| |
 |
 |
s no one can enter this antique house and I cannot leave but to alien times and places, I expect no visitors. But the habit of society is such that—despite the illimitable library, the well-stocked larder, the gallery, the musical instruments, and all the countless diversions that the capacious luxury of this mansion affords—I am compelled to speak, were it only to the personified walls, the ghosts of memory or some distant dreamer who in drifting attends now and then to my words.
Let us say then that this house has a thousand doors, although they are to me innumerable. Opening any one of these, I find its obverse side always of a distinct character. Passing to the opposite side of a door of darkly varnished and intricately routed oak, I see another, gray, cracked and disintegrating with age—or I find it is penetrated by an opaque leadlight window through which can be vaguely discerned the interior of a house other than my own—or I discover that I have passed through the oversized door of a barn. Nor does this peculiar phenomenon show the slightest pattern except that the door’s exterior always conforms in some measure to its immediate surroundings.
Through many months or years of passing out these doors and returning, I have stood upon every corner of the earth and gazed upon the works and disasters of all times. These observations, drawn as memory permits and supplemented by matter gleaned from the library, will form the main substance of what follows. And I trust my hearer—the understanding walls or kindly dreamer—will believe that I have identified each scene with the care and patience that my imprisonment requires of anyone who would preserve his sanity. |
Some years ago, in the long night of the house, I opened one of the many six-paneled doors that greet me stonily along the halls. And again, in spite of myself, in spite of silent promises to leave them alone—again—I gave way to the loneliness and claustrophobia of unearthly confinement and passed to the other side. Nor did I more than step over the threshold before the door behind me broke, split and all but crumbled to ash upon the ground.
Yet as I looked where it lay, I knew it would wait for me, that even the unresisting fragments of dust would regather themselves at my touch and readmit me to my prison. For now, it was enough that I was free of it. And without thinking more of the place to which I would inevitably return, I turned and looked. |
| Peshtigo, Wisconsin |
My Darling Wife and Children,
I’ll see you in the morning.
Your loving Husband and Father |
|
| —over an empty grave. |
|
It was a barren expanse, the clear view of the horizon interrupted by no more than the charred and withered stems of trees. And the carcass of a doe lying immediately before me would have been the very emblem of the greater devastation—which leveled a booming land of giant red and white pines into a plain of ash—if that devastation had not been so much of humanity.
It was October 1871. All along the eastern seaboard, the newspapers were alive with tales of the great Chicago fire that occurred simultaneously with the destruction of Peshtigo. But the fire of Chicago, despite its tremendous cost in loss of property, took relatively few lives, while the loss of lives in the region of Peshtigo—uncounted to this day—is estimated at between 1200 and 2000. It would be some time before the nation learned of this latter destruction—later still before its details were fully believed—but perhaps not nearly late enough before it was forgotten.
The fires had been breaking out all Summer and Autumn. Fire was not merely a tool to keep warm or cook; it was instrumental in clearing land for farming and the building of homes—it is impossible to plow land until the trees and stumps have been removed and it is slow and costly to do so by brute labor. The use of fire for such purposes was common, and if precedent were the sole basis of reason, no one should have suspected that it might lead to disaster. But the year had been very dry. Peshtigo was a lumber town and the mills created wastes of bark and sawdust together with the dry lumber, and these wastes were dumped into river or creek beds, or at roadsides. And with the nicety of hindsight and the convenience of contemporary knowledge, these conditions alone—the dry materials and the heat and drought of summer—might seem sufficient for alarm.
But there had been no disaster comparable to what was to come. And had drought been the only factor, the disaster might not have occurred at all—or not on the scale that has made it memorable.
As the Summer progressed into Autumn, the situation became progressively worse. Fires broke out in the woods; peat beds burned to a depth of five feet; and among the desiccated pine needles could be seen racing lights of fire that burned underfoot and no more. The air thickened gradually with smoke and people passed in the streets of Peshtigo with handkerchiefs over their mouths. Still, they were a people not unused to fire—it was as much part-and-parcel to their lives as electricity is to ours. Men and women busy at a thousand tasks do not think of the coal-fired or nuclear plants that supply them; of the filtering and purification necessary to provide potable water from the tap. And the people of Peshtigo in 1871 might be forgiven for not suspecting, after the hundreds or thousands of fires and plumes of smoke that they had experienced throughout their lives, that this one would consume their livelihoods, homes and families. It was a bad year, very dry, and the smoke was unpleasant. They hoped it would rain soon.
But instead of rain, a cold front came from the west—in the words of Peter Leschak, author of Ghosts of the Fireground, “A huge cyclonic low system . . . .” The meeting of hot and cold air is the source of wind. Warm, low-pressure air rises and cool, high-pressure air rolls in to take its place. This "huge cyclonic low system" produced violent winds that stirred the fires already burning into greater intensity and spread each further abroad from its point of origin. From Chicago to Michigan to Minnesota, prairie fires sprang up and conjoined, creating larger blazes, increasing the heat and adding power to the winds. This firestorm centered itself over Peshtigo—with its mills, slash and dry waste. Winds of up to 100 miles per hour continually dispersed the smoke of the flames and revealed a sky filled with fire that roiled with the same bodily turbulence as racing storm clouds. Even before the trees and houses were touched by the advancing fire, the superheated air caused them to burst spontaneously into flames, while roofs and trees were torn away and tossed by the wind. And the wind blew from the fire burning fragments that ignited whatever they touched.
People took refuge where they might. Some descended into wells in the hope that the fire might pass over them, but in whatever covert they hid, the fire pursued them. Nor was it possible to outrun it. The ambient air temperature reached between 500 and 700 degrees. The authors Gess and Lutz (of Firestorm at Peshtigo) described the experience of Karl Lamp. While trying to escape the fire with his family, the wheel fell off their wagon. They were attempting to go by foot when their horse burst into flames; and when Lamp turned around, he saw his family burning.
Some went to the river. The Reverend Peter Pernin describes his flight and survival there:
“Once in water up to our necks, I thought we would at least be safe from fire, but it was not so; the flames darted over the river as they did over land, the air was full of them, or rather the air itself was on fire. Our heads were in continual danger. It was only by throwing water constantly over them and our faces, and beating the river with our hands that we kept the flames at bay. Clothing and quilts had been thrown into the river . . . and they were floating all around. I caught at some that came within reach and covered with them the heads of the persons who were leaning against or clinging to me. These wraps dried quickly in the furnace-like heat and caught fire whenever we ceased sprinkling them.”
In the aftermath, the survivors struggled forth from where they lay burned, swollen, sometimes almost blind. And then they saw, as I have described, the trees cut down by the whirlwind and the barren plain exposed; the foundations of their houses lying anonymously among the ruins where they could not be found; and the very cars and beams of the railroad tracks in half-melted and resolidified distortion.
The recovery of bodies was difficult. Unrecognizable forms were blackened and attempts to move them by grasping their limbs sometimes broke them into pieces. Searchers learned to shift the bodies onto sheets to carry them. But there were a great many who were never found. A farmer, Sandy Mac, never learned where his family had been buried. But he at length erected, behind a Methodist church in the town of Harmony, a stone bearing the inscription: “My Darling Wife and Children. I’ll See You in the Morning. Your loving Husband and Father.”
Valiant efforts were made to rebuild the town and revive the hopes of growth and prosperity that had led it on until the time of the disaster. But one trouble followed another with disheartening continuity. Army worms erupted from the ground, passing over the soil and consuming all that lay before them. The fire had driven away all their natural predators and their numbers so multiplied that they could be taken up with shovels. Only the appearance of a parasitic fly brought the problem under control by feeding on the worms. But the fly multiplied in turn from its abundance of food and soon the air was filled as thickly with their swarms as it had been not long ago with the smoke of the smoldering woods and prairie.
Many left, never to return. It was not simply that rebuilding was difficult but that, for some, rebuilding only emphasized the absence of the ones they loved and threw an unforgiving light on their loneliness and horror.
The town of Peshtigo remains with the stone memorial of those who died. But a greater memorial is in the land, consecrated by the ashes of the dead; in the distant towns and cities visited by the scarred faces of the survivors; and in the ghostly knowledge of those who hear of the great Peshtigo fire and remember it. |
There is no light in the house but the gas and hearth. And no window tells the hour but myriad clocks give the time in intricate and knowing contradiction. Still, the body knows when it’s reached the end of the day and my night is fast closing around me.
There will be other doors on other days.
There may be no end to them. |
|
|
