Читать книгу Fire on the Rim - Stephen J. Pyne - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCHAPTER ONE
The Area
COME EARLY.
When you stand at Little Park, it does not matter how far, or for how long, or for what reasons you have been away. Everything outside the North Rim vanishes instantly. The cold air shakes you awake; your skin feels as if it has plunged into a mountain stream; lungs ache for breath at the high elevation; trees in the crystal air look as if they have been etched on glass. The scene shocks with recognition. The great, many-boled ponderosa, dead for centuries, still guards the Sublime Road. Every sinkhole in the swelling meadow has a story. Every cavity in the old road revives an instinct. Eight months seem like a weekend. The sense of freshness and familiarity is overpowering. There is only the North Rim.
And fire. Scan the snowpack at Little Park. If it is deep and furrowed, there will be no spring fire season, and fires will be coincidental, spasmodic, ignited peripherally around the points that outline the Canyon. But if, by mid-May, the snowpack is broken into floes and the meadow is braided with briskly running streams, the fires may come early, and they can enter into the interior. They will go to the heart. This year the ground is raw with dead grass, mud, and duff. There will be fires.
So come early. There is no feeling like it. There are ample jobs; there is a promise—a wild hope—that can leap chasms; there is an animal thrill as the crew builds and the fire danger escalates. The Rim erases the outside world. Snow gives way to smoke. Nothing else matters.
* * *
The fire is at Deer Creek, and there is not much that can be done. Jim and I greet 210—the Park helicopter—with a firepack, some handtools, canteens, sleeping bags, and a Mark III pump with accessories, all ransacked from the fire cache. It’s the best we can manage on short notice. The cache is in disarray. Unopened boxes, heaped late in the fall, collect like snowdrifts in corners; slip-on units hang from the ceiling like monstrous beeves; packs are scattered, rifled, and incomplete from winter pilfering; saws are unassembled and pulaskis unsharpened. Jim hastily tests the Mark III while the 210 is a distant speck over Oza Butte. We barely complete our enter-on-duty (EOD) papers before climbing into the helo. The fire will probably expire before we reach it. If not, the pump should give us an edge, and there are few occasions to use it properly on the waterless Rim. At least we have a fire.
We fly over Tiyo, The Dragon, Sublime, Rainbow Plateau, Powell Plateau, a topographic fugue of Rim peninsulas and Canyon gorges. Then we cross beyond the edge of our fire maps. Deer Creek is a narrow gorge, like an opened coffin, with springs gushing out of limestone and a creek that debouches into the Colorado River itself. The fire is below the springs in a floodplain of grass, rushes, mesquite, and cottonwoods—ignited by yet another river party, conscientiously burning its toilet paper. We land at a small knoll, an Indian ruin overlooking the creek, and agree to a pickup the next morning at 1000 hours. A handful of cottonwoods, probably hollow, puffs with sad smokes. The hot air of the Canyon cloys and suffocates.
The Mark III, lugged painfully to the creek, proves worthless, full of sinister, hopeless sputters. Methodically we attack the cottonwoods with pulaskis and shovels, until we suddenly realize that the fire—from somewhere, somehow—has crossed the stream. The scene explodes. Within minutes the fire races through reeds, shrubs, cacti, cottonwoods and across the narrow floodplain and up the rocky slopes. The rush and crackle of flame echo off the cliffs. The box canyon concentrates a convective column black with roiling smoke; fire lookouts from Flagstaff to the Arizona Strip report the towering column, rising angrily like a thunderhead; Dick Johnston, fire officer for the North Kaibab National Forest, sights the smoke while taking out the trash at his Fredonia home; two hikers, who just minutes previously painfully staggered down from Surprise Valley, scramble back up the trail with the agility of bighorn sheep. Then it ends. Within thirty minutes the fire has run its course. The head dies out amid the Tapeats sandstone, and there is nothing left but flaming trees and smoldering pack rat middens stuffed under boulders. A group of river rafters appears, also drawn by the awesome smoke, and wonders if the Park Service knows about the fire. “We are the Park Service,” Jim informs them.
Nightfall creeps over the gorge, and we retire to our camp at the ruins for a fitful sleep. The evening is oppressively hot, filled with the obnoxious odors of tamarisk and sour woodsmoke, and when we rise at dawn, haze hangs in the gorge like a prehistoric smog. We mop up scattered pockets of flame and smoke, more to keep ourselves busy than to control another outbreak. Jim surreptitiously tries, without the least success, to start the Mark III.
At 1000 hours, the helo has failed to show; at noon we eat the last of our rations; at 1400 hours, we slink off the knoll for the timid shade of a mesquite. Deep within Canyon gorges our radio is worthless. We are dead to the Park. Not until 1600 hours does 210 appear, delayed, the pilot explains, by assorted “river emergencies.” The helo rises, like a fluttering raven, out of the Canyon. The snowbanks under spruce and fir shock us back to life.
At the cache I grab some C rations for dinner, while Jim, readying the Mark III for storage, tries the starter rope once more. The pump coughs, rocks the cache with noise, and roars with a cacophony that could fill Transept Canyon. “Dammit,” he mutters. “Nothing at this place works except at this place.”
The smoke column rises from southeast of Cape Royal, near Lava Canyon, where the Colorado River makes its great bend to the west. Flames move briskly through desert grasses, shrubs, and scattered pinyons. The fire burns in a narrow canyon but will soon crest onto a broad terrace. If it continues it may spread through one of several brush-covered debris cones that span the vertical cliffs of the Redwall limestone; it could, conceivably, continue all the way to the Rim. Winds gust upslope in slow coughs.
Park fire officer McLaren orders fire retardant and requests a small crew from the North Rim. The “crew” will be an ad hoc group—a handful of recent regular fire crew arrivals, but mostly reserves, curious and untrained, who have been impressed into service from duties as garbage and fee collectors, a carpenter and plumber, even a ranger. The reserves are unenthused, and everyone is unacclimated. Even the regulars have only just arrived, and they have not yet unpacked their gear, which clusters on bunks like lichen-backed stones.
We begin arriving by helicopter around 0900 hours, store our firepacks amid a large rock outcrop, and throw dirt along the advancing flaming front. The grasses have the kindling temperature of Kleenex; even the prickly pears burn hot. No fireline needed here, only a vigorous perimeter of hot-spotting and cold-trailing—knocking down flames and using burned-out patches as a surrogate fireline. But the fire moves upslope through the rugged terrain much faster than we do. We will be saved only by the slurry. For nearly an hour a B-26 and a PB-4Y2 drop retardant, operating out of the retardant base at the South Rim airport. McLaren directs the drops from the Park helicopter. We follow behind the slimy trail of slurry, extinguishing flames that escape it or that burn under its pink patina. The helo brings in more firefighters and removes one, overcome by heat, back to the North Rim. When the B-26 shortens its return time and suddenly appears on a drop run directly over us, Wil and Dave take refuge behind some large sandstone boulders; the retardant cloud, in a slow, graceful vortex, swirls around the boulder and paints them pink. When finally contained, the fire totals 350 acres—a quarter mile wide and a mile and a half long.
Dave and Wil establish a small helispot, where 210 can land, then we fly the perimeter. At areas that need mop-up we drop off two-man teams, each with at least one regular fire crewman, along with shovels, saws, and fedcos. The chief problems are pack rat middens tucked around giant boulders and hollow-trunked junipers that can smolder for days and in a high wind throw sparks outside the old burn. While the scenery is spectacular—great fault blocks, bands of ancient lava, a topography of terrace and ravine, an unblinking desert sun—the heat is oppressive. Then 210 is called away to other Park duties, and, fully equipped, we climb on foot through the colossal silence. Mop-up slows. The reserves tire quickly; they have long since sweated away the flush of excitement; they want to go home. Around 1700 hours we fly them off the line and reposition a handful of fire crew regulars at another trouble spot. Two hours later the only smokes are safely within the deep interior of the burn. As the last crew departs, the Chuar fire—in the lee of a Canyon sunset—is engulfed by deep, cool shadows from the Rim.
Building 176 echoes with emptiness. Its screen door flaps in the evening winds. One by one we shower, open cans of beans, peaches, and beer, and throw sleeping bags on bunks. Dave searches for a fresh shirt and socks. I clean and oil my boots; the heat has baked them as stiff as sheet metal; ash, once wet, then fired, congeals like concrete. My left foot is blistered. Wil moves with studied deliberateness, his muscles as stiff as two-by-fours. Ralph and Joe should EOD tomorrow. We can unpack our gear tomorrow. Outside, winds from Rim and Canyon mix in black, noisy gusts.
Tomorrow we will open the fire cache.
THE CACHE
The great double doors draw open. Chilled morning air seeps through all four stalls. A winter’s mustiness rises, like an invisible steam, out of the cache.
The grime looks wonderful. I have come home. We all have. We are what we do, and the fire cache is where we do it—or where we start to do it. Fire season ends when, in the late fall, the cache is stuffed with the residue of one summer and the ordered goods for another, and fire season begins when, the next spring, the cache is again exhumed and revived. As often as not, we are dispatched to fires from within the cache or its annex, the Fire Pit. All backcountry roads (and all the roads of winter) lead to the cache. After fires are out, we clean up our gear in the cache. We begin workdays in the cache, and as often as not we go to the cache on our days off as well. We can live without a ranger station, without a resource management office, without Building 176, without a Grand Lodge, a North Rim Inn, a saloon; but we cannot survive without the cache.
There is a rough logic to excavating the fire cache. We take the bulk items first: oversize cartons of paper sleeping bags, cases of canteens, cotton hoses, twelve-packs of shovels and pulaskis, a small warehouse of postseason fire orders. Kent, The Kid, Gilbert, and I dump them willy-nilly on the asphalt outside the cache. The fitness trail paraphernalia goes next. We carry the stations—like miniature dinosaurs constructed of two-by-fours—behind the road shed until they can be set up in proper sequence. Next to them, under a white fir and a looming ponderosa, we stash the slatted sections of the hose drying rack; it will not be assembled until the snows melt. Right now our need is access to the cache; it has to be opened, emptied, and refilled.
So, after a winter away, do we. The cache is an exchange as much as a warehouse. Step across its threshold, and its crowded exhilaration will overwhelm whatever else you bring to it. The cache is inexhaustible and infinitely renewable. This is ritual as much as logic, and to make the renewal work, every item has to be touched, pondered, moved, reshelved, and allowed to crowd out a winter of remote experiences, distant thoughts, and abstract emotions. Rookie or returning veteran—the effect is the same. Already, as the day progresses, I begin to slough off one existence and take on another. Shovels replace pencils; firepacks displace books; chain saws and fedcos suppress lectures, television, magazines, malls, libraries. The fire cache is made for access: its bank of doors opens half the building at once. Through them we pass into the North Rim.
After the bulk items have been removed, we start on the smaller boxes. Each goes to one of the four stalls or bays that make up the cache. The tool stall on the north end is reworked first. Our firepacks hang on one wall, each pack framed by a wooden nameplate; racks of shovels, pulaskis, McLeods, flanked by sledges, peaveys, picks, and axes fill up another wall; on the third are spare tool handles, wedges, a vial of linseed oil, cans of black and red spray paint, stencils, hand files, sandpaper. Sprouting from the floor are a wood box, bristling with worn tools ready for conditioning; a tool jig, with grinder, leather apron, ear protectors, vises for securing tools while they are sharpened; a black box, now cold, that emits steam like a witch’s brew when it warms a green plastic goo that coats the sharpened edges of shovels and McLeods. Above are three flail trenchers liberated from the fire cache at Yellowstone. Progress is slow. We must re-equip each firepack and individually sort the usable tools from the unusable. On the floor, dominating nearly the whole of the stall, sit two slip-on pumper units of two hundred gallons each. As soon as the trucks are available, we will hoist the slip-ons using a chain block and tackle, back a truck underneath, and lower and bolt a slip-on to each bed. With the fireroads blockaded by snowbanks and mudholes, there is no urgency. We walk around and climb over the slip-ons. The logic of opening the fire cache is the logic of fire season: handtools and firepacks precede slip-ons; crewmen come before roads; fires, before project work.
It is hard to realize that the cache has a history. Its instincts are to rework and homogenize on an annual cycle, and it thus fits well the life cycle of a seasonal firefighter for whom two, perhaps three fire seasons may constitute a lifetime. That is one of the things that made my tenure at the North Rim anomalous: I returned for fifteen seasons. I came to the Rim when I was eighteen, shortly after graduating from high school. I spent four years at Stanford, returning to the Rim each summer, and in my fourth season—the youngest member of the crew—I was made foreman. I skipped my graduation ceremony to help open the cache and the fireroads, worked late into the fall to capture some prescribed burning, then started graduate school in January 1972 at the University of Texas in Austin. The ceremonies for master’s and doctoral degrees I bypassed, too; better to open a summer than to close a winter. I took my doctoral orals with my fire boots on and my car packed outside Garrison Hall, ready—win, lose, or draw—to hurry to the Rim and begin fire season. In the spring of 1977, amid a dizzying snowstorm on the North Rim, Sonja and I married. Meanwhile, I landed a cooperative agreement, a sort of bastard grant, from the History Office of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., and set about researching a history of wildland fire in America. For the academic year 1979–1980 I went to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina on a fellowship and wrote up a draft of my fire history; there our first child, Lydia, was born. Through it all I returned each summer to fire and the Rim. But finally I just got too broken down to haul my ass, a big saw, a firepack, and assorted handtools and canteens up the ridges. If I wanted to stay in fire, I would have to write; I would have to stock the fire cache with books. During my last season, 1981, as my first fire book inched toward publication, my back was a mess. By then I had accepted an appointment with the History Department at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that would send me for a season to Antarctica. I always knew that the question was never whether I would leave but when. Now it was decided. I had stayed as long as I could; I would trade fire for ice.
Kent and The Kid move to the next bay. The cache is a rectangular building originally constructed by the CCC as a temporary warehouse for storing road equipment. The lumber is rough, the lighting poor; a corrugated tin roof reverberates during thunder and hailstorms. Small, murky windows rim three sides, and the bank of double doors frames the fourth. Only after the fire crew was assigned the structure, during a forced relocation from the indigenous cache, did the Park pour a cement floor. The interior design is our own. The north bay houses the tool stall. Here we concentrate the daily tasks, firepacks, and handtools. But the smell and noise during midsummer are too fierce not to quarantine the bay partially with a wall, and it is accessible only from the double-doored front or a doorway to the adjacent stall—the less frequently used project fire stall. We want daily access, but we also want isolation.
In the project fire stall we store matériel not destined for daily use. The bay thus acts as a buffer between the tool stall and the rest of the cache. Scores of canteens fill elevated racks. Five-gallon cubitainers climb one wall like cardboard ivy. Fedcos and project firepacks for first aid, heliport management, and saw repair festoon the other. Army pack frames crowd a corner. Old fireroad signs decorate the doorway like a collage. As we open the winter deliveries, we substitute new for old, and a pile of discards grows outside the heavy double door. Gilbert and I move some new rations and sleeping bags to an enclosed room, mouse-proofed and locked, in the back. I toss paper sleeping bags into a small attic above the room. Everything goes; we will sort the good from the bad as needed. Later that afternoon The Kid and I will visit the ancient root cellar, accessed by a trapdoor, below the bedroom of the supervisory ranger’s house, where old rations, batteries, and other perishables (including handtools, which have a tendency to disappear) are stored over the winter. Some new crew mess kits are discovered, along with gas lantern mantles, long-range patrol rations, and fire shelters. But enough. The project fire stall can be straightened out on a rainy day. Kent and The Kid move to the primary work areas.
No wall segregates the two last bays from each other. Only a short shelf juts out like a jetty, and together the two bays make an all-purpose great room. Along one wall there is a workbench with wood and machine tools. Along another are storage shelves for assorted bulky items: the Mark III pumps and accessories, jerry cans for gas, GI surplus webbing harnesses for carrying canteens, saw supplies, whatever. There are cases of hard hats. One corner holds a chain saw bench; another, a wooden cabinet with flagging tape, headlamps, batteries, hydraulic appliances, assorted firepack necessities; a third, a ceiling-high rack for hoses; the last, a four-shelf cabinet for chain saws. The saw shop is more elaborate and self-contained—our concession to high tech—but it is far from functional. Boxes of winter-ordered parts pile around the dark workbench like mushrooms pushing through pine litter. On the bench are an electric grinder and a chain breaker and a can of oil with several seasoning chains; other chains hang in clusters from pegs like mistletoe; individual saw kits, destined for firepacks, are scattered across the bench like windfall. A surplus military field desk holds endless screws, spare parts, instruction manuals, specialty repair tools. Overhead dangles a fluorescent light, constantly bumped and swaying.
Steadily we unburden the great room of its congestion. The miscellaneous residue finds its way to shelves, or to other sheds, or to the asphalt outside until we can determine what it is and why we have it. A few bulky items are hoisted to planks crossing the joists that make a surrogate attic. A case of back-firing flares—fusees—goes to the flammables shed, a flimsy metal structure behind the warehouse that houses gas, saw mix, oil, drip torches, and flamethrowers. The outside saw bench, where we clean saws after daily use before storing them in the saw cabinet, is buried under old and new snow. We will dig it out later. The structural fire cache in another building we ignore. Kent plugs in a coffeepot, and Gilbert scrounges some spare packets of “Coffee, Instant, Type II” from the rations.
Yet there is more. A fire cache abhors a vacuum. Everything, it seems, sinks to the Lower Area and eventually finds its way, deliberately or coincidentally, to the fire cache, the great mandala of the Rim. Everything comes and goes in a grand recycling. The great room acquires quasi-permanent furnishings. Two metal lockers discarded by maintenance are eagerly scavenged and installed; a weight lifting bench appears alongside the saw cabinet; a punching bag hangs from a rafter. Some trash we haul to the Boneyard, some to the warehouse on CCC Hill. The cache is thus eclectic and plentiful; everything almost—but not quite—fits its purpose. For all its congestion it is profoundly utilitarian. A good fire cache learns everything and forgets everything. And all of it is grimy with oil and dust, coated with memory like pine pollen.
Coated, not stored. Unlike the tools and packs and fedcos, memories cannot be kept in steady state, removed like rations or restocked like shovels. The fire cache does not save the past. It reworks it, and by using the past, it continually converts past into present. But the rhythm of the cache—the cycle of fire season—is only one of several rhythms that affect us. There is also the cycle of a seasonal career, and it imposes a slightly larger rhythm upon the rhythm of annual renewal. To these I have added a third.
My longevity as a smokechaser on the North Rim was unprecedented. I even predated the existing fire cache. It is not uncommon for someone to remain somewhere in the fire community for as long as I did, but it is rare to spend those years all in the field. I experienced the annual fire cycle fifteen times, and I passed through the career cycle perhaps five times. For me, season must play against history. The opening of the cache is the opening of a Great Season.
Now, even after a day of housecleaning, the air is rank and heavy and suffused with a faint, sour odor of old woodsmoke. Memory mixes with hope. It is as though I have never left.
* * *
As 210 lifts off, we see several large thunderheads. We skirt them, yet it is apparent that they are moving in the same direction we are, that they are marching to the northeast, to Nankoweap Basin. Overhead arcs a magnificent double rainbow.
The fire is about fifty acres in size, flaring up a very steep slope in typical Canyon desert fuels. The helo delicately deposits King and me upslope from the fire, not truly landing but hovering on a small terrace under full power, perched like a raven on an outcrop, then quickly lifts off. Even as we knock down some flames at the head, it is obvious that two firefighters with handtools will not contain the fire. But this early in the season—preseason, really, with only fires in the Canyon—two are all we are. Suddenly, however, as we throw dirt along the flaming front, I realize that the onrushing storm contains a solution. The rain will not reach the Canyon bottom—it will evaporate into virga long before then—but the cascading winds will pour down the Canyon. The lower flank of the fire perimeter, now quiet, will soon become a new head.
We scramble to the bottom of the ravine and extinguish every flame. No fireline here, just a chain of linked hot-spotting, made rapid by the loose, sandy soils. The scheme works. Winds blow down the Nankoweap like a flume; the upslope flames are driven back into the burned area and expire; the lower corner is already dead cold. In fewer than two minutes, the Rainbow fire is out.
King leads as we trudge up the talus and select a campsite not far from our landing site. The fiery flush is gone, and I feel heavy sweat build up under my fireshirt. A parade of thunderheads washes through Nankoweap Basin and sweeps out across the Painted Desert. Sun and storm mingle among buttes and gorges. We search through our firepacks, extract a double meal of C rations—leftovers from last autumn—and pluck out our headlamps. The clouds transfigure the sunset into a colossal alpenglow. King fashions two fusees into a makeshift stove. Cloud and sun glide by us in grand rhythms, until the Plateau casts a deepening shadow, a false night, and evening winds slough off the Rim and pass over us—two busy ants—on their way east.
THE PIT
Kent wrestles with the lock, which is sluggish, perhaps rusted from the winter. The sky clouds, and without sun the day turns suddenly chilly. The Kid squirts some graphite into the lock, then Kent tries the key again. The door opens to a small room, part of the maintenance warehouse that stands next to (but some distance from) the fire cache. Above the door is a routed wooden sign that reads FIRE PIT.
Beyond the first doorway is a second—this one with the door removed—and beyond that is a small, narrow room, lighted from a bank of dingy windows. Here we do our paperwork, hold what pass for conferences, and congregate for dispatching. The managerial revolution demands that “managers,” even if they are fire crew foremen, have offices, and the Fire Pit is our ambivalent response. It is an imperfect weld between fire and bureaucracy. As much of the outdoors as possible has been brought inside. Its interior is a bizarre syncretism of the utilitarian and the whimsical, informed by neither logic nor history, defiantly untamable. The double entryway makes an anteroom known as the Arm Pit, while to the rear is a mouse-proofed storage room, once used to house hardware for mountain rescue operations, but now dedicated to items like fireshirts and firepants, gloves, batteries, fire maps, and compasses. Between front and rear there is barely room to walk. Crowded into the Pit are an oil heater, forcibly joined to an ancient brick chimney, which rises through the middle of the room; a metal government-issue grey desk, squatting glumly in a corner and piled with soiled fireshirts and gloves; a chair from the Lodge, its wicker unraveling; a dilapidated wooden bench, irrationally salvaged from the Boneyard; milk cans stenciled with FIRE in red letters; a giant round of pine, the only remainder of a huge ponderosa that once glowered over the flight path of the North Rim heliport but is now known fondly as the Base of a Big Yellow Pine after a favorite expression of McLaren, the Park fire officer; some scraps of carpet discards on the floor. The Kid turns on the oil heater, without effect; the drum outside is empty. Kent searches for a coffeepot.
The walls are saturated with fire paraphernalia. There are dispatching maps for the North Rim and the North Kaibab Forest, and a Federal Aviation Administration flight map of the Grand Canyon, all covered with Plexiglas. A trellis of clipboards posts biweekly tours of duty, requisition needs, helicopter schedules, work projects. There are posters of Smokey Bear, lightning, a pinup advertising Husqvarna chain saws; there are photos of former crews, our Hall of Flame; a slab of aspen, sheared longitudinally and routed with red letters that read NEVER GIVE A INCH. Above the desk hangs a square sign constructed from scrap plywood, with a metal button (scavenged from a government-issue brown metal cabinet); a large arrow that points to the button has been routed out with the caption “Lightning Button. Press for Fire.” Elsewhere, mounted on wood, are a pair of photos, one from 1936 when the fire cache was opened, and another, forty years later, with FCAs taking the place of CCC enrollees but with the vehicles and arrangements otherwise identical.
The Kid opens the windows, but the only effective fumigation is smoke. From the floor Kent picks up a ball of flagging tape—the “Dragon Flaggin’,” recovered from the great Dragon fire—and places it on a shelf labeled FCA Musuem. There are other trophies: a pulaski coated with slurry on one side and charred on the other that Alston recovered from the Sublime fire; the lucky turkey feather that guided Rethlake across Powell Plateau; a memorial plaque, signed by Park and Forest crews after the Circus fire; a two-foot bronze nozzle, discovered in a dark corner of the structural fire cache, now the John Smokechaser Award; a metal Log Cabin syrup can; a Mickey Mouse hard hat; a motorcycle helmet with drip torch nozzle and fusees bristling out of it; and the wooden sign itself, FIRE MUSUEM, whose misspelling instantly qualified it for inclusion. Mementos flood the wall. For a seasonal crew—for a migrant folk society like ours whose collective memory is brutally short—this omnium-gatherum of artifacts is our surest record of the past. If the cache tells us who we are, the Pit tells us who we have been. Outside the window stands our fire totem, a fire-sculptured snag brought back from Walhalla and planted as a sentinel.
In a perfect world the Pit would be located in the cache, but the Pit has two items that the cache lacks—a base station radio and a telephone—and the need to connect with an audience other than the fire crew. Distance from the fire cache is part of the price we pay for communication with the outside world. The Pit must syncopate the rhythms of bureaucracy and fire, Rim and Park. Alienation from the cache is more annoying than dysfunctional. We can shout from the door of the Pit to the doors of the cache, but we can speak to the Park only through radios, phones, and official forms.
Its real distance from the cache lies in its bureaucratic role. With its great battery of double doors, it is the character of the cache to open, to let mounds of matériel and throngs of firefighters pass through, in and out, day and night, season after season. Not so with the Pit. Its double entryway emphasizes that this is a place where things stay in or stay out, that it exists outside the mainstream of real firefighting. If the cache is a portal to the Rim, the Pit is a portal to the Park.
The Pit is less an office than a way station. It is too transient, too empirical, too filled with the minutiae and trophies of life in the woods; it tries to build from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It expresses how a fire crew would connect to a parent bureaucracy, not how a bureaucracy would choose to connect to its fire crew. Supervisory rangers don’t like to enter it. The Pit is cold, rudely fashioned, less comfortable than the woods; and that is how we like it. The Kid reads aloud a poem scrawled in longhand and posted over the desk.
Sittin’ in the Pit
Feelin’ like shit
There’s somethin’ I’m supposed to do
But I can’t think of it.
Sittin’ in this chair
Breathin’ in the air
There’s somethin’ I forgot to do
And it’s causin’ me despair.
Walk around the cache
Pickin’ up the trash
There’s something I just got to do …
But fuck it.
Kent discovers the coffeepot under a soiled fireshirt and plugs it in. I step out the door and yell to Gilbert to bring some ration coffee from the cache. The air is damp and chilled, alien to fire. We find chairs or chair surrogates and accept the nostalgia of fires remembered and the more powerful nostrum of fires promised.
But already we feel the distance from the cache. “We gotta get out on the roads,” Kent says. “Yeah,” The Kid agrees. “And when the hell are we gonna get a fire?”
Three times during the past week observers on the South Rim have reported a smoke near Bright Angel Point. There are six inches of fresh snow on the ground with one to two feet of old snow in the denser woods. The reports are viewed with skepticism until a routine helicopter flight sees, then flies over, the source—a puffing, live white fir on the Uncle Jim Point trail. Our own Uncle Jimmy and E.B. begin the hike in. For more than an hour they crash through snowbanks. The sky has glossed over with filmy cirrus; it is impossible to discriminate between sky and smoke; they ask for assistance. Recon 1 guides them painfully to the smoldering snag. The tree is huge, alive, hollow, and rotten at the top. From the ground they can locate no smoke, much less flame. Convinced that the fire can only go out, they leave it alone. A week later the fire is still simmering and actually ignites some freshly exposed fuel on the ground. Uncle Jimmy and E.B. return to fell the tree.
The amount of sound wood in the interior bole is uncertain. They assess the lean of the tree, determine the preponderance of branches on each side, and check the wind, which fills the canopy like a sail. Uncle Jimmy cuts, while E.B., flapping his arms to keep warm, spots, ready to swat embers that might rain down. A few flakes of white ash settle on snowbanks. Their feet are numb with cold. Clouds of smokey snow billow upward as the tree brushes past others, then crashes to the ground. They extinguish the fire by stuffing the hollow interior with snow. The stump is composed wholly of sound heartwood—only the top is rotten. Not for another week, when they can travel across newly exposed rock and mud, do they return to the fire and officially declare it out.
Back at the Fire Pit, as they fill out their report, E.B. remarks that the coffeepot put out more heat than the Whoopie fire. “Yeah,” agrees Uncle Jimmy, searching the DI-1530 for a code small enough to enter the estimated fire acreage. “But you don’t get overtime for drinking coffee.”
176
It is a short walk—no more than a hundred feet—from the Fire Pit to Skid Row.
We amble to Building 176 for lunch. The screen door hangs up on a rock, half open and half closed. The whole cabin has sunk since it was constructed in the mid-1930s as temporary officers’ quarters for a CCC camp, and the doors cannot clear easily. Kent kicks the screen door open. The front door also sticks, this time on a bulge of ancient linoleum, which rests on a foundation stone. This door, too, can be neither closed nor opened completely.
The cabin is partitioned into three rooms. The front room combines a kitchen, a sofa, and an oil furnace into something slightly larger than a shoe box; a middle section houses a bathroom of sorts, while the hallway swells into an open bedroom; the rear room, added decades later, makes a larger bedroom. I live in the middle room, which is really a broad passageway to a shower and toilet that joins an overheated front room with a frozen rear room. When the rear room was occupied by three rookies, it was dubbed the Nursery. When the Cosmic Cowboys—Lenny, Dan, and Charlie—claimed the rear room, they converted it into a miniature Gilley’s. To compensate for the front door, which won’t close, the rear door won’t open.
Once considered prime real estate in the Area, the string of cabins of which 176 is a constituent is unable to compete with the sleek modernism of giant house trailers trucked in by the Park Service. The cabins have become known as Skid Row and assume the role of a slum, fit only for seasonals. Four fire crewmen now live in 176, and another crewman resides next door in 175. The great virtue of 176 is that it is a stone’s throw from the cache. In 176 we eat and sleep and do little else.
No one assumes the least responsibility for upkeep. The sink spills out dishes; it bubbles bad odors, grease, and cups like a mud geyser; our sink, a friendly visitor observes in midsummer, is getting “very ripe.” Our bathroom, another notes, smells as if Ralph’s pickup truck took a shower in it. The back bedroom begins to resemble the kitchen. From time to time we clean up. We will not allow the situation to deteriorate to the state that 155 reached one summer, when it was necessary at the end of the season to clean it out with road brooms and shovels.
Dominating the kitchen, which dominates the cabin, is its wooden table, three feet by two feet in size. Inevitably there is a problem with doors. On one side the front door opens into the table, and on the other, the refrigerator door does. The refrigerator, moreover, has a reverse handle so that it opens first along the wall, then into the table; this means that it can be opened fully only with effort and never when the table is occupied. The table is equally obstructive to both doors, but there is nowhere else to put it, and we cannot do without it. The table itself is constantly, indifferently littered with debris. A random inventory discovers a hammer, a pipe wrench, a can of shaving cream, crumpled aluminum foil, salt and pepper shakers liberated from the Inn, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce, a pocketknife, a gas cap, a harmonica, a measuring cup, an apple, dirty dishes, granola, cartons of instant milk, a three-year-old copy of Life magazine, a box of Kleenex, Scientific American, napkins, dirty silverware, a potholder, an onion, a mostly empty pitcher of Kool-Aid, crackers, a can of beans, paper plates, homemade bread, and an indeterminate patch of sticky goo (probably honey and maple syrup). With appropriate shufflings, we eat on the table, play cards on it, and rebuild carburetors. On it I write the last two chapters of my doctoral dissertation.
The truth is that 176 is a bivouac, not a home. It is another place we move into and out of. Built on one pattern, then modified with ad hoc amendments; designed for one purpose, then applied for another; used, not lived in; and moved through, not truly inhabited—176 is the perfect residence for a fire crew. We don’t work on the North Rim because we live here; we live here because there is work to do, and the nature of that work, firefighting, dictates every part of our existence. Our cabin is little more than a detached annex to the fire cache, and we could sooner do without it than without the cache. Even on lieu days a crewman is more likely, after sleeping in (if he can), to hang around the cache than the cabin. That is the way we want it, and we treasure 176 as much for what it is not—which would divert us from what really matters—as for what it is.
What improvements there are take place outdoors. Outside the front door stands a concrete and rebar fireplace extracted from the Boneyard. Beyond the back door a brick-lined pit designed to accommodate a Dutch oven, in which Lenny makes his exquisite peach cobbler, points to the Rim. A wooden picnic table oscillates between the front and rear of the cabin. With a chain saw Dan carves two five-foot trunks of ponderosa into mock thrones. Cars park on both sides of the cabin. The Rim of Transept Canyon breaks open no more than thirty yards behind us, and the sun sets routinely across the Canyon, our backyard. It is a point of honor—a moral imperative—that we have a campfire in the evening.
When Hopi tower reports the smoke, it is no more than a pencil-thin column that scatters above the tree canopy into a diffuse plume. Booby and Vic hurriedly outfit a pumper, grab some packs, and drive north. No fireroads have been opened within the Park, so they plot an elaborate detour through the Forest. They are the only regular fire personnel available so early on the Rim—Booby as a seasonal firefighter and Vic as the new ranger supervisor. It is the first fire of the season, and they can almost taste the adrenaline.
The smoke thickens, builds, and rises. As Park fire officer, Clyde struggles to organize a recon. Booby and Vic drive steadily onward. They veer around some logs, cut others, pause at signs stripped by the winter. They are still deep in the Forest. The fire is an acre in size. Everything is unusually dry; and Rainbow Plateau—a peninsula surrounded on three sides by canyon—is exceptionally dry. It is a fire to kill for. The fire torches some trees. Clyde requests the Park dispatcher to ask the Forest dispatcher for the location of the nearest air tanker. It is only noon, and the fire continues to escalate. Black smoke erupts like a gushing well as flame enters the oily crowns of ponderosa; surface fires flash through scrub oaks and heavy litter like surf striking a rocky shore. Clyde orders a retardant drop from an air tanker stationed at Prescott, while Booby and Vic, temporarily mired in a mud puddle on a stretch of Forest road just outside the Park boundary, stare with longing and frustration at the Shinumo Gate. They extricate themselves with a winch.
The fire is now about ten acres; with a long burning period ahead of it, the fire will probably proceed to the Rim and up the peninsula. Clyde requests a helicopter; Booby and Vic struggle with the rusted lock at the Shinumo, finally break the chain, and enter the Park. They continue to dodge trees where possible and cut them where they must. The helicopter locates a landing site not too far from the fire, but there is a much better helispot possible along the Rim if a few trees are dropped—a chore quickly done. Within an hour it is possible to begin ferrying firefighters from either North or South Rim to the fire. Booby and Vic stop the pumper near Swamp Lake. Rainbow Plateau is due south. They study their fire map, realize that the plateau tilts downward from east to west, and wisely elect to hike along the eastern Rim; even so, there are three substantial ravines to cross. They seize packs, tools, and canteens and begin to flag a route south. The fresh personnel landed by the helo work a flank of the fire. The air tanker, a B-17, arrives, drops its load along the most active perimeter, then departs for the retardant base at Grand Canyon airport for another tank of slurry. Many more people will be needed. The fire is twenty acres and growing as it wishes. The smoke column is visible to all the regional lookouts. Clyde orders three SWFF crews. The fire flashes over Emerald Point and expires in midair as it sweeps into the void of the Canyon. Booby and Vic thrash through vicious meadows of locust. Not yet acclimated to the high elevation of the Rim, panting from both exhaustion and anxiety, they listen helplessly to their radio, a constant buzz of voices, a flaming rush of shouts, chain saws, aircraft. Hopi tower reports another fire farther west.
Clyde makes a pointless recon, for it is discovered later that Hopi tower, manned for the summer by the music teacher from Grand Canyon High School, has reported the sunset over Mount Trumbull as a fire. Meanwhile, Booby and Vic catch whiffs of smoke. They can hear the helicopter, then chain saws, then voices, shouts. They tie their last flag at the helispot, now piled high with matériel. Within a couple of hours the SWFF crews—Hispanics from New Mexico, tough and regimented—will trample over their flagged route to the helispot at Violet Point. The route will become a trail. When the SWFFs arrive, the local crews will be released.
Booby and Vic grab canteens and shovels and wander in the direction of the noise. They want to find someone to report to before they are released. They would like to see the Emerald fire, and darkness is coming fast.
“IF YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE …”
Our sense of geography enlarges slowly and empirically. It begins with a nuclear core of work stations and gradually expands, like a tree branching outward, to encompass the Rim. Skid Row, the maintenance shops, the gas pumps, the mule barn, the galleria of mid-scale managerial shops are added to the Greater Cache to form the Lower Area. The ranger station (a.k.a. “the Office”) and a cluster of upscale housing constitute the Upper Area. Here the administrators of the Rim congregate, and here there are frequent contacts with Park visitors.
The entrance road passes near the Office on its way to a terminus at Grand Lodge, somewhat over a mile distant. Between the Park Service Area and the Lodge are side roads that lead to the North Rim Inn, the campground, the garage, the wranglers’ quarters and mule barn, the ball park. We know the fire cache well and the Area somewhat less well. We know the Rim only as we encounter it during the course of our work—which is to say, where fireroads and fires take us. We know the Canyon from scattered fires that occur within it. Our interest varies by a kind of inverse-proportion square law. The Lodge can be reconstructed—is reconstructed—and the Inn can be rededicated as a store, and the changes affect us hardly at all. But when Horace Wilson bulldozes the heliport into dust, when the fire cache is relocated, when the storage sheds where we used to park the pumpers are converted to a galleria of clapboard offices, we are outraged. This is sacred space. It is our connection to fire.
In the great room of the cache there is a routed sign that reads IF YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE, YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE. After a few weeks even rookies no longer have to ask what it means. At best the cache is a portal; at worst, a sink. “The Area” becomes an expression of opprobrium. Rangers work in the Area. Offices, not fires, populate the Area. The Area exists because there is a source of water (Roaring Springs) to exploit, not because there are fires. The Area is staffed to serve the visitor.
This is the dichotomy that divides the North Rim into two realms: you work either in the Area or out of the Area. Every job apart from ours relates directly or indirectly to the Park visitor, and that compels everyone else to stay in the Area because this is where the visitors cluster. If there were no visitors, there would be no Office, no Lodge, no Inn, no campground, no paved highway or overlooks, no saloon, no sewage treatment plant; there would be no park rangers, no ranger naturalists, maintenance laborers, carpenters, plumbers, road workers, no supervisors. But we could pass an entire summer and never contact a visitor in an official capacity. We could be stationed anywhere on the Rim. We are informed by fire—by fires that originate from lightning, not from people; by work that puts us in contact with the forest and the rolling ravines of the North Rim, not with visitors or with the Canyon to which they come to gaze; by events that cannot be forecast with managerial precision prior to their occurrence, that can only frustrate career tracks and budgets. Fire is eclectic, ineradicable, invasive, stochastic, opportunistic, fun—and its attributes become ours.
Our status within the Park Service, and our place within the Park, are extraordinary. No one knows exactly where to position us within the organizational geography of the Park, or where to place the cache and the Pit within the functional geography of the Area. No one knows what to call us, what kind of uniform (if any) we ought to wear, what we should do and how we ought to do it. We are creatures of the Rim at a time when the River, not the Rim, defines the political geography of the Park. We manage by opportunity, not by objective. We are at once irrelevant and irrefutable, the fire weeds of the Park Service, thorny locusts in an otherwise open glade of ponderosa. We fit nowhere, and if we stay in the Area, we cannot survive as a fire crew. If you don’t get outta here, you don’t survive.
* * *
“I can’t write the report,” says Mac.
“It’s easy.” I shrug. “You just look up the codes in the manual, fill in the blanks, and sign it. No report, no fire. No fire, no pay. That’s just the way it is.” Mac shakes his head. “The manual won’t help. What happened isn’t in the manual. I’ll tell you what happened.
“The original smoke report came from the Forest Service. Their fire recon guy—Observer 1, they call him—well, he wasn’t even close. He might as well have flown over the Dixie as the Kaibab. They don’t know the Park. He mistakes Big Springs Canyon for Kanabownits Canyon. So Tim and I drive down W-4, which has not yet been opened, and we have to clear it as we go. Just enough to get through.
“The Forest Service guy says to go half a mile beyond W-6, then take a compass bearing of 97 degrees. I don’t think he corrected for declination. I don’t know. We walked for over an hour, all of it across ridges and ravines. There is nothing there to sight on. There’s nothing—no placenames, no landmarks, no roads; maybe no fire. Nothing works. Typical early-season fire. Call it the Shakedown fire.
“So I request Recon 1, and we walk back and pull our flagging and wait at the pumper. Well, it’s getting dark. Recon finally arrives and circles for what seems like hours and then gives us a mixed set of directions. Waste of time. You can’t mix geography and mathematics. You follow a ravine or you take a bearing, but you don’t do both. Anyway, you forget after a winter. So recon has us park the pumper at this drainage and then tells us to follow it east. OK. We are supposed to come to a bend, then another bend. At this second bend we are supposed to find a fallen log in a small meadow, and on the south slope there is a grove of aspen. At the aspen we are supposed to follow a bearing of 162 degrees. This should get us to a small clearing on the ridge. Then he wants us to climb up the ridgetop for another quarter mile. ‘The fire is burning at the base of a big yellow pine.’ We can’t miss it.
“You can see this coming. It’s dark by the time we reach the second bend. Or maybe it’s the third. Or the fourth. The whole drainage is a tangle of bends and oxbows. There are logs in all of them. The whole south slope is covered with aspen. So I figure, ‘Fuck it. The fire’s somewhere on the ridge. We just hike up the slope and follow the ridgeline until we come to the smoke.’ Besides, it’s getting dark. We get out our headlamps. I’m hungry as hell, but I figure we can eat when we get to the fire. I’m tired. I haven’t been up on the Rim but three days, and I got a bad case of Kaibab emphysema.
“So we climb up. Tim’s heaving for air. We use our shovels as walking sticks. The canteens hang below our chests and clang like cowbells. What a comedy. We get to the ridge, and we walk up it. We walk all the damn way to the summit. We don’t see anything. It’s pitch-black. We’re sweating like hogs. So we drop the gear, sit down on a log, and eat rations. Haven’t a clue where the fire is. But I reason we can walk back down the ridge to W-4. If the fire is on the ridge, we have to find it. Right?
“Forget it. It’s about eleven when we reach the pumper. We drive back to the Area. I still have my wash sitting in the laundromat, so I dump the wet clothes in the dryer and eat, and in the morning we set off at seven. This time we get a compass bearing, and we walk to the fire. Ridgetop, my ass. Well, I knew—just knew—we’d be sent traipsing around the countryside again, so we didn’t flag. The fire was a mess. The snag had pretty much burned through, but there was quite a patch of surface fire and a lot of mop-up. We could be there for maybe a couple of days. You and Charlie were on the Preamble fire, but there was nothing else going on, so I asked for some help with mopping. Big Bob, the BI himself, and Holden, that new seasonal ranger, came out.
“But how we gonna get them in to the fire? Neither one of them can compass worth a damn. So I send them up a drainage just below the fire; the ravine goes all the way to W-4. Or it seems to if I got the fire located right. We had a lot of logs to buck up and figured to run the saw pretty much continuously. Let ’em hike up the draw. If they don’t see the smoke from the morning inversion, they’ll hear the saw. Well, they don’t see anything or hear anything. I think they took the wrong draw. They get on the radio and ask us if the saw is running. Of course it’s running, which means we can’t hear the radio. Well, eventually we hear them, and they want us to run the saw. So I send Tim up and down the ridge with the saw running—a complete waste of time. These guys are lost. I mean, they’re out in the Twilight Zone. So I keep Tim revving up the Big Mac, and I run some flagging tape—a continuous roll—across the ravine. There’s no way they can miss it. The place is looking like a goddamn carnival. I run another set of flags over the ridgetop and down the ravine on the other side. Then I just sort of wander around. It’s like a Brownian movement. Eventually we run into one another and collect at the fire. Big Bob nearly passes out under a tree. Holden is willing; he used to be a logger and got on some fires in the Sierras. Holden, Tim, and I mop up like mad the rest of the afternoon. We won’t get it done, but it’ll be good enough to leave at night. And it is night when we get ready to pack up. We leave the full canteens and a fedco and some handtools. Holden and the BI of course didn’t bring any headlamps, and the batteries in mine are weak. Then the great debate. How we gonna get back?
“I want to compass back to our pumper. But Tim doesn’t trust the compass, and Holden and the BI want to go to their vehicle, not ours. We decide to follow a ravine out. We take the flagging to the south ravine. We can’t see a fucking thing. I walk a little ahead of Tim, and Holden and the BI walk one to each side. The bottoms of the meadows are a mess, totally trashed—spruce, fir, aspen. The smoke hangs there, and the light from the headlamp scatters. It’s nearly worthless. No moon. And it’s wet. The damn inversion is forming. My headlamp gives out. Everything seems familiar and nothing seems familiar. Every place looks like every other place. We reach the road around midnight. So where’s the pumper? Any pumper?
“We split up. Tim and I go north, and the two bozos go south. Sooner or later one of us will come to a vehicle. Whoever finds a pumper will drive back to pick up the other guys and look for the second pumper. We don’t get back in the Area until 3:00 A.M. Holden and the BI parked their pumper somewhere; I don’t know where, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Maybe their map was bad. We were lucky to find them. Now that I think about it maybe we were unlucky.
“So Tim and I hike in the next day—our basic compass bearing—and we mop up and carry everything out. I’ll be damned if I’m going back in twenty-four hours to check for smokes. It’s out. If it isn’t out, I’ll wait until it comes to find me. Anyway, the BI says his time is too valuable to waste on any more snag fires.
“Now how the hell do you put this in a report? Just where do you find all this stuff in the manual? Where are the codes for running up and down a ridge with a chain saw and flagging tape? I’m not even sure I could draw a map. Where are the codes for wandering around the goddamn woods all night? What the hell does it matter what fuel model burned? ‘Elapsed time,’ my ass! You write the report. Find it in the book. Try it. I’ll give you a bearing.
“OK, OK, I’ll fill out the forms. But you know what I think? I think we need a new book. Our own book. A North Rim book.”
TASTE OF ASHES
There is something wrong in the Pit.
We sense it as soon as we pry the winter lock open. There is something missing; no, not just some thing but a feeling. Wil points to a space where the Base of a Big Yellow Pine used to be. The bench and milk cans are gone. The Musuem is gutted. Most of our photos are stripped from the walls. The BI has cleaned out the Pit. Now that the resource management office is complete—now that he has a proper office with electric heaters, venetian blinds, fake paneling, carpeting, a ritzy location within the new galleria of mid-level managers—the Fire Pit will be decommissioned. It is an act of bureaucratic vandalism.
For years our position within the Park has deteriorated, and the winter gutting of the Pit is a culmination, not a novelty. When the original fire cache was inaugurated in 1936, its double stalls—one for forest fire and one for structural fire—opened onto the major crossroads of the Area. Until the late 1960s, the fire crew remained the largest in size, and its mission—with the exception of actual lifesaving—the most vital to the Park. But that mission has been abandoned, without establishing an adequate surrogate; the fire crew diminishes in size, and other divisions increase dramatically in numbers; fire management is transferred from agency core to periphery. The fire cache is relocated to its present site between the warehouse and the mule barn. The old forest fire stall is reconditioned for an ambulance and mountain rescue apparatus—ranger operations. And rangers—the quintessential people managers—assume control over the Rim. Rangers turn the fire cache into a logistical slush fund and oversee a steady hemorrhage of tools, canteens, headlamps, hiking equipment.
What is fantastic is that this final act of vandalism has come from the top, not from the bottom. The brutality and cowardice and pettiness by which it has been perpetrated leave us speechless, then angry, then resigned, and finally indifferent. For us, fires are indispensable; the Pit is not. We need a future more than we need a past.
“OK, OK,” Joe laughs, magnanimously, cunningly. “Forget it. They can’t stop the fires from coming.”
The storm rises in the South and begins depositing lightning everywhere. We watch, disgusted and unbelieving, as a smoke curls up from the South Rim. A recon is mounted. There is a fire on Powell, near Dutton Point. Kent and Tyson race off, oblivious to the knowledge that they face a long drive and a longer walk. A second smoke is sighted deep in the Iron Triangle, near the abandoned E-1 fireroad; Randy, eager for overtime, takes a rookie; the fire, he calculates, will be simple. A third smoke, faint and remote, rises out of the Poltergeist Forest south of the Sublime Road. Alston takes Johnny Begaye and Howard Tsotsie, two SWFFs.
Recon 1 circles lazily over the remainder of the Rim, dodging thunderheads, biding time and watching for smokes. Alston enters the Sublime Road. Recon 1 powers back to give him a bearing—187 degrees magnetic, 202 degrees corrected—before departing for the South Rim.
Loaded for bear, Randy hikes up E-1. “The fire is to the north, left, at the third large log across the old road. Just up a little hill from there,” he remembers Recon saying.
Alston climbs into his firepack, while the SWFFs take a pack, a saw, and a fedco. Methodically, Alston adjusts his compass, smokes a cigarette, and begins to flag a route in. Two ridges. The compass hangs from a button on his fireshirt. Every twenty yards or so he takes a new reading, walks to an object in his line of sight, backsites his old flagging, and adds a new flag.
Kent and Tyson, another SWFF, reach Swamp Point. They see no smokes in the vicinity of Dutton Point. Since there are tools cached at the Powell helispot, they elect to take only firepacks and canteens across Muav Saddle. They check their map. The surface relief of Powell Plateau dips sharply from east to west; if they stay on the eastern Rim, they will cross the fewest ravines. There is no need to bring sleeping bags. They will work all day, all night if necessary.
Randy has reached the third log. The ridge is at least one hundred fifty feet above him, but he cannot see it through the dense forest. His crew hop and climb like enormous beetles over downed spruce, over branches, trunks, windfall; they move in slow motion, as though they have entered another planet whose gravity is twice, three times that of the earth. Branches tear their carefully balanced packs. Still, they climb on, blindly and always uphill.
The SWFFs follow Alston wordlessly. He halts, backsites, pulls out another cigarette. They have walked for more than a mile and a half, he estimates. Early in the season the large fuels are still wet. Plenty of time for a cigarette. May is a season for patience.
Kent and Tyson plunge down into Dutton Canyon, the great drainage, overgrown with scrub oak and locust, that segregates Dutton Point from the rest of Powell Plateau. There is no other route across the towering mesa. Overhead the midday sun glares tauntingly. Soon they will arrive at the fire; the narrowing geography of the Point will draw them irresistibly to any fire. There is no way the fire can escape them.
Randy concludes that they have reached the ridgetop. But there is no fire and no smoke; there is only an opaque forest of Engelmann spruce and white fir. Randy slumps down, crouching against a log to hold up his pack; he scans his map; he flips a coin. “Heads we go north,” he announces to the uncomprehending forest. “Tails, south.” The squad flounders north; after about fifty yards they see the fire—a flaming snag, half a dozen burning large logs, smoldering duff a foot thick, everything arranged to resemble the aftermath of a tornado. Maniacally, panicky, Randy scrambles around the site. Where, where, he screams, is the goddamn dirt?
So intent is Alston on his bearing that he hardly hears the SWFFs. “Kq’! Kq’! The fire!” He looks up from the compass. There, a mere ten yards away, is a pool of smoke. Cautiously he abandons his bearing and moves to the smoke. A dead aspen log—not more than eight inches in diameter and leaning against a white fir—is puffing furiously. There is virtually no ground fire; in fact, water oozes out of the duff as they tread. They trace the line of lightning down the furrowed trunk of the fir, untouched by fire, to the aspen. Alston sits down on a log, stuffs his compass into his pocket, and smokes another cigarette while he contemplates their incredible fortune. Had they arrived an hour later, the fire might have expired. The SWFFs want to extinguish the fire instantly, but Alston dampens their enthusiasm. He is sure there must be subtle complications in the scene. He is confident that he can extort at least an hour of overtime from the fire.
At Dutton Point the view of the inner gorge is spectacular. Kent climbs a tree, searches avidly for the smoke, and sees nothing. There is only one response possible. He requests another recon. Clyde obliges, and almost as soon as the plane leaves the airport, Clyde recognizes his error. “It looks like I gave you a bum steer,” he admits to Kent and Tyson. “I meant to say Ives Point, not Dutton Point. When you get to Ives, you’ll see the fire. There is nothing else around.” He does not say—does not need to say—that Ives Point is the farthest possible extremity of Powell Plateau, that Kent and Tyson will have to recross Dutton Canyon, hike back almost to the helispot, then trace out the declining backbone of the plateau. They arrive well past sunset. The Bumsteer fire—a flaming pinyon—acts like a beacon. They slump beside an adjacent tree, packs still on, and stare at the fire for perhaps two hours. Occasionally they drink from a canteen. At some point they fall asleep. In the morning they mop up the quietly flaming stump and start the trek back. When they reach the truck at Swamp Point, they open the doors of the cab and, reaching across the seat, pull each other in.
Randy calls for reinforcements—for water, rations, saws, firefighters. Three of us trudge in. No one has found any dirt. It will be a difficult mop-up. Sitting despondently on a sawn log that evening, Randy names it the Rekup fire. “‘Rekup,’” he explains, “is ‘puker’ spelled backward.”
Alston returns to the cache shortly after 1700 hours redolent of satisfaction. He has worked through his lunch hour; the Smoker fire was uncontrolled when he arrived; his crew will receive hazard duty pay.
