William Marvel: Forgetting 1947

That watering has been a primary item on the Davis Hill chore list for four of the last six summers, as regular rainy days have become a rarity. I didn’t keep specific records in 2016, but archived emails indicate that I was hauling additional water for the gardens that summer, and again in 2018. Last year was bone dry. The spring from which we draw water is no longer the inexhaustible fount that it was in the 1960s, probably because the number of houses on the hill has increased more than eightfold, and some have swimming pools. Just running a hose out to the gardens is not feasible, and extended dry spells preclude collecting enough rainwater. 

This year may turn out to be the driest since 2001. The few light rains we’ve had in June won’t come close to making up for our deficit. “Normal” precipitation for the first three weeks of June in this region is supposedly 3.32 inches, but last year by June 21 my rain gauge showed only .45 inches had fallen here. This year, it was only .31 inches — less than one-tenth of normal rainfall. Last year, May precipitation fell an inch below normal, and this year nearly an inch and a half. April of this year was nearly an inch below normal, and we had no snow in March. As dry as last year was, this year is already much worse. 

Last September, New Hampshire Public Radio reported 72 percent of New Hampshire in “severe drought,” intensifying the risk of wildfires. Eight weeks ago, Boston’s Channel 10 reported “tinderbox conditions” in Maine and New Hampshire. Since then, we’ve seen only one-fifth of the rain that NOAA calculates we should have here in May and June. 

As New Hampshire imitates the overdevelopment in California, the infernos now devastating that state become a danger here, too, and we have the added propellant of pine forests. We who grew up within these woods in the wake of the 1947 Brownfield fire dreaded a recurrence from about VJ Day to Halloween during every dry year. There was sometimes even talk of canceling hunting season, or postponing it, because no one wanted smokers out in the woods, and nearly everyone smoked in the 1950s. 

Prime fire-danger season now begins as early as June. After two successive dry summers divided by a winter with below-normal snowfall, 2021 may bring the gravest danger of a major forest fire in decades. With the Fourth of July looming, that evokes the topic of fireworks. According to the latest statistics from the National Fire Prevention Association, U.S. fire departments received reports of 19,500 fires started by fireworks in 2018, and 28 percent of them started on a single day — July 4. 

With Conway attracting an increasingly obnoxious breed of visitor, illegal fireworks have become a more frequent annoyance from Memorial Day through Labor Day, and especially on weekends. Usually it just means a few nights of interrupted sleep during the course of the summer, but this year it could lead to a conflagration that might incinerate much of the town — and probably leave the worst parts. 

This year, at least, the police department should actually enforce the ban on fireworks, starting with those prominent and predictable private displays everyone knows about, and often report. Maybe the selectmen could also increase the maximum fine sufficiently to make that ban at least minimally effective. Remember, the Brownfield fire would not have happened without failure at the municipal level.

William Marvel lives in South Conway.