FIRE 



161 



saying that you do not have to consult records to gage the fire hazard on a 

 given forest. All you have to do is look at the faces and listen to the talk of 

 the ranger and forest guards. There is truth in this. 



The Caribbean National Forest of Puerto Rico has practically no fire 

 hazard. And of such is the reward for being on a tropical rain forest with 

 200 inches annual rainfall, foresters say there, relaxed and cheerful. For- 

 esters working out from Missoula, Mont., seem by comparison in the summer 

 season, gaunt, tense. There is little laughter among them. "You will not," 

 says Evan W. Kelley, once a major in the A. E. F. and now regional forester 

 in charge of fire control and other Forest Service activities in Montana and 

 northern Idaho, "find West Slope forest officers gay. We are smothered by 

 the work, by the menace, in the fire season. To feel it, come live here in the 

 dry time, with the mountain storms spitting and crackling. 



"This season (1938) we had 140 fires going on one 2,000,000-acre area 

 at once. All of them were started by lightning. No special zones of risk; hits 

 all over. The lightning starts duff and snag fires, and occasionally in a dry 

 top of a living tree. Many are hard to find. Not a fire at first, just a creeping 

 smolder. We've hunted for 4 days to find one, sometimes. 



"We send out smoke chasers, working in from section lines, with com- 

 passes to run down fires reported by the fire towers. We send work crews 

 out, strip the ground a rod or so apart, hunting the terrain for smoldering 

 fires, as if we were looking for a lost child. 



"And just when you think you've got them all, and can take a Sunday 

 afternoon off, you get a day of high wind, low humidity, more lightning, 

 and roaring fires to fight all over the mountains. It's a hard game to beat. 

 It takes men with nerves of iron and bodies of steel," says Major Kelley, 

 who adds that when his time comes to retire he is going "to put up a cabin 

 in a swamp, a big one." 



In one particular the fire situation on northwestern dry-land forests is 

 less nerve racking than the situation on the forests of Florida, Georgia, Mis- 

 sissippi, and of other far Southern States. There is something impersonal 

 about defending from destruction woodlands fired by lightning. A man can 

 be rather fatalistic about it; he can fight and not be angry. In many parts 

 of the far South, however, and in the most dangerous, the driest season, most 



