After supper we lie about the fire and sing or dream. Perhaps some one tells a story. The hours go so rapidly that we do not know where they have gone. And when the evening is over? The fire is still glowing, a bed of bright coral coals and gray ash. The fire will just go out if we leave it. Besides, we haven’t time to fetch water to put it out with. No, nine chances out of ten, if we leave the fire it will not go out, but smoulder on, and a breeze coming up in the night or at dawn, the fire springs into flame again, catching on the surrounding dry grass and pine needles. Soon, incredibly soon, it begins to leap up the trunks of trees. Before we know it, it is springing from tree to tree, faster than a man can leap or run.
In dry weather you and I could go out into the woods anywhere, and with a match not much bigger than a good-sized darning needle, set a blaze that would sweep over a whole county, or from county to county, or from state to state. Millions of dollars’ worth of damage would be done, and the chances are that the careless, wanton act would be the means of having us put into prison--which is precisely where, given such circumstances, we should be.
Have we ever stopped to think for a moment, we who camp so joyfully, what loss and injury such carelessness on our part may mean to a whole community? To begin with, there are the forests themselves, and all they represent in actual timber, in promise for future growth, and in security for rain supply. Then in fighting the fire thousands of dollars’ worth of wages will have to be paid and hundreds of men’s lives will be in danger. The sweep and fury of such forest fires, unless one has lived in the neighborhood of one as I have, is beyond the comprehension or the imagination. Burning brands are blown sixty feet and more over the tops of the highest trees and the heads of the men who are fighting the fire. Before they can check the blaze of the fire nearest them, one beyond them has already been started.
Also there are the life aspects, big and small, of such a fire. Not only are the lives of the men who fight the blaze endangered, but all the homes, camps, farmhouses, villages, and their inmates are in imminent risk. What it has taken others years to gather together, to construct, may be swept away in a few hours. Helpless old people, equally helpless little children--all may be burned.