Arizona (“Towering Infernos,” Novem-
ber 15th). I was a nineteen-year-old work-
ing for the Avra Valley Fire District. That
day—the hottest of the year—I carried
sixty pounds of hose and couplings down
to the hotshots on the front line. I emp-
tied my bag at the bottom of the hill, in
a grove of ponderosa pines, while a hand-
crew scraped the earth under a canopy
of crackling needles. The air seemed to
be searing. Suddenly, an enormous whoosh
rose from the canyon, and a copse of
aspen exploded. A stream of hotshots
running up the hill shouted back at us
to evacuate. When we reached the road,
there was chaos. Firefighters threw their
gear into any truck that had room. We
drove to safety as a pyrocumulus cloud
rained ash and fire from above.
That day, we witnessed a kind of fire
we had never seen before. Decades
of wildfire suppression combined with
a warming planet had created time
bombs all over the West. And we were
employing an outdated strategy: spend-
ing hundreds of millions of dollars to
send college-age crews into tinderbox
forests with shovels and axes. A six-foot
firebreak versus a pyroCb? The knife-
to-a-gunfight idiom fails to capture how
dangerously ill equipped we were.
It is encouraging to read that some
organizations are beginning to employ
preventive-burning practices. Fires are
a natural process, important for the
health of a forest, and, if preventive burn-
ing is not adopted by the Forest Ser-
vice immediately, the environmental
consequences will be dire. Preventive
burning has other benefits, too: aggres-
sive winter burning will keep firefight-
ers employed throughout the year. It
will also ease the physical and emotional
burdens that megafire summers place
on firefighters.
Nic Tarter
Portland, Ore.PAIN AND GAIN
Meghan O’Gieblyn, in her review of
recent books about suffering, points
out that many people believe hardship
can be a source of good things (Books,
November 15th). I can attest to this. I
spent the year of 2011 working in an im-
poverished town in the Australian out-
back. I did not choose to do this, and
I did not have the resources to leave. The
suffering I observed during this time
was crushing. Even a year or two after
I returned to the U.S., when people
asked what the experience had yielded,
I couldn’t say. Only later did I realize that
it had changed me utterly. That year was
difficult. (Indeed, I, along with most of
my fellow-workers, was paid an hourly
“hardship” bonus by the Australian gov-
ernment.) But wherever I lived from then
on felt like sheer good fortune. It seems
to me that, to quote Louise Glück, every-
where I turn is luck.
Louise Wareham Leonard
Wolcott, N.Y.
O’Gieblyn offers a variety of explana-
tions for why some people seek out pain
rather than avoid it. An attraction to
pain can be bewildering, but the insights
of the renowned behaviorist B. F. Skin-
ner provide some useful context. Skin-
ner’s studies of operant conditioning
show how positive and negative rein-
forcements play a role in our behavior.
When an aversive stimulus, like pain, is
applied, there is necessarily a reward
when that stimulus ends—thus, one can
learn to experience pain as the precur-
sor to pleasure. Seen in this light, sex-
ual masochism, and also the seeking out
of nonsexual pain and suffering, looks
less counterintuitive.
Louis R. Franzini
Jacksonville Beach, Fla.
1
THE AGE OF MEGAFIRES
M. R. O’Connor’s piece about fighting
megafires brought to mind an experi-
ence I had in 2004, when I evacuated
alongside Mike West during the “blowup”
of the Nuttall Fire, on Mt. Graham, in
•
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