On the Texas fires

As one who has lost property to fires in Eastland County in the past, I can empathize with those dealing with the present fires in that part of the State. My losses cannot begin to compare with those who unfortunately have lost their homes.

No amount of stoicism can give spiritual or psychological comfort in cases of uncontrolled danger such as this, but I am reminded of a thought I had when I was trying to make sense of the fires. It gave me a bit of perspective, but did not ease the pain.

The “natural” state of almost all the land in Texas west of the I-35 corridor before the white man came was open grassland, kept that way by prairie fires. Trees cannot recover from fire as quickly as grass; in fact a lot of the properties of grass evolved to insure a quick recovery from fires. Some of the best pasture for buffalo and cattle is fresh grass that shoots up out of the ashes within days of the fire. I saw this happen on my pasture land that burned. As with other ecocultures, fire is the “great gardener” of grasslands.

Indians such as the Comanches used to purposely burn vast areas of grassland to promote new, fresh growth for enticing buffalo into their local hunting grounds. This, along with natural fires caused by lightning, assured that most of central and west Texas was relatively treeless except for those places where the sweeping prairie fires could not reach — outcrops of rock, creek and riverbanks, and various forms of broken country. The canyons between the town of Cisco and Lake Cisco, where I used to play with Bill Lee and others when we were boys are examples of such places.

Imagine Eastland, Stephens, Erath, and Palo Pinto counties without the great expanses of cedar and mesquite and post oak; imagine the same for the entire hill country. That is the way the natural cycles worked to keep it; that is the way the Indians helped to keep it. It is the way broken by the white man with farms, ranches, and fences.

RJH

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