The Marsh! The Marsh Is on Fire!

Sure, the title is a cheesy rip-off of a song, but it got your attention.

The marsh really is on fire, though, – on purpose. The Department of Natural Resources began the annual, controlled burnings a couple of months ago. The only signs of the burnings most people witness are the charred remains of the marshland.

Despite traveling Shorter’s Wharf Road (which becomes MD some number or other, which becomes Maple Dam Road) every day, we’ve never seen the fires.

Wait a minute. Let me back up here.

Three names for one road?

Don’t ask me. That’s just the way they do things down here. You drive a few miles on one road but you never know what road you are on because along the route, the name has changed a few times. What the section of the road cutting through the marshland is called, I have no idea. All I know is if you come in from the Cambridge side, it’s Maple Dam Road. If you come in from the other side, it’s Shorter’s Wharf Road. Somewhere in between, it’s MD some number or other. I’d tell you the number, but there are no signs, but I know that’s how the road is named because I saw it on a map once.

We now return to the story of the burning marsh.

So, everyday, we drive along this road we nicknamed “the back way” for sake of ease. One day we cut through the marsh and all of it is brown. The next day it is charred black with dozens upon dozens of muskrat mounds dotting the landscape. (The mounds were always there, but you couldn’t see most of them because of the tall marsh grasses.) We never did see the fires.

Tonight, coming through the back way, we finally saw a section of the marsh burning. The flames were far off in the marsh, nowhere near the road. We didn’t see any firefighters or game wardens so I reckon they set a section at a time on fire and let it burn out on its own.

The burning is supposed to rejuvenate the marsh grasses and provide more food for the waterfowl the following fall. Man is supposedly simulating what would occur naturally if we weren’t here.

Now, since Ernesto hit back in September, nothing down here has been dry. The air is saturated with moisture, daily, and the ground is a sopping wet sponge. A few weeks ago, I tried building a bonfire and couldn’t keep it going because all the wood was too wet despite not having any rain for a couple of weeks. On top of that, this time of year is not known for thunderstorms.

The reasonable, and logical assumption, then, is that these marshes rarely, if ever, burned through the autumn and winter months. I’m not like all of the locals down here who don’t trust a thing the government does and have a complete faith that whatever the government does, it’ll screw it up, but either the marsh is supposed to naturally burn in the summer when it is drier and thunderstorms abound or our DNR folks are simply pyros.

I have a confession to make, though. A few weeks ago, when I tried unsuccessfully to build a bonfire, I couldn’t understand for the life of me how the pyros could burn the marsh, and I couldn’t keep a pile of wood burning. A couple of weeks ago, I learned how easy it is to burn a marsh, but not the wood.

The marsh grasses down here, especially the phragmites, are highly flammable. They burn fast and intensely hot. I piled a mound of dry grass (dry for down here, very moist grass by anyone else’s standards) and lit it. It was a little slow at getting going, but once it took off, it burned like molten lava. The flames were minimal, but the whole pile smoldered in a mass of red heat.

I even piled masses of grass I dredged out of the drainage ditch on top of this molten mass. Nothing can get wetter than being submerged in water for months. Water dripped out of the pile as I threw it on top of the fire. Every last bit of it burned. The next morning, all that was left were chunks of wood practically un-charred.

Don’t ask me for an explanation. Waterlogged grasses burn with intense heat, but damp wood barely gets charred.

Yet another backwards phenomenon down here in the Toddville Tidewaters.



© 2006
Mark Darien
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