Be. It would absorb, reduce, and reflect what was brought to it. This journey to the Underworld would have no guide, no Tiresias, Sybil, or Vergil. Here was an existential Earth. Its story must begin and end with Ice. Into this world humans would enter, do whatever they would—the choices were limited—and then depart while The Ice continued unchanged.
The structure of The Ice became deeply (and deliberately, if reluctantly) ironic. While the narrative would conform to the classic journey to a source, its perspective would be Modernism. The Second Age had a suitable narrative sledge, but one ill-previsioned to survive on the solipsistic Ice. Modernism had the conceptual apparatus to appreciate The Ice, but little motivation to go there. The book would thus simultaneously critique both syndromes. This design was a necessary, not a happy, one. I assumed that it would make the book too alien, too abstract, and too formidable for general readers, and perhaps reach beyond my talents. But I could find no other way to approach the experience honestly. I was ready to try.
When I applied for the Antarctic Fellowship, I was unemployed except as a seasonal firefighter at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. By the time I received the fellowship, I had accepted a job at the University of Iowa and surrendered my migratory life as a smokechaser. The exchange of Antarctica for the Grand Canyon in 1981 was thus explicit and the replacement of fire by ice implied.
Yet in my new career I found it very difficult to find the time to proceed. My frustration mounted. I was wild to write. In 1984 I signed an advance contract with Oxford University Press that included a small advance, $1,500 up front, another $1,500 upon receipt of the manuscript. I requested a leave of absence, which the History Department generously granted. I spent the summer rewriting a fire plan for Rocky Mountain National Park and Big Hole National Battlefield in Montana, secured a small contract from the Defense Nuclear Agency to study historic fires for their relevance to the nuclear winter question, and arranged to teach a course the following spring semester at the University of Arizona in Tucson, 110 miles south of our temporary home in Phoenix. If all went well, my summer earnings, advance, and small savings would carry me, my wife, and two preschoolers through the remainder of 1984, while my DNA contract and teaching and the rest of the advance would haul us through winter and spring. I had returned to the seasonal rhythms I knew best. In September I headed home to Arizona.
I had four months dedicated to writing. In anticipation I had written the Prologue during the previous spring break. That left eight chapters to write. I calculated that I needed to write two a month, a schedule I refused to compromise. Money was a constant crisis. So was that greater currency, time. I let lapse memberships, subscriptions, everything that did not contribute directly to the project. My connection with the University of Arizona granted me an adjunct professorship, a status I used to plunder the library of its wonderful Antarctic collection (a gift from Lawrence Gould, chief scientist with Byrd’s second expedition). I cleaned out whole shelves and dumped them into our Honda station wagon, parked at the library loading dock. At home I arranged them on the floor, stacks lined up by chapters. Quite apart from the intellectual and emotional impact of The Ice, the conditions under which the book was written account for much of its obsessiveness and intensity. I finished the manuscript in the first week of January 1985.
The nuclear winter monograph became a major project. Once a week I would also drive to Tucson to teach, and return around midnight. I tried to save at least two days a week for rewriting The Ice. By April I had the manuscript in sufficient form to send to Oxford. I desperately needed the remaining advance. Meanwhile, Jim Olson of the National Park Service contacted me about further fire planning, this time at Yellowstone. The History Department at the University of Arizona would grant me another year of part-time teaching. I requested an additional year’s leave from the University of Iowa, again generously granted. In truth we did not have the money to move back to Iowa City. No matter; we had made it.
But weeks passed without word from Oxford. Finally I called and was told that the manuscript had been handed to another editor. Calling her from my corner desk (bears and bison, not fire, were Yellowstone’s summer crises in 1985), I was told that she found the manuscript incomprehensible. Oxford would not publish it. Then she demanded that I return the money I had already been advanced. My whole edifice collapsed like a burned-out snag. I had sold the family cow for a handful of magical beans. I had no money, I told her. Oxford could sue me if it liked. Eventually we agreed that I would pay back my advance with the royalties I might receive after publishing the manuscript elsewhere.
By now the summer was waning. I submitted my reports to Yellowstone and accepted a kind offer from William Patterson III to accompany him, as a paid consultant, on a two-week fire tour of New England parks, primarily Acadia. Before departing, I shipped out copies of the manuscript to other editors. Only one made it beyond the second chapter, and despite a glowing reader’s report demanded that I cut the manuscript in half and forgo royalties. At this point I remembered that Holly Carver, who had copyedited my first book, Grove Karl Gilbert, had taken the managing editor’s job at a revived University of Iowa Press. Did she want the manuscript? She did; the UI Press did a wonderful job of editing and publishing the book; and the New York Times Book Review, to all our astonishment, gave the book a splendid sendoff and later included it among its year’s Best Books. On the basis of that review Arlington Books brought out a British edition and Ballantine bought paperback rights. The beans had sprouted after all.
By then our circumstances had reformed completely. I had written the first draft of Fire on the Rim, a memoir of my life as a firefighter on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, though it would not be published until 1989. I had accepted a job at Arizona State University’s new West Campus. And I had wrangled a small grant from the National Science Foundation to begin a study of fire in Australia. When The Ice was published, I was only three months returned from an extended research tour of Australia that would evolve into Burning Bush. My scholarship I envisioned as resembling the dual arms of a spiral nebula, one sweeping along a line of fire, the other tracing the culture of exploration.
Second thoughts? Of course. The intensity—the white heat—in which The Ice was written gave it a coherence of voice, but not always an equal coherence of content. Much of the book seems to me still too abstruse, a kind of imitative fallacy in which the abstracting quality of Antarctica was not realized so much as mimicked. The effort to resist the reductionism of The Ice by piling the narrative sledge with lists of phenomena, ideas, and events too often overloaded it, sinking it through a frozen crust of prose. The madness had its method, though it too often alienated where it might have enlightened.
Soon afterwards, the once spiraling nebula that balanced fire with exploration collapsed into the supernova that I call Cycle of Fire. Yet paradoxically The Ice proved critical to the Cycle scheme. It was from confronting Antarctica that I learned how a single phenomenon could inform both geography and history. With Australia, I substituted fire for ice. Fire became a narrative driver, not simply an indispensable presence. That, structurally, is the difference between Fire in America and, beginning with Burning Bush, the other Cycle books.
But The Ice proved equally vital to the conceptual design for the Cycle of Fire suite. The catalyst was a MacArthur Fellowship that fell out of the sky in the summer of 1988. I was determined to exploit it to do something big, something unique, something that I could build on in the future, and something that I could accomplish in five years. (I failed utterly in the last proviso.) The obvious solution was a global history of fire. When the MacArthur arrived, I was, in fact, about a third of the way through the manuscript of Burning Bush.
There seemed two basic options. One was to complete Burning Bush, as conceived, then write a large volume that would summarize the Earth’s fire history. I reckoned that I could complete such a book within the time alloted. But two of the better-documented fire histories I had (or would have) already written; any summary book would involve a good deal of repetition or at least revisitation. Should I not use the MacArthur opportunity to plunge into new terrain rather than revisit old lands? Could I not arrange several fire histories into a coherent suite?
