the fire this time

 When I went out to get the paper just before dawn, the air smelled like a new campfire built on the wet ashes of an old one, a mixture of acrid new smoke and wet smoulder. There are over two hundred fires burning out of control between here and the Atlantic coast.

They’re sort of like peat fires in England and Ireland. Lightning strikes in the swamp and starts a fire hot enough to propagate in the damp underbrush. The fires can go on for weeks or months in areas so remote that heavy equipment can’t reach them. (A regular forest fire can be attacked from the air, by dumping water and retardant. Doesn’t work on these already-wet kind.) Strong winds from the east have made it worse.

I suppose on a secondary level there’s an economic force at work. If this were happening to billion-dollar real estate, they would find a way to go in and put it out. That boggy scrub-pine land won’t grow anything but cockroaches and rattlesnakes, so the hell with it. When cropland starts to smoke they’ll be all over it like a cheap suit.

Joe