Seattle-based author Timothy Egan seems to have a way with disaster. In his last book — the widely acclaimed 2006 National Book Award winner “The Worst Hard Time” — Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, deftly depicted the darkest reaches of the Great American Dust Bowl, through characters brought to life amidst a haunting existence of 10,000-foot-high dust storms sweeping the land and ravaging what was once one of the richest ecosystems on the planet.
In his latest work, “The Big Burn” — which Egan will read from Nov. 22 at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge — the author wields a similar literary alchemy, this time from the perils of the largest forest fire in American history.
“No living person in the United States had seen anything like the flames that roared through the Bitteroots in the summer of 1910,” Egan writes in the prologue, ‘A Fire At The End Of The World.’ “At its peak, the storm would consume three million acres in barely two days.”
The book begins with a doomsday dispatch from the small mountain town of Wallace, Idaho, as residents scramble to evacuate what Egan describes as “an amphitheater of flames.”
“People took stock of what to take and what to leave behind,” he writes. “A woman buried her sewing machine out back in a shallow grave. A pressman dug a hole for his trunk of family possessions, but before he could finish, the fire caught him on the face, the arms, the neck.”
The rail cars designed to bear the load of the exodus had only enough room for less than half of the town’s 3,500 population, and by mayor’s decree no able-bodied men were allowed on the last train out of town. An unscrupulous and dastardly few forced their way regardless, while others hunkered down, grabbing garden hoses and forming a last line of defense for the deathtrap of a town.
In the mountains — where fires raged with the fuel of gale force winds — a ragtag band of fledgling forest rangers, Buffalo Soldiers and hastily recruited immigrant workers, many with little to no fire-fighting experience — were pit against the overwhelmingly menacing blaze.
Interwoven with a wickedly detailed, at times hour-by-hour, account of the futile attempt to corral the rampant wildfire, Egan relates the contentious creation story of the U.S. Park Service through two of its biggest benefactors — the indefatigable 26th President Theodore Roosevelt and the country’s first chief of forestry, a mysterious and intriguing man named Gifford Pinchot.
“On this they agreed,” Egan writes of the duo, “Americans had become much too short-sighted with the continent they now straddled.”
At the time — the darkening twilight of Manifest Destiny — the pioneering notion of protecting these potentially lucrative swaths of uninhabited forestland for future enjoyment was met with staunch opposition by businessmen some 2,000 miles away who stood to profit handsomely from the land’s exploitation.
“To the enemies of the forest service,” Egan writes, “the fire was a chance to kill the crusade of conservation.”
But to the contrary, the inferno actually, in some ways, led to the expansion of the forest service and the inception of the National Parks Service in 1916.
