Out of the black, back into brilliant green

Regeneration.

Rĭ-jĕn′ə-rā′shən.

We’re rebuilding — though we know it will be a very different place, perhaps for years — perhaps for a generation.

Thursday marked a full year since a forest fire burned down the house we had in Adam’s Cove, N.L., a hand-built house that had stood on a foundation of huge gathered and carefully placed stones since the First World War. More than seven tandem loads of boulders went for post-fire safe disposal. My back hurts thinking of the wiry homesteaders who hauled and placed them, and I feel for the small pony that pulled the rock cart.

Starting again feels like the only thing we can do — hoping against hope that the hundreds of burned acres that were destroyed in two separate forest fires last year will regenerate in some form close to the familiar.

Right now, all we know is that the night sky will look mostly the same, though it will be framed by a rim of far fewer trees, and that the moon will still rise huge and yellow-white on clear summer nights.

I’m going to document what I can — how a burned land comes back to life after fire, and how a community that lost some 200 homes manages to do the same.

Where the fires touched down, the changes are stark. In some places, the fire was hot enough to burn away the topsoil, leaving only sand and rock, especially in a curving valley nicknamed The Snake.

In other places, the fire was fickle, burning one house but leaving its close neighbour untouched, or catching the tops of the trees on high ground but leaving grass and shrubs intact along the low-ground courses of streams and brooks.

Apple trees that were 75 to 100 years old burned and died in the fires — other apple trees threw out strange large new leaves from burnt branches, and may have survived. This spring will tell that tale. Many of the apple trees I keep track of have outlived even the homes of the people who lived there: long before the fires, I kept records of trees near old foundations, foundations I found either when the apple trees bloomed or when the lilacs planted by homeowners made their brief soft-purple appearance. The imported trio of abandoned Newfoundland homes — apple trees, lilacs, and unkempt clusters of yellow lilies.

The blueberry barrens, woven with shrub spruce, simple rose and red osier dogwood, will likely recover, though the spruces certainly won’t be part of the equation again for at least 10 years, enough time for past cones to foster new saplings.

The standing burnt firs and tall spruce are charcoal-black and needleless now — but I’m told they will quickly foster a new sort of life. The insects that revel in the rotting wood of trees that will turn silver-white as the burned bark falls away — and then the birds that revel in eating those same insects. Nature will still win, but in a different way.

Some significant recoveries were already evident early last fall; fireweed was living up to its name, spreading far and wide in fields cleared of spring’s flattened tall yellow grass. I can only imagine how it will look in the coming summer — and how the legions of drifts of the feather-light fireweed seeds in their surrounds of crystalline spikes must have looked as they caught and travelled on the fall winds. Not thick like Winnipeg’s spring cottonwood fluff, more like armadas of uncounted individual roiling and slow-travelling wanderers.

Under what had been a canopy of mature spruce across the brook, there used to be deep pillows of sphagnum moss. By last fall, the burnt moss was failing and stands of meadow grass had sprung up like they had just been waiting for the opportunity of direct sunlight.

I hope to follow it for years — I hope to write about it for years.

How long is obviously not at all in my hands.

I want to write about what comes back — and what doesn’t. How the landscape changes, and whether features like the nearby forest of wind-stunted and bent long-needle pines return or decide that the effort is too great. I suspect they will: the pines seem to dedicate themselves to growing cones when they’re as young as five years old, and the ground in the pine forest above Broad Cove is scattered with a thick layer of cones. Some will start the cycle again, I hope, amidst the blackened wasteland. I hope to look at regeneration in both the macro and micro sense — from the success of single clusters of ferns to what happens to the fingerprint of fire on whole oceanside capes. If it sounds interesting, stay with me as I travel.

I recognize, by the way, that columns about the detailed recovery and change in a small patch of Newfoundland may not all be of interest for a Winnipeg audience, so much of what I plan to write will be on my Substack, Found in Place — russellwangersky.substack.com

Russell Wangersky is the comment editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca