The Smoke That Choked the Sound
As Seattle rebuilds from its Great Fire, a more insidious disaster—the annual torching of Washington’s vast forests—threatens the region’s economic future.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is something the matter with the air out here. It is not the air of a city; it is not the air of the hills. It is heavy, thick, and suffocating. It seems to set everything on fire. The scientific people explain the abnormal state of the atmosphere as a result of the fires raging in the states of Illinois and the Northwest; how the smoke travels such long distances is a mystery to the uninitiated, yet we feel it in the ordinary charge of electricity in the air. The situation is similar to that in the country at large. While cities have been destroyed by fire, it is estimated that more timber has been lost from the forest fires of the past two months than all the houses in the territories of Washington and Montana combined. Millions of feet of timber have been destroyed; it is impossible to calculate, but it has certainly been enough to supply the state with firewood for the entire winter.
There are many theories as to how these fires begin, and all of them are probably true. The Indians are criminally careless; during this season of the year, they spend a great deal of time in the woods, and it is nothing to them whether the forests burn down or not. When they break camp, they leave their fires burning on the ground and go heedlessly away. Many others do the same thing. Because of the frequent winds, once these fires are started, there is no way of stopping them. Vast quantities of timber lie upon the mountains; the rank growth of underbrush offers the fire a good hold, and it insists on its own way. The forest fires are magnificent, but it almost seems as if they took aim at the monster trees and selected their victims. They run along the ground and attack the trees from the bottom, climbing upward. They spring from branch to branch, consuming everything in their way. They produce a terrific heat which nothing can withstand, and against which it would require an army of men to make a successful battle.
“They produce a terrific heat which nothing can withstand, and against which it would require an army of men to make a successful battle.”
In 1889, as Seattle emerged from the ashes of its own urban fire, the unchecked destruction of Washington’s timber through fire and mismanagement was framed as a crisis of 'natural resources' and economic potential. Today, we confront the same recurring threat, not as a loss of lumber, but as a climate-driven crisis of air quality and forest health that fundamentally shapes the livability of the Pacific Northwest.
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