Appreciation (24) … An older man's beard, after burning
Torrey Orton
April 19, 2010

Some fires are too fierce…

 

On the last day of a weekend in Falls Creek, 7 years after the alpine fires which burned for two months in early 2003, a verbal image for the sight we had seen from a dozen perspectives and lights over three days assembled itself out of a hundred glances – an older man's beard, grizzled, shaped by the number 2 razor cut now popular among young and old (I get this look after about two weeks not shaving). This impression is startlingly present in the light of early morn or evening, slanting in to reveal things against their backgrounds almost rising anew after the directness of full light which submerges differences of distance and colour. That full light is its own subject, not the lighted!


This is the look of the snow gums on the highest peaks of the ranges around the ski village which itself escaped a fiery fate by a hundred meters on the day the surroundings were vaporised back then. The fire was so fierce that nothing it touched regrew around many trunks for years, in contrast with my "woolly" story from last year's Black Saturday fires. Even the leaves were burned off most trees, not merely browned or shrivelled as often happens.


So 7 years later the ridges up to the tree line are bordered with lifeless, bleached white branches, much below which a slight tinge of new growth arises from the still vital roots of the nearly dead. They were mature trees so the height is quite constant, noting outstanding about above the surrounding remnants as does with higher alpine ash forests. An impression can be found here. Some predict it will take 50+ years for their next maturity to be reached again.


Here's a winter view which captures some of the effect, but overdone because the non-winter look is more branchy (as in the previous view). If it were a beard it would have some hairs articulated amongst the general brush of the cover. Or, taking the image another way, it would show some skin beneath the fuzz. In forester lingo these are called "stags" – freestanding, blanched, dead remnants of fierce fires, reminiscent of stag horns. These snow gums look especially antler-like.


As we drove out the last morning of this Easter weekend, we recalled the morning 7 years and three months before when we drove out through the smoke of the fires started by 87 lightning strikes, some of which we had seen from the top of Mt Nelse three days before, noting the rising columns of smoke all around us at 50 to 100 Ks distance… and a couple at 20! They closed the Nelse track the next day as the columns were still rising, more or less vertical. The wind which carried all before rose two days later and the fires burned for another six weeks.


"This is Australia…."