Smoke and Wildfire in Whatcom County

This morning, Monday, 2 August 2021, the sun rose as a dirty brown disk over the north flank of Sumas Mountain. Last night, the Northwest Clean Air Agency sensor in Columbia Valley north of Kendall was bright red and labelled “Unhealthy.”

The air has cleared since early this morning and the sensors are back to “Good” all over the county, but I imagine that is only temporary.

This isn’t the first time wildfire smoke has mingled in the August Whatcom County air. When I was a kid in the 1950s, we often smelled smoke in the late summer and early fall, which my dad said was from logging slash burns, the practice of setting fires to clean up the debris left from a logging operation. I suppose those weren’t technically wildfires, but they were close.

Much earlier, a forest fire burned through the Waschke Road homestead the year after my grandparents were married in June of 1909.

Whatcom County was different then. Much of the lowland was logged for merchantable timber before the turn of the century, but logged over land is not ready for crops. Logging in 1895 was not like forest harvests today.

I’ve seen a few photographs, which I wish I had to display here, that show glimpses of the homestead when my grandparents took possession. Huge stumps, some eight feet in diameter, and eight or ten feet tall dotted the ground covered with slash and brush. Snags, dead standing timber sometimes fifty feet tall, towered over dry fiddle-head and deer ferns mixed with hardhack brush; a havoc that would become the orderly fields my father and grandfather cultivated, and now is still farmed by my son.

Loggers were only interested in trees of a certain size. Too small, and they weren’t worth the trouble. Too large and they were too hard to move. Falling a monster Western Red Cedar or Douglas Fir with axes and misery whips– double-ended hand crosscut saws– could take days. Then the trees had to be limbed and bucked into sniped lengths that ox teams could pull down the skid road, a path through the brush and remaining trees. Greased wooden skids were laid across the way every four feet or so. The oxen pulled the logs on the skids to a saw or shingle mill, the river, or the bay. I heard stories of abandoned giant logs, which farmers had to dynamite to break them into chunks small enough to dispose of— most likely by burning.

Big leaf maple, birch, alder, cottonwood, and vine maple were trash trees left behind for the farmers to contend with.

Following their marriage in 1909, my twenty-four year-old grandfather Gus and his soon pregnant seventeen year-old wife Agnes set themselves to transforming the chaos of stumps, snags, and underbrush into a productive farm.

My grandmother told me a story that took place in September of 1910 in the second year of their marriage. I caution you that this is my grandmother’s recollection fifty years after the event, and my recollection here was formed another sixty or so years after she told the story to me.

Gus and Agnes had planted a few potatoes and peas between the stumps and snags on ground that they had cleared of underbrush. They had one cow, a pig, a horse, and a few chickens that fended for themselves. They lived in a cedar shack Gus had built for them. Gus had dug a shallow well by hand so they didn’t have to walk the half mile to Deer Creek carrying buckets of water. But no electricity, pump, or running water.

Towards the end of August 1910, smoke began to drift in. Gus wasn’t surprised. He had arrived a decade earlier in the North Bellingham-Laurel area with his parents, brothers, and sisters on the Great Northern Railroad. He knew August and September were often filled with smoky haze.

One morning at sunrise, the couple saw a column of smoke rising between their little homestead and Sumas Mountain in the foothills to the east. Snowy Komo Kulshan (Mount Baker) was silhouetted to the south.

They did not think much about it. Something was on fire somewhere almost every day back then. Neighbors gathered to try to smother the flames, but most often, the fire burned itself out. A northeast breeze, now called the Fraser outflow, was building, as it often does in late summer. Unlike the extreme cold of a December or January outflow, a summer northeaster is hot and dry. Wheat and oat thrashing weather.

Fire weather…

The smoke column grew all day. Instead of burning out, the fire was moving down the Nooksack River plain.

As often happens, a cool and damp onshore breeze from the straits to the west blew in towards evening, slowing the fire down. Shortly after dawn, the outflow was back, stronger, hotter, dryer. The fire began to speed closer.

Gus and Agnes had a hard day, clearing away brush and beating down small fires with burlap sacks and shovels as flames flared up from embers carried by the wind. Their livestock had disappeared.

Now comes the part that amazed my grandmother fifty years after the fire.

This summer, the news broadcasts show evacuations, fire crews, and houses burning almost daily. With all our technology and heavy equipment, people still die in forest fires. I shake my head today, wondering if my then young grandparents were wise and brave or foolhardy for what they did next.

When a cool and damp onshore breeze rose in the evening, my young and innocent grandparents laid down their tools, said their prayers, and went to bed. Grandma smiled and giggled when she told me they slept like little rabbits snuggled in their nest.

The next morning, they resumed fighting the fire, which passed by the homestead, and eventually burned itself out in the flats south of Ferndale. Finding their cow, horse, and pig took several days, Grandma said. The chickens came back on their own.

Looking at this story, today, I can hardly believe it. But my grandmother was a truthful person, not given to exaggerating or over-dramatizing.

Contemporary newspapers bear out her story. The Lynden Tribune, 15 September 1910, has account of the fire from Lynden as the town fought to prevent the town from burning. The Blaine Journal also reported on the fire and the fight to save Blaine. An item in the same paper estimated the damage at $1,000,000– 28 billion in 2021 dollars.

My grandparents slept through it.

Note: Wendy McLeod, Assistant Manager of the Lynden Public Library, helped me find the newspaper articles that substantiate my grandmother’s story. Thank you, Wendy!