OLD SMOKEY, Bearing Climate Change

 

I have to tell you that, during the “carboniferous age”, our planet was far more flammable than it is today. About 420 million years ago the air was made up of almost 40% oxygen, compared to less than  20%. today.  All this “extra” oxygen came from the exultation of mosses and plankton which had run such a riot over the earth that they laid down the vast coal beds and oil reservoirs which we mine today. But this plant-foria also left behind extensive beds of charcoal, hinting at vast fires which had burned plants before they could become coal. 

Today, dead wood burns at 150 F. But with twice the oxygen available, that flash point was reduced to within a few degrees of 90 degrees F. The Silurian Age was not the kind of world a little bear cub could survive in for very long.  Which was, in part, why there were no little bear cubs wandering around 430 million years ago.  And damn little hard wood.

More recent charcoal records tell an equally interesting story. It seems that before the twentieth century there were a far more forest fires in North America than since. As long as there was a frontier, flames were used to conquer the land. Native Americans burned swaths of grasslands and forests to trap prey, and Europeans burned them to convert woods into farms and grazing lands and even steam. But with the closing of the American frontier – which happened in 1880 according to Professor Jackson Turner - all the land in America became property. It was owned by somebody or some corporation or the government. 

It was then that fire became not a tool but a threat. It was a brand new way of thinking about fire. For the first time in history, humans made the moral judgment that fire was usually a bad thing.  Because it was burning somebody's property.

In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act was signed by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison. It put 13 million acres of forest under Federal protection, so it could be managed to maintain water drainage and lumber resources. Wildfires still remained largely beyond human control, even when humans had started them. In Yellowstone, America’s first National Park, only those 6 to 10 of the wild fires which broke out each year along the park's roads, were contained.  Meanwhile  the 35 fires in the back country each year, usually started by lightning, were allowed to burn themselves out. Then came the drought year of 1910.

They called it The Great Fire. It was started by a lightening strike on Saturday, 20 August, 1910. There were  2,000 fires already burning in the forests of Idaho and Montana. The Great Fire by itself burned 3  million acres,  as well as the towns of Avery, Falcon and Grand Forks, Idaho, De Borgia, Haugan, Henderson, Saltese, Taft and Tuscor, Montana. The smoke was seen as far away as Watertown, New York.  Eighty-six humans were also killed, including 28 members of “The Lost Crew” of firefighters.

That fall Henry Graves, Chief of the Forest Service, decided the key to fighting wildfires was the quick arrival at the fire by an adequate, trained force , armed with the proper equipment. And by 1935 enough resources had been committed to this fast response that the new Chief, Ferdinand Silcox, could order that all wild fires reported must brought under control by 10:00 a.m. the very next morning. By 1939 the Forest Service had even established “Smokejumpers”, men who would parachute into remote back country and with shovels and hand axes, isolate a wild fire and tamp down any smoking embers. And that was when the story turned Hollywood.

On Thursday 13 August, 1942 Walt Disney released his fifth animated feature film, which was called “Bambi”.  In the climax of the movie the adult Bambi and his father struggle to survive a raging forest fire. The Forest Service thought they had a good fit with that dramatic sequence and hired "Bambi" for use on wildfire warning posters. 

Unfortunately the forerunners of the NRA protested this “insult to American Sportsmen,” since the movie showed hunters shooting Bambi’s Mommy.  Disney decided to withdraw the characters for the duration of World War Two, which meant that the Forest Service had to go looking for another animated spokes-figure.

At the time the most famous firefighter in America was “Smokey” Joe Martin of the NYFD, who had just died at the age of 86, in October of 1941.  So the Advertising Council, which drew up the posters for the Forest Service, decided any new spokes-figure should be named for him. 

The very first poster of the new figure was released on Wednesday, 9 August, 1944.  August which used to be the start of the "wild fire season".  The poster showed Smokey Bear (No “The” in the name) wearing blue jeans and a Forest Rangers’ hat, pouring water on a campfire. Three years later, in 1947, they added the caption “Remember, Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

On Thursday, 4 May, 1950, sparks from a camp stove started a blaze in the Capitan Mountain Range, of the Lincoln National Forest in northern New Mexico. It eventually burned 17,000 acres. One of the crews sent to deal with the conflagration was a unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas. 

Over a couple of days, while they worked, the men saw a black bear cub running around in the burning forest, and finally, on 9 May , they were able to capture him. He seemed to have been abandoned by his mother, was about 3 months old, and was burned and badly singed.

The crew named him “Hotfoot Teddy” and turned him over to local veterinarian Edward Smith. Smith and his wife Ruth had two children, 15 year old Donald and 4 year old Judy. Everybody fell in love with Hotfoot, except Judy, who according to her brother, kept expecting the bear to bite her. And yet it was Judy who was used as a prop when the photographer from Life Magazine showed up to take pictures of the little bear with the bandaged feet.  The little bear cub became an instant piece of merchandise.

Over night the little cute bear cub had his own comic strip and his own cartoons at the movies. The Forest Service recognized the value of Hotfoot, and he was flown to Washington, D.C., rechristened “Smokey Bear”, and given his own cage at the National Zoo. And there he resided, loping back and forth on his still tender feet until 1976, when he died at the ripe old age of 26. They buried the old guy back in New Mexico, in the forest of his birth. And about the time he died, so did the moral judgment about forest fires being all bad.

As the  Smokey Bear baby-boomers grew up, a more nuanced vision of fire in the wilderness has taken root. The Forest Service no longer uses the phrase “Forest Fire”, exchanging it for “Wildfire.” In 1965 , 94% of the public approved of the under control by 10 a.m. policy. By 1970 that percentage had fallen to 46%, and by 2004 only 6%. Part of that was probably the cost of fighting the fires; in an average year over 84,000 wildfires burn over 3 million acres, at a cost of over $540 million, and the lives of 16 firefighters.  But then, what is an average fire season anymore?

There is the perception that these numbers are going up, but it is hard to measure that based on something less than a century of hard data. After all, the “Great Fire” of 1910 burned 3 million acres by itself.  In 1988 Yellowstone Nation Park suffered 99,000 acres burned, 36% of the park. But nobody remembers the 1910 fire, anymore. There is very little film of that conflagration. Everybody remembers the fire of 1988. That’s human nature, and will never be cured. But...

...British and American statistical studies have come to the conclusion that, since the 1950's,  the fire season has gotten longer by 80 days.  Anthony Westerling of the Scrips Institution summed up the situation this way; “With the snowmelt coming out a month earlier, areas then get drier earlier overall...There's more opportunity for ignition.” As Thomas Swetnam, of the University of Arizona has pointed out, “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But...it's happening now…”

So poor little Smokey was actually lucky he was not born fifty years later, or he would have been in real trouble. That little cub had few tools for dealing with a fast moving forest fire, and none for climate change - but then neither do humans.  

And the 25,000 Koalas burned to death in the January 2020 Australian brush fires certainly could not handle the climate crises.   It would be helpful, I think, to remember we should not be worried about climate change because of what it might mean for Smokey, or Bambi, or even the Koalas  which are expected to become extinct within 30 years.  You should be worried about what it means for you. And your children. And your grandchildren.  And your great grandchildren.  They are not going to think very highly of  you, if you keep ignoring the reality of climate change.

- 30 - 

OLD SMOKEY, Bearing Climate Change

 

I have to tell you that, during the “carboniferous age”, our planet was far more flammable than it is today. About 420 million years ago the air was made up of almost 40% oxygen, compared to less than  20%. today.  All this “extra” oxygen came from the exultation of mosses and plankton which had run such a riot over the earth that they laid down the vast coal beds and oil reservoirs which we mine today. But this plant-foria also left behind extensive beds of charcoal, hinting at vast forests which had burned before they could become coal. 

Today, dead wood burns at 150 F. But with twice the oxygen available, that flash point was reduced to within a few degrees of 90 degrees F. The Silurian Age was not the kind of world a little bear cub could survive in for very long.  Which was, in part, why there were no little bear cubs wandering around 430 million years ago.  And damn little hard wood.

More recent charcoal records tell an equally interesting story. It seems that before the twentieth century there were a far more forest fires in North America than since. As long as there was a frontier, flames were used to conquer the land. Native Americans burned swaths of grasslands and forests to trap prey, and Europeans burned them to convert woods into farms and grazing lands and even steam. But with the closing of the American frontier – which happened in 1880 according to Professor Jackson Turner - all the land in America became property. It was owned by somebody or some corporation or the government. 

It was then that fire became not a tool but a threat. It was a brand new way of thinking about fire. For the first time in history, humans made the moral judgment that fire was usually a bad thing.  Because it was burning somebody's property.

In 1891, the Forest Reserve Act was signed by U.S. President Benjamin Harrison. It put 13 million acres of forest under Federal protection, so it could be managed to maintain water drainage and lumber resources. Wildfires still remained largely beyond human control, even when humans had started them. In Yellowstone, America’s first National Park, only those 6 to 10 of the wild fires which broke out each year along the park's roads, were contained.  Meanwhile  the 35 fires in the back country each year, usually started by lightning, were allowed to burn themselves out. Then came the drought year of 1910.

They called it The Great Fire. It was started by a lightening strike on Saturday, 20 August, 1910. There were  2,000 fires already burning in the forests of Idaho and Montana. The Great Fire by itself burned 3  million acres,  as well as the towns of Avery, Falcon and Grand Forks, Idaho, De Borgia, Haugan, Henderson, Saltese, Taft and Tuscor, Montana. The smoke was seen as far away as Watertown, New York.  Eighty-six humans were also killed, including 28 members of “The Lost Crew” of firefighters.

That fall Henry Graves, Chief of the Forest Service, decided the key to fighting wildfires was the quick arrival at the fire by an adequate, trained force , armed with the proper equipment. And by 1935 enough resources had been committed to this fast response that the new Chief, Ferdinand Silcox, could order that all wild fires reported must brought under control by 10:00 a.m. the very next morning. By 1939 the Forest Service had even established “Smokejumpers”, men who would parachute into remote back country and with shovels and hand axes, isolate a wild fire and tamp down any smoking embers. And that was when the story turned Hollywood.

On Thursday 13 August, 1942 Walt Disney released his fifth animated feature film, which was called “Bambi”.  In the climax of the movie the adult Bambi and his father struggle to survive a raging forest fire. The Forest Service thought they had a good fit with that dramatic sequence and hired "Bambi" for use on wildfire warning posters. 

Unfortunately the forerunners of the NRA protested this “insult to American Sportsmen,” since the movie showed hunters shooting Bambi’s Mommy.  Disney decided to withdraw the characters for the duration of World War Two, which meant that the Forest Service had to go looking for another animated spokes-figure.

At the time the most famous firefighter in America was “Smokey” Joe Martin of the NYFD, who had just died at the age of 86, in October of 1941.  So the Advertising Council, which drew up the posters for the Forest Service, decided any new spokes-figure should be named for him. 

The very first poster of the new figure was released on Wednesday, 9 August, 1944.  August which used to be the start of the "wild fire season".  The poster showed Smokey Bear (No “The” in the name) wearing blue jeans and a Forest Rangers’ hat, pouring water on a campfire. Three years later, in 1947, they added the caption “Remember, Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”

On Thursday, 4 May, 1950, sparks from a camp stove started a blaze in the Capitan Mountain Range, of the Lincoln National Forest in northern New Mexico. It eventually burned 17,000 acres. One of the crews sent to deal with the conflagration was a unit out of Fort Bliss, Texas. Over a couple of days, while they worked, the men saw a black bear cub running around in the burning forest, and finally, on 9 May , they were able to capture him. He seemed to have been abandoned by his mother, was about 3 months old, and was burned and badly singed.

The crew named him “Hotfoot Teddy” and turned him over to local veterinarian Edward Smith. Smith and his wife Ruth had two children, 15 year old Donald and 4 year old Judy. Everybody fell in love with Hotfoot, except Judy, who according to her brother, kept expecting the bear to bite her. And yet it was Judy who was used as a prop when the photographer from Life Magazine showed up to take pictures of the little bear with the bandaged feet.  The little bear cub became an instant piece of merchandise.

Over night the little cute bear cub had his own comic strip and his own cartoons at the movies. The Forest Service recognized the value of Hotfoot, and he was flown to Washington, D.C., rechristened “Smokey Bear”, and given his own cage at the National Zoo. And there he resided, loping back and forth on his still tender feet until 1976, when he died at the ripe old age of 26. They buried the old guy back in New Mexico, in the forest of his birth. And about the time he died, so did the moral judgment about forest fires being all bad.

As the  Smokey Bear baby-boomers grew up, a more nuanced vision of fire in the wilderness has taken root. The Forest Service no longer uses the phrase “Forest Fire”, exchanging it for “Wildfire.” In 1965 , 94% of the public approved of the under control by 10 a.m. policy. By 1970 that percentage had fallen to 46%, and by 2004 only 6%. Part of that was probably the cost of fighting the fires; in an average year over 84,000 wildfires burn over 3 million acres, at a cost of over $540 million, and the lives of 16 firefighters.  But then, what is an average fire season anymore?

There is the perception that these numbers are going up, but it is hard to measure that based on something less than a century of hard data. After all, the “Great Fire” of 1910 burned 3 million acres by itself.  In 1988 Yellowstone Nation Park suffered 99,000 acres burned, 36% of the park. But nobody remembers the 1910 fire, anymore. There is very little film of that conflagration. Everybody remembers the fire of 1988. That’s human nature, and will never be cured. But...

...British and American statistical studies have come to the conclusion that, since the 1950's,  the fire season has gotten longer by 80 days.  Anthony Westerling of the Scrips Institution summed up the situation this way; “With the snowmelt coming out a month earlier, areas then get drier earlier overall...There's more opportunity for ignition.” As Thomas Swetnam, of the University of Arizona has pointed out, “Lots of people think climate change and the ecological responses are 50 to 100 years away. But...it's happening now…”

So poor little Smokey was actually lucky he was not born fifty years later, or he would have been in real trouble. That little cub had few tools for dealing with a fast moving forest fire, and none for climate change - but then neither do humans.  

And the 25,000 Koalas burned to death in the January 2020 Australian brush fires certainly could not handle the climate crises.   It would be helpful, I think, to remember we should not be worried about climate change because of what it might mean for Smokey, or Bambi, or even the Koalas  which are expected to become extinct within 30 years.  You should be worried about what it means for you. And your children. And your grandchildren.  And your great grandchildren.  They are not going to think very highly of  you, if you keep ignoring the reality of climate change.

- 30 - 

AIR HEADS Part Eight

 

I would say there were four truly amazing things about Cal Rodger(above) s’ transcontinental flight of late 1911. The most amazing thing (to me) is that Cal smoked 19 cigars a day during the 49 days it took him to cross America: that's 931 cigars in total. Where did he get them all?  How was he still breathing when it was all over, after inhaling all those exhaust fumes and all that tobacco smoke?

The second most amazing thing is that he burned 1,230 gallons of gasoline to cover 3,220 miles, for an average of 38 miles per gallon; not bad! Detroit couldn’t match that a hundred years later.  

The third most amazing thing about the flight of the “Vin Fiz Flyer” is that during those 49 days Cal had been actually airborne just three days, ten hours and four minutes of total actual flying time, giving him an average air speed of 51.59 miles per hour. That means that he was “grounded” for a total of forty-five days, sometimes because of bad weather, but mostly because of crashes. 

And that brings me to the fourth amazing thing about Cal Rogers’ flight. Despite all the bandages he had adorning his body and the leg cast he was wearing at the end,  Cal survived. He even survived when his engine exploded less than 200 miles from the finish line.

It happened on November 3rd, the day after Cal’s brief meeting with Bob Ward in Arizona. Cal had just left a refueling stop in the desert at Imperial Junction, California, (meaning he had crossed his last state border!) and was climbing out over the expanse of the Salton Sea (above), aka the Salton Sink..

Without warning the Number One cylinder in his Wright engine exploded catastrophically. It blew out the entire left side of the engine block (above), and Cal’s right shoulder and arm were peppered with shrapnel. Somehow, with his right arm almost useless, Cal executed a banking turn over the salt waters and glided the “Flyer” back to Imperial Junction. He managed to land safely, again, with just one arm: Cal had become quite a pilot. After two hours of surgery a doctor was able to remove most of the metal from Cal’s arm.

The engine was destroyed of course, but the hanger car of the “Vin Fiz Special” carried a spare which “Weggie” and the team of mechanics (above) was able to quickly install - and enough parts to assemble a couple of more.  It took a little longer this time because the crew was short handed. An explosion of estrogen in the Pullman Car of the "Special" had driven master mechanic Charlie Taylor to jump ship back in Texas. The man who had built the original engine for the Wright Brothers had set out alone for California.

The next day Bob Fowler, heading the other way, was almost across New Mexico when he ran into his own mechanical problems. A clogged fuel line chocked off his engine near the isolated water station of Mastodon, 16 miles lonely outside of El Paso, Texas and just north of the Mexican border.

There was no town at Mastadon,  just a water tank where the single rail line and a siding ran between sand dunes, and it was a very lonely place at the time. It still is, especially since the railroad has "moved on". On satellite photographs today it looks like a drawing, all straight lines through a tan background. It was only a little less lonely in 1911. New Mexico wouldn’t even become the 47th state for another 68 days. 

Once he was safely down, Bob Fowler cleared the clogged fuel line, restarted his motor and tried to get airborne again. But the the Cole Flyer couldn’t break free of the sage brush and rocks. Bob would have to wait for a shift of the wind. Except, it didn’t shift.

Meanwhile, still headed west, Cal didn’t even wait for his wounds to heal. Early on the morning of 5 November,  wearing an arm sling to match his leg cast, he made the hop from Imperial Junction through the San Gregorio Pass to Banning, and from there on to Pomona, where he made a last refueling stop. 

And finally, at 4:08 p.m. on Sunday 5 November, 1911, Cal Rodgers landed at the Tournament of Roses Park, on the current grounds of Cal Tech.  He was met by 10 to 20,000 cheering people, most of whom had paid a quarter apiece to be there. The New York Times reported, ''...a maelstrom of fighting, screaming, out-of-their-minds-with-joy men, women and children.'' Cal was loaded into a car and driven around and around the stadium. And among all of the cheering and back slapping, poor deaf Cal kept asking, “I did it, didn’t I? I did it?”

They draped Cal with an American flag (above, left), and posed him next to his mother (above) and in his shadow, (above, center), Marie.  

And almost nobody who was in that crowd cheering Cal Rodgers had any idea that a deaf man had just flown coast-to-coast. It was quite an achievement. 

And nobody was prouder of Cal than Mable, unless it was "Weggie", his faithful mechanic, beaming up at him in a photo.

Cal’s personal victory came a week later, in the Maryland Hotel (above), when he met with a representative for Mr. W.R. Hearst. The newspaper mogul pride was burning from the negative publicity over his refusal to extend the $50,000 prizes' time limit.  So in an attempt to soften the blow  to his reputation, Hearst wanted to present Rogers with a loving cup trophy. 

Cal turned it down. He wanted the money. And he wasn’t going to let W.R. off the petard he had hoisted himself upon, without it.  But like most rich people, Hearst didn't care what people thought of him, as long as they thought of him as rich.

Unnoticed by the press was that other rich man, Mr. J. Odgen Armour, owner of the Armour Meat Packing Company, had spent $180,000 (including Cal’s fee of $23,000) to support the flight. And they had paid all this to sell a really terrible soft drink that quickly disappeared after the publicity of the flight died down.

Then, on 10 November, the "Vin Fiz Flyer" was in the air again.  The city of Long Beach had offered Cal $5,000 to actually complete his journey right up to the Pacific Ocean, in their town.

This final flight was going fine until half way there, when the engine quit. Cal landed, fiddled with the Wright engine himself, and started again. 

And then again the engine coughed and died, this time over Compton (above). But this time when landing, Cal plowed into the ground.

And this time Cal did not walk away. He was pulled unconscious from the wreckage. 

But his lucky bottle of “Vin Fiz” was still undamaged, hanging from the broken wing strut. If you believed the publicity agents. 

Cal suffered a concussion, a broken ankle, broken ribs, an injured back and burns. . By now Cal must have really hated that damn bottle of "Vin Fiz.

Meanwhile, out in the wilds of Mastodon, New Mexico, Bob Fowler was still stuck in the sage brush and beginning to think he would never get out. Finally, on 10 November, a two man Santa Fe work crew appeared over the horizon, pumping a handcar (above). And that gave Bob an idea. He talked to the railroad men and they agreed to help him out. 

Using railroad cross ties they fashioned a platform to sit atop the hand car, and then struggled to secure Bob's  “Cole Flyer” atop that platform. On the morning of Monday, 13 November, 1911,  the entire contraption was pushed from the siding onto the main line. Bob clambered aboard. The Cole Flyer's motor was started. 

And with railroad workers running alongside to stabilize the wings, the “Flyer” began to move along the track . This was much like the system the Wright brothers had used to launch their original flyer, back in 1903.

 And just as the Cole Flyer began to pick up speed, Bob looked ahead to see a column of smoke rising from the single tracks stretched out before him. Instantly Bob realized he was on a collision course with a steam locomotive.

For a moment it seemed a variation of the joke about the first two automobiles in Kansas running into each other. The massive engine and the fragile airplane quickly ate up the ground between them, heading for the most unlikely collision in either aviation or railroad history!

- 30 -