The Mountains Are Burning - Again

It's a mountain thing. No, really.

Down here in Surry County, we think it's just a Lowgap thing, but it's not. It's a mountain thing and one of those traditions that seems to die hard.

In the spring, the mountains burn. They've done so for decades and although they don't burn every year (and I don't even know if this year's fire, which started Feb. 14, was "set" or not), they burn.

We react as though it's a bad thing, especially if our homes are clustered so close that we can see the embers glowing after the sun goes down (not unlike the friend who made this picture). But the burning of the mountains isn't the evil we would have it be, especially if we didn't build our new mountain homes along the steep ridges and keep all those beautiful trees so close by to preserve nature.

My granny used to tell stories of the mountains burning.

Back in the 30s and 40s, and through the millennium before that, mountain families let much of their livestock run loose in warm months. While milk cows and the horses used for farm work needed to be close at hand, sometimes cattle and almost always pigs and other animals were branded (usually with ear notches that neighbors recognized) and left to wander the mountains through the warm months. There was no such thing as cars whizzing by at 60 mph to put an untimely end to the prospect of winter bacon. It was a much easier task to fence in gardens and let the animals find food wherever they could.

Hence, burning off the mountains.

Indians recognized that burning the prairies (I occasionally get a dose of the History channel from hubby) created new, tender growth that attracted game. Here in the mountains the same theory applied. Cows, sheep, pigs, whatever, couldn't eat the brush, and new growth was less likely to come up through inches of dead leaves. So the farmers burned the mountains.

If they were lucky, whoever set the fire did it on a still day in February or early March. Those who lived closest to the mountains kept an anxious eye on the wind and smoke, and if the fire turned, neighbors arrived to help keep the blaze away from buildings with wet sacks and hoes.

My grandparents had one of those farms through which the Blue Ridge Parkway eventually carved its way. The unsettled slopes of Fisher Peak weren't too far in the distance, and in the spring smoke would often curl over the mountain ridges.

I remember Granny told about one neighbor who had a white baby goat that followed her everywhere, and when the mountains were burning the goat came along when she and her family came to fight the fire. All day long the little goat followed in her footsteps as she beat a soaked cloth sack against the flames. At the end of the day, the little goat's hair was singed and he was as tired and dirty as the people who had fought the fire.

In those days, neighbors came together and only worried about what was worth saving -- homes and barns, corn cribs and haystacks. These days, it's still largely neighbors (better known as volunteer firefighters), but they fight the fire in the forest. They have to because not doing so could mean that instead of a brush fire that cleans the mountain, the fire feeds on several years of debris and grows to a blaze that leaves the mountains scarred and bare instead of ready to grow again.

It seems that, even without the livestock running free, we might be better off going back to the old ways, burning the mountains every year and concentrating our efforts as our ancestors did by taking care of homes and buildings.