Fire Season (15 page)

S
mokejumpers have a long history on the Gila. Since 1947, a contingent has been stationed just south of the forest, first at Deming, then later at the aerial fire base near Silver City. They arrive each spring from bases up north—Missoula, Montana; McCall, Idaho; Fairbanks, Alaska—and spend a couple of months here. The elite corps of wildland firefighters, they’re dispatched on initial attack to smokes in some of the most remote and difficult country in the West, places beyond the reach of roads, places to which it would take a day or more to get a regular crew on the ground.

The first jump of a wildfire occurred in July of 1940, in the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. The men tossed burlap sacks out of the plane’s cargo hold in order to test the winds; they jumped wearing padded leather football helmets with wire-mesh face masks to protect against head injuries. Many of the earliest smokejumpers were conscientious objectors during World War II. Opposed to killing men in Europe and Asia but not to serving their country, sixty of them happily signed on to fight fires in the forests of the American West. Their experiments were closely monitored by the U.S. Army, which borrowed the lessons learned in jumping wildfires and applied them to the formation of paratrooper units, such as the 101st Airborne.

In addition to possessing a colorful history, the smokejumpers were blessed to have a poet write a beautiful book about them. Norman Maclean’s
Young Men and Fire
is the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire. Better known for his novella
A River Runs Through It
, which Robert Redford made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, Maclean worked summers with the Forest Service when he was only a teenager, an opportunity he was afforded because able-bodied woodsmen had gone to fight in World War I. In 1920, Maclean went east to college at Dartmouth, to study English. When he finished, he returned home to Montana and worked again briefly in the mountains of his youth. It was a moment that divided his past and his future forever. He often looked back at a career that might have been—a career in the woods, in logging camps, fighting fires and packing with mules and playing cribbage in the bunkhouse. Instead he went to the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate and later held the post of William Rainey Harper Professor of English. He taught there for more than forty years, mostly Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, and each summer decamped from Hyde Park for Montana, where he spent three months at his family’s cabin on Seeley Lake—not far from where the smokejumpers made some of their first practice jumps in the summer of 1940.

Nine years later, Maclean was home again for the summer when he heard about a fatal wildfire in Mann Gulch, a steep side canyon near the breaks of the Missouri River. Thirteen smokejumpers had died when a fire they were fighting blew up below them. A few days later Maclean arrived at the scene of the conflagration, with the fire still burning in stump holes and scattered trees. The smell and the look of the gulch haunted him the rest of his life. After his retirement in 1974, he would spend years attempting to reconstruct what had happened to the men who died there.
Young Men and Fire
is, in one sense, the story of an unforeseen disaster, in which smokejumpers accustomed to unifying earth, wind, and fire found themselves overwhelmed by that final element, which they could not outrun. It is also, as Maclean put it, a story in search of itself as a story—or, to say it another way, a tragedy in search of a tragedian. Late in the book he writes:

Those who know something about the woods or about nature should soon have perceived an alarming gap between the almost sole purpose, clear but narrow, of the early Smokejumpers and the reality they were sure to confront, reality almost anywhere having inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous, and the upgulch breeze can suddenly turn to murder. Since this principle comes about as close to being universal as a principle can, you might have thought that someone in the early history and training of the Smokejumpers would have realized that something like the Mann Gulch fire would happen before long. But no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man—namely, that generally a first principle can’t be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and become a second principle.

To tell the story, Maclean taught himself the latest wildfire science with dogged precision, coaxed a friend to help him mark time on the hill, and read and reread the official report on the fire. He plumbed the recollections of the fire’s three survivors, two of whom he led back to the scene to revisit their close encounter with death. The smokejumpers’ foreman, Wag Dodge, had lit an escape fire and lain down in its ashes as the big fire whirl passed over his men: he tried in vain to persuade them to join him, the only hope for survival most of them had, though none of them listened. “With the flames of the fire front solid and a hundred yards deep he had to invent the notion that he could burn a hole in the fire,” Maclean wrote. “Perhaps all he could patent about his invention was the courage to lie down in his fire. Like a lot of inventions, it could be crazy and consume the inventor. His invention, taking as much guts as logic, suffered the immediate fate of many other inventions—it was thought to be crazy by those who first saw it.”

Dodge would die five years later, still haunted by his inability to show his men the way to their afterlife through and beyond the fire. Maclean returns repeatedly to a version of the event as a kind of Passion play, with Stations of the Cross scattered up the hill, marked now by literal crosses where each of the dead men fell, monuments to their unimaginable end. Although Maclean never says so explicitly, Dodge resembles a kind of Jesus figure, misunderstood in his message at the moment it counted most for the world, that world for Dodge consisting entirely of young men running uphill in a gulch and a wildfire running faster forever and ever—the nightmare scenario of all who have ever fought fire.

Though he worked on the story for most of the last fourteen years he lived, the manuscript remained unfinished upon Maclean’s death. When it was published in 1992,
Young Men and Fire
was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award—a sadly posthumous tribute to a genius of American letters whose only other book was short-listed for a Pulitzer in 1977, a year when the judges deemed no book worthy of the award and abstained from offering a prize in fiction. But having started writing so late in life—he began
A River Runs Through It
only after he retired from teaching at the age of seventy—he was never angling for prizes. He was angling for immortality, and with both of his books he achieved it.

T
he next morning the Cobre Fire hardly shows any smoke. Nevertheless, the jumper plane lifts off from Grant County Airport at 8 a.m. It circles the fire for half an hour, the spotter assessing likely jump spots and dropping paper streamers, testing the wind. The streamers unfurl and float into the treetops, bright pennants of yellow and pink, weighted slightly on one end with a pouch of sand to ensure they don’t just float for miles. Their colors make them easier to follow than those original burlap sacks, and the weight of the sand and the length of the streamer are calibrated to mimic the drift of the average-size smokejumper. The spotter judges the winds light enough to jump. The open meadow on Apache Peak provides the target for landing. From our privileged perch, Ben and I watch as first one jumper and then another leaps into midair, chutes abloom above them in an instant. They swoop toward the mountain amid swirling ridge-top winds, soaring like giant birds.

One of them, fooled by a sudden wind gust, slams into the meadow with an audible thud and performs an awkward half-somersault. The other lands smoothly but manages to hang his chute in a tree. Their para-cargo—food, water, tools, tents, sleeping bags—follows soon after in a box with its own chute. I amble over to greet them, make sure they’re still in one piece. The first of them beams at me, still geeked up on the thrill of the leap. “Dawson,” he says, extending a hand. “Not very often we jump at this elevation. Those ridge-top winds were gnar-gnar”—jumper shorthand for gnarly times two. I tell Dawson what I know of the fire and how to get there, while Ben helps the other jumper, Chris, untangle his chute from the branches of a wind-stunted pine. We learn they’re BLM jumpers from Alaska. In half an hour their gear stands neatly stacked in the meadow, and they’re ready to begin their hike to the fire.

“Looked from above like we could take a leak on it and that would be that,” Dawson says.

“Cocktails and cribbage at six, then?”

Chris smiles and flips me the thumbs-up.

“Deal me in,” he says.

All day long I scope the surrounding country for sleeper smokes, snags hit by lightning that may have smoldered overnight. None appears. By early afternoon the Cobre Fire no longer shows. I try to engage Ben in conversation, but it becomes clearer by the moment that, being half my age, he regards me as something of a bewhiskered fogey. That I would write letters to friends on a typewriter, sit with them for days making notes in the margins, hike down the mountain with them and drop them in a mailbox to be trucked overland across the country, strikes him as about as antiquarian as sending word by smoke signal or semaphore. He becomes animated only when I ask about his high school’s rivalries with other local towns. He tells me he and his buddies in Truth or Consequences, better known in these parts as “T or C,” or simply Torc (rhymes with
dork
), have a particular hatred for the boys of Hatch, a town just down the road that proudly calls itself the green-chile capital of the world. After football games the boys of each town honor an unspoken agreement with their rivals to gather in the parking lot of the Sonic drive-in, dump Jim Beam into their Styrofoam soda cups, say unkind things about the size of each other’s genitalia, and, when properly lubricated, “throw down on the little sissy bitches,” as Ben puts it. Good, clean American fun.

Around four o’clock, Chris and Dawson tramp into the meadow. Their fireproof Nomex uniforms look as fresh as the day they were laundered. They laugh about how easy a fire it was to put out. “A few shovelfuls of dirt and it was nap time,” Chris says. Hardly the stuff of tragedy or even poetry—more like farce, that the Forest Service, in a spasm of institutional habit, would drop men from an airplane on a fire that would have burned out on its own after skunking around in a stump hole for a day or two.

Yet I have been provided with a skilled cribbage player, and for that I’m grateful. Dawson and Ben decline my invitation to the cocktail hour, but Chris grabs the deck and begins to shuffle. I simmer a packet of creamy noodles to supplement Chris’s Top Ramen. We find a ball game on the radio, hoist a glass of spirits, toast our benefactor:
To the United States Forest Circus, aviation and prevention divisions
.

“Dude, the jumpers back at the base are gonna hate me,” Chris says. “Whisky, cards, chocolate, a baseball game—this is the cushiest jump I’ve ever made.”

“Don’t forget coffee in the morning,” I remind him. “Freshly ground, organic, grown in the shade.”

“We should’ve called the fire a half-acre and stayed another night.”

F
or four days I leave the mountain to Ben. Even as I reacquaint myself with the pleasures of “syphilization,” as Edward Abbey called it, a part of me can’t help but wonder how the kid is holding up. Storms roll through all weekend, and the local newspaper, the
Silver City Daily Press
—or
Daily Press Release
, as it’s more accurately known—reports several new fires on the forest. I’m tempted to leave my radio on all weekend, scanning for news. Because we live on a hill south of downtown, I can make out the dispatcher, Cherry Mountain, and Apache Peak too if I set my radio on a bookshelf in the living room. For a day and a half I resist the temptation but on Saturday afternoon I break down and eavesdrop for a few minutes. From what I can gather in bits and pieces of half-broken transmissions, it seems a fire crew is lost in the Black Range, somewhere north of Apache Peak. They’ve run out of water, so a helicopter has been dispatched to drop them some and save them from dehydration. Ben sounds panicky and overwhelmed, the dispatcher exasperated, the helicopter spotter bemused. This is what my Forest Service friends call a Class C clusterfuck. I can’t bear to listen very long. Later I will learn that the crew thought they could hike cross-country from their fire to Wright’s Saddle, a distance of seven miles across tough country, traversable only by mule deer and elk.

I mention none of this when I return to the lookout on Tuesday. Ben is sitting on the porch when I arrive, his bedroll looped to his pack. Our transition, totaling maybe three minutes, is curt and sort of sad.

“I’m still young,” he says. “I need to be around people. I got so lonely I hiked out Sunday night and drove into town. I hiked back up the next morning.”

“Are you cashing it in for the summer?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

Thinking about, hell. His pack is enormous. He’s cleaned all his canned food out of the pantry, leaving only a few packets of dried fruit and the bottled water. He’s burned more wood than he cut, committing one of the cardinal sins of lookoutry. I can’t work up much in the way of outrage, though. Almost every year one or two souls spend a day in a tower on the Gila and never return. Just last year one guy got on the radio his second night on Loco Mountain, not long after dark, and called the Beaverhead work station to say his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It took half an hour of coaxing over the radio by the station manager to calm him down, and the next day he hiked out and was never heard from again. When you consider a person has to be free of a fear of fire (
pyrophobia
), a fear of confined spaces (
claustrophobia
), a fear of being alone (
isolophobia
), a fear of heights (
acrophobia
), a fear of steep slopes and stairs (
bathmophobia
), a fear of being forgotten or ignored (
athazagoraphobia
), a fear of the dark (
nyctophobia
), a fear of wild animals (
agrizoophobia
), a fear of birds (
ornithophobia
), a fear of thunder and lightning (
brontophobia
), a fear of forests (
hylophobia
), a fear of wind (
anemophobia
), a fear of clouds (
nephophobia
), a fear of fog (
homichlophobia
), a fear of rain (
ombrophobia
), a fear of stars (
siderophobia
), and a fear of the moon (
selenophobia
), then it’s little wonder most people aren’t meant to be lookouts.