too, was less a concern for foresters. Virginia had a mere arsons. Yet the
geographic distribution of arsons seems less a matter of latitude and longi-
tude than rural poverty. For the Forest Service’s data correlate very well with
the Southern Regional Council’s maps of Dixie’s enormous ‘‘po’ country.’’
Meanwhile the firing persisted. Theannée horribleof forest arson was
. A deep January freeze followed by drought and high winds to fuel and
drive wildfires leveled a quarter-million acres in the South. In the black-
ened aftermath, investigators classified no fewer than percent of the
conflagrations as arson. This marked what was actually a three-year-long
holocaust in which , fires burned more than . million acres in the
region. Lightning and careless burning of debris by humans apparently ac-
counted for most of the disaster. But by almost percent—another
breathtaking statistic—of all American forest arson took place in the South-
east. And by then, too, another element had entered Bertrand’s and Baird’s
arsonist profile.
This was the era of a burgeoning, violent, and expensive government
‘‘war on drugs,’’ dramatized onby the Armani-fashioned detectives of
Miami Vicebut in reality a grittier, more mean-streets and down-home
tragedy. In remote rural Florida, drug dealers set signal fires to guide deliv-
ery planes; sometimes the fires got out of hand. So the new federal Drug En-
forcement Agency found itself in alliance with federal and state foresters.
More significantly, cultivators of cannabis across the nation took to the
woods, and rivals not infrequently burned one another out. AnAmerican
Forestsmap prepared from Drug Enforcement Agency data revealed that
arboreal marijuana planting was most common in regions with the most
widespread rural poverty: the desert Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the
northern Great Lakes, and of course, the Southeast, especially Appalachia
and Ozarkia. It was an updated but familiar story, for here was also the old
territory of the moonshiner, before, during, and since Prohibition. Early-
and mid-twentieth-century illicit whiskey making had taken place in cities,
in the company housing of piedmont textile mill towns, but most famously
in the woods, the deeper the better. Few southerners were big-time moon-
shiners; I have discovered neither a remote counterpart to Al Capone nor to
Latin American drug growers and dealers there. Typically, southern moon-
shine makers and marijuana farmers were ordinary country people (not
always men) who made modest livings in hard times. A bit like the fol-
lowers of legendary Robin Hoods in medieval Europe, moonshiners and
most pot growers of recent times resorted to risky business within shelter
of a commons now taken away. The sheriff’s men—and deputies and reve-