I first notice the aspen in the summer of 2019. Hundreds of tiny shoots, each one with its tip sheared off by the tractor cutting the field. The irony catches in my throat — it’s the beginning of fire season, and we’ve just mowed down a potential firebreak.
When I bought the land in 1988, summers were hot but never scary. No one talked about “fire season,” and “flying embers” wasn’t a term in anyone’s vocabulary. The neighbouring fields were green and well-tended. Mine was planted in alfalfa and managed by my neighbour Rick, a gentle, soft-spoken man who surprised me that first summer with a cheque for ninety dollars for my share of the crop.
“You’ve done all the work,” I said. “Why pay me?”
He grinned as he handed me the cheque. “You own the land.”
After Rick died in 2004, I stopped cutting that field, assuming the vegetation would compost down and improve the soil. I didn’t know uncut grass takes ages to decompose. By the summer of 2015, the field was a thick mass of dried-out grass and weeds, the perfect tinder for a flying ember, a term in everyone’s vocabulary now with wildfires burning all around us – 200 hectares at Lynch Creek to the north, 4,400 hectares near Rock Creek to the west, and the massive Stickpin Fire just over the border in Washington State, an out-of-control inferno that would eventually grow to almost 31,000 hectares.
The field was never a natural grassland.
The fear in our small community of Grand Forks is palpable, and when fiery embers blow across the Washington border, fear turns to anger at the unkempt fields: “What the hell is wrong with people?” “Those overgrown fields are a bloody fire hazard!” “People are such idiots.”
My stomach clenches. I’m one of those idiots. My two acres of dry grass and weeds is less than ten kilometres from the Lynch Creek fire, a short distance for a flying ember. Embarrassed by my negligence, I post a note on our neighbourhood watch page: “If anyone is available to cut my two acres of dead grass, please pm me. It needs to be cut, baled and hauled away . . . and yes, why am I only thinking of this now is a good question.”
No one replies. Of course not, it’s too risky to pull a swather in a dry, overgrown field in the middle of summer. One strike on a stone and the whole field could ignite. There is nothing to do but wait. Wait and hope for rain.
By the end of August, the Lynch Creek Fire reaches 1,700 hectares. Several of us move our emergency bags to the door and pack family treasures in our vehicles. We huddle together in groups of three or four, feeling vulnerable and helpless as we watch the billowing plumes of smoke rise in the distance. Some days, smoke smothers the entire valley, grounding helicopters and leaving fire crews without air support as they battle the flames and build fire guards.
Eventually, the hot, dry days of summer give way to fall. The fire guards hold, the rains come and the flames are gradually extinguished. The air smells fresh again and, as temperatures cool, morning dew bathes the land. It’s as if the earth remembers to breathe and so do we, exhaling in relief that we made it through the 2015 summer of fire.
How can anyone own part of an interconnected living system of roots, vegetation, soil, and water?
As I unpack the car and move my emergency bag to the basement, I promise myself I’ll hire my neighbour Don to cut the field the following year. The decision brings some relief until I realize that may not prevent a fire from spreading. A dry field, even when cut, is still vulnerable to flying embers. The landscape needs moisture and I wonder if installing an irrigation system is the best solution, even though it doesn’t seem sustainable in the long run, especially if droughts worsen and water tables continue to drop. And there’s the bigger question of whether it’s ethical to pump groundwater simply to keep a field green to protect it from fire.
With so many uncertainties, I feel I’m missing something obvious. The field was never a natural grassland. It was forested land before being cleared by settlers in the early 1900s and planted with alfalfa. Trees were felled, often with the help of dynamite, until the land gave way to the plough and human dominance.
For decades the sub-irrigated field produced a healthy crop without surface irrigation. But, over time, as water tables dropped, the field became a dried-out mass of thirsty brown.
During the winter of 2015, I start researching eco-restoration and the water cycle. I ask myself why I didn’t do this a decade earlier. Given the state of the natural world, accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, soil erosion and ecosystem collapse, action is crucial. What we do or don’t do on the land in the next few years really matters. I find myself wishing my friends had bought the neighbouring properties so we could work together and have more impact.
Meanwhile, unknown to me, natural processes are at work underground. The tall aspen along the edge of the field are spreading their roots in all directions. When the snow melts and the ground warms, small shoots surface in the field from subterranean buds along the root systems.
They function as a single organism
When Don cuts the field in the summer of 2016, the mower rips off their tiny tips. I don’t notice any of this at first. In fact, it takes three more years before I realize what is happening. But, the aspen aren’t deterred. Despite being nipped off each year, the saplings sprout more shoots and continue to grow. They function as a single organism, with the older trees in the forest providing water and nutrients to the emerging saplings.
By the time I finally see them in the summer of 2019, there are hundreds of tiny shoots in the field. I bend down for a closer look and come face to face with the tiny saplings, each one with its tip ripped off by the mower. The irony is unavoidable – it’s the beginning of fire season and we’ve just mowed down a potential firebreak.
I wonder what would happen if we stopped mowing the field so close to the forest edge. Would the aspen continue to spread, possibly all the way to the road, a distance of nearly one hundred metres? Would a small aspen grove be more resistant to fiery embers than a grass field or a coniferous forest? And does it even make sense to re-wild a two-acre field, given the enormity of eco-restoration required worldwide? Two acres is a tiny patch of ground, hardly significant at the scale of an ecosystem. But sometimes you have to start where you find yourself… just as the aspen did.
What we do or don’t do on the land in the next few years really matters.
I decide to send out my own exploratory roots. The following year, when Don cuts the field, he leaves a ten metre strip from the edge of the forest to allow the aspen sprouts to grow. Five years pass and each year he leaves more and more room.
Today, in 2025, there are hundreds of saplings in the field, many of them over five metres tall and some sprouting as far as twenty metres from the forest edge. I plunge my hand into the soft soil beneath the trees. It is cool to the touch despite the summer heat. It has more tilth and feels more like a moist sponge than the dry, flour-like soil in the open field. When the rains come, the moisture seeps deeper into the ground and the pungent smell of damp earth lingers long after the clouds vanish.
The emerging aspen grove becomes a welcoming presence on my morning walks. In spring, black-capped chickadees flit among the branches, breaking the silence with their eager mating calls. Even the trees seem eager for spring as swollen buds open to the light, revealing tender green leaves that are soft to the touch. In summer, chatty pine siskins and red-breasted nuthatches keep me company as I sip my tea in the dappled shade. In autumn, the slightest breeze turns the grove into a quivering blaze of gold. And in the white silence of winter, I strap on my snowshoes and crunch my way among the naked trunks, laying down tracks alongside those of rabbit, grouse, deer and squirrel.
What does it mean to be in “right relationship?”
This small grove may indeed become a firebreak one day. Only time will tell. I may not be here to bear witness but, as the landscape grows and changes, something grows and changes in me too.
What starts as a question about safety from fiery embers becomes a curiosity about the water cycle and, from there, a discovery of connections. Observing the trees as the seasons pass, I notice relationships I was previously blind to. My eyes open to the kinship between the emerging aspen shoots in the field, their older siblings at the forest edge and the towering tree on the hillside that must be the oldest of them all.
I bushwhack my way up the hill, passing charred coniferous stumps from fires long ago. I stand at the base of the old aspen and gaze up the length of her trunk. Over a hundred feet tall, she’s lived on this land longer than the thirty-six years I’ve been here. She makes me wonder about my place in this ongoing cycle of relationships that started long before I was born and will continue long after I am gone. I think of Rick paying for my share of the crop, reminding me I own the land. But he was wrong about that. How can anyone own part of an interconnected living system of roots, vegetation, soil and water? A living system that shrugs her shoulders at arbitrary property boundaries and fence lines.
If I am not an owner, then who am I in relation to this place? What does it mean to be in “right relationship” in this interconnected web of life where fire is part of the natural cycle of renewal?
Can I say I’m in right relationship if I intervene by creating a firebreak? Or if I interrupt the natural process of plant succession where aspen is a pioneer species that moves in after a disturbance and then gives way to a climax species of conifers? Already, seeds from Ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir are sprouting among the young aspen saplings. Over time, their evergreen canopies will crowd out the aspen, interfering with their ability to photosynthesize and causing them to wither and die. And then the aspen grove will become a coniferous forest again, just as it was a hundred years ago before the land was cleared for farming. I don’t want that to happen. I want to weed out the conifers and allow the aspen to spread but I ask myself if that is my decision to make.
I sit with the question over the winter alongside increasing signs of climate chaos, ecological collapse and monster fires. In the past, when fire came to the land, it cleansed the landscape, clearing the forest of dead and diseased trees and opening up the canopy to allow new growth. But the massive fires ravaging the planet today are not the regenerative fires of old. Today’s out-of-control beasts burn down to the mineral layer of the soil, destroying microbial life and killing root systems.
Our ecosystems didn’t evolve to withstand these intense infernos. Humanity didn’t evolve to withstand them either but, as part of the interconnected web of life, we are compelled to respond. To start where we find ourselves. To deepen our roots. To strengthen our kinship with the living world and to persevere, not knowing what the future may hold.
Margaret Steele has written extensively on affordable housing issues. In recent years, her focus has shifted to writing about the land she lives on in the Granby Valley north of Grand Forks, BC.
