Ring of fire
To burn the Flint Hills is a quiet and exclusive art
Staff writer
In the cold light of Sunday, Chuck McLinden poured a line of gasoline across old grass.
The line stretched for a half-mile east, beginning at the corner of 160th and Yarrow Rd.
As the gasoline caught, he watched from his rearview mirror. Fire spread across a thin strip of the plains.
The fire raged and went out. Afterward, he drove his old pickup — outfitted with a yellow gas tank, a seven-foot long “firestick,” and a water hose — north a quarter-mile.
Cows the next pasture over turned and watched as McLinden poured gasoline and lit another “stopper fire.”
As he lit this second stopper, he turned on the water hose affixed to the back of his pickup, pouring out a strip of water parallel to the fire. Every action was measured, performed to a militaristic level of precision.
Karen McLinden peered out from the driver’s seat of her own pickup, observing her husband between cracks in the front windshield. With the water line, the cows to the west would stay extra protected from any wind changes.
“We don’t need steak while we’re sitting here,” she said.
Preparing for a controlled burn is at once banal and tense.
From the outside, one could see only a pickup trundling lethargically along the grass. The air was dead quiet. But just behind the vehicle, fire and water roared.
Although McLinden has lit hundreds of backfires in his life, the task still requires full concentration.
“I don’t usually talk when I’m in there with him, because he’s got so many things to pay attention to,” Karen said. “Plus, when you’re in there, you can’t see anything. It’s all behind you.”
Measuring out water, noting where flames are blowing, and making sure nothing funny happens to the firestick while navigating a vehicle filled with gasoline across bumpy terrain is a high-wire act.
The firestick is a prickly device, unique to the Flint Hills.
An unassuming steel tube, it is filled with gasoline and hooked to the side of a truck. A plug at the end is twisted so as to drip gasoline as the vehicle moves.
Starting from one lit patch of grass, the stick drags the fire along the plains.
The McLindens compare it to a pipe bomb. So did historian Jim Hoy, who wrote in 1989 that the device “has all the appearance of a bomb, but I am told there is no known instance of an explosion, apparently because no oxygen can get into the pipe.”
Hoy wrote that the firestick came into use in the early ’60s, which agrees with Chuck McLinden’s claim that his grandfather, Bud, popularized the device
“My grandfather was the first one in the country that most people remember using a firestick,” he said.
McLinden still ranches on the same land his grandfather did more than 100 years ago.
He attended college in Missouri Valley, but returned to the family ranch after a year, after torn ligaments in his ankle ended his varsity football career.
“When I quit playing football, I kind of lost interest in college,” he said.
From his years learning under Bud and ranching himself, he has become one of the county’s preeminent controlled-burn scholars.
“Back in the day when nobody had fire sticks and trucks to put it out, Mother Nature would set this country on fire, most of the time with lightning,” he said. “The Indians figured out that the buffalo went where the green grass was. So the Indians were actually the first stewards that used fire to clean off the plains, so the new grass would come to draw in buffalo. It works the same for cattle.”
After lighting the first of the two stopper fires, Chuck rendezvoused with Karen and two other ranchers.
For reasons of safety and efficiency, burning is almost always a group activity, and there is a communal spirit to the network of ranchers who do burn.
The McLindens burn their own property, of course, but also frequently do so for their neighbors in exchange for favors.
“One of the guys helping him today owns this pasture, and we’re just helping him do it,” Karen said. “He helps us when we get ready to load cattle.”
When the wind shifts dramatically and fire spreads where it’s not supposed to, the McLindens only really worry if they’re not friends with the owners.
“It happens to everybody,” Karen said. “If they do this, they’re pretty understanding.”
Wearing a red hoodie that matched his pickup, Chuck chatted to the two other ranchers. His prominent teeth flashed bright as he smiled. He wore glasses. Clip-on sun lenses were attached to the brim of his hat.
The discussion pertained to who would go where after the main or “head” fire was lit.
After a few minutes, McLinden decided it didn’t really matter.
“Oh, hell, just go ahead and light it,” he said. “I’ll catch up with you.”
In the nighttime, of course, pasture burns blaze orange-red, as a dramatic, flattened sun. But in the daytime, the colors of wildfire are fresh and strange and mystical.
The smoke is white in the blue sky; when plumes get high enough, they can be mistaken for rainclouds. When dust is kicked up and sucked into the flames, the light turns yellow and brown. Nothing burns black or gray; the freshness of the fields is emphasized in the flames.
The luckier of frogs hopped onto roadways to escape the flames. The cows to the west slowly turned their heads and watched.
“Some of them have never seen a fire before,” Chuck said. “These old cows, they see one somewhere about every spring. But some cattle get in here from parts of the country where they don’t burn. They get a little nervous.”
Shrouded in white smoke, the daytime pasture fire is less physically than spiritually imposing. It lasts about three hours. The soil is rejuvenated, and invasive species, like red cedars, are killed off.
Dark dirt is left behind, from which summer grass will start to appear in a matter of days.
“The blacker the ground, the better the burn,” is a common expression among the ranchers.
Burning season begins in the second or third week of March. At times, smoky fields are all-encompassing. McLinden will burn 20,000 to 25,000 acres over the course of a season. He has about 12,000 acres to go this year, he said.
“We try to be done about the third or fourth week in April,” Karen said.
Ranchers study wind patterns before they set out to burn; with the right wind, thousands of acres can be burned in a matter of hours.
Usually, not a single square foot is left free of fire, as flames flock to any space unexhausted of oxygen.
“Fire draws fire,” is another of the ranchers’ favorite expressions.
Karen is a cosmetologist by trade. Although she grew up on a farm, she is much newer to burning, having married Chuck three years ago.
She enjoys tagging along to help out.
“I love it,” she said. “Every once in a while, you’ll get quite an adrenaline rush.”
As the head fire continued beyond the McLindens, and black pastures speckled the skyline like something from another planet, Chuck explained that there has been some recent pushback toward the fires.
“All these yahoos that are bitching about the smoke, the urbanites that don’t like it,” he said, “this is, first of all, how we keep the country clean and pretty, and second of all, how we improve our income.”
Driving along in the throes of spring, Chuck often will spot one — a pasture burn.
Despite having lit so many, he likes to pull over and watch the fire snake across the plains.
“The fascination is still there,” he said.
There are no urbanites, no yahoos; not out here. It’s simple. Fire against sky against ground. A land refreshed by a holy force.