Saint Simons Island Fires

Weather: We got snow on Tuesday, and, since the Earth as turned since December, the afternoon was warmer and it disappeared.

There’s still snow in the Jémez and on the northwestern corner of the Black Mesa that I can see. In my yard it remains in shadows of buildings, fences, and trees, especially on the north and western sides.

Last useful snow: 1/22. Week’s low: 16 degrees F. Week’s high: 57 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, pink evening primroses, vinca; new growth on alfilerillo and a snapdragon.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red or purple: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples, leaves on a few golden spur columbines and purple asters

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Still little evidence animals are entering the yard

Tasks: On Friday I saw someone on a low ladder using long-handled loppers to prune his apples. His ground must be frozen harder than mine. It gave when I walked on the gravel in the drive Saturday.

The same day I saw some men loading a pick-up bed with wood when I was stopped at a light in town. They must have cut down a sapling that was in the way. They had cut the wood to length, but it wasn’t more than a few inches in diameter. They also were picking up all the sticks from the ground. Those were the actions of people who are using wood to keep warm.

Weekly update: Cecil Frost noted foresters, at least in the south, were slow to recognize lightening could cause woodland fires. They simply assumed fires were "carelessly set to improve grazing, to clear land, and to protect woods where turpentine is being gathered." [1]

Fanny Kemble made the same assumption in 1839 when the English actress was spending a year on her husband’s plantation on Saint Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Toward the end of March she noticed fires burning in a number of places on the island and concluded:

"The ‘field-hands’ make fires to cook their midday food wherever they happen to be working,

and sometimes through their careless neglect, but sometimes, too, undoubtedly on purpose, the woods are set fire to by these means. One benefit they consider that they derive from the process is the destruction of the dreaded rattlesnakes that infest the woodland all over the island." [2]

Frost noted people who actually lived in the woods knew better. He mentioned one land owner in coastal Onslow County, North Carolina, who provided free log cabins near his turpentine plantation to "poor white families, whose duties included fighting summer lightning fires." By putting them in harm’s way, he provided an incentive for them to extinguish the fires and ring bells for help if the flames grew more serious. [3]

As we all have learned, there is a difference between fires set by lightening and those caused by humans. Lightening usually occurs in the rainy season when the duff already may be wet. If it isn’t raining when the fire starts, it probably will be within a few days. These fires burn comparatively few acres, and go out by themselves.

Fires caused by humans are worse because they occur outside the monsoon season when nature has no chance to act, and they often occur in areas made more flammable by humans like the ones in Onslow County who were living near concentrations of pine resins. The Dome Fire of 1996 was caused by German campers who thought urinating on a cook fire was enough, the Cerro Grande was set by the Forest Service as a controlled burn in an area that needed clearing in 2000, and the 2011 Las Conchas, like this summer’s fire in Paradise, California, was caused by a high-voltage power line destroyed by high winds.

Susan Bratton thought humans had contributed to the fire problems on Saint Simons in 1839, not by their carelessness, but by unwittingly disrupting the natural pattern of woodland succession. When Englishmen first saw the island, it was dominated by "evergreen oak-mixed hardwood forests." [4] Men began cutting the live oak for building frigates in the 1790s, and continued "until the resource was depleted." [5]

By the Civil War, most of the upland parts of the island that weren’t planted with cotton had been depleted and left fallow. Instead of the original vegetation, pines with differing nutrition demands had taken over. [6] As Bratton observed, Kemble only mentioned pine woods in 1839. She added:

"Live oak forests do not carry fire well, even under exceptionally dry conditions. During a large fire on Cumberland Island, during July and August, 1981, the fire moved quickly through pine forests and oak scrub, but dropped into the understory and then went out when it entered mature evergreen oak stands." [7]

Not surprisingly, the winter of 1838–1839, when Kemble was on Saint Simons, the state was beginning what became an extreme drought when the rains didn’t appear until July 1839 in upland Georgia. [8] This would have made it analogous to the Cerro Grande fire when routine winter burning to open new fields could have gotten out of hand because of unanticipated variations in the weather. After all, they worried more about too much water and hurricanes than too little.

Notes on photographs: Taken 16 January 2019.
1. Two types of yuccas that are still green and uneaten by the ground squirrel. Purchased as Yucca Baccata (broader leaves) and Yucca Glauca (narrow leaves); who knows what they really were.

2. The snapdragon (Antirrhinum majus) leaves stayed viable until the snow covered them. The stems remained green, and now new growth has emerged at the base of one.

3. Alfilerillo (Erodium circutarium) plants were still viable until December. When the snow cleared, the leaves had turned a dull red. They’ve now begun to put out new growth.

End notes:
1. T. H. Sherrard. A Working Plan for Forest Lands in Hampton and Beaufort Counties, South Carolina. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903. Quoted by Cecil C. Frost. "Four Centuries of Changing Landscape Patterns in the Longleaf Pine Ecosystem." 17–43 in The Longleaf Pine Ecosystem: Ecology, Restoration and Management. Edited by Sharon M. Hermann. Tallahassee: Tall Timbers Research Station, 1993.

2. Frances Anne Kemble. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1863. 242–243.

3. T. Gamble. Naval Stores: History, Production, Distribution and Consumption. Savannah: Review Publishing and Printing Company, 1921. Cited by Frost. 35.

4. Susan P. Bratton. "The Vegetation History of Fort Frederica, Saint Simons Island, Georgia." Castanea 50:133–145:1985. 133.

5. V. S. Wood. Live Oaks: Southern Timber for Tall Ships. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1981. Cited by Bratton. 139.

6. W. M. Brewer. "Some Effects of the Plantation System on the Ante-Bellum South." The Georgia Historical Quarterly 11:250–273:1927. Cited by Bratton. 139.

7. Bratton. 143.

8. Georgia. Department of Agriculture. "Climate." 35–72 in The Commonwealth of Georgia. Atlanta: Jas. P. Harrison and Company, 1885. 58.

Firewood

Weather: Last Sunday we had snow at the exact temperature where water freezes. It was nearly invisible, but had the cadence of snow. When it fell on bared land it disappeared. When it landed on snow, it blended in. Yesterday it was just enough warmer that it was obviously rain, even if it turned into flakes at times.

When I planted trees and shrubs around the house I did so to create sun screens for other, more tender plants. I didn’t realize I was also creating winter protection. The leaves keep roots and crowns protected as the snow disappears. Even the wild grasses have a similar strategy: the dead blades protect a few greens ones in the center that keep the roots nourished in the cold.

Last useful rain: 1/28. Week’s low: 27 degrees F. Week’s high: 54 degrees F in the shade. Snow on the ground since 12/26.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, snow-in-summer, pink evening primroses, vinca; everything else is under snow.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Breaks in snow that probably came from rabbit

Weekly update: When the animals disappeared from the forests, they were replaced by humans who burned wood to cook and stay warm. Before anyone could buy a chain saw, that meant scouring the woods for dead trees and ignitable underbrush. Everything had to be cut to size by an axe.

That probably reduced the fuel load in nearby forests enough to keep wild fires under control in most seasons.

Fewer people today rely on wood alone. When I moved here, we only had propane for heat. Three of my neighbors used wood stoves for heat. When we got natural gas, they continued to use their stoves. My one neighbor was out many mornings with an axe splitting the cut-to-length logs he had delivered.

Time passes, and people get older. One man died and the descendants who live in his house use only the natural gas. The wife of the second neighbor died, and I think his current one is from town. They no longer used wood, but gas.

The third neighbor now has his wood delivered already split. Since his wife retired, I think they use it as a supplement rather than a primary source. People need more heat when they are home all day, which means more ashes to remove.

As wood turned from a necessity to a life-style, people became fussier. They weren’t willing to accept any type of wood, and expected it to be split into evenly sized pieces. That meant the underbrush no longer was being harvested.

Most years men who had access to wood, filled their pickup beds and parked in local parking lots along the main road from Santa Fé to Taos. I don’t know their sources. The national forests issue permits for fire wood with the proviso it not be sold. The Santa Fé office charges ten dollars for a green cord, and twenty for five cords of dead wood.

A couple years ago, the primary lot used by street vendors was taken over by a gas station, and the men moved to other locations. Friday I went looking to see where they were, and I couldn’t find any.

I thought they might have gone north toward the big boxes where I’d seen men selling potatoes and chicos in the past, but there were none. Much of that land is now for sale, and the owners may be discouraging the peddlers.

My one neighbor still gets his wood, but he probably uses the same source every year and has his telephone number.

The poor who rely on wood probably still scrounge where they can. The past few years the electric utility has been cutting trees that threatened its wires. I don’t what terms they offered for removing the wood, but in many places they simply left it on the ground.

One person in the village piled the wood along the road to create a barrier. When I drove by recently, all the wood had disappeared. I assume someone, somewhere is using it to keep warm.

Notes on photographs: Taken 19 January 2019.
1. The snow in the path on the west side of the house continued to turn into slick ice.

2. Globe willow leaves (Salix matsudana umbraculifera) captured by dead Mexican hat (Ratibida columnaris) stems.

3. A few green blades in a clump of needle grass (Stipa comata).

End notes: USDA, Forest Service, Santa Fé website.

Beaver and Deer

Weather: A white cover lingers, with an ice layer beneath, but the icicles have disappeared. The snow in the yard and prairie has retreated around clumps of needle grass and shrubs. Around my house, plants are still buried in snow on the north and west sides, but exposed in the cold, damp on the east and south.

Last useful snow: 1/1. Week’s low: 18 degrees F. Week’s high: 49 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas, coral bells, snow-in-summer, pink evening primroses, vinca; everything else is under snow.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, snow-in-summer, winterfat

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: Rabbit

Weekly update: Donald Trump recognized a problem when he saw it, and responded with his gut. He claimed one of the problems abetting the spread of forest fires was the accumulation of dead underbrush. His answer that they should be raked clean was based on a view that forests were like English deer parks that had broad expanses of green edged with trees. The difference between the wild and the domestic didn’t exist for the man raised in an urbanized area.

Actually more deer might be useful. In Michigan, where I grew up, the size of the white-tailed deer herd was a source of constant debate. When the state first was being settled, deer lived in the hardwoods of lower half of the peninsula. Elk and moose inhabited the northern pines where dense canopies suppressed the growth of competing plants.

Increased settlement eliminated the southern habitats while logging opened the north. Second growth forests had shrubs and grasses that deer could eat. These, of course, become the dead underbrush if they’re not eaten.

In the 1930s, the state began planting trees that encouraged the return of the deer herd. By the time I was a child, no tree in the upper peninsula that I saw had branches any lower than a deer could reach. I didn’t know pine tree branches could reach the ground until I saw some in Louisiana.

New Mexico has a different climate, and different ecology. Mule deer and elk are the prime game animals. However, like Michigan where white tails were hunted to near extinction by market hunters in the late nineteenth century, New Mexico has had it’s problems with the elimination of livestock in the forests.

The other animals that were hunted to death in the north were beaver and the other small fur-bearing mammals. Beavers lived on bark and the live part of tree trunks, the cambium. This of course killed trees, and limited the growth of new trees. In Michigan, that kept areas open for deer and other animals.

Fur trapping was less common in this part of the country than in the north, because the climate is not as cold and thus the fur didn’t grow as thick.

I don’t know much about game animals, but I suspect that some of the problems we attribute to forest fires aren’t so much the result of current practices, but the consequence of human actions taken a century or more ago.

Notes on photographs: All taken 12 January 2019.
1. Needle grass (Stipa comata) in the yard.
2. Vinca (Vinca minor) poking through the snow on the west side.
3. Snow-in-summer (Cerastium tomentosum) in the scree bed on the east side.

End notes: "Deer Management History in Michigan." Michigan, Department of Natural Resources website.

Freshets and Floods

Weather: The snow lingers. In places, ice is forming underneath where the snow is melting during the day, then freezes before it is absorbed. Icicles hang from my steel roof and others that face east or northeast.

Last useful snow: 1/1. Week’s low: -2 degrees F. Week’s high: 38 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Leaves on juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, blue flax, sweet peas; everything else is under snow.

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, winterfat

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Animal sightings: One bird came out for seeds on a chrysanthemum, and the rabbit has left a daily trail.

Weekly update: Humans take credit or blame for some of their actions, but overlook others. Thus, some suspect global warming is causing more severe storms, and concede people building on barrier islands contributes to the problem. What they don’t recognize is they, like many of us, really do want to live near nature, either on a waterfront or near a forest. Unfortunately, while the population increases, the amount of land does not.

The causes of increased population pressure go back to the 1950s when people had more children than their parents had had during the Depression. At the same time, penicillin and other improvements in medical care meant more who were born survived, and those who did live lived longer. No one blames health care for overbuilding the sea islands, because no ones wants to return to earlier conditions.

Humans cannot help themselves from impacting the environment. In South Carolina, Samuel Dubose, Jr. noted the effects of agricultural successes on his life. His great-great-grandfather, Isaac DuBose, left Normandy after Louis XIV rescinded the act of tolerance for Huguenot Protestants. [1]

The French-speakers weren’t particularly welcomed by English colonists, and settled on land upriver from Charleston. [2] Once indigo was accepted as a commercial crop and subsidized by the British navy, DuBose remembered "one after another" of the Huguenot "planters moved" to Saint Stephen’s Parish "as opportunity offered for the purchase of land" and slaves. [3]

The bounty ended with the American Revolution, and eventually cotton replaced indigo as a cash crop. Soon, lands downriver were being ravaged by freshets, as floods were called. He wrote:

"The upper country being then but partially cleared and cultivated, the greater part of its surface was covered with leaves, the limbs and trunks of decaying trees, and various other impediments to the quick discharge of the rains which fall upon it, into the creeks and ravines leading into the river; consequently much of the water was absorbed by the earth or evaporated before it could be received into its channels, and even when there so many obstacles yet awaited its progress, that heavy contributions were still levied upon it. The river, too, had time to extend along its course the first influx of water before that from more remote tributary sources would reach it. Owing to these and other causes, the Santee was comparatively exempt from those freshets which have since blighted the prosperity of what was once a second Egypt." [4]

His own house was burned during the Civil War, [5] and his descendants moved to Charleston. [6] Cotton and rice plantations reverted to second growth forest that was purchased by wealthy northerners for hunting retreats in the early twentieth century. Thus, was formed the upper class taste for living in what had been wetlands.

Forested land away from the coast was deemed wasteland. Dubose’s acreage was flooded in the early 1940s by Lake Moultrie, [7] a reservoir created by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to produce power for the area north of Charleston. [8]

Each step in the degradation of DuBose’s patrimony was independent and seen as progress at the time: the expansion of arable land, rural electrification. The result, more land was rendered useless, and the remaining land became more crowded. The damage from storms simply increased at each stage with increased density.

Notes on photographs: Taken 3 January 2019.

End notes:
1. "Isaac DuBose, I." Gini website. 23 May 2018.
2. Walter Edgar. South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. 51-52.

3. Samuel Dubose. "Reminiscences of St. Stephen’s Parish, Craven County, and Notices of Her Old Homesteads." 35-85 in A Contribution to the History of the Huguenots of South Carolina. Edited by T. Gaillard Thomas. New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1887. 40.

4. Samuel Dubose. 37-38.
5. "Harbin Plantation – Lake Moultrie – Berkeley County." South Carolina Plantations website.

6. Harlan Greene. "Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward." The South Carolina Historical Magazine 83:154-167:1982.

7. SC Plantations.
8. Wikipedia. "Santee Cooper."