FIRE 



171 



city chamber of commerce was giving the lady rain maker a banquet for 

 breaking the dry spell. 



Next day on the way to Jackson, up through the De Soto National 

 Forest, rain came so hard and fast that it stopped windshield wipers, halted 

 most traffic for hours, and put out every outdoor fire for hundreds of miles 

 around. Roads were washed out, torrents of debris from denuded hillsides 

 boiled in the bottoms, rivers leaped from their banks; and some 30 miles 

 southwest of Jackson, floodwater performed a feat of erosion so striking as 

 to make news in the press throughout the land. 



After dark, the middle span of a highway bridge ripped out. A truck 

 came along doggedly, its headlights dimmed by continuing sheets of rain. 

 Bluntly it plunged into the boiling, muddy river. The truck driver fought 

 his way out of the water somehow back to the highway and tried to flag 

 approaching cars. In all, 14 persons drowned — in 6 cars — from driving off 

 the broken bridge into the floodwater regardless. Then the truck driver 

 managed to stop one, and the other cars stopped behind it; and the ghoulish 

 work of recovering the bodies began, with newsmen there in their numbers, 

 taking flashlight pictures. 



"Yours is a strange and violent country," said a foreign visitor to Jack- 

 son, reading the papers. In the street people talked low and mournfully, 

 their heads hanging. And one man, with a cackling humor, half hysterical, 

 told a group at a street corner, as ambulances streaked by with sirens wailing: 

 "That lady in Florida had the stuff, all right. And a lot of people said she 

 was a fake." 



Much of this may seem out of order, but nothing in nature is utterly 

 unrelated; and between forest fires, floods, and further catastrophes the 

 relationship is pretty thoroughly established. The measures of loss vary 

 widely, according to climate, and the extent and pitch of the watershed; 

 but the inevitable relationship between the sort of voodooism that impels 

 burning, and the sort of voodooism that leads chambers of commerce to 

 give publicity banquets to rain makers becomes increasingly plain. The result 

 in many places is a wasting and threatened land, neither pleasant nor 

 promising to behold. Let us proceed with this inquiry a little further. The 

 consequences affect forest recreation, most certainly. They bear as well on 



