The Guest We Forgot How to House

The valley across from me is visible for a change. The smoke from the recent fires has finally cleared enough to get a real look at the damage. I am amazed, honestly. The scorched, blackened soil of the burn zone is huge. I have never seen my childhood valley that desolate on that side of the river — miles without sage or grass to cover the naked land.

One hundred fifty thousand acres of the western half of my county. From Conconully to Loomis, it burned. It came within a few miles of my own hometown. Less than three miles from the river, in places. It should never have gotten that close.

I keep thinking about the last several years of wildfires in the Okanogan, and I can't help the way my brain wants to find the pattern in it. First, we stopped the controlled burn programs — for reasons that seemed sound enough at the time. Then we ripped out massive amounts of the very thing that had made controlled burns mostly unnecessary in the first place. Now we can't understand why the fires are so much larger than they used to be.

I said in my last post that fire is neither friend nor enemy. I stand by that. I've lived here my whole life, and my relationship with wildfire is colored differently than most folks around me. I don't see it as something to be eradicated. I see it as a guest — one that has always visited this land, one this ecology actually depends on — and a guest is something you manage and contain, not something you either welcome carelessly or try to lock out entirely.

That's the part I keep coming back to. It isn't that fire is behaving differently. It's that we quietly stopped keeping the house in order for when it comes.

I remember, as a kid, sitting at the local restaurant listening to my elders talk over their morning coffee. These weren't formal meetings. Nobody was taking minutes. But these men shaped the political, social, and literal landscape of my hometown right there at that table. The mayor, the cattleman, the orchardist, the fire chief, folks from wildfire command — whoever had power or money in this valley could be found at that table on any given morning, arguing over bacon versus sausage and, in the same breath, actually making the decisions that would later become reality.

That's where I learned the real fire plan for my community. Not the formal one. What actually happened.

One particularly brutal fire season, I remember the men being gathered and unbothered by it. No one worried about the town. No one concerned about the closer local homes. They talked instead about folks further out, the ones who weren't protected. I didn't understand yet how those closer places were protected — I just knew, somehow, that they were.

A younger man from the wildfire crew asked the question I couldn't yet ask myself: what did they mean, the safe areas were protected? That's when the elders started taking turns explaining how their own properties were, themselves, part of the county's fire defenses.

The Pine Creek orchardist talked about how, during a fire near his land, he'd turn on every sprinkler he had — and how the county irrigation district would temporarily shut off water to everywhere else in order to build enough pressure to run every orchard in the area at once. A green, wet buffer, built on demand, out of infrastructure nobody called a fire plan.

The rancher told the same story about his alfalfa fields, doing the same job when the fire came for his stretch of the valley instead.

Little by little, I got the full picture. These men, listening to each other over coffee, were describing how their farms, ranches, and orchards functioned as natural firebreaks — miles of green, irrigated land that fire had real difficulty crossing. They talked about the dirt tracks ringing their properties doing their own small part too. Their livelihoods, it turned out, were a major working piece of this community's fire defense. I never looked at an orchard or a field the same way again. Never just food production, after that.

I understand why things changed. Money. Workload. Age. A different generation inheriting land with different lives and different expectations attached to it. Those morning table sessions don't happen anymore — which means no one today has a guy at the irrigation district they can call to unofficially shut off water to half the valley so pressure can be pushed where it's actually needed. No one alive on that land now was ever told the other value their grandfather's orchard carried, only that it was too much work and too expensive to keep running. No one realized how much that field of alfalfa was worth beyond feeding cattle they no longer want, or can afford, to keep.

I don't know how to fix any of that. I'm not here to suggest we go back — I don't think that's a real option, and I'm not going to pretend it is. I just know that today, a fire grew past one hundred fifty thousand acres, burned from Conconully to Loomis, and came within a few miles of my hometown — less than three miles from the river. Where once, it would have been stopped several miles out by orchards, fields, and the dirt roads that served them, all of it doing a job nobody had to write down because everybody at that table already knew it by heart.

Fire isn't our enemy. It isn't our friend either. As I look across the valley at the burned land, my heart aches. Our annual visitor doesn't have the containment it once had — and it's being allowed to act more like an enemy than the unwanted, much-needed guest it's always actually been.