Cameron Peak Fire meets Schrödinger's Cat -by Bonnie Shetler
A few weeks ago I was reading Interference, a book of fictionby Brad Parks. Several of the main characters were quantum physicists and the storyline makes multiple references to Schrödinger’s cat, a famous thought experiment intended to illustrate the condition created by a single particle existing in a potential state of two different outcomes. The cat in question is enclosed in a box and will either live or die depending on the state of a single atom. Since the observer cannot know the exact state of the atom, quantum physics suggests that the cat is both alive and dead until the observer opens the box.
On the morning I took my first walk in over a week along the mountain road where I live, the air was clear, the cloudless sky a familiar Colorado blue. The sunlit meadows were just turning from green to yellow in anticipation of fall. No evidence of smoke or fire plume. A beautiful bright golden calm spread everywhere. And yet I knew that the fire still burned beyond the mountains to the west and that the potential existed for it to either run out of fuel and die or spread beyond its boundaries and flare up again.
A week earlier dry winds had fanned the flames of the Cameron Peak fire, creating a magnificent and horrifying plume of smoke that darkened the sky from the foothills out into the eastern plains. Everyone across our road and beyond to the west was under a mandatory evacuation order. The following day, as the sky and the very air around us turned a dark orange red, we, along with all mountain residents to the east of us, were told to evacuate. Most of us did. A few refused.
My husband and most of his fellow volunteer firemen chose to stay behind to offer assistance. But a number of other local residents chose to believe that the fire would not run this far east or that they could protect their homes if it did. After all, their homes were spared from the last fire and they knew that a significant snow storm was moving in that evening and that much of the landscape between them and the fire had been burned off in the 2012 High Park fire, leaving little to fuel the flames.
What I and most of our neighbors remembered is the total unpredictability and ferocity of that earlier fire. How it traveled from our area to the edge of Fort Collins in a matter of hours and how many homes were quickly and completely consumed. Those memories informed our choices to leave.
Today I can look outside my back window and see young aspen groves, mountain grasses, ponderosa pine trees and beyond them the stark rocky side of a mountain littered with fallen logs. Unlike the observers of Schrödinger’s cat box, we mountain folks get to see the devastating consequences of an out-of-control wildfire alongside the beauty of healed meadows and the majesty of surviving pines. Both things are true.
Bonnie Shetler received a master’s degree in mathematics from The Ohio State University in 1971 immediately after which she moved to Fort Collins with her husband Terry. After a year of soul searching she changed academic course and earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Colorado State University. After forty years working in her private therapy practice she recently began a slow journey into retirement. She lives in the foothills west of Fort Collins where she works, and volunteers remotely., sometimes writes, often bikes , hikes, reads, and considers the vastness of time and space.
