Story by Cailyn Domecq
Photos courtesy of Angela Gaskell
Beams of sunlight stream through a canopy of longleaf pines outside of Pinehurst, North Carolina, as birds sing their melodies and a bright green lizard scurries across the soil. Barely a single cloud in a sight, blue sky is the background for the forest.
Jesse Wimberley walks in with a drip torch, a canister made up of diesel and gasoline that drips through a looped nozzle, ready to start a fire. He angles it down, touches the flame to the ground, and a deep orange line of fire crawls along the forest floor.
The flames spread as Wimberley and the crew closely watch the path the fire takes across the forest floor of pine straw, wiregrass and bramble. The crew’s goal is not to stop fire, but to ensure the blaze does its work as part of a carefully planned prescription – longleaf pines thrive on the treatment.
“We now understand that fire is part of the landscape, and we need to learn to live with fire, not try to stop it,” said Wimberley, a fourth-generation “burner” and community organizer from West End, North Carolina. “Fire is actually medicine. It is cathartic to the forest, not detrimental.”
This fire is part of a plan to restore and preserve the longleaf pine throughout the Southeast. What once was a 90-million-acre cumulative landscape that spanned from Virginia to Florida to Texas in pre-settlement times dropped to three and a half million. The goal of America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative is to get the population back up to eight and a half million by 2025: Right now, about five million acres are back.
Described as the middleman for prescribed burns, Wimberley has paired private landowners with the education and resources to burn for about six years through the Sandhills Prescribed Burn Association.
He can remember helping his family work on fires when he was a kid, and he is now frequently seen with soot smears across his face. Those marks only make his smile pop out more when he says you wouldn’t find him anywhere else when a burn is going on.
“What I’m trying to do is take that beauty, that art, that cultural significance that fire has and just put it into a little bit more replicable process,” Wimberley said. “My job is to find a way to take that value and translate it into enough of a science that we don’t have problems when we scale it up.”
Today, people like Wimberley and the rest of the burn crew keep the practice – and the longleaf – alive. Longleaf pine is not only resistant to fire, but it is fire-dependent: the young pines need the undergrowth cleared out in order to grow. The method which is now known as “prescribed burning” was first introduced naturally by lightning strikes, continued to be put into practice by Native Americans and has been handed down through generations of southerners.
But putting fire back on the landscape wasn’t easy – Smokey the Bear and the U.S. Department of Forestry promoted fire suppression for years. None of this stopped longleaf lovers like Wimberley and other members of the Prescribed Burn Association from committing to its gradual resurgence.
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Longleaf gets its a-matter-of-fact name from boasting the longest leaves in the eastern pine species. The seedling turns into a grass stage, bushy and low to the ground, before transitioning to a stage where it resembles a bottlebrush. Afterward, it grows to become a sapling and goes onto full maturation growing anywhere from 60 to 110 feet tall according to the Longleaf Alliance. After a tree gets about 70 to 100 years old, its height growth comes to a stop.
It’s the tree that put North Carolina on the map in the first place, according to Wimberley.
Tar, pitch and turpentine were three products known as the “naval industry” that the British sought to extract from longleaf. The industry tapped trees for turpentine and cut them down to ship around the world pre-steel – before steel was around, longleaf pine had the greatest tensile strength when compared to any other product.
These practices took a toll on the population of the trees, as did a lack of fire. Without fire, the “understory,” or underlying layer of vegetation, gets too thick and sunlight cannot reach the forest floor, causing plant life to become stagnant and not productive for flora or fauna. Wildfires are more likely to happen in these conditions due to an excess of fuel from pine straw and leaves, but the goal of the prescribed burn crew is to eliminate this chance.
The U.S. Forest System became an active opponent in fire setting practices in 1910 after the Big Burn: a fire that destroyed three million acres across northern Idaho and western Montana.
About two decades later, The American Forestry Association sent caravans out into the South to begin a three-year crusade for fire prevention. Packed with movies and literature, the vans traveled the hinterlands to promote their philosophy and stop burners. Known as the “Dixie Crusaders,” they distributed pamphlets and showed self-produced films to some three million people while traveling 300,000 miles throughout the Deep South.
At the time National Forest Service administrators thought fire stopped longleaf from germinating, when in fact, it was the complete opposite – they couldn’t germinate without it.
Wimberley says that the introduction of Smokey the Bear as the mascot of fire suppression was “one of the most successful and detrimental federal programs to ever launch.”
Accustomed to burning on their longleaf-filled property almost every day, Wimberley’s family continued their own turpentine business and fire routine amidst the campaigning.
“We southerners were very stubborn,” Wimberley said. “They even sent a psychiatrist down to try and understand why southerners insisted on setting the woods on fire.”
The USDA has backed off the no-burn stance over the past decade. During the Trump administration, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, a South Carolina native who understood fire culture, came out in support of prescribed burning.
“You know, it’s counterintuitive, right?” Wimberley said. “You think that if you put out a fire you save the forest, but now what we’re seeing is all that fire suppression built up jewels in the forest, so that when they burn now it’s a catastrophic burn that destroys the entire forest.”
There are still some discrepancies across organizations on times of the year to burn and the types of methods used, but the use of “good fire” – one set intentionally as a restorative force – is now an agreeance among them all.
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It’s common for a burn to get rescheduled last minute if the weather shifts or one factor becomes off. Wimberley recalled the times he had to send a crew home if they arrived and conditions were unfavorable. No fail-proof method exists for this artful science, but a burn plan always takes relative humidity, wind, temperature and typography into consideration.
“The fire danger is never over until all burning material has been extinguished, and that can be several days after,” Wimberley said. “There is never a moment in the burn where you can say everything is fine – you have to be paying attention before the burn and look at the weather day of and several days after.”
For the Pinehurst burn, members of the SPBA and Conservation Corp gathered at Wimberley’s family property with a cabin made from ancient longleaf timber on April Fool’s Day.
Today’s group was a first-time experiment of bringing an outside burn crew and contracted burn boss together to work.
The crew was made up of about 12 Conservation Corp members from both North and South Carolina who had never met until about an hour before the project began, but you never would have guessed it from their communication and shared focus on the forest.
“The Sandhills are the most biodiverse next to the Amazon,” Jesse’s partner Angela Gaskell said as she walked down the dirt path from the cabin to the woods.
She describes herself as the one who does all the behind-the-scenes work, but don’t let her fool you – she certainly knows her stuff.
As Gaskell walks along the wooded path, there isn’t a single sprout she hasn’t met before.
She quickly identifies some birdsfoot violet, fiddle horns, cane, wiregrass – the premier grass of the sandhills – pitcher plant, and Venus flytrap, all of which need fire just like the longleaf pine.
Team lead Cait Rice of the Corp group called out positions, responsible for laying out the plan and making sure everyone is on the same page The plan was to tackle two units, one at five and a half acres and the other at 18.
Length between fire spots is measured in “chains,” equivalent to the metric measurement of 66 feet, but individually translated into however many footsteps it takes to walk.
“We call it burning in the middle of a Walmart parking lot,” landowner and burner Keith Tribble said about burning a unit when the land around it has already been burned.
Already charred ground acts as a barrier and strongly reduces the potential for a “spot over,” when a fire transfers outside of its intended unit.
Corp members remained stationed to manage the project as a line of fire from one side of the property met in the middle to unite with the other side. A cloud of smoke blew over when the wind piped up but quickly dissipated when conditions stabilized.
“If you’re not getting smoke in your face, you’re not learning anything,” Tribble said. “Fight fire with fire is a true statement.”
After the units were complete, the last of the crew pumped a 55-gallon tank filled with water on the back of the “Atomic Dawg” – the Cub Cadet reportedly named after an 80s funk song – and did a mop-up of the remaining smolders with a hose and fire rake.
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Private landowners are a big part of making a substantial change in restoration efforts. Eighty-three percent of longleaf-covered land is private according to Wimberley, so the only way to fully restore those areas is to include private landowners in on the deal. So far, the only way this works is through the PBA.
Wimberley knows every stump and puddle across those acres of his and beyond. To ensure that the fire goes out at the end of the burn, he says he will walk this property six or eight times.
“They were joyful at every moment,” Wimberley said about each walk around. “We always are wondering if we make any change with our life – you can see it after a burn. You can see that you’re bringing healing back to the land.”
