My skin felt prickly with focus.

By Rebeccah Hartz

An experience along an old abandoned railroad changed me, I think.

Old railroad rights-of-way are a common refuge for rare remnant prairie. Slim patches along the tracks have escaped the plowing, commercial developments, and other disturbances that have driven much of the Chicago region’s once-abundant prairieland into oblivion. Old Plank Road Trail, stretching westward from Chicago Heights to Joliet, has many such sites. Originally a road across the marshy prairie, made by laying oak planks side by side, it saw wagonloads of settlers moving west and their harvest heading back east. The plank road later became a railroad, which in turn was abandoned in 1972. It now serves as a recreational bike path and pedway. The 33-foot trail is bordered on the north and south by 33-foot swaths of remnant tallgrass prairie, untouched since the trail’s conversion roughly one hundred and seventy years ago. On November 9^th, we set out to burn three of these precious remnants, just west of I-57 in Matteson.  

The fire seemed to be slow getting started. But we were ready.

Our crew consisted of two Orland Grassland-based volunteers, two staff members from the Nature Conservancy’s Indian Boundary Prairies, who came equipped with pumper units and suppression tools, and six volunteers from along the North Branch Restoration sites, myself included. 

I was drawn to joining this burn crew through my growing interest in ecological restoration and natural history. As I learn more about the restoration process, I notice there are a seeming infinite number of variables to consider while making sense out of a situation and charting a course forward. Fire itself is hypnotic, arresting, but the behavior of the burn, as it relates to those infinite variables, is captivating in its own way. I am fascinated by how different elements of the burn interplay: temperature, winds, humidity, fuel types, topography, many more. You have to maintain a hyperawareness throughout the process, a full immersion to account for these multiple unfolding processes. 

 

Every burn starts with careful planning.
When the flames began to leap, I would understand why.

    In defiance of our times, an era that seems increasingly to promote multi-tasking, split concentration, quantity over quality, the burn is a fully immersive act of mental and physical engagement. Halfway through our second burn unit, I became conscious of how sharply attuned I was to the process. My skin felt prickly with focus.  

That second unit was a narrow strip of tall grass between the trail and a harvested field, thick with corn stubble. Rather than manually preparing a firebreak on both flanks, we raked and soaked only the east end. The west end of the burn unit transitioned from grassland to dense brush, which leader Bill Fath felt confident was a natural fire barrier. This gave me pause. I knew that historically woodlands and rivers had sometimes comprised natural firebreaks, but I did not feel ready to relinquish control into the hands of nature. My experienced crewmembers knew better. Bill crouched before a matted tuft of pale grasses and lit a match. In seconds, the flames were eating through feet of fuel, rising like pillars into the air. When asked, Christos calmly gathered some thatch onto his rake and held it to the fire, then dragged it along the perimeter. It seemed more in tune with the site than the drip-torch ignition we had been briefed on in training.

Christos spread fire by pulling it with a rake.

From years of building campfires, I’m accustomed to watching wood burn, where the drama of the fire develops in place. I was not prepared for the visual and emotional impact of a prairie burn. The head fire moved in a roaring tidal wave of heat and power. It’s otherworldly, the fire washing over, devouring and transforming all at once. Unexpectedly elating and more than slightly alarming, as the flames reached the brush, they subsided almost as rapidly as they had leapt up, leaving a black, balded earth, fizzling quietly. I was surprised by the peace of this natural conclusion. 

After the flames, there is black, and peace.

Maybe this peace was the most unexpected part of the burn. Despite the inherent perils of the process and the apocalyptic scene left to us at its conclusion, the overarching mood was one of calm, quiet joy, and anticipation. An essential part of the restoration process had been delivered, and a slender but dear stretch of earth was primed for renewed vigor. 

One of the most intriguing parts of the prescribed burn is its role in fulfilling an ancient legacy. Fire has shaped the region, changed the evolutionary course of now-fire-dependent plant communities, and given us a wonderfully unique mosaic of ecosystems: open oak woodlands, savannas, prairies. Watching our burn sweep across the land, I wondered what this process looked like hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. How did the Native Americans manage their burns, and how did they relate to them? What did they know and understand that we don’t? (Note: I’m using past tense here because my understanding is that today’s Chicago-region tribes no longer use prescribed burns.) This is a subject I’m excited to research more. 

Finally, there is the question of our burn’s impact. I have yet to witness the “before and after” dynamic of a restoration-in-progress, so the extent of one burn’s effects and the variables that might interfere with its success are on my mind. In particular, all three burn units were either proximal to or had growing within them significant populations of invasive species. These had not been cleared prior to the burn, and had long since dropped seed. To what extent will the persistence of these invasives mute the benefits of our work? 

Postscript: Historic Photo

Compare our Plank Road burn crew from 2018.
Excellent spirit, but only two sets of fire-retardant clothing among us.
Level of leadership training? Perhaps equally primitive. Credit for improvements go to Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves (especially Christos Economou) - and to Orland steward Bill Fath (second from left, above) for his hard work and dedication to burn training.

Additional reading

In a comment (below), Ryan recommends a good article on burning from Missouri. See To Put Out Fire.

A fine old book on Native Americans use of fire can be found at: Forgotten Fires.

Another important article from Missouri is Doug Ladd's “Ecologically Appropriate Fire in the Missouri Landscape: A 35 Year Reflection”.

That article includes the words: "We need to change default conceptions across a broad segment of society. An unburned, fire-starved, overstocked woodland should not invoke notions of a sylvan paradise but instead be seen for what it is: a stressed, degraded, biotically depauperized system." 

It also includes the words: "Existing knowledge gaps are exacerbated by the realities of the contemporary environment. The fact that a certain pattern of fire prevailed in presettlement times does not guarantee that it will have the same effects in today’s fragmented landscape, subject to influences of allochthonous biota, altered hydrology, and changing climate patterns. We need a robust and ongoing culture of documentation and investigation, learning and adapting as we progress, enfranchising careful application of fire to nurture the healthy, diverse landscape upon which we as a society are ultimately dependent." 

Can anyone recommend good research on Native American use of fire in Illinois - or other especially important tallgrass region fire research?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Shane Tripp for dramatic photos.

Thanks to Pat Hayes for the 2018 crew photo. 

Thanks to the Village of Matteson and Rich Township, the owners of the Old Plank Road Trail and these Illinois Nature Preserves, for years of good stewardship.

Thanks to Illinois Nature Preserves staffer Kim Roman for resources, trouble-shooting, leadership, and so much more. 

Thanks to Kathy Garness for proofing.