Great Plains amounted to almost two million acres—roughly three thousand square miles. Rhode Island, that useful state for comparing geographic measure, covers about a thousand square miles of land. The March 6th fires burned an area about the size of three Rhode Islands.
Ashland, Kansas, is almost fifty miles from Slapout, if you follow a straight line across the prairie. As the county seat of Clark County, Ashland grew along the gentle valley of a creek, with ambitious streets as wide as big-city avenues. After going through a familiar Great Plains cycle of boom and not quite bust, the town today has a population of about eight hundred and fifty. Two water towers rise at either end of town; swallows swoop and dive around the tall, white grain elevators at Ashland Feed & Seed, by the train tracks at the end of Main Street. A twenty-foot-high bas-relief map on the front of the courthouse shows the county’s historic sites, including the place where one of Coronado’s men lost a bridle bit when they were looking for the rumored Cities of Gold in the vicinity in 1541. The intricate, rusted, ancient object is on display in a glass case next to the district-court clerk’s office.
Millie Fudge, Clark County’s head of emergency-management operations, is in her late sixties. Mildred Barnes was her name growing up; she has lived her entire life in the western part of the state. Dark-eyed, with short, light-brown hair and black-rimmed glasses, she walks leaning forward a bit, as if successfully towing a great weight. Her twanging, slightly gravelly voice projects calm, and her silences have formidable presence. Everyday attire for her includes a dark-blue T-shirt, bluejeans, running shoes, and a camouflage holster on her belt containing a radio. From time to time the radio squawks, and she answers it. She works with the volunteer fire departments and the police, not only in Ashland but also in the county’s two other towns, both of which are smaller. Her office is in the ambulance building, because she is also the E.M.S. director for the county.
Millie’s husband, Gary Fudge, is a retired truck driver. The couple married in 1970 and moved to Ashland in 1979. They had three boys and a girl. Their third son, Brannon, born in 1981, suffered from a brain disease called Rasmussen’s encephalitis, which caused him to have as many as three hundred seizures a day. When Brannon was seven, his parents took him to the Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, where Dr. Ben Carson (now the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development) performed a brain operation called a hemispherectomy, which cured the seizures and allowed the boy to function. Brannon learned how to talk and take care of himself, and did well until his late teens, when another operation was necessary. He graduated from high school in 2000, but because he required monitoring he stayed in Ashland and opened an ice-cream shop called Fudge Man’s. “He and I ran it together,” Millie says. “He loved people and they loved him. In fact, he enjoyed visiting with customers so much that he sometimes ignored business and I’d have to remind him about it.”
In 2002, because of complications resulting from a hairline fracture in his skull, Brannon went to a hospital in Wichita, and while recovering from surgery he lapsed into a coma. After thirty-three days, his family made the decision to take him off life support. The experience led his mother into despair. She got through this period only by the grace of God, she says. Her family’s ordeal left her with love for her Ashland neighbors for patronizing Brannon’s shop and supporting her family and being with them as they grieved. In a way, Brannon was why she got into public service in the first place. She had signed up for her first E.M.S. course back in 1983, partly so she would be able to take care of him and her other children.
On the morning of the fires, Millie was checking the Weather Service updates. At about eleven-thirty, she got a notification about the Starbuck Fire and a request for Clark County to send whoever was available down to Oklahoma as reinforcements. With her daughter, Brandy Fleming, who is the assistant emergency manager, she set out in the department’s pickup, but before they’d gone twenty-five miles it became obvious that they would have their own problems closer to home.
They stopped near Englewood, two miles from the state line, the county’s southern border. By that time, the fire was approaching a ranch owned by a man named Frosty Ediger, who has raised cattle and wheat there for fifty years. The Englewood volunteer firemen had already given up trying to stop the ranks of flames rolling across the prairie and were focussed on saving people and structures. An Englewood fireman saw Frosty Ediger on his tractor trying to plow a firebreak around his house. The fireman looked at the oncoming inferno and thought, That old man is going to die.
In conversation, people out here bring up God a lot, but that could be because a self-evident mighty power—the sky above—demands attention almost every day. At any minute, this humongous sky might smash you with hail or whirl you away in a tornado or bless you with rainbows and cloud-piercing sunbeams evocative of celestial choirs and the angels ascending and descending. Now, to the southwest, the gray and black smoke was boiling up toward altitudes where airplanes are tiny white X shapes with pipe-cleaner contrails. The smoke mounted in gray cumulus-like eruptions or redacted everything above the horizon line to black, while the underside of the billows glowed orange from the flames. Embers flew through the air, and the fierce heat added its own force to the wind, which blew with such a noise that people standing four feet apart had to shout to talk.
On a quirk of the wind, the fire jumped over Frosty Ediger and his house and outbuildings. In Englewood, directly in its path, some trees already blazed. The Englewood firemen retreated to defend the town. Millie saw the arm of flames sweeping north and realized that she and her team would have to manage the disaster from Ashland. They drove back on Highway 283, along which the telephone poles were soon burning. The Englewood firemen had advised her to go, but as they watched the flashing lights recede they felt completely alone.
Millie Fudge did, too. She had called the sheriff’s office in Ashland and asked them to call Mutual Aid, an organization of neighboring counties that help one another in emergencies. But fires caused by sparking or downed power lines had broken out all over. When the sheriff’s office called her back, they said that all trucks had gone to other fires and none were available. Millie then asked them to call counties farther out, but the same answer came back. Eleven separate fires burned in Kansas that day, though none the size of what was approaching Ashland. It hit her that Clark County’s three volunteer fire departments (in Englewood, Ashland, and Minneola) would be defending their towns and county entirely on their own. For Millie, this was the most frightening moment.
Garth Gardiner, a rancher who raises cattle and quarter horses west of Ashland, watched through the window of his ranch’s office as the smoke plumed skyward and figured the fire would miss him. He got in his pickup and drove west on a dirt road for a better look, then pulled over and gauged the smoke’s distance—still pretty far off, he thought. Suddenly, a wall of flames came leaping over a ridge about three hundred yards away. “I saw it and hauled butt out of there,” he said. Speeding back toward his house, he saw the smoke engulf his family’s cattle operation, to the southwest, causing the photo-sensor floodlights above the corrals to turn on. Soon, only those lights, tiny pinpoints, were visible. Within the smoke’s blackness, Garth’s brothers, Mark and Greg, and Mark’s wife, Eva, each escaped without knowing if the others had made it. Mark drove out on a lane so dark with smoke that he had to hold the truck door open so that he could follow the gravel road edge below him.
On folding tables in Ashland’s ambulance garage, Millie Fudge set up the Emergency Operations Center for Clark County. She gave her daughter and two volunteer assistants the job of listening to all the police and fire dispatch calls and writing them down. Computer records would do for later; now, in the rush of events, she trusted paper. Other volunteers recorded the comings and goings of first responders on T-cards, which they inserted in a multi-pocket organizer that hung on the wall so the cards were visible at a glance. At three-eleven in the afternoon, Millie ordered the evacuation of the nursing home and the Ashland Health Center. She also ordered the evacuation of the entire town of Englewood and, about twenty minutes later, the evacuation of Ashland itself. Residents grabbed what they could and drove southeast, to Buffalo, Oklahoma, or east, to Protection, Kansas. (The town’s name comes from its Republican founders, who espoused protective tariffs; it was later among the first towns in the United States to be inoculated with the Salk polio vaccine.)
Still the fire came on. Burning tumbleweeds flew forty feet above the ground, and the red cedars in the hollows roared as their resinous boughs ignited like kerosene. The wind swept up the dry grass until the air itself was on fire. Ashland’s firefighters had never seen a blaze that could not be outflanked and subdued. “But what could you do against this monster?” Millie asked. Like the Englewood firemen, Ashland’s tried to save structures and people. In outlying areas, they hosed houses with a flame-retardant foam. Some houses could not be saved. Here on the prairie, fires are fought from trucks, not on foot. Bumping over rough ground, the trucks threw the firemen around, banging them up and bruising them as burning sparks went down their necks. Several times, the fire’s front line jumped over the trucks, and the firemen kept from burning by spraying a mist around themselves.
Cattle, for no known reason, sometimes ran into the flames. A man and his eleven-year-old son became separated while trying to move their cows to safety. The father, bouncing on an all-terrain vehicle, lost his cell phone; the son, driving a pickup, couldn’t reach him and thought he had died. The son almost went back into the flames to try to save him; in another vehicle, his mother, who still had her phone and kept her head, insisted that the boy not do that. Horrible minutes passed before both father and son made it out of the smoke O.K.
Several ranchers set out to plow firebreaks, as Frosty Ediger had done. Mike Harden, a farmer and rancher, got his tractor and heavy-duty disk plow and began to plow all around Ashland. He disked along the state and county roads on both shoulders, and along fences, and all around the health center, on the town’s west side, and around the southwest side of the high school, and around the house of his former math teacher, and around piles of hay bales. When a transmission hose on his tractor broke, he started blading dirt and making firebreaks with a road grader. Once, Harden graded so close to the flames that the dirt he threw put them out. He also bladed a firebreak around his tractor and his disk plow so they wouldn’t burn. He drove the grader to his house, quickly ate a supper his wife had fixed for him, and went out again.
At about four in the afternoon, the wind shifted from out of the west or southwest to out of the north. David Redger, the Ashland fire chief, conferred with Millie, decided that Ashland was most vulnerable from the northwest, and sent trucks there. At Garth Gardiner’s, the firemen told Gardiner they would try to save his house, and they did. It touched him to know that some of these men, neighbors of his, helped him when at the same moment they were losing property of their own. The fire department now had more reports of houses on fire than it had trucks. Nothing was burning yet in town. The last evacuees made it out on roads with fire so close on either side that it blistered the paint on their cars. By 6:48 P.M., fire surrounded Ashland on all sides, and it was impossible to enter or leave the town. Those evacuated to Buffalo and Protection had to be evacuated farther, to the towns of Woodward, Oklahoma, and Coldwater, Kansas. As the flames closed in, Millie considered moving the Emergency Operations Center to a field of new wheat on the town’s north side, just past the golf course. Too green to burn, the field could provide a refuge.
In Englewood, Bernnie Smith, the fire chief, was looking for water. A fire truck had run over a hydrant, draining the town’s water tower, and he couldn’t pump from wells, because the electricity had gone out. Meanwhile, his daughter was trying to bring his wife, who suffers from severe asthma, out of the smoke and to a hospital. Without treatment, she could die. Smith told his daughter to drive her south, to Woodward; half an hour later, his daughter called back to report that fire was blocking the roads in that direction. He told her to try the town of Beaver, Oklahoma, northwest of there, but when she got to the clinic it didn’t have the necessary medications. She turned south, toward Perryton, Texas, but another fire, later called the Perryton Fire—also caused by power-line sparks—ruled that out. Then he told her to go north again, to the town of Liberal, Kansas, even if she had to drive through fire to get there. She finally reached the Liberal hospital, and her mother received treatment.
On the front line in Oklahoma, Charlie Starbuck and his crew fought on. When the wind changed to out of the north, flames suddenly surrounded them on three sides. Starbuck always drives with both windows of the truck cab open so he will feel the same heat as those riding on the back. Now the encroaching flames leaped through the cab, in one window and out the other. Starbuck ducked. By misting around themselves and blasting the fire with their hoses, they reached safer ground upwind. “We almost got overrun,” he told me later. “To this day, I’m amazed that we didn’t end up going to a lot of firefighters’ funerals.”
In Texas, the wind shift led to three of the state’s deaths. A rancher, a cowboy who worked for him, and the cowboy’s girlfriend were trying to rescue cattle when flames from an unexpected direction suddenly caught up with them and brought down their horse and four-wheeler. The three burned to death as they tried to escape on foot.
As night fell in Ashland, the few people remaining in town looked out at flames in every direction. Not all were sure they would ever see their families again.
People give different explanations for what saved the town. Some point to the firebreaks that Mike Harden disked and graded. In places, you could see where the fire had come up to one of those and stopped. The wheat field where Millie had thought of moving the Emergency Operations Center seemed to have been crucial. An aerial photograph from a day or two later shows the soot black of the incinerated prairie meeting the spring green of the four-hundred-acre field in a straight, uncompromised line. The fire kept threatening the town into the next day, and Ashland’s firefighters stayed on the job without sleeping, some of them for thirty or forty hours. Millie remained at her command post, getting only a few hours’ rest during the same period. On nature’s part, the humidity increased, and the wind died down at night.
The only fire fatality in the county (or the state) on March 6th occurred when a truck driver on Highway 34 tried to turn around, jackknifed his truck, got out of the cab, and died of smoke inhalation. His name was Corey P. Holt, and he came from Oklahoma City. In the low visibility, two cars then crashed into the truck; the cars’ occupants were injured, but no one died. Englewood lost about a dozen houses, nine in the town itself, and an Englewood man whose house burned down died of a heart attack two weeks later.
Losing buildings and fences and vehicles and stored-up hay was bad, but the suffering of the cattle grieved the ranchers’ souls. Thousands of cattle died in the fire, but thousands wretchedly survived—blinded, their ears gone, ear tags melted, udders burned off. Many had little hair left and their feet were burned so badly that they walked out of their hooves. Herds stood swaying slightly, moaning or mute in agony. Shooting cattle occupied the ashy days afterward. Ranchers whose guns and ammunition had burned up had to borrow them or ask neighbors to do the killing. Bulldozers and backhoes dug pits for mass burials.
Ashlanders said God had spared the town and its residents. Miraculous escapes were attributed to God’s plan. Even the few older citizens who had been around for the Dust Bowl storms declared they’d never seen anything as awe-inspiring as this. Everybody said they hoped never to experience anything like it again.
But, in a sense, they soon did. Immediately after the fire—even as it still burned—unsolicited and generous aid started arriving from around the country. The outpouring amazed them even more than the fire had. News outlets did not cover the prairie fires extensively, the way they do California fires. But rural America found out about the March 6th fires on social media and followed their progress in real time. That day was a Monday. By Wednesday, hay to feed the cattle now without pastures started to arrive. For weeks afterward, convoys of flatbeds loaded with large cylindrical hay bales, up to five thousand dollars’ worth of hay per truck, all decked out with American flags and hand-lettered messages of support, rolled in, night and day. In Englewood, the fire department couldn’t unload all the trucks at late hours and left a skid-loader and a sign by the firehouse asking the truckers to please unload their bales themselves. In the mornings, new piles of bales had appeared.
Replacing a mile of fence costs ten thousand dollars. The Gardiner ranch, for example, lost more than two hundred and seventy miles of fence. Trucks from Iowa and Michigan arrived with donated fenceposts, corner posts, and wire. Volunteer crews slept in the Ashland High School gymnasium and worked ten-hour days on fence lines. Kids from a college in Oregon spent their spring break pitching in. Cajun chefs from Louisiana arrived with food and mobile kitchens and served free meals. Another cook brought his own chuck wagon. Local residents’ old friends, retired folks with extra time, came in motor homes and lived in them while helping to rebuild. Donors sent so much bottled water it would have been enough to put out the fire all by itself, people said. A young man from Ohio raised four thousand dollars in cash and drove out and gave it to the Ashland Volunteer Fire Department, according to the Clark County Gazette. The young man said that God had told him to; the fireman who accepted the donation said that four thousand was exactly what it was going to cost to repair the transmission of a truck that had failed in the fire, and both he and the young man cried.
Farm and ranch organizations and an association of rodeo cowboys gave tens of thousands of dollars to fire sufferers. Residents of Ashland, who had farsightedly established their own 501(c)3 foundation several years earlier, could accept the donations and distribute them without having to route them through another nonprofit, such as the Red Cross. The president of the Stockgrowers State Bank, Kendal Kay, who is also the town’s mayor, offered low-interest loans so ranchers could re-start their operations. But, as one rancher noted, all those who rebuilt acquired extra zeros on their debt line.
Even more contributions arrived: newborn-calf formula, veterinary medications, protein cake for cattle, winter clothes, frozen casseroles with scriptural messages taped to them, a shipment of cheese curds from Wisconsin, and more hay, of all kinds, in bales whose quantities had never been seen in the region before. After the 24/7 task of managing the hundreds of fire trucks and crews that showed up in the days after the fires, Millie Fudge turned to making note of all the donations, so that people could be acknowledged and thanked. Kansas’s governor, Sam Brownback, made a visit; nobody chided him for the state’s recent to-the-bone budget cuts. The fire had moved so fast that no agency outside Clark County could have done much anyway, Millie believed. In fact, the state’s Incident Management Team had showed up on March 7th and provided excellent practical assistance, she pointed out (although the county had been careful to retain local control).
A young woman whose family’s ranch houses had burned told a livestock-association meeting in Wichita, “The government didn’t help us, but America did.” From the point of view of Clark County as a whole, the government did play a part: the National Weather Service sent warnings about the wind shift; the states of Colorado, Nebraska, and South Dakota dispatched firefighting teams and aircraft to help squelch what was left of the fire; Ashland used a FEMA grant to buy two of its fire trucks; and the Department of Agriculture later provided ranchers with payments of up to a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for livestock losses and up to two hundred thousand dollars for fencing. And, of course, Millie and her team, as county officials, were part of “the government” themselves. None of that, however, was to the point, which was the unexpected non-governmental love that the fire sufferers felt coming at them from around the country as if out of nowhere.
A gun-store owner in Oklahoma who raffled off a 9-mm. pistol, an antelope hunt, and a custom rifle explained, “They’re all my people.” A stranger sent a cash donation and a handwritten note directly to Garth Gardiner after reading about him in the news. She said she wanted to do this for him even though he was a rancher and she was a vegetarian. “Our country’s in a pretty turbulent political situation nowadays, but people are still good,” Gardiner told me.
One afternoon last summer, I talked with Bernnie Smith in the shade behind the Englewood firehouse. He rolled some office chairs out the back door for us, because the metal building was stifling. Smith is a compact, green-eyed man with a level gaze and a quiet demeanor, and he wore a Western shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, bluejeans, square-toed cowboy boots, and spurs. My call had interrupted his workday; he’d been moving cattle on his ranch. His horse stood in a stock trailer nearby, behind his club-cab pickup.
Smith said that dealing with the emotions that the firefighters went through after the fire had been kind of a P.T.S.D. experience, because, honestly, they thought the fire had kicked their ass. They held meetings after it and talked about it and sometimes cried, and invited post-stress counsellors a time or two. The guys on his crew range in age from nineteen to over seventy, and they stayed on the fire for, in some cases, two days straight. He worried about one young guy because Smith thought his eyes had been burned, but he turned out to be O.K. The generosity of people in the aftermath had meant an enormous amount. “That hay movement after the fire is the greatest thing that’s happened in America in my lifetime,” he said. He still loves to look at a pasture full of good grass, but he remarked, “It’s pretty until it burns,” adding, “That grass is your livelihood and a hazard at the same time.” He and I talked for hours, until his horse was whinnying with impatience and kicking the slats of the trailer. Smith never mentioned that while he fought to save lives and houses in Englewood the fire had burned up a third of his cattle herd.
I learned that fact later, from Cara Vanderree, the librarian in Ashland. She is originally from Comanche County, next door, and her family has been in the state for generations. The Ashland Library is the best small library in Kansas, in the judgment of the Kansas Library Association, which recently gave it an award. Vanderree speaks in a sweet, soft voice. A lot of her job, especially in summer, consists of superintending kids who want to use the library’s computers. With sweetness and patience, she requires that if a child wants to play on the computer for half an hour the child must read a book for half an hour, and she watches to make sure the child actually reads. Sometimes she decides a difficult child must go, and she says, “Darlin’, I can feel your home callin’ you.”
Before the fire, Vanderree did some archival work for the Kansas Humanities Council, transcribing recorded recollections. After the fire, when everyone was going through a period of talking about it, trying to come to terms with it—a period that has not yet ended—Vanderree got the idea of recording as many survivors of the fire as wanted to participate. Then she would put the recordings on the library’s Web site, and make the transcriptions into a book. The Kansas Humanities Council liked the idea and gave her a grant, as did the Kansas Health Foundation. With the assistance of Diana Redger, who has a master’s in history and is also the Ashland fire chief’s sister, the library has interviewed sixty-nine people.
Vanderree had thought she could ease the chore of transcribing by downloading an app she bought online. She soon discovered that the app couldn’t understand a Kansas-Oklahoma accent. When a speaker said the word “town,” what the computer somehow heard was “Tehran.” The repeated appearance of the Iranian capital in the first-person accounts of a Kansas wildfire gave the project a certain international flavor, but these and many other mistakes became a pain to deal with. She and two assistants went back to doing the transcriptions themselves.
Redger conducted most of the interviews, and at the end of each one she asked the interviewees if anything good had come from the fire. They replied that it made them know their neighbors better, it drew people closer together, and it strengthened the town. I know all these answers are true. If you drive on the plains a lot, you see towns in decline: store windows boarded up on Main Street, houses becoming run-down, local schools closed. Our rural places are emptying out. The frame of a sign with no sign in it could be an emblem for much of small-town America, not only on the plains. Sometimes a town will even lament its fate publicly: “Pray for Fowler,” read a sign I drove past in Fowler, Kansas.
Ashland used to have dozens of businesses, a passenger-railroad station on the Santa Fe line, and a movie theatre that showed films every day. All are now gone; but the town nonetheless continues, with the courthouse, an office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a public swimming pool, a lumberyard, a good restaurant, the grain elevators, a motel, two bed-and-breakfasts, a public school for K-12, four churches, two banks, the health center, a veterinary clinic, and the library. The March 6th fires affected other towns, but I know of none that did a local-history project about the experience. Ashland’s collection of fire stories is like the town’s immune system kicking in.
The prairie greened up quickly after the fires, and in some places the grass came back better than before. Then, on March 5, 2018—almost exactly a year after the fires—a wind-driven fire broke out just north of Ashland. Incredulous, the fire department pounced on the blaze, put it out, and watched indignantly lest it make another peep, which it did not. No major fires have threatened Ashland this year. In April, however, big fires burned again in Oklahoma. One that officials called the Rhea Fire started near the town of Seiling and consumed about three hundred thousand acres, with two deaths. I drove through the area just afterward. Wind turbines in great and stately numbers populate the prairie there—Oklahoma gets more than a quarter of its electricity from wind-generated power. The blades were turning slowly overhead as ashes drifted in the air and made the whole landscape look smudged and blurry. Black skeletons of scrubby trees stretched to the horizon south of Seiling; in other places, the flames had turned open prairie into Sahara-like dunes dotted with spiky black sagebrush stumps.
Since 2005, the prairie states have seen a lot of fires. Several that burned in 2016 now look like preludes to the giants of 2017; other record-setting fires had preceded them. The biggest prairie fire in Texas history burned about a million acres on the Panhandle in 2006. Deke Arndt, a meteorologist and a climate scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has written on NOAA’s Web site about prairie fires. I called him up and asked if he saw the fires as part of a pattern related to climate change.
Arndt grew up in Oklahoma, and his mother still lives there, so he understands the immediacy of weather in people’s lives on the plains. He thinks that may be why Oklahoma produces so many weather scientists. Arndt explained about the dry line and said that it has been creating wild weather in the region since before humans lived there. But the weather and the climate are two different things, he added (as meteorologists often do). Extreme weather has always occurred on the plains. What is new, and derives from climate change, is that the atmosphere has become hotter and wetter, bringing more rain, causing wetter years (2016, for example), which produce more fuel in the form of grass. As the atmosphere warms, it is also thirstier, so that when dry periods come the air sucks more moisture from the soil and the plants and makes the land more susceptible to fire. We may be witnessing a slow process of desertification in drier parts of the region, but nearly half the people in Arndt’s native state doubt that climate change is real.
No one I talked to in Kansas told me that he believed in climate change. Prevailing opinion holds that nothing about the recent extreme weather here is much different from what’s always been. People say that Native Americans sometimes used prairie fires as an environmental tool. Some claim that government policy is partly to blame for the recent fires, and often single out the C.R.P.—the Conservation Reserve Program, a federal initiative that, since the nineteen-eighties, has paid farmers to replant and maintain grass cover on their land. The argument resembles the one applied to the long-standing policy of fire suppression in forests: that is, fire suppression and the Conservation Reserve Program both create dangerous buildups of fuel.
As Adam Elliott, who administers the program in Clark County from the U.S.D.A. office in Ashland, told me, the C.R.P. was intended to be a continuation of government efforts to put marginal land back into grass so that it wouldn’t blow. A subsequent increase in deer and game-bird populations has become another justification for it. (That increase is evident on summer mornings, even in the middle of Ashland, when you awake to the dulcet “bobwhite” call of the quail.) People say that the fires resulted from a unique combination of a rainy period followed by a drought, with the land made more flammable by the C.R.P. Evidently the government agreed with this analysis, because soon after the 2017 fires the U.S.D.A. expanded the time frame for grazing on otherwise closed C.R.P. land.
When I asked Millie Fudge her opinion about climate change and the fires, she deliberated so long before answering that I thought I’d offended her. Then she said, “I’m not knowledgeable about that. Climate change, if it exists, might have something to do with the fires. But, whether it does or not, I know God is in control. He allows or causes the increase in fires to happen for a reason.”
Again she fell silent. “What is the reason?” I asked.
More silence. Then: “The fires are a wake-up call. They will get worse. We humans think we are in charge. We think we are indispensable to God, but he is showing us that he is in control. He is telling us that we need to find God.”
When I talked to Mike Harden, the man who plowed and bladed the firebreaks, he also said he did not know if climate change existed. “But I’ll tell you, it’s never boring trying to raise cattle or crops out here,” he went on. “My great-grandparents came out and homesteaded in the eighteen-nineties, and we’ve seen everything. Floods. Hailstorms. Grasshoppers. Ice storms. Tornadoes. Dust and more dust. And now these fires. Living here takes it out of you, but every year is a little bit different. Whatever the weather is going to do in the future, that’s not up to me. All I know is that the Bible says man will eat his bread in the sweat of his face, and that’s certainly true if you ranch or farm in western Kansas.”
I drove hundreds of miles trying to make geographic sense of the fires. After going back and forth between Oklahoma and Kansas several times, I noticed the name of the river I crossed in Oklahoma near the border: the Cimarron. How could it have taken so long for me to notice the Cimarron River? On the whole Great Plains—in all the West, for my money—no other river name coincides with Western myth so closely or so lyrically. Almost ninety years ago, Edna Ferber wrote a novel, “Cimarron,” about the opening of the Oklahoma Territory. The book was made into a movie, starring Richard Dix, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, in 1931. That movie, in turn, was remade into another “Cimarron,” which starred Glenn Ford, in 1960. There’ve been any number of other movies, TV shows, songs, and albums with “Cimarron” in their titles. It comes from a Spanish word that means, in this context, a runaway horse that lives in wild places.
For years, the Oklahoma Panhandle was No Man’s Land, a refuge for outlaws. For complicated reasons, no state had jurisdiction there. A branch of the Chisholm Trail, which the cattle herds followed northward from Texas after the Civil War, crossed the Cimarron River not far from present-day Highway 283. Englewood, just north of the river in Kansas, where law existed, offered entertainment and hotels and a railroad connection for cowboys riding the trail. Outlaws used to commit crimes in Kansas and then escape back across the Cimarron to relative safety. Western-style shoot-outs, where the bad guy drew on the lawman and the lawman shot the bad guy, occurred on the dusty streets of Englewood. From the even more civilized town of Ashland, marshals set out across the Cimarron to catch and bring back wanted men for trial.
In wet periods, the Cimarron runs at about the volume of a respectable creek back East. I stopped and watched its clear, buckskin-colored water flowing through the willows and the red cedars. A few cottonwoods held up their blackened branches, but otherwise you’d never know that fire had recently raced along this valley. If I were younger, I would have swooned farther back into lonesome-cowboy fantasies, into all the “Cimarron”s of my childhood. But that Wild West past happened to other people. We are of a different time and place—on our own, like the Ashland and Englewood firefighters in the firestorm. As I looked at the Cimarron River, my thoughts were of the present and the soon to come. ♦
