The truth is, I belonged here. I grew up on a rim and live preferentially on borders. All my scholarship emanates from fifteen summers I spent on a forest fire crew at Grand Canyon. It took me a long time to realize that my real mission was to apply the scholarship I had been trained in, history as a humanistic discipline, to the subject that most gripped my imagination, fire. In the old days, hunting down lightning-kindled snags in the backcountry was called smokechasing. That, in academic form, was what I have done with my scholarship. And that's what, intellectually, I was doing in Ghana.

I would like to be able to say that I was there overtly as a humanist, that the subculture of wildland fire recognized the contributions of historians (in particular) to its ambition, that a larger world of political economy appreciated that it could not address the purposes to which it might put its monies and machines without appeal to humanistic scholarship, that this larger world admitted that technology could enable but not advise, that science could advise but not choose, that ultimately it would need the vitality and rigor of philosophy, literature, and history if it were to choose wisely. In fact, these were the last things they wanted. They sought "methodologies" and "manuals." They wanted control plots, replicability, numbers. They commissioned the author of Introduction to Wildland Fire, not Fire in America, the book I wrote at the National Humanities Center. They wanted the authority of science—its political if not its epistemological authority—even if they had to seek it in such troubled forms as sociology.

Actually, I could bring much of what they needed. I could tell them how America had evolved from a rural, fire-saturated landscape to an urban, fire-starved one; how Australia had sought to reconcile rural traditions of burning off with a search for national identity; how Europe seemed congenitally unable to conceive of fire as anything but a social creation. I could tell them why, based on historical evidence, fuelbreaks worked and failed. I could recommend how to segregate science from management, how the political ecology of fire worked, how creations like forest reserves have survived the withdrawal of the colonial powers that installed them. I could tell them why they didn't need a formal questionnaire, only suitable questions.

The humanist in me could read with skepticism the text of a Netherlands-sponsored proposal for a ten-year project in bushfire control. The Dutch wanted to erect a system of "green firebreaks" around the forest reserves in the transitional zone. The literary critic warned about the choice of words and imagery. Would the scheme have the same punch if those barriers were called cassava corridors or plantain patches? Would it have the same political panache if it were not premised on the vision of the Sahara marching to the sea? The philosopher noted the many political values embedded in the coded clichés of three-year plans and masked in ambiguous phrases about holding village lands in trust. The historian identified the persistence of European ideals about landscape, of beliefs about the relationship of trees and climate, of concepts such as "desertification," tough as spores, that have survived in the face of hostile evidence for millennia. The cultural critic observed that the Dutch were treating the shallowing forests of Ghana as they have their own shallow seas, that the firebreak barrier was a kind of seawall, that the intricate network of green fuelbreaks was a system of dikes by which one could drain fire from the landscape. All this the Ghanaians needed to hear.

Degraded perimeter of the Pamu-Berekum Forest Reserve. The closed forest is stripped, the woods replaced by weeds. (Courtesy of the author.)

Equally, I would like to tell you that the humanities were busy making a case for why they ought to be patrolling Ghana's fire frontier. This is trickier. I can't because they weren't, not in any systematic or institutionalized way. Even I was there as a wandering mendicant. I freely confess that the humanities of fire is an eccentric enterprise. I came to the subject by a quirk of personal history, and no one else is likely to pick up the torch when I lay it down. But the omission seems odd, and perhaps symptomatic. In a literal sense, we are uniquely the keepers of the planetary flame. We hold a species monopoly over the manipulation of fire. It is a power we will almost certainly never allow any other creature to possess. And because fire is as ecologically potent withheld as applied, our fire power forces us to choose and, by our choices, to make and reveal our sense of who and why we are. All of this renders fire an ideal subject for the humanities, which has long imagined that it, among all species of scholarship, is uniquely the keeper of the cultural flame. In this sense, fire may stand for many overlooked subjects.

The problem resides less, however, with the object viewed than with the viewer. Too much of the contemporary humanities can apparently see nothing except people of specific categories and texts of unspecified abstraction. But semiotics is not consuming Chromolaena and mahogany; combustion is. An ironic voice cannot say whether, on a February afternoon, flames in three-year-old fallow will hurl embers over a forty-meter-wide fuelbreak. Engendering cocoyams and maize does not determine when forest guards should early-burn along the reserve's slashed boundary. Wildfire does not care whether the colonial era privileged indigenous forests or exotic teak plantations. Drought comes regardless of ethnic choices between shrubs and woods. Play with fire—real fire—and you can get really burned.

Talin II Forest Reserve (near the Pamu-Berekum Reserve). The typical boundary, slashed by machetes (locally called "cutlasses"), is highly vulnerable to fire. (Courtesy of the author.)

In brief, much of the conceptual apparatus of the contemporary humanities, and perhaps its most visible expressions, seem to stand helpless before the flames. Even environmental history typically behaves more like a genre than a subject. Too many humanist critics seem unable to parse phenomena outside their own socially constructed categories. The cult of irony and the glossing of text upon text has spawned a modern scholasticism whose aridity makes the putative advance of the Sahara seem mild by comparison. The people at the Forest Research Institute of Ghana may not, in their heart of hearts, have truly wanted a sociologist, but they were quite sure they didn't want a humanist.

Nothing could happen until you actually engaged the fire.

That is our loss more than theirs. I went to the Pamu-Berekum Reserve because I needed Ghana more than Ghana needed me; and so, I would argue, the humanities need a larger world more than the larger world needs the humanities. For a scholar on fire, a professional pyromantic, such reasoning is obvious. Fire happens. Before we existed, fire was, and, after we are gone, fire will remain. It may sound strange to the uninitiated, but the hardest part of firefighting at the Canyon was finding that burning source snag. That was the skill of the smokechaser and the core of life as a North Rim Longshot. Nothing could happen until you actually engaged the fire. A crew that can't track down its smoke sinks into ridicule and even self-disdain. It took me years to appreciate that the same was true for scholarship.

Smoke is unpleasant. It causes the eyes to smart, the nose to run. It soils clothes. It's deceptive. It's elusive. It's even carcinogenic. And when you find it, you face a lot of nose-in-the-ash, shoulder-to-the-shovel labor. But that smoke, and its informing fire, are what keep scholarship from becoming scholasticism. Text cannot refer to text indefinitely; the world rushes over and scatters our categories like so much loose gravel. I need those smokes. They not only keep me in the woods; they are also what send me to the stacks.

Further Reading Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilization (New York: Viking Penguin, 1995). Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Stephen Pyne, America's Fires: Management on Wildlands and Forest, Forest History Society Issues Series (Durham, N.C.: Forest History Society, 1997). __, Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). __, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997).