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Stretches of grapevine and deadfall such as this could provide fuel for a brush fire in rural Wilson County, where county fire marshal Edwin Baker says the wildfire threat is “as bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

Wilson County Fire Marshal Edwin Baker says the rural county’s pastures and scrubland have been turned into a tinderbox by the South Texas drought. He says the wildfire threat is “as bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

Wilson County Fire Marshal Edwin Baker says this kind of subdivision fence could be in danger if a brush fire started to run.

STOCKDALE — On the last day of school before Christmas break 1972, when Edwin Baker was a 185-pound senior footballer at Stockdale High School, the principal hurriedly entered one of his classes and pointed at him and two of his Brahma teammates.

“I need you, you and you to come with me downtown and help fight a fire,” the principal declared.

Baker recalled with a laugh: “And that’s the way I became a volunteer firefighter.”

Now a half-century older and ready for retirement in December, Wilson County’s indefatigable fire marshal finds himself in the cauldron of an historic drought that has turned thousands of square miles of farms, ranches and grasslands in South Texas into straw kindling.

On ExpressNews.com: More droughts, fires are in Texas’ future

Baker, who is not prone to hyperbole, said on a tour Sunday of some of the county’s tinderbox pastures, “It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it.”

“Hear that crunching underneath my feet?” he asked as he bent a knee-high stalk of bluestem grass in a roadside ditch. “Firefighters call that fuel. It’s like gasoline.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s U.S. Drought Monitor says January through June of this year has been Wilson County’s driest six-month period in the past 128 years, with rainfall nearly 11 inches below normal. That puts the county deep in an “exceptional drought,” the index’s worst condition.

On ExpressNews.com: Massive wildfire burns almost 3,000 acres at Camp Bullis

Baker pays a lot of attention to something called the Keetch-Byram Drought Index, which measures soil moisture to gauge forest fire potential on a scale of 0 to 800. “To give you some idea,” Baker said gravely, “at 550 we impose a county-wide burn ban no matter what. We are now at 767.”

So far, Wilson County’s 808 square miles - you could squeeze in all of Houston, plus Paris three times - have escaped the kind of fire that most worries Baker. A downed power line’s sparks, an 18-wheeler’s bouncing metal chains or a careless cigarette butt could ignite acres of dense, raw brushland. The flames might run across the parched prairie and set off large expanses of gnarly live oaks and mesquite that often define properties out here.

Wilson County and most of South Texas saw “exceptional” drought in parts of 2006, 2009 and (more extensively) 2011, and the area has had a decent decade of rain since then. But in that time, Wilson County’s increasing suburbanization and changing demographics have elevated the threat of wildfires. No longer is the county wall-to-wall farms and ranches connected by one-stop-light towns.

In the northern part of the county, near the Bexar County line off FM 3237, subdivisions like Western Way have sprung up, with sprawling cul-de-sac homes, huge lots and the occasional waiting Range Rover. There are far more roadside clusters of storefronts, with Brazilian martial arts studios and fancy coffee.

Frackers’ man camps, like the cabins in Stockdale on Texas 123 across from the Dairy Queen, are reminders of the oil boom that brought thousands of mostly cheap wooden housing units.

The concern in towns such as Stockdale, La Vernia, Floresville and Poth is that a raging brush fire would leap over roads and feed off that new housing as well as trailer homes and small businesses.

“The places with well-watered manicured lawns don’t concern me all that much,” said Baker, cruising past $300,000 homes in the Quail Run subdivision, “but some of these 10-acre ranchettes are as brown as can be.”

That suggests that the wildfire they all fear could just as easily start in a suburban driveway as underneath a John Deere tractor clearing cactus.

Those suburban tracts are largely responsible for the 3-percent growth in the county’s population since July 2021, to nearly 54,000 today.

But Baker is not about needlessly alarming people. He said the fire threat in South Texas is completely different from that faced by firefighters in Northern California and throughout the Mountain West, where giant pines and spruce often burn for months in lethal canyons of fire.

“I’ve only seen two actual forest fires in Wilson County,” he said. “One of those, in 2001 after a lengthy drought, ran over the top of firefighters for about a half-mile.”

On ExpressNews.com: Climate report warns of more extreme weather for Texas

“We wouldn’t have anything like the Bastrop fire,” he said, referring to the 2011 inferno east of Austin that consumed 32,000 acres (mostly dense loblolly pines), burned for 55 days and remains the most destructive wildfire in state history. “We are dry, yes, but we are also spread out.”

Baker, 66, has put on a few pounds since his high school days and doesn’t have to respond personally to every fire and EMS call like he used to. As burly as Smokey Bear, he sports a graying crew cut under his cowboy hat and droopy Fu Manchu. He chews tobacco and cautions city folk that he may not always sound politically correct.

Asked if he ever utters the words “man-made climate change” when talking about the drought in this heavily Republican county, Baker says: “No, I don’t. We’ve always had trends. Drought and wet years cycle about every 10 years. I can’t speak for the farmers and ranchers, but I don’t think they are concerned.”

Baker became the county fire marshal in 1997, after many years in the oil fields, followed by work as a Stockdale volunteer firefighter, an EMS paramedic, a private fire protection specialist, a fire department chief and Wilson County health inspector, among other jobs.

As fire marshal, he oversees burn permits and fire inspections, advises the county commissioners on fire danger and serves as the county’s emergency management coordinator, among other duties.

Despite the influx of older and usually less rural newcomers, and the rise of the exhausted double-income rural commuters, Baker said that being a volunteer firefighter still appeals to many.

“We get a lot of former military,” he says. “I won’t call them adrenaline junkies, but they’re used to going 100 mph and when they get out of the service, they still want that excitement. Plus, for the most part, they’re disciplined, know how to take directions and how to work as a team under pressure. I had a retired major from the Air Force, very smart man, very dedicated.”

Some volunteers are new to Texas and want to meet people. Although fire departments in Wilson County and throughout America remain predominantly male, Baker said they welcome women and suggests he wouldn’t have much patience for crusty males who didn’t feel the same way.

The rural Texas fire department has changed over the years. Many of them are now part of emergency services districts. If approved by voters, they can be funded with an ad valorem property tax of up to ten cents per $100 of assessed property value.

Their greatest technological weapon in rural firefighting?

Probably the cell phone, Baker said. “People used to see smoke and let it go. Just farmers burning. Now they call us.”

The rural firefighter today is also likely to be far better trained and equipped than when Baker was a high schooler who stayed in shape by hauling hay and watermelons in the summer. He estimates that over the past 28 years he has trained nearly 1,000 firefighters in South and Central Texas and through the Texas A&M Forest Service in College Station.

“I just recall that in 1985, when I was first asked to be a volunteer firefighter in Stockdale, I told the chief I didn’t want to fight fires without knowing what I was doing. I wanted training,” Baker said. Most of the public, he added, is not aware of “the billions of dollars saved across the country” by the use of volunteer firefighters.

“I’m watering my lawn as much as I can because I’m afraid of someone tossing out a cigarette,” Quintanilla said as she closed up her Sylvia’s Mexican restaurant in Stockdale one afternoon. “Imagine what the farmers are thinking with all that dried grass.” She shook her head.

As Quintanilla’s waitresses mopped the floor, she walked over to a table full of family photos and memorabilia to find a 1972 photo of that Stockdale High football team on which her brother was the quarterback and Edwin Baker was the center. She graduated three years before Baker.

She ran her finger across the black-and-white photo and the three rows of grinning farm and ranch boys, searching for one who might have had red hair.

“There, I think that’s him, No. 52,” she said. “We’re really lucky to have him at a time like this. He’s organized. He’s efficient. He gets things done. He’s a good fire marshal, and a very good person.”

Bruce Selcraig is a senior staff writer and former U.S. Senate investigator. A native Texan, he's written for The New York Times, The Atlantic and Smithsonian, and was an investigative reporter with Sports Illustrated in the 1980s. His work has ranged from refinery explosions to Mafia-backed sports agents and a hunt for the real Robinson Crusoe, a distant Scottish relative.