Fire Season (12 page)

“Have some hot coffee,” I said. “You’ll feel better about life.”

“I’m trying to feel okay about the prospect of freezing to death.”

I laughed, added some wood to the fire. The prospect of death was one of the unspoken reasons we took these trips, and we both knew it. He owned a historic brick home back in town, had a smart Scandinavian beauty for a wife and two grown children making their way in the world, one a journalist, the other a lawyer. He worked fifteen hours a week as a consultant for a Fortune 500 company at some obscene hourly rate. He was on pace to retire well before the end of his fifties. (His motto is that of all highly paid consultants: “If you can’t be part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.”) His daily life was structured for maximum ease and comfort, in other words, and while this had been the plan all along, on some level it troubled him. His broken bones were merely the most vivid evidence that he needed a brush with danger now and then, to keep his senses alert, stave off the onset of senility, remind himself he was, at base, just an animal—a highly evolved animal. It’s not as if either one of us loathes our domestic life. We love our wives, good wine, sports on television, dinner in a nice restaurant—especially our wives. It’s more a matter of achieving some measure of balance, some substantial contact with that part of ourselves that relishes a campfire under a sky berserk with stars, forty miles from the nearest social worker, completely reliant on our own dexterity.

Within an hour of our breaking camp that morning, snow had begun to fall. We’d structured our trip with this possibility in mind, figuring we could reach the old abandoned lookout on Nana’s Peak in a pinch. Too far from a decent road to get people in and out with any ease, the lookout had been shuttered decades earlier. From the spot where we’d camped that first morning, Nana’s Peak was another nine miles, and we had no choice but to press on through the storm. We hiked beneath a gorgeous forest of spruce and fir and through the scars of old burns where blown-down aspen lay across the trail by the dozen. Snow collected on our hats and melted from the heat of our heads, refreezing into grotesque ice sculptures in the cold. We couldn’t see fifty yards in front of us, the snow was falling so hard, and almost every step was fraught with the possibility of disaster—a twisted knee, a sprained ankle. I hadn’t felt so giddy in months.

We arrived on Nana’s Peak after five hours of tortuous walking and found the old cabin intact, though filthy with rat shit. Some good soul had left enough wood in the box to get a fire going, and Black Larry swept away the rodent droppings while I tended the hearth. Once we’d warmed ourselves and cleared away the worst of the filth, we found an old metal bucket and filled it with snow to melt on the stove, replenishing our water supply. All night the blizzard raged, but inside the cabin we were warm and dry. We found a deck of playing cards, a couple of candles, a pen and paper, and we settled in for cribbage at the crude table, keeping score the old-fashioned way.

“Why don’t we make it interesting and play for whisky?” I said. “Winner gets a shot of the other person’s stash.”

I had taught him how to play myself and figured I could school him as I usually did, capturing more than my share of bourbon in the bargain. I was wrong. He kept getting hands; I kept muttering, “This ain’t a hand, this is a foot,” and before long he was gibbering happily about his prowess at cards and my whisky supply had shrunk to next to nothing, though I’d barely touched it.

“You have learned well, grasshopper,” I said.

“Grasshopper like whisky,” Black Larry said.

In the morning we woke to a world resplendent with light. Not a cloud could be seen in the sky, and everything glittered under the sun. We were momentarily blinded when we stepped outside the cabin. By noon the snow was melting off the roof, so we set the battered bucket under the eaves to catch the fresh water. The old tower beckoned, despite its wooden steps having blown away near the top. We carefully climbed its skeletal remains to look out on the Black Range in all its winter majesty. The scars of big burns stitched a patchwork of forest types, with the vegetation everywhere in some state of recovery from big fires—the Divide Fire, the Pigeon Fire, the Bonner Fire, the Seco Fire, the Granite Fire, each of them covering thousands if not tens of thousands of acres over the past twenty years. From where we stood there wasn’t a road within ten miles in any direction, and not a paved one within thirty. We were alone above 10,000 feet, in the heart of the heart of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, fifty miles of mountains stretching to our north and the same to our south.

“I’ll bet we’re the first people to make it here this year,” Black Larry said.

That night he graciously shared his whisky, my supply having been decimated, and I found an old scrap of paper I tacked to the wall, after writing on it the following message: “On this peak and on this rock Black Larry cleaned my clock at cribbage on a snowy night in March—the South End Sentry.” Meanwhile, Black Larry had been doing some writing of his own. “Want to hear Black Larry’s Rules for Black Range Travel?” he asked.

“You’re some kind of guru now?”

“Calm yourself and listen, son. You might learn a few things from a Black Range hand like myself.”

1. Do not speak of Black Range travel in the language of conquest; the Black Range will make you its bitch.

2. Pack a minimum of 4 ounces of whisky per person, per night, and do not gamble with it.

3. Avoid the high country before May 1, unless you’re packing snowshoes.

4. Use maps as rough general reference only; trails on maps may not exist on the ground.

5. Add 50 percent to mileage on trail signs—all of them lie.

6. Layover days are highly advised for anyone over the age of thirty-five.

7. When in doubt as to your route, refrain from bowling up prematurely.

8. Make friends with people in high places; they have Forest Service keys to locked gates and cabins.

9. Always stow cold beer in the truck for the end of the trip.

“One more and I can call them commandments,” Black Larry said.

We considered several additional maxims, each of them with merit, before we settled on one that spoke to our immediate situation but also had a timeless quality:
Thou shalt not complain of snow or rain in a land where they’re seen infrequently.

S
ince then, two months of sun and wind have depleted fuel moistures. On the morning fire-weather forecast, fire danger moves for the first time from High to Very High. The same afternoon, as if on cue, I see a bloom in the shape of a mushroom, thirty miles west of me, drifting up over one of the ridges running north of Cherry Mountain. It settles a bit, drifts, blooms again. Unmistakable. Smoke.

I turn to the binoculars, focus in, confirm the judgment of the naked eye. I hang the binoculars back on their hook, circle the firefinder cabinet, spin the ring with the flat of my palm. I squat for a look through the peephole, adjust it to settle the crosshairs at the base of the smoke. It’s so far away I need a moment to work up an accurate azimuth, but eventually I get it: 273 degrees, 45 minutes.

Next I drop the big map on its hinges from the ceiling. I wrap a length of string around the nail driven into the map at my location, run it out over the compass rosette at 273 degrees and three-quarters. North of Cherry Mountain the string crosses a paved highway, right over a spot called Grandview Promontory. Plausible, especially in the absence of lightning. Whether out of malice or carelessness, there can be only one cause—
Homo sapiens
—and he rarely strays far from a road.

Normally my next move would be to call Cherry Mountain for a cross, but no one’s home there. In fact, with the fire on the far side of a ridge from here, a mere six miles from Cherry Mountain and five times that far from me, it seems likely that if Cherry Mountain were manned I’d have heard about the smoke fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago merely by having my radio set to scan. Rumor has it that a paperwork snafu has delayed the rehire of my friend John, who should have been on duty for weeks by now. Until the bureaucratic cluster is untangled, the district has been sending its fire prevention officer up the mountain most days for a look around. Today, for reasons unknown, he failed to show. Maybe he had the day off and no one volunteered to spell him. No matter now. I’m on my own—and off my turf.

It’s 5:00 p.m., so the angle of the light doesn’t help. The entire landscape to my west appears one-dimensional. I could take a good long while, study hard through the binoculars, try to map each faintly discernible ridge, maybe pinpoint the smoke within a quarter mile. But I figure it’s better to report now and err slightly with a location, since it will take crews as much as an hour to arrive on scene—an hour they can use to get rolling and I can use to work up a more precise legal, if indeed my first hunch proves mistaken.

I offer up my knowledge to the dispatcher, make sure she knows that my legal, without a cross from Cherry Mountain, remains tentative. Within minutes an engine is on its way. By the time it reaches Grandview Promontory, I’ve revised my initial report to put the fire three miles farther west, up Cow Camp Canyon: thus, the Cow Camp Fire. There the crew finds my smoke, arriving on scene, according to my notes, fifty minutes after my first call to dispatch—pretty good time on a winding mountain road. They immediately call for backup: another engine, a hot-shot crew. Fire size is modest, two to three acres, burning on a flat aspect in grass and ponderosa pine, active on all sides with flame lengths of two to eight inches. Spread potential is moderate. Cause appears to be human: a truck is parked in the center of the burn.

On a fire this far away, I can be of little help beyond ringing the alarm bell. I’m too distant to offer radio relays or give the crew any intelligence about fire behavior. All I can do is sit in my tower and watch the character of the smoke for hints on the crew’s progress. For an hour or so there’s little change. The smoke puffs, rises, disperses, disappears, puffs again. I see no sign of real growth. With a force of more than thirty hard at work scratching a line around it, the IC calls the fire contained just after dark. As usual, mop-up duties will remain into the following day, but this fire, like most others, will barely make a mark on a landscape so vast.

S
weet, expansive days of birdsong and sunshine string together, one after another. Through the open tower windows I hear the call of the hermit thrush, one of the most gorgeous sounds in all of nature, a mellifluous warble beginning on a long, clear note. Dark-eyed juncos hop along the ground, searching for seeds among the grass and pine litter. All is quiet on the radio. Not a single fire burns in southwest New Mexico. I swim languidly in the waters of solitude, unwilling to rouse myself to anything but the most basic of labors. Brush teeth. Piss in meadow. Boil water for coffee. Observe clouds. Note greening of Gambel oak. Reread old notebooks for what this date has offered in other seasons, such as this, from three years ago:

I wake to three inches of snow and a world of frozen silence. Fog cups the mountaintop, shrinking the visible world to a couple hundred yards in all directions. I am socked in most of the day. Not until late afternoon do the clouds break and reveal a world cleansed by rain, with views to snowy Sierra Blanca in the east and the Magdalenas, also snowy, over the flanks of the San Mateos. Showers trail over the Burros like a curtain rustled by wind. Everywhere water drips, snow falls from trees; ice dislodges in big chunks, clangs through the steps to the tower. I nap, eat, nap, drink coffee, read, nap again. Three naps in one day—an all-time record. Indolence in my tower at thirteen bucks an hour—all glory and honor to the American taxpayer, who keeps me hard at work!

How did I come upon this aptitude for idleness? I blame it on the injurious effects of my Midwestern youth. At age six I learned the logistics of cleaning manure from the family hog barns. Around the same time I joined with my brother in plucking rocks from plowed fields and pulling weeds by hand from neat rows of soybeans. Manicured fields and well-kept barns—the whole right-angled geometry of Midwestern grain farming and its attendant animal husbandry—eventually became synonymous in my mind with a kind of pointless feudal labor that condemned its practitioners to penury or government handouts. At twelve, after the bankers invited us to leave the farm, I took on odd jobs in town—mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, gathering aluminum cans to sell at the recycling plant. At fourteen I began a short-lived career in the grocery trade, bagging foodstuffs and mopping spills in the aisles, occasionally filching a box of Little Debbie snack cakes in compensation for a paltry wage. At fifteen I learned to fry donuts in our small-town bakery, 3 a.m. to 8 a.m., six days a week, a job I held until the day I left for college. To pay tuition I painted houses, baked bread, unloaded package trailers at UPS in the middle of the night. I tended bar. I dabbled in the janitorial arts, cleaning the University of Montana fieldhouse after basketball games and circuses. I spent a summer as the least intimidating bouncer in the history of Al’s & Vic’s Bar in Missoula. I baked more bread.

Undergraduate degree in hand at last, I ascended to the most rarefied realms of American journalism, handing out faxes and replacing empty water coolers for reporters at the
Wall Street Journal
. My tenacity and work ethic established, I was promoted to copyediting the Leisure & Arts page, a job I held for three years. I was anonymous, efficient, watchful, and discreet. Four days a week an unblemished page was shipped electronically to seventeen printing plants across the country, and the following morning nearly 2 million readers held the fruits of my labor in their hands. At first I resented the lack of attention paid to my mastery of English grammar and the intricacies of the house style book. Not once did I receive a letter from an armchair grammarian in Terre Haute or Pocatella, one of those retired English teachers who scour the daily paper with a red pen in hand, searching for evidence of American decline in the form of a split infinitive. Nor did my immediate superiors mention, even in passing, that I did my job diligently and well. Over time I began to take delight in this peculiar feature of my job—that my success was measured by how rarely people noticed what I did. I was barely noticed at all.