Undulating Undulates

Incendiary Imbeciles #3

Wildland fire workers’ “Ethics” contemplates “Ecology” within the Golden Rule. Sometimes institutional biases prevent participants from doing the right thing, still wildlands abide.

From the plane I saw the herd of elk below. Our airplane and jumpers floating into the meadow jumpspot must have disturbed them. The elk herd began to stampede.

Now came my turn to jump. I stood in the open airplane door behind my jump partner who squatted in front of me. When we exited, my parachute opened and I saw the elk herd nearly below me, surging and billowing through the trees as they ran. This nebulous brown mass appeared as a great amorphous amoeba with swarming parts budding off and wobbling in a slightly different route and then returning to the colossal main body.

As I tried to head for our jumpspot, the flowing brown heap of Cervus canadensis seemed to anticipate the direction of my glide and turned synchronously with my parachute's movements. They appeared to run with their antlers slid into grooves in their shoulders with their faces apparently gazing up at me. But I could see their eyes remained intensely focused straight ahead. Feeling the wind and how my parachute reacted, I couldn’t decide: should I run with the wind or should I hold into it? Which direction to turn?

When I pulled my right toggle and turned right, the undulating ungulates swelled back under me. I pulled left and then they veered left. I pulled on the brakes and still the oscillating morass remained beneath me. As I sank lower into this brown, squirming, humongous amoeba, I thought I’d surely be trampled.

Then suddenly the elk broke away from me and disappeared into the shadows of the forest. And I softly landed on the ground.

Later I talked to Jim Thrash, a jumper and a packer and he knew a lot about elk. He laughed at my story about my imbecilic parachute handling and how I couldn't escape the elk herd below me. He told me that plenty of elf elk roamed that part of Eastern Oregon where I jumped, but they weren't thriving. Probably because we suppressed all the natural wildfires.

Elk need nutritious browse and forbs which fire can provide by releasing nutrients from old plants and dead litter. Natural fire will thin out plants that compete for space, light, water, and soil nutrients. Wildfire can especially destroy competing plant species that aren’t fire-adapted. Wildland fires may also help suppress pathogenic fungi and other microbes that would diminish the vigor of plants in the area. Fire may enhance beneficial and symbiotic fungi and microbes. Even the sooty smoke provides a service because tiny soot particles can act as aerial fertilizer, spreading the nutrient benefits long distances. Also, elk favor the patchy mosaics of old and new forage growth that wildfire provides when it burns naturally, leaving close to 10% severe intensity, 20% moderate intensity, and 70% low intensity.

Source: NPS

Elk flourish in intermediate seral biome stages and conditions. This includes ponderosa pine which shelter and nurture the brush, browse, and other feed that make young elk strong and successful. Elk have no use for the climax stage in this area of the West which holds fir tree species and shades out other plants. Elk use the cover that comes with the mosaic patterns that natural fire lay down. Random patches of open meadows with clusters of mature and maturing trees provide plenty of edge effect where browse, brush, and forbs survive best. These patches also create visual shelter to protect them from predators.

Jim sardonically suggested perhaps those choreographing elk may have been trying to drive us away so we couldn't suppress the fire. Then, the conditions would become perfect for enhanced elk habitat when natural wildfire took its course. Jim jokingly averred that I should have parachuted onto the back of the elk herd’s leader, grabbed him by the antlers so he could take me to areas where the elk thrive best because natural fire stays unsuppressed.

Over the years I thought a lot about talking to Jim and my aerial rodeo tangling with that elk herd below. I think maybe I should have steered my parachute on to the back of the leader, grabbed his antlers and rode him into an elk Valhalla where fires won’t be suppressed and there's plenty of browse and forage, and stochastic shelter to protect the elk from predators. There, perhaps, wildland firefighters will have become Fire Rangers, shepherding beneficial wildland fire into areas that need it, while maintaining fire intensities that produce the necessary random, perfect mosaics.

In such a restoration, elk calves can grow big and gangly and unafraid like that elk calf that, many years later when I canoed through a remote tallgrass marshland, nearly trampled me. Maybe it knew a wildland fire suppressor when it saw one.