Читать книгу Fire on the Rim - Stephen J. Pyne - Страница 10

Part One

EOD

WHEN THE CLOUDS PART, there are disjointed colors and shadows and fragments of more cloud. Lou’s eyes bulge and dart like a chameleon’s. Clouds close and strike the Rim like surf. The storm seals off the Canyon in slow swirls of black and white. To the west there is lightning; clouds billow like wet smoke.

Lou flies the Cessna northward. We circle and wait for the clouds to break. They lift, suddenly lightening, and reveal a great bowl of a meadow; Lou plunges the plane through the cloud deck. Across the meadow runs a plowed brown scar. An orange wind sock identifies the site as a landing strip, and we are soon bouncing over mud and cobbles on the ground. Two men and a green Park Service station wagon are waiting for us. Stan wears a ranger uniform, complete with Stetson. Harry—much older—is outfitted with a cowboy shirt, a cowboy hat, and boots. Lou declines to fly back to the South Rim. He will wait out the storm.

We drive to a paved highway, U.S. 67, and turn south toward the North Rim. The road runs along a vast grassy plain, green and yellow, grey and brown. Around the edge of the swollen meadows there is an impenetrable forest. Some patches of snow collect along the perimeter. Under the darkening sky white clouds scud across the meadow, and fog streams through the woods. Occasionally there are bursts of hail. After a few miles the meadow narrows, pinched off by a portal of trees. A wooden sign, heavy as a boulder, announces GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK. Beyond is a small log cabin that serves as an entrance station. It is vacant, dreary with winter. We drive through another large meadow. The clouds break momentarily, sunlight streaks to the road, and steam rises from the pavement.

Harry, half deaf, shouts, “How do you like this country?” “It’s all new,” I reply. Stan nods. Stan, Harry, and Lou talk about the road. It is narrow and full of potholes, “disgraceful,” “unsafe.” Replacement of the entrance road, they agree, should be the Park’s highest priority. I stare out the window at the fog and trees. “Those aren’t smokes,” Harry yells, laughing. “If you’re going to be a smokechaser, you’ll have to tell the real smokes from the waterdogs”—he points out the window—“like them. That’s only fog. Remember Smokey’s First Rule of Firefighting: You can’t fight a fire you can’t find.”

When we reach the ranger station, I hand over my papers, and they send me to my quarters with the rest of the fire crew in the Sheep Shed. The crew is out now, I am told. When they return I can get a bunk, clothes, and firepack. I am to report for work in the morning at 0800 hours.

No one says much to me when the crew returns. Bill, the foreman, gives me a hard hat and a firepack from the fire cache. The Sheep Shed is a dilapidated wooden bunkhouse, and I take the only unclaimed bunk. It has about six inches of clearance from the ceiling. Someone motions me to join them for dinner. We walk through the woods to a cafeteria called the North Rim Inn. The next morning, having mis-set my alarm clock, I am dressed and ready at 6:00 A.M. A few groggy eyes blink incredulously. I don’t know what to do. I sit in a chair, fully dressed with a Levi’s jacket and hard hat, and read for two hours, while the rest of the crew, several of them hung over, rouse themselves about fifteen minutes before work. No one more than glances my way. No one needs to.

Pete is driving a red Dodge powerwagon outfitted with a slip-on unit, tools, saws, and firepacks. We turn off the paved road for two muddy ruts (“E-1,” he calls it) across a short meadow, then enter a dark woods. Pete insists on being called by his nickname, The Ape, which he earned by virtue of a huge barrel chest and a passion for climbing trees. His car is known as the Apemobile; his bed is the Ape’s Nest. He wears a Levi’s jacket over an orange fireshirt. An orange metal hard hat, slightly too small, sits incongruously on his head. His facility with language is astonishing. He can make even four-syllable words sound like four-letter words.

We roll from one rut to another. A fallen aspen blocks the road. I climb out and look for an ax. “Break it,” The Ape grunts. I stare blankly. Disgusted, he leaves the vehicle, picks up the short end of the aspen, swings it against some trees, and pushes until the log snaps. We drive to where a large tree bristling with branches has fallen lengthwise down the road. The branches spin across the road like a spider web. The Ape selects an enormous black and yellow chain saw and begins cutting. I pull branches away. Together we roll the large chunks out of the road, sometimes using a long pole with a floppy hook, a peavey. The rain starts, followed by hail and fog. We slide along portions of the road; in places the truck splashes sheets of mud past the window. When the road bends and The Ape slows, the powerwagon sticks in a mud puddle the consistency of brown tar. The Ape runs a winch cable out to a tree. The cable tightens, then springs loose. “Fuckin’ goddamn clutch popped,” mutters Ape. We gather some wood and surround the left-side tires. Still no luck. Ape dumps the water out of the tank, all one hundred fifty gallons, and with winch and engine operating together, we lumber out of the puddle. We drive for what seems like hours. More trees, more mud, more hail. Then the forest abruptly opens; our keys undo the lock at the gate, and The Ape drives onto a logging road.

The clouds are still too thick to see much. Dense pockets of fog sweep across the road like gentle brooms. When the scene lightens, it is filled with charred black stalks and dense brush. Alongside the road are rotting piles of roots and logs. The ground is rocky and grassy. “The Saddle Mountain fire,” The Ape explains. “Started in 1960, on Park lands. Fuckin’ Reusch sent out two smokechasers to find it. They couldn’t locate fuckin’ anything—too dark and no goddamn roads. They came back to the Area and agreed to return the next day. Jesus H. Christ, it happens all the time. But this fuckin’ fire burned through the night, forty acres in the Park, then wiped out nine thousand fuckin’ acres in the Forest. The fire crew made buckets of overtime just on patrol. Lucky bastards. The ranger station has a photo of the crew that the Park sent to the fire. The Forest Service built this road to log off what they could of the burn. If you ever want to get them fuckin’ mad, just say ‘Saddle Mountain.’”

Another truck is at the end of the road, with another smokechaser. The Ape goes to the other truck and talks. I stare at my fire map. I unfold and refold it. The Ape returns and we eat lunch in the powerwagon. The Ape warms up a small can on the truck manifold. The steam in the cab is so thick he turns on the defroster. I now see a group of Indians huddled under a small tarp off under some trees. When the rain and hail let up, The Ape says, we will begin work on the boundary fence.

Booby jogs toward me as best he can while stepping over the heavy windfall and balancing a chain saw. “A smoke on Powell Plateau!” he yells. “Meet me at the truck.”

Booby, one of the Indians, and I ride in the cab. The other Indians—“SWFFs,” Booby calls them, short for “Southwest Forest Firefighters”—climb onto the back of the slip-on. “How do we find the smoke?” I ask. Booby replies that we have a good location for this fire, that we usually smell a fire before we actually see it. I have no idea where Powell Plateau is, and every ten minutes or so I stick my nose out the window to sniff for smoke. The drive lasts nearly an hour and a half. When it ends, at Swamp Point, we are at the rim of the Canyon. On a mesa across from the Point there is a column of smoke.

Booby hands me two canteens, which he drapes around my firepack, and some tools and tells me to take off. There is a trail of sorts across to Powell. “Just follow it.” A couple of SWFFs are outfitted in the same way. From the slip-on he fills up fedcos—rubber bladder bags that hold five gallons each and can be carried like backpacks—and hands them to the remaining SWFFs. The trail is easy going down; we descend for maybe a thousand feet. The trip up staggers us, however, and I pass one reeling SWFF, then a second. We are strung out over maybe a quarter mile. The sun blasts off exposed rocks as though Muav Saddle were a reflector oven. Near the top I realize that there is no trail to the fire. I wander around for a few minutes, trying to orient myself, then slump down a little ways from the trail and wait. Eventually one of the SWFFs appears, then another. They talk in gasping, hushed Hopi, and finally leave the trail to bushwhack cross-country. I follow. We come to the fire—the smoldering stump of a tree and a burning log. There are now three SWFFs and myself on the scene. I am a seasonal employee, they are temporaries; I have a government driver’s license, they do not; I am a fire control aid, an FCA, they are SWFFs. I am the fire boss. They wait for me to say something. I fumble with my pack and canteens, buying time. “All right,” I say. “You guys know what to do. Get to work.” They nod and pick up tools. One grabs a shovel and begins to throw dirt on the log. I copy his every gesture. By the time Booby arrives we have most of the log covered.

We cut and dig some more before Booby decides that he will spend the night on the fire with Hugh, crew boss of the SWFFs. Booby and Hugh have each brought a sleeping bag. I am to return to the Area with the rest of the SWFFs. If we leave shortly, we should reach Swamp Point before sunset. The SWFFs who carried fedcos go back empty-handed; I have to carry my firepack across the Saddle again. I am exhausted when we get to the powerwagon, and it is apparent that it will soon rain and that we all must ride in the cab.

I am the only one with a license, but I have never driven a standard transmission truck. The SWFFs sit on one another’s laps. One straddles the gearshift; he will shift for me if I will work the clutch. We lurch forward. The ride lasts several hours. I have not the slightest idea where we are. When we come to forks in the road, the SWFFs debate in Hopi about the proper road to take, then point and say in English, “This way.” One of the Hopis is quite old, probably sixty, and he chants in a low voice, almost in harmony with the engine whine. At last we come out to Highway 67. The remainder of the drive should be easy. It is nearly midnight when we run out of gas about a half mile from the Area.

Booby and Hugh come back the next day. Gummer drives out to pick them up, and Booby announces that it was a nice fire. There wasn’t much mop-up left, he says; they slept well, and Hugh got up early and made coffee. “That’s why,” he explains, “I wanted Hugh to stay the night.”

* * *

There are four smokechasers on the crew: The Ape, Gummer, Booby, and I. We have a foreman, Bill (“Wee Willie”), who is married and lives in a cabin. He hangs around the Area, never participates in fire crew parties, and dispatches himself immediately to every fire. We are supervised by a permanent Park Service ranger, Chuck, who reports to the unit manager. There is one patrol ranger (Weird Harold), a Park Service permanent, and one seasonal ranger. There are four or five ranger naturalists; it is hard to know exactly. The maintenance crews—Buildings and Utilities (B&U) and Roads and Trails (R&T) both—have fewer than ten people. The B&U group calls itself the Rare Breed. There are no fee collectors; there is no visitor center. The ranger station is a slightly refurbished mess hall constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. Almost everyone who is single eats at the North Rim Inn. The fire crew and the SWFFs always go as a group.

What makes the fire crew the largest collective entity on the North Rim are the SWFFs. Each summer a squad of six is requested out of the Southwest Forest Firefighter program for a tour of duty that lasts most of the summer. Our group consists of Hopis. The SWFFs live in the east bunk room of the Sheep Shed, the fire crew in the west. Separating (or binding) the two bunk rooms are a common shower and a toilet. The fire crew used to reside in a cabin, another relic of CCC days, and wishes to return. There are rumors of trouble among the SWFFs.

We are returning from the Grand Lodge when we notice flashing lights outside the Sheep Shed. The rangers are present and there is yelling. I am told to watch our bunk room. There is more screaming and the sound of tires on gravel. After a while Booby comes in. “Butch has been drinking,” he says. He assaulted Albert and nearly kicked his ear off with the pointed toe of his cowboy boot. Albert is on his way to the Kanab clinic in the back of the ranger station wagon, but the SWFF crew refuses to bed down in the Sheep Shed until Butch sobers up. Booby says that I am to stay in the Sheep Shed and watch Butch. I can hear Butch stalking across the floor and chanting on the other side of the shower stall. “I have to go now,” says Booby. “And, yeah, Butch may have a knife.”

I dress in my fire gear and drag my blankets outside. The moon is nearly full. Forest and Rim are bathed in silver light, and the Canyon is a black abyss. There are large ponderosa outside the Sheep Shed and some aspen. I stumble over to the aspen. Light streams out of the Sheep Shed, but there are no screams. I hear only the wind, and under the trees I cannot feel it.

Two days later we move to a cabin.

The lightning storm comes late in the day. Early the next morning Chuck sends me to Kanabownits tower with three SWFFs. We man Kanabownits only on special occasions. Chuck says he is sending Hugh with me because Hugh has a lot of fire experience; I should seek his advice. If there is a smoke in the western portion of the North Rim, we will be dispatched. He hands me a pair of binoculars from the ranger station safe.

Hugh struggles up the steps to the tower. He is breathing irregularly, his eyes are bloodshot, and his speech is a little slurred. He is unusually talkative and eager to please; after the episode with Butch, he fears that the whole crew will be sent home. I scan the horizon with the binoculars, trying to see more of the landscape with them than without. I can see the Rim and Canyon clearly. Powell Plateau stands out in bold relief. There are bluish mountains to the south, southwest, and west. I can’t name any of them.

Hugh and I sit down in the lookout booth and open the windows; the other two SWFFs stay with the truck. I begin to read a book and plan to survey the scene every half hour or so. Hugh chatters away. He tells me about the biggest fires he has worked, how long he has been with the SWFF program. He asks for the binoculars. I return to my book.

After a while Hugh points to a bluish haze hanging around a point on the Rim and declares that it is a fire. “I can’t tell,” I say. I have seen only one forest fire in my life. It is still early morning, Hugh explains, and the fire is only smoldering; now is the time to attack it. I take a bearing with the firefinder and watch the smoke some more with the binoculars. The haze is unquestionably dense, like the air in a campground during the early morning. On the other side of the point the bands of the Canyon are visible. The fire must be right on the Rim. I radio the information to Chuck. “The fire is at Rose Point, on Rainbow Plateau.” “Good,” he says. “Start to it and we’ll send up Recon 1 to guide you.”

With Hugh’s help I stop the powerwagon just north of Rainbow. There are no roads or trails, and Rose Point is more than a mile away. We load up with firepacks, chain saw, fedcos, handtools, and extra canteens. I flag our route by tearing off pieces of plastic surveying tape from a roll and tying them to tree branches. The drive takes an hour, and we walk for more than another hour before we hear that 211 has departed from the South Rim airport. We have found nothing, though several times I am sure that I can smell the odor of something burning. Hugh is enthusiastic. I want to traverse along the Rim, but Hugh points out that if we do that, we must cross several steep ravines. Better to follow deer paths, he cautions. So we do. We can always retrace our flagging back to the truck.

We hear the plane but we cannot see it, so we work our way to the Rim. The plane is circling far to our north. I get on the radio and ask the observer if he can help us reach the fire at Rose Point. He says that he is at Rose Point. “No,” I reply, “you are much too far north.” No, he replies, he is at Rose Point, and we must be somewhere else. After some maneuvering he locates us at Violet Point, the southern extremity of Rainbow Plateau and maybe an air mile from Rose Point. He cannot see any smoke. Are we sure there is a fire? “I guess not,” I reply, wondering if my nose has led me to anything more than the memory of a morning breakfast of bacon and burned toast. After Recon 1 surveys the rest of the North Rim, he heads for the airport.

The day is late, so we stagger back to the powerwagon by the most direct route we can imagine. The fedcos and extra canteens, useless, are drained to lighten the load. The next day we return and pick up our flagging.

It is a slow season for fires.

So it is, but there is still much to do. There are fireroads to open: the SWFFs clear brush, while we cut and move logs with chain saws and winches. We work with the R&T crew in rebuilding the Sublime Road. Two days a week we cut wood for the campground. We cut down snags—hazardous trees—along the main road, and buck and split the wood for the campground bins. We work in the fire cache: there are tools to sharpen, paint, rehandle; there are signs to rout and paint. If there is nothing else to do, we go to the Fence. The north boundary fence is a great sink for labor; usually one smokechaser will take the entire SWFF crew to the Fence for the day. If you drive slowly, this means only five and a half hours of real repair work. And we overhaul the network of tree towers.

When the CCC was in force, they moved North Rim tower to its present location, built Kanabownits tower to provide additional coverage, and constructed a dozen tree towers by attaching metal ladders to the trunks of prominent trees around the North Rim. The idea was that smokechasers could climb a nearby tree tower to get a better fix on a fire. The ladders were secured by lag bolts and joined by a heavy copper wire to conduct lightning to ground. The best tree tower (TT-1) scales a giant white fir behind the ranger station and ends in a small crow’s nest. The tree is topped, there is a small platform on which to stand, and a metal pipe encircles the affair in imitation of a handrail. The other towers end in branches, which have to be climbed to acquire a view. Over the course of thirty years, the system has decayed. Some trees have died, and others have been weakened by lightning. Some have been so overtaken by surrounding trees that nothing can be seen from their tops. In some cases, the tree has grown so much that bark overlaps the rungs of the ladder, making it all but useless. The Ape wants to restore the whole network.

The work goes slowly. It may take us an entire day to drop a useless tree and remove its ladders; locating a new tree may require that we climb half a dozen. Ape instructs us in the use of spikes and ropes. Many of the trees selected are ponderosa and have no branches for the first forty feet or more of trunk. Someone has to spike up to the nearest large branch in order to position the ladders. The tree must be wired to protect it against lightning. The crown jewel is TT-15, which The Ape personally selects along fireroad E-1. This is a new tower, not simply a replacement, and it is intended to prevent the kind of disorientation that brought about the Saddle Mountain debacle. Gummer does the climbing, while The Ape puffs thoughtfully on his pipe. The tree is a ponderosa pine with a diameter of nearly five feet. The bark seems thin, like an orange balloon ready to burst, as though the tree has been stretched and exceeded its natural dimensions. Gummer proceeds slowly. The tree is almost too wide and the bark too thin for him to grip. We work late to get two ladders (each about twelve feet long) up the first day. Gummer leaves his rope on the branch in such a way that we can pull him up the next day without spiking. Cutting branches is slow work; at thirty-five pounds and over three feet long our chain saws are too cumbersome to use so we cut with handsaws. When the ladders give out, there are large branches to climb. The Ape is content with the view. It is the most difficult climb of the summer, and with it the rehabilitation of the tree towers is complete. Within three years, however, the great ponderosa at TT-15 dies, is declared a hazard, and is felled.

We do odd jobs as assigned, although much of the work is dismissed, fairly or unfairly, as make-work. There is never enough work when there are not enough fires, and there are never too many fires. To kill time, we drive out to Point Imperial to check on the progress of the diseased trees at the overlook, drive through the campground, or make a quick visit to the store. When times are slow, the horseplay begins. To skirt a bad washout on the Sublime Road, Gummer carefully eases a powerwagon through an aspen grove and over a couple of aspen saplings. The Ape is impressed. When The Ape next passes the site, he stops the powerwagon, puts it into four-wheel drive, turns his hard hat backward, and proceeds to level the entire grove of aspen. About a week later Chuck comes down to the fire cache to inquire if we know anything about this aspen grove on the Sublime Road, the one with tire tracks all over it. No one knows anything, but Chuck understands everything.

The Ape is convinced that there is a fire near The Basin. Twice in the past week Red Butte lookout has reported a smoke at fifteen degrees on the North Rim. No one has found anything, and the bearing runs suspiciously close to the dump and to the campground—both sources of smoke—but The Ape trusts the lookout at Red Butte. Red Butte itself is a strange, camelback-shaped monadnock between the South Rim and the San Francisco Peaks. The Forest Service has done nothing more than erect a small shack at its summit. The lookout’s name is Barbara, otherwise known as Barbara Red Butte. When Barbara Red Butte is not sighting smokes, she shoots rattlesnakes. The inside of the shack is plastered with snakeskins and coils. The Ape drives to Lindbergh Hill, site of TT-7, climbs it, and returns with the compass bearing of a possible smoke. He plots his bearing along with the azimuth reported by Red Butte. They cross near Hades Spring in Upper Thompson Canyon. He insists that it has to be a fire.

We drive down fireroad W-1A, a former entrance road for the Park. When the new road was paved, it followed Lower Thompson Canyon; the old road skirts Upper Thompson Canyon. The Ape studies his map. We don our firepacks and begin to walk. When we come to a long meadow, Ape says he smells smoke. He reconstructs the flow of evening air, cooler and heavier, as it spilled like gentle rain over the contours of hill and ravine before emptying into the meadow-lake. Back in the woods he comes upon a smoldering fir. It has been burning for days and would probably smoke for several more. The Ape is triumphant. He announces the location of the Hades fire over the Park radio. Then he tells me that we will bring the powerwagon into the fire.

We mark the route from the meadow to the fire with flagging tape. Getting the truck from W-1A to the meadow is awkward, but The Ape is determined. It will complete his coup. Ape walks ahead with a pulaski, cutting downed aspen logs with its ax end and pulling debris away with the hoe half. There is no vestige of a road present, no prospect of a road in the future. We wind around the forest, our route like oxbow lakes. Eventually we come to the meadow and the fire. The fir is hollow and burns on the inside. Ground fire smokes stubbornly in deep duff. We use up all the water in the slip-on. Ape volunteers—insists upon—taking the powerwagon back to the Area for another load of water, while I scratch a fireline and mop up. He is gone for almost two hours; it is dark when he reappears. We dump the load on the fire, stir the sizzling coals and duff, and prepare to leave. We will return tomorrow before we declare the fire out. The Ape drives back to the Area.

The next morning, however, Stan and Chuck call us into their offices to discuss the “serious,” dents and destroyed side mirror on the red powerwagon. They believe I was driving when the accident occurred. From The Ape’s account it must have happened when I drove the powerwagon through the woods. I don’t know when it happened; I didn’t know anything had happened. A vehicle accident is a serious matter, they remind me. Later, they inspect the scene and discover red paint on the bark of a tree and find splinters of the mirror on the ground nearby. The arrangement of debris makes it clear that impact occurred on the way out. Knowing nothing of this, I approach Stan and Chuck after work. “I don’t know what is going on,” I say, “but I did not smash the pumper.” “Don’t worry, son,” says Stan kindly. “We just figure Pete had a little accident.”

The fire crew does everything collectively: we eat together, work together, play together. Our social world is as compressed as our housing, Building 155, a small cabin constructed during CCC days as temporary officers’ quarters. There is one large room, big enough for two sets of bunk beds along one wall. The wall does not presently exist because a new room is being added to the cabin; in its place is a canvas sheet. On the opposite wall there is a closet and a small bathroom. There are four chests of drawers, two stacked on the other two. The double-decker dressers block the closet. For entertainment we have a battery-operated phonograph and three albums. By the end of the summer I despise every song.

There is a small kitchen that is never used. Instead we eat nearly every meal at the North Rim Inn. We are issued discount cards that entitle us to breakfast for $.50, lunch for $.75, and dinner (except steak) for $1.00. When we work outside the Area, we order box lunches from the Inn at the same discounted price. A rookie smokechaser at pay grade GS-3 makes $2.05 per hour, so it is possible to eat very well on little more than one hour’s pay. We occupy a table at the Inn; the SWFFs take one also, and so do the maintenance crews and the rangers. After dinner we all sit around the table and BS. Everyone has a pipe. I do not smoke, but it becomes apparent that a pipe is mandatory, so I get one and chew on the stem determinedly. We talk about work and money; about girls and parties at the Lodge; about the Park Service and our bosses. We talk about the fire crew.

There are endless discussions about life in the “old days,” generally last year or the year before. A fire crew turns over rapidly. Rare is the seasonal who stays with fire for four summers. Crew traditions are oral, incessantly refashioned, and made ancient by the brevity of seasonal life. In the old days the fire crew ruled the North Rim. They were crazy and hardworking and had lots of fires. They restrung the Fence clad only in hard hats, Jockey shorts, and boots. They cut fireline faster than the Forest Service fire plow. They were living legends. “Call me Shane,” one insisted when he first arrived, so they did. He spent most of his free time on a motorcycle. Drunk, he drove the whole fire crew to the Lodge on his cycle. There was brawny Tim, reckless and roguish, an inventor of rough sport and censor of fire crew morals—which meant, in perverse inversion, that he oversaw a certain level of “corruption.” Tim organized endless parties with girls from the Lodge, Inn, or campground. Above all, there was Reusch. Reusch had been district ranger for a decade, had weathered the Saddle Mountain Burn, and had passed his rough benediction over the fire crew. Reusch was built like a grizzly. One night he picked up Tim, who had the bulk of a tree stump, and placed him on the fireplace mantel. Reusch, it is said, constructed W-6 fireroad while en route to a fire, driving a Jeep with one hand and swinging an ax with the other. He pampered and ruthlessly worked the fire crews, invited them to his house for drinking and general hell-raising. After the Saddle Mountain fire, Reusch made it a policy not to pay for overtime unless his crews found a fire. In disgust, Tim and Shane located a snag with a catface, started a fire in the basal cavity, and extinguished it. We found a fire and we put it out, they solemnly swore.

Now, of course, the new regime is less colorful and less sensitive to fire crew needs. The cautious Chuck has replaced the reckless Reusch, and I have replaced Tim. Chuck’s manifold fire credentials are dismissed. The crewmembers blink with incredulity when they learn that Tim and I attended the same high school in Phoenix.

They are determined to corrupt me. There is hope. I carry a pipe, though I have yet to smoke it. I drink a beer from time to time. I have learned to use simple swear words, not in fluent fire crew idiom but as a halting, second language. But I do not party. Gummer finally proposes that we organize a “book party.” The Ape reluctantly agrees. We each find a book and go to the Lodge. For half an hour or so we variously read or, more commonly, prowl restlessly around the Lodge. The book party is a failure. Books will not substitute for girls. My initiation becomes a matter of some importance. It will not be easily solved, but there have been stubborn rookies before: Gummer got his nickname because Tim thought he acted like a bubble-gummer. There is hope; there will be fires.

The crew is cutting and splitting wood on Lindbergh Hill when the smoke report comes in. North Rim tower sites the fire just south of the Sublime Road “in a grove of aspen.” The Ape and I depart immediately. We exit the Sublime Road at W-2 and, with pack and tools, begin walking. We walk for an hour. No smoke. Ape radios the tower and asks if he still sees smoke. “Yes,” Rick replies. “It is in a small grove of aspen.” “Christ!” mutters Ape. “Does he know how many fuckin’ groves of fuckin’ aspen there are on the North Rim?” We walk for another hour. It rained last night, and the sky remains largely overcast. It is difficult to spot smoke against that kind of backdrop. We climb another hill. The spruce branches are still wet; we brush against them as we trudge, loaded like pack mules, through the woods, and we both are soaked. At last we stop. Something bounces off Ape’s hard hat. He picks up a piece of charcoal. Some more charcoal falls nearby. We stare at each other and look up. Immediately there is a thunderous crack; awkward in our firepacks, we stagger as fast as we can away from the noise, while the top of a large fir crashes to the ground. It is the lost smoke.

The Ape grins. The tree has broken far below where it has been burning. The entire burning section is now on the ground. Ape tells me to dig a fireline. He hacks off branches with a pulaski, then stacks the green branches on the quiescent flames. The smoke thickens. He radios North Rim tower that we have arrived at the fire. I complete the line, and Ape continues to pile on more branches. The fire, which was nearly out, now flares and smokes heavily. North Rim tower calls to ask if there is a problem. The Park fire officer, Clyde, asks if we need an air tanker, some slurry, some advice. “No,” says The Ape. “We’re holding our own.” The fire rushes through the branches in sudden, gulping flames and sends up dense pockets of black-and-white smoke. The Ape lights his pipe. “Good fuckin’ work,” he says to me. Clyde has personally gone to Hopi tower to observe the smoke column puffing malignantly from the North Rim. He can have an air tanker up in minutes, he reminds us. It is now after 1700 hours, the start of overtime.

The Ape decides we should eat. In digging for my C rations, I unearth a bag of marshmallows. The Ape sees it and goes bananas. “It’s just a gag,” I explain. He insists that we cut some sticks. He squeezes a marshmallow down the point, locates a bed of red coals, and turns his hard hat around. We are just browning up the first batch when we hear a voice.

Rick trudges past our last flag. He is carrying a coffeepot, has carried it all the way from North Rim tower along our flagging. “After that fire flared up, I thought you boys could use some help,” he explains. “Thanks,” we say. “We’re doing just fine. Would you like a marshmallow?” Blankly, alternately staring at the smoking log and the pot, Rick shakes his head no. The fire has nearly expired; the large wood is much too wet to sustain combustion; only the oily branches, carefully prepared, could torch. We begin serious mop-up. It does not take long. Before he leaves we ask Rick to take a picture of our marshmallow toast. Trying to juggle coffeepot and camera, he quietly obliges.

When I return in early June the next summer, Ape asks me how the winter went.

I am driving the red powerwagon to the Inn. School had gone OK, but for months all I had thought about was the North Rim. For an instant I am caught between polysyllables and swearing and can’t say anything. “At least you learned to drive,” The Ape shouts. “Christ, you were fuckin’ awful.” “Yeah,” I say lamely, glancing out the open window. “It’s great to be back.”

But it doesn’t matter what I say or how I say it. The wind gusts, and my words vanish in its thundering rush through the pines.