A spectacular lightning storm on July 31 touched off over 60 fires in the southern Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Two days later my neighbors were the first to be evacuated. We live at the foot of Deer Mountain in the Rye Creek drainage. The nearby community of Darby, well known as a hotbed of opinionated people who do not stand in the middle of the road, has drawn together in an unprecedented way. As the fires and evacuations spread everyone is working together to help each other protect homes and lives. The tremendous natural force of the wildfires has defied all human control for weeks. The swirl of human emotions of fear, hope, frustration, compassion and love has become as thick as the smoke while Bitterrooters keep working together to help each other.

Larry Campbell interviewed by a German
television crew in front of his home.

Loggers, environmentalists, Forest Service, volunteer fire departments and folks of every persuasion helped to save my cabin. One day unfolded like a movie. With the fire roaring towards the cabin, ten friends helped move furniture, wrap my cabin in fire shelter material and cut down grass and weeds. A volunteer fire department set up a pump and put sprinklers on the cabin. Into the crescendo of frantic activity and roaring fire arrived the USFS 'Bitterroot Hotshots' fire crew. Like the cavalry come to save the day, they sawed and dug a hand line down one ridge behind my cabin and up over the next.

Into the midst of this incredible community effort, while the fires still rage and people fight to protect their homes and lives, Montana's Governor Marc Racicot entered the scene by seizing the national spotlight. If we had hoped for constructive help or attention those hopes were dashed. In one of the most craven, self-serving political moves imaginable our Governor squandered the opportunity to bring national attention to our valiant and constructive community effort by playing the blame game. Instead of uplifting leadership we got a dose of partisan politics. Racicot, positioning himself for a political appointment in a possible Bush administration, blamed the Clinton administration for the fires, suggesting that more logging and fewer roadless areas would have prevented the wildfires.

If Governor Racicot wants to find blame for these forest fires he need not look far. The Deer Mountain area is infamous for the extensive logging and road building that has occurred for more than fifty years. Through interest free loans of taxpayer money Montana state government enabled the purchase of seventeen sections of land by the unscrupulous Darby Lumber Company. They proceeded to slick the trees off Deer Mountain to a degree never before seen in the Bitterroot, and they built roads into every corner. This tragic example of forest stewardship was Montana made. But misplaced blame is not the point so much as misinformation.

Mature trees such as this Ponderosa Pine have evolved to withstand fires. Periodic burning of undergrowth allows the trees to reach their full size.

If logging and roads could actually fireproof a forest Deer Mountain should not have burned for another two hundred years. In fact it went up in smoke in a column that reached over twenty thousand feet. On Sunday August 6 the logging slash, dry grass and brush that had replaced the trees burned rapidly in an eruption of fire that drew other nearby fires towards it and into two neighborhoods. The winds sucked into the Deer Mountain fire brought the Bear fire north, racing downhill toward my cabin. When the smoke cleared ten of my neighbors' homes were gone.

Some might say the problem was not enough logging. I suppose if the few trees remaining on Darby Lumber land had been cut then, yes, the forest could not burn because there would be no forest. However the grass, weeds and brush that inevitably follow logging burn even faster. The fact is that the largest fire in Montana now has burned right through the most heavily logged and roaded part of the Bitterroot National Forest. Logging and roads do not prevent forest fires.

We Bitterrooters will persevere and work together to protect our homes and lives. If the opportunists who want to exploit peoples' fears for their own personal and political gain can't bring themselves to help out they might at least wait until the smoke clears before clouding the issue with false rhetoric. At that point scientific research and observations of the relationship between logging and the fires would be preferable to uninformed reaction. Neither Montana nor the nation can afford ill-conceived reaction fed by fire hysteria. Our National Forests are too important to become fodder exploited for political or commercial gain.

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