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Interview with authorJeanette Ingoldon writing THE BIG BURN
Biography JEANETTE INGOLD is the author of The Window; Pictures, 1918; and Airfield. She lives and writes in Montana. Q: Your story, The Big Burn, is based on an actual fire that devastated portions of the Northwest—the region where you live. What influenced you to write a book about this particular event—is "the big one of 1910" still discussed in Montana and the surrounding area? A: The initial idea for The Big Burn came from a bike ride in the Idaho mountains, where the book is set. Just over the Montana line, several miles of the old track bed of the Milwaukee Railroad have been spruced up to accommodate trail bikes, and the day my husband and I set out along it, we had the wild country pretty much to ourselves. Brief snippets in a history book—and then a lunchtime chat with a trail guard—told us that the damp, echoing, dark tunnels that we'd been riding through had once been the scene of high drama. In 1910, when summer wildfires blew up, evacuation trains trapped by flames had sheltered in those tunnels. Beyond the tunnels' ends, flames had raced up the timber trestles of the high bridges we'd been crossing. Stories get their starts in lots of ways. In this case it was a matter of coming across an event so dramatic and difficult to comprehend that I got caught up thinking about the people who lived through it—how they met it and how it changed them. And then I began to think about the connections between their experience and wildfire as we know it today. The 1910 fires burned a huge swath across the Northwest, worst and most dramatically in Idaho and Montana during the blow-up that began on August 20. But the 1910 fire season spewed destruction in other parts of the Northwest and also, especially earlier in the summer, in other parts of the country. Yes, the 1910 fires are discussed still, both as history and as an explanation for the put-out-every-fire approach that the Forest Service embraced for the better part of the rest of the twentieth century. And still, when we have a bad fire year, 1910 is the benchmark against which it's measured.
Q: In this book, you depict three teen characters—each faced with a different life-threatening situation caused by a wildfire, and each living adult lives in a tough, depend-on-yourself pioneering world. How are the lives of Jarrett, Seth, and Lizbeth similar to and/or different from the lives of teens today? A: When you write about teens living on the frontier of a hundred years ago, you find yourself dealing with paradoxes in terms of ages and experiences and possibilities. On the one hand, their more limited knowledge of events beyond their immediate world and the stricter behavioral expectations of the time would have made those teens more naïve—maybe more innocent—than young people are today. That affects how you write a developing relationship, such as the one between Jarrett and Lizbeth. It limits the options that you can give a young woman like Lizbeth, even when part of what you're writing is a young woman pushing to expand her options. On the other hand, there were fewer institutional
protections then, for either children or their families. And, on the
frontier especially, maybe more of a willingness to let a young person's
ability to work determine when he or she would be considered an adult,
rather than letting that be defined by some arbitrary age. And of course,
in the absence of rapid communication and pervasive record keeping, it was
far more possible for someone like Seth, determined to prove himself in
the army, to get around regulations by simply lying about his
age. Q: Between some chapters, you include introductory passages or "Field Notes," to detail the progress of the fire and fire-fighting efforts. These sections seem to underscore the danger of this wildfire and increase the tension for The Big Burn characters. Are the "Field Notes" written from historical records and based on facts? A: The "Field Notes" are drawn from the research I did to understand both fire behavior and also the historical milieu in which the 1910 wildfires happened. One of the difficulties I faced in writing The Big Burn was the need to find a way to show spread-out, simultaneous events that couldn't have been experienced by just one person. I was able to handle much of that by using multiple viewpoints, those of the three main characters and also those of several adults in various roles—homesteader, Forest Service people, firefighter, townswoman. But I also faced a second problem. Part of what I wanted to do with The Big Burn was to explain wildfire and especially the 1910 blow-up from today's perspective, when the science of fire and the understanding of forest ecology have progressed far beyond anything my characters could have imagined. And in the case of the young black soldier, Seth, I also wanted to present a broader picture of the Twenty-Fifth Infantry than he would have possessed. To my mind it was fascinating stuff, as well as being information that I wanted my readers to have so that they would understand the why behind what was going on in the story. And so, after much internal debate, I wrote it up in the short, basically nonfiction sections called "Field Notes." It was a bit of a gamble—you don't want to take a reader out of your story—but as it's turned out, the early readers from whom I've heard have almost all mentioned how something in the "Field Notes" expanded their knowledge.
Q: Your son spent last season on a U.S. Forest Service fire crew, and although you mentioned that he's well trained and has superior fire-fighting and safety equipment, The Big Burn made it very clear that each wildfire has an unpredictable pattern all its own. How did knowing that your son was facing the dangers of fire-fighting affect your research and writing? A: Actually my son, Kurt, is now in his fourth summer on a fire crew. And although my interest in the 1910 fires began with that bike ride in Idaho, the immediate impetus for writing The Big Burn came as much from my wish to understand Kurt's work as from anything else. As I remember it, I was on the phone with my editor very early in the 2000 fire season—well before 2000 developed into such a bad fire year—and I mentioned that I'd been thinking how sometimes all you know of a fire is the sound of planes overhead. At the time, I was listening to the drone of a tanker carrying fire retardant from the aerial depot near where I live, over the mountains to the forest where Kurt was working. It was a sound I'd hear again when I was writing The Big Burn's afterword. I'm a mother before I'm a writer, and like most mothers, I teeter on that line between wanting to know what my kids are doing and being glad I don't. The worrying doesn't stop just because the kids grow up and make their own choices about what's important and what jobs are worth taking on. But I've found that trying to understand the choices—and in this case, learning about the job as it's done today—helps. And it was cool, too, to have Kurt's suggestions for The Big Burn. He provided many of the fireline details—thirst and wasps and headaches, as well as fire crew camaraderie—that brought alive for me how things would have been for my characters. And he was a great help when I asked him to check over my afterword, which is really a nonfiction section about firefighters today.
Q: Have you ever been near to a wildfire? If so, how did you react to the danger? A: If you're fortunate—and I have been—you don't know first-hand what it means to be in direct danger from wildfire. In presentations about The Big Burn, the photo of a torching tree that I show is one my son took. But still, wildfire is a fact of life in the West, a hovering threat that is part of the texture of summer. The fire danger signs go up, their pointers aimed at moderate or high or extreme. One year you stand in your front yard and watch a spotter plane direct retardant drops on a nearby hillside. Another year you watch helicopters skim just above the surface of a river, trailing water buckets that will be emptied on the slopes above. If you take a night flight home from someplace, you might see orange lines of wildfire breaking the mountain darkness below. Maybe when you're on the ground again, shifting winds will blow a blaze out of control and you'll be told to prepare to evacuate your house—be left on your own to decide what's important enough to merit car space. In forested country, fire isn't as much an if as a when. And if you live out here long enough, you'll probably experience many of those things that have been part of one or another of my years. Certainly, you'll know what it is to breathe smoke and to look for the dirty horizon that will tell you where it's coming from. Q: What is the one message you would like teens reading this book to take with them as they move toward to their own independent lives? A: I suppose the message is the same that I hope they'd take from any of my books—that it's important to have the courage to think for one's self and to act on one's convictions, but that learning how to do so isn't something best done in a vacuum. I want my readers to appreciate the value of analyzing experiences, bad and good, and of listening with an open mind to what others have to say. I want my characters to show young people moving beyond imposed limitations, to decide for themselves what they'll do with their lives. And I want my readers to see that part of maturing is accepting that we have responsibilities to others as well as to ourselves. This interview appeared on the Harcourt, Inc.
website, where you'll find links to the
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It is the summer of 1910 and the mountains are
burning from a wildfire. Caught in its path are three
teens—Jarrett, who joins the fight against the forest fires;
Lizbeth, who must decide whether to defend her homestead or
let it burn; and Seth, an army enlistee who must learn courage
to gain the respect rarely afforded a black man in
turn-of-the-century America. A teen historical fiction book by
Jeanette Ingold and Harcourt Books.