Notes from my Knapsack 5-13-21

Notes from my Knapsack 5-13-21

Jeff Gill

Spread versus containment

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Memorial Day is nearing, and Granville plans a parade and ceremony on May 31; stay tuned for more details as we get closer, and the banners go up on Broadway to honor our six surviving World War II veterans.

Summer is coming, and outdoor activities are clearly ideal in so many ways, COVID or not.

One book I'm looking forward to this summer is a new John Maclean book, titled "Home Waters" which comes out June 1. It's a family memoir, and you may be familiar with his father Norman writing about how "A River Runs Through It" which was itself a memoir about the Blackfoot River in Montana in many ways. John went on to be a journalist, and along with his global awareness and perspectives, he ended up helping pick up a loose thread from his father's estate, "Young Men and Fire," which turned John into a primary documentary non-fiction author on the subject of wildland fires, and those who fight them.

I can recommend any of John Maclean's books, tragedies though so many of them have been, but I look forward to "Home Waters" because he will get to work in a different register, as it were. When you are attempting, even in the breadth of a book's length, to sum up all the complex human and environmental detail that resulted in the deaths of those who chose to go out and fight wilderness conflagrations, you have to make many tough choices about whose stories to tell, and how you get not only from ignition to accident, but weaving in the aftermath of those firefighter deaths, lessons learned, and sometimes not learned, but always asking why.

So while looking forward to reading how John asks some very different questions when "Home Waters" comes out, I'm thinking back through those earlier works, and stories, and questions. Because I keep seeing parallels between epidemiology and wilderness firefighting. Arguably, I know little about either (I can hear you in the back mumbling "or nothing!"), but my natural bent is towards metaphor and comparison, and how we can learn in one field from the successes and failures we already have in another.

We all know, from the news if nothing else, that there are numbers around wilderness fire outbreaks, and if we have any imagination at all, we know those numbers only cast faint shadows of the human let alone natural costs they represent. Yes, we're sensitive to the number of deaths: "four killed as forest fire rips through a national forest…" The acreage is usually mentioned, even if most of us would have trouble really imagining what a thousand acres "looks like," let alone a hundred thousand acres.

And then there's containment. "The Whoosit Fire is now 65% contained." It's a figure calculated by the amount of fire line dug around it, the fuels involved and the wind direction and what's in the way. 100% contained we can imagine, but 50%? It almost sounds like there's no difference between 0% and a line halfway around, if the wind turns.

For the COVID situation, the spread seems pretty wide, but in Ohio, 10% of us appear to have had it, some extrapolate that to 20% total cases recovered from having the virus, along with 40% started on the vaccine, over 30% completed. Allowing for overlap, you have us somewhere around 50% either having had it and/or vaccinated. That leaves 50% who could still get it.

I would argue, then, that we're a long way from containment. The fire is still burning, however you measure it. And we have fire line to dig, and flames to put out, before everyone is safe.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's swung a Pulaski a few times but never in harm's way. Tell him how you think we need to put this fire out at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.