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ОглавлениеCHAPTER TWO
Tipover
THE FIRE CACHE and the fireroads are symbiotic. The cache opens to the roads, and the roads take us to the Rim. Without the fireroads we are condemned to the Area. With them we can recapitulate the ritual of renewal on a grand scale. The roads take us to fires.
It is good, tough work. We exploit every tool, test every vehicle, initiate every crewman. Trees must be cut and hauled off, branches and brush trimmed back, eroded sites repaired, new signs installed. Milk Creek must be spanned with another corduroy bridge. Old roads, abandoned and retained as foot trails, must be reflagged. Every road and trail must be revisited and reopened. Hands toughen, and muscles harden to the texture of Gambel oak. Mind concentrates—a chisel rather than a probe.
From the fireroads we learn (and relearn) the geography of the North Rim. There are two geomorphic terranes: the Canyon and the Plateau. They are incommensurable; they operate according to two sets of geologic processes and represent two epochs of geologic activity. The Plateau is a landscape without vantage points. There are no peaks to which you can orient and from which you can look out. Hydrology is no better guide, for the Plateau is karstified, its drainage subterranean and deranged. Where Canyon and Plateau meet, along the Rim, their conjunction is startling, arbitrary, relic, violent. Yet only there can you determine your location with any precision.
Gradually the days lengthen, the landscape sheds its winter snowbanks and dries, and the sky clears. Forest and meadow slough off their dormancy but have yet to flower. The storm tracks have moved too far north for weather systems to pass through routinely, yet the summer rainy season has not arrived. There is neither fire nor water, only the recession of the latter and a promise of the former.
On both time and place the fireroads impose a kind of order. They instill a functional integration on a topography that is otherwise at odds with itself. They establish reference points, and they give access. The only way to move from rim point to rim point along the surface is through the Plateau, and that makes the roads mandatory. Opening the roads likewise imposes a complementary temporal order. Clearing the roads marks a tumultuous, subtle change in season, between spring melt and summer rains, when the Kaibab exchanges mud for dust, when the sun streams through the dappled woods and the air is full and warm. It is a critical moment in the annual cycle of natural history at the North Rim—and in the life cycle of a seasonal fire crew.
Whatever the season holds, the fireroads open it to us.
The fire is reported along fireroad W-1, on the last ridge before The Basin. “Yes,” Recon 1 reports, “right along the road.” Kent is restless. Others have been sent to fires reported earlier in the day, yet he and two SWFFs have remained in the cache. It has not been an easy fire bust. Recon 1 has been flying unceasingly since late morning. There have been long, indecisive walks. No more than a fraction of the roads are open. The snowpack prevents access to Sublime and W-1; only the Walhalla fireroads are passable. None of the crews can see fire from their vehicles. Kent takes the white powerwagon and proceeds down W-1, about a twenty-minute drive from the fire cache.
Recon 1—with reliable, soft-voiced McLaren calling the shots—is right. The fire is adjacent to the road. The snag has been shattered by lightning into a thousand splinters; a gouged trunk flames on the ground like a candelabra. Kent fires up the pump on the slip-on. While he adjusts the throttle, the SWFFs pull out the hardline hose and drag it toward the fire. In two minutes the fire is out. Incredulous, they buck up the log, roll it over, search through the duff for smoldering cinders. They find nothing. The log steams and hisses. The slip-on chugs happily. They empty the rest of the tank on the log, roll up the hardline, abandon the Scorcher fire, and return to the cache.
The Kid has just cleared the Shinumo Gate, after a long detour through the Forest. His crew faces another forty-five-minute drive before they come to TT-2. From there they will have to compass at least a mile south cross-country. Kieffer’s crew, meanwhile, has yet to locate their fire. They have hiked nearly two miles down W-1G, then bushwhacked into the woods on a compass bearing. Kieffer is gasping out his presumed location over the radio to Recon 1. His crew is trying to signal McLaren with compass mirrors. They can hear the plane but they cannot see it.
HOW THE FIREROADS ARE OPENED—AND CLOSED
Aspen are easy. Ralph kicks most of the branches off the road. If the trunk is dry, he breaks it by snapping it like a whip or by wedging it against other trees and pushing. Bone sits in the truck and shouts friendly obscenities. There are so many branches and logs across the road that you can wear yourself out just getting in and out of the pumper. Ralph drags an aspen log across the road, then hefts another and throws it like a spear. A large bole remains, green and sweating. He motions for a chain saw. Two saws—Big Mac and a Stihl 045—are mounted for easy access onto the slip-on. Bone mocks disgust. “Use an ax,” he shouts. Ralph chops where the trunk narrows; huge chips spray into the woods. Bone cinches his chaps, inserts plugs into his ears, and fires up the Stihl. He lops off the branches, then bucks the bole into sections while Ralph hauls the residue over the road berm. Another tree is visible about forty yards ahead. Bone hesitates before plodding forward, the saw perched on his shoulder. Ralph climbs into the cab and drives to meet him.
Spruce are dreaded. Some perverse instinct guides them, in their fall, down the center of the road. They descend in clumps; not one tree but several crash at any site. Although the trunks are not large, the branches are prickly; limbing them is like trimming a porcupine. The work goes steadily, but a clump may take half a day to clear. Worse than mop-up. Ralph spots a spruce cluster just beyond the next bend. Only an hour remains until noon; they will work through the maze, then eat. A warm sun streams down on the fireroad—powdery silt, scattered mudholes, and cobbles of buff limestone and hard, spangled chert.
It is worse than they anticipated. A white fir has crashed across the road and taken several smaller spruce down with it. The bole of the fir is enormous; the branches are large and messy; the tree is heavy with water. Limbing proceeds cautiously. The fir’s weight rests on nearly buried branches, and one tree sits uneasily upon another. They limb cautiously. Almost always the trunk will bind when cut, and often roll to one side; wedges, a sledge, and a second saw are essential. As Bone trudges to the thicket, Ralph prepares another set of chaps, another saw.
The trunks of the several spruce are all green. Each section, once cut, will resist movement; everything will bind. Ralph and Bone wedge each section free, then wrestle the rounds off the road with peaveys. Too slow. Ralph sets up a chocker chain around a large pine and hooks a snatch block to it, while Bone pulls out the winch cable. Section by section the logs are disassembled, dragged in whining protest over the drainage ditch and across the berm. Ralph and Bone strip every branch from one final round and roll it down the road. The road bends, but the round continues and neatly caroms off into the woods. Finally they kick the littering branches off the road. Still in chaps, they eat lunch under another fir. The next logs down the road are aspen, easy stuff. “Bare hands,” Bone yawns.
The road gradually descends to the Rim, and after another mile or so they will leave the trashy spruce-fir and enter the more open ponderosa forest. Here logs seem to fall perpendicular to the road; the trunks are round, clean of branches through self-pruning; windfall is less extensive; it is easy business to buck, roll, or winch. If the top of a ponderosa crashes across a road, it can throttle passage with large, cumbersome branches, but with pine only a few judicious cuts, a selective carving, are needed—not a shearing as with spruce and fir. Yet more is at stake than ease of sawing; large expanses of ponderosa coincide with the Rim, and the Rim with fire.
The Plateau and the Canyon are dichotomous. They meet with catastrophic suddenness along the Rim, a border that is profoundly irrational and immensely powerful. The Plateau is a great inverted dish, shallow and carved into ridges and ravines that radiate outward from a central axis like spokes in an oblong wheel. The hydrologic connection between Plateau and Canyon is subterranean; the Plateau absorbs moisture like a sponge, then discharges it at spectacular springs deep in the Canyon. The surface drainage of the Plateau is a relic of Pleistocene fluvialism, while the sidegorges of the Canyon expand along ancient, long-dormant faults laid down during the flexing of the Plateau. In some areas surface ravines drain away from the Canyon, in others, parallel to it; where a ravine does debouch into the Canyon, its contribution is negligible. The topography of the Plateau does not lead logically to the Canyon Rim; the fireroads do.
Fires are not limited to the Rim, but they have a peculiar relationship with it, as though snags were somehow ignited by the friction of Canyon against Plateau. To get from point to point along the Rim, however, you must pass back into the Plateau. That means that the fireroads want to go other than where the Plateau wants them to, and it means that the opening of the fireroads is slightly out of sync with the natural cycle of the fire season. The points dry first, and fires appear there earliest in the season; but to reach them, you have to pass into the Plateau, where the snowmelt is incomplete and the roads impassable. The incongruity of the fireroads is the incongruity of fire, Park, and Rim.
Superimposed on the annual cycle of road opening is a larger history by which the roads were installed, maintained, and abandoned. Clearing the fireroads opens questions of Park policy. Even as we labor to clear the system, there is a movement to shut them permanently. The fireroad grid was largely laid out during the CCC occupation of the Rim, and as a network it reached its apogee during the early 1960s. When fire policy is reformulated, the fireroads feel the impact quickly. Some of the roads are abandoned because they cannot be restored without extensive maintenance. All the roads that pass through meadows are closed for ecological reasons with the exception of those that, like Sublime and W-1 to The Basin, also carry tourists. The euphoria of closure is contagious. E-1, E-2, E-3, E-1A, E-6A, E-6B, E-7, W-2, W-1G, W-1C, W-1B, W-1D-A, W-1D-B, W-5, W-4A, W-4C, W-3, W-1E—the fireroad system of the North Rim is soon gutted.
We keep some old roads on our fire maps as trails and otherwise increase our reliance on helicopters, though the Park refuses to allow permanent helispots to be constructed and steadily downgrades our priority access to the Park helo. The old fireroad names become disjunctive, remembered by veterans and learned by rookies but without integration or purpose. As the roads close, we nail the old road signs to the fire cache wall and replace their alphanumeric nomenclature with geographic names. W-4B becomes the Swamp Point road; W-1D, E-6, and E-5 become, respectively, the Tiyo Point road, the Obi and Ariel Point roads, the Matthes Point road. But the old names persist, like fire-sculptured snags in green woods.
The operating principle seems to be that fireroads which are visible to the public but not opened for public travel are condemned, while those with public access, regardless of the terrain through which they pass, are retained. The Park will not deny public access in the face of public criticism, and it will not deny access to the heaviest user of all: itself. To close down all roads would shut off the backcountry not only to visitors and to the fire crew but to rangers, interpreters, and researchers. In fact, as the ranger division swells beyond the carrying capacity of the Rim, it is essential that some fireroads remain open so that excess rangers can undertake “backcountry road patrol.” Thus for major fireroads the Park refuses to let them be either repaired or closed: it wants the roads without appearing to have the roads. Closing fireroads is a way to convey a new fire policy without having to support that policy overtly. It is not fire that the Park wants to manage but its fire establishment. Shutting down fireroads is a way to shut down activities that no longer seem relevant to the agency. The only road that truly concerns the Park is the entrance road, which it insists must be widened and rebuilt to accommodate the motor homes that swarm like tent caterpillars. The future reconstruction of the entrance road will keep the Park in a happy uproar for several seasons.
Bone mentally notes the indirect effects of the approaching Rim—the more open canopy, the gusts of warm wind, the drier forest. If Rich and Lenny move down from the Swamp Point road, they should meet Ralph and Bone by midafternoon. With two vehicles in tandem, they should be able to clear the Kanabownits tower road. There might even be time, on the way back to the cache, for a detour to Tipover.
* * *
Both fires are probably started by the same storm cell. The fire at Matthes Point is instantly reported by Scenic Airlines; the Rookie fire is a sleeper.
Jack and I race to Matthes in the red powerwagon. Unlike other Walhalla fireroads E-5 is rarely boggy. We pass rapidly through ponderosa forests interspersed with glades of rock and grass. The fire is at the end of the road, a snag exactly on the Rim, not ten yards from the road.
Jack drops the tree carefully inland, against the lean but away from the Canyon, a maneuver that exhausts our stock of wooden wedges. The active fire flickers in the lightning-gouged furrow around the trunk. Clouds darken the sky, and in the distance there is thunder. We limb and buck the snag, then prepare to start the slip-on. Easy money. As the slip-on coughs to life, however, the first raindrops strike. There are more and soon a deluge. We kill the slip-on and scramble into the cab of the truck. The rain lets up slightly, only to continue in a steady drizzle. We draw cards. I lose and dash out of the truck to turn over the bucked sections of snag. They sizzle in the rain. Before I reenter the cab, I grab my firepack. It contains enough rations for both of us.
Then it is Jack’s turn, so he finishes his crackers and runs to turn over the logs. The rain falls steadily. For another two hours we dash to the fire in a weird minuet. Each run fogs up the cab, and we have to turn on the defroster. We stand a couple of logs upright, vertically, and let the rain drain into their rotten cores. We finish our rations, read, and talk; at about 1600 hours the rain lets up. We climb out of the cab and inspect the fire. The air outside is cold and damp; the Canyon is a rocking sea of clouds. The slip-on has a full tank. Jack wants to know whether or not we can claim that we worked during our lunch hour.
The Rookie fire is not reported for another three days. It probably survived the rains by retreating into a catface, a cavity at the base of a pine. The fire is two acres in size, spreading steadily but unspectacularly in all directions.
We send the Nursery from 176, and the rookies have a good time. They race around the fire with a pumper, knock down the flames, and return for a second load of water. They take the second pumper as well; Gilbert reminds them that there is also a small water tank along E-5 from which they can draft. They return that night, serenade the saloon and Skid Row with exuberant beeriness, and the next morning announce ambitious plans for mop-up. They want both pumpers and the water truck. Everything returns empty late that afternoon, and Tom explains that they intend to return the next day for more. “More what?” Dave asks. No one has ever used this much water on a North Rim fire.
The next day we all turn out. The fire is a mess. There is a mediocre scratch line around the perimeter, no evidence of bucking on large logs; there are gouges in the ground where high-pressure hoses streamed through the soil, and puddles of standing water, in one of which a patch of duff still smokes. Disgusted, Dave issues shovels and fedcos, and we break up into two-man teams and section the fire off into blocks. By lunchtime the fire is out. Gilbert plucks a section of saturated duff, squashed and reshaped under a tire, for the FCA Musuem.
RALPH GOES TO BECKER BOG; OR, LIVING WITH THE KANABOWNITS AXLE BUSTER
The mud is like a living ooze, and we are clogged in it.
It is axiomatic that there is no running water on the North Rim, only intermittent streams that appear during the spring melt. All of the ephemeral runoff, however, seems to be channeled into the fireroads. The red pumper is now half submerged in a vat of mud where the Sublime Road veers into a meadow. I have emptied the slip-on and Wil and John Paul have attempted to dig out our right-side wheels. With the winch cable, we uproot a spruce, the only tree in the vicinity; one shovel is now stuck under our right rear tire. There is no other recourse than to radio for help. I tell Joe that our saw has broken and to bring out Big Mac. It is a code phrase that means “I’m-stuck-like-hell-so-get-your-ass-out-here-with-chains-and-a-block-and-tackle.” Never publicly admit that you are stuck.
The mud is entirely seasonal. It is one of three hydrologic categories we recognize: no water, useful water, and mud. “No water” is the norm. It is why we dry-mop fires and pack in fedcos and wrestle with slip-ons and pumpers. “Useful water” is generally found in the Canyon and must be deliberately packed or pumped to the Plateau. The Area is sustained by an incredible pump and pipeline operation that taps Roaring Springs some thirty-nine hundred feet below the Rim. “Mud” occurs only seasonally but with devastating effectiveness. The mudholes tend to occur at the same sites each year, probably sustained by quasi-permanent springs and seeps—leaks in the karstified plumbing of the Plateau, an exposé on the inverted hydrology of the Kaibab. As the snowmelt disappears, so will the mud. Once it is gone, even the summer rains cannot restore it.
We learn all this empirically. It is enough to know where and when water and mud can be found. The springs are generally irrelevant, but where the subterranean hydrology bubbles to the surface by a fireroad, there is mud, and mud is always germane. The perennial sites have been named: the Elephant Trap, the Black Hole, the Kanabownits Axle Buster, Mogul Hill, the Little Grand Canyon, the Wallow Hollow. For each, too, there are regular procedures for extrication. The same trees, marked by collars of scraped bark, are used for winching; log fulcrums, commemorating previous disasters, decorate the berm like cairns along a trail; caches of rocks and branches flash an alert along roads, like river eddies that warn of submerged snags. But Wil and I have discovered a new site, and we will have to work out a new procedure. We sit to eat an early lunch and wait for Joe.
The crew mills around the fireline, waiting for the extra water to arrive. Though the forest brightens rapidly, the evening chill is slow to lift. There are wisps of fog in the Glades. A few sprouts of grass, tentative and thin, poke through old, dirty layers of pine needles.
There are misgivings about conducting a spring burn. The last spring fire flashed across an upper crust of duff like a flame through gasoline, fatally scorching even large trees, then expired suddenly without much total fuel consumption. The large fuels and the deeper duff are still too wet to burn. But the plans have been approved, the fireline and a large portable folding tank are in place, and when the water arrives, we will lay down a hose system within the line to protect the fire perimeter. The extra water, it is felt, should allow us to quell any unwanted flare-ups. But the water never arrives. Jonathan and the dump, with the old water tank attached to it like a turtle’s shell, reach only the junction of E-6 and E-6A before he radios for someone to bring him the Big Mac and an extra chain.
The junction is located within a shallow draw, where E-6A doubles back on itself. The site is dense with young fir—curiously rank within an otherwise open ponderosa forest. One rear wheel of the dump has found a mudhole. The dump cannot move, there is nothing on hand that can pull it out, and the first hope of extrication is to lighten the load. That Jonathan and Rich attempt, using the Mark III. Water sloshes rapidly out of the tank and onto the hillsides, only to slide over the surface back into the hole. More moisture will enter the hole by seepage. A mud bog has become a mud moor. The mud now captures a second rear tire, and the skewed truck blocks the entire road.
We prepare a detour for our pumpers and report the incident to maintenance, which greets the news with its usual scowl. Yes, we agree, we will pay overtime for someone to get the dump. It takes several hours for the front-end loader to reach the scene, trailed most of the way by a covey of curious Winnebagos. At first Dane attempts to pull the dump out directly with heavy chains. Then he tries to dig out the rear wheels with the loader, to lift the rear of the dump out of the hole. The loader’s tires spin; there is movement, a thrill of hope; then the thrust of the loader depresses its own wheels down through the surface crust. The dump has not been lifted; the loader has been sunk. Wildly Dane tries to free the loader, but each attempt only buries it more deeply. Water and mud ooze over its axles. The loader coughs to an ignominious death. It will take two weeks until the ground can dry sufficiently to liberate the vehicles. In the meantime, we so improve the detour that everyone agrees the temporary road is superior to the old one.
The prescribed fire is postponed indefinitely.
We open the roads in a traditional sequence—some for their importance, some for convenience, and always relative to the mud condition. The Walhalla roads are usually the first to dry out. Despite some notorious swamps, W-1 is usually drier sooner than Sublime with its lengthy traverse of high meadows. For access to Swamp Point and the Saddle Mountain Turnaround we simply rely on Forest Service roads. E-1 is almost always opened last. When maintenance brags that it can handle the Elephant Trap, the R&T crew promptly sticks a road grader in the bog, then watches helplessly as a dump truck, filled with gravel, sinks up to its axles. The Sublime Road is closed for weeks.
Joe and Henry Goldtooth show up in the white powerwagon; they have paused at the store to pick up some candy bars and Cokes. We will be at the site all afternoon. After an hour of futile labor it is apparent that we will not return by 1700. We debate whether to leave the truck until tomorrow or stay with the project. Overhead the sun bears down; mosquitoes germinate spontaneously out of the ooze; the mud, like brown tar, washes over the axle; the doors can no longer be opened. We pause for a break, chew on candy bars and tins of crackers, and debate strategy.
Wil and Joe recall episodes from previous seasons. Nearly all the worst mirings have been the result of administrative decrees that—conditions be damned—such and such a road would be opened by such and such a date. When Captain Zero, North Rim manager, demands that W-1 be cleared within a day so that visitors can travel to Point Sublime, we protest and are told to remember our place. Our place, apparently, is in the mud. On Crystal Ridge we stick all three vehicles within the space of thirty yards on a road that resembles a slow stream of chocolate pudding. We work individually—each crew to its vehicle—for an hour, then realize that our only hope is to treat the problem collectively. We scratch out drainage ditches to carry water off the road, dig out wheels, stuff rocks and logs into the enveloping ooze, cut small green trees to make fulcrums and levers. We free one truck, then another; the last we abandon for a week. The ruts and drainage ditches are visible for years afterward.
I recall when Kent and I were sent to clear W-1E and had only to cross Lower Little Park to finish when we sank up to our axles and spent four hours winching and digging and plowing the pumper around the perimeter of the meadow, a passage commemorated by a line of scalped, plucked trees. When we finally arrived at the cache, the white pumper had a swath of mud on each side halfway up the doors. The winch was cluttered with grass and wildflowers. That night I woke abruptly, as from a nightmare, and stared around uncomprehending; the lights were on, and The Ape, Booby, and Swifter stood around my bunk and watched while in my sleep I furiously wrapped an imaginary winch cable around a bedpost.
The fire is a sleeper, about half an acre in size and no more than two hundred yards from W-1D-B. Alston, Achterman, and a SWFF, Billy Begaye, flag a route into the fire from their pumper.
It is nearly sunset. The fire spreads poorly, smoldering in deep pine duff and flaming in downed logs. Quickly the crew cuts a line around the fire; but dirt is scarce, and without water mop-up could last for days. The situation calls for water, lots of water. Alston proposes that they bring the pumper to the fire.
Already darkness grows around them, and towering pines cast shadows over nightfall. Achterman issues headlamps; the group spreads out and walks slowly back to the pumper. Alston drives, while Achterman and Billy swamp. Achterman drags away some downed logs; then he and Billy cut through a small sward of reproduction, while the pumper’s headlights cast bold, eerie shadows through the woods. There is one moderately steep hill to negotiate—steeper than they anticipate—and they winch the pumper up the last thirty yards. No need to flag: the tire tracks will not last long, but they will survive the fire.
Late that evening Alston returns to the Area to refill the slip-on and announces slyly that the fire will be called the Double A fire in honor of him and Achterman. All three sleep on the fireline, happily supplied by the pumper. Early the next morning they leave a dead fire. They propose we keep their route open as fireroad W-1D-B-AA.
Then there was the time when Captain Zero decided that the stream at North Canyon on the Kaibab National Forest was the solution to the North Rim water crisis and arranged to meet Forest officials there. The Forest Service refused to drive across the Crystal Springs road. This was the Forest’s road, but Captain Zero insisted that his boys would drive everyone to the trailhead. Becker does, and mires the vehicle up to its door handles on his way out. Because Zero’s party will rendezvous with another truck on the other side of the trail, Becker is on his own. So far from the Park, his radio does not work. He walks out to Highway 67 (about five miles), hitchhikes a ride to the entrance station, and calls for help. Our other engine promptly sticks next to his. Both vehicles are in a broad meadow where their winches are useless. We call for the water truck. Fully loaded, it can either pull us from the mud or act as an immovable object from which we can winch. With the mechanic for a driver, the water truck gets lost on Forest roads, and we have to arrange for another vehicle to help locate the water truck. By 1800 hours we have two terminally stuck pumpers, eight people, and a thousand-gallon war-surplus water truck ensconced in the mud at what has become known as Becker Bog. By winching one truck against another, we make a little progress. But much more collective power is needed. In desperation we decide upon a grand gesture, a do-or-die scheme that will either liberate the vehicles or terminate our careers in a quagmire of accident reports. With chains and cables we join all three vehicles into a single complex knot. The two pumpers face opposite directions. It is nearly 2200 hours; everything is done by headlight, headlamp, and not a little moonshine. The parade spins, tugs, sloshes. But at any time at least two vehicles have some traction, and the tiny convoy slides ungainly out of the mire. The next morning Captain Zero describes the wonderful meal he had at Jacob Lake Inn after his hike. He refuses to authorize overtime for the crew at Becker Bog. He refuses to reward what he dismisses as an error of judgment.
Farther west, it is not going so simply. A fire is burning in some snags near Lancelot Point, but the nearest fireroad, W-4A, is more than two miles away and ends at an unnamed point. Dana, Tim, and I are clearing roads when the smoke report comes in.
The forest is relatively open and will probably become more so as we approach the Canyon. I send Dana ahead with instructions to line the fire and wait for us. Then Tim and I plot a route. There is a shallow ravine separating us from the main peninsula to Lancelot Point, so we cross it and steer into the woods. The going is remarkably easy, and the clearing marginal; I walk ahead and select routes. Suddenly I halt, dead in my tracks. To Tim, blinking over the hood of the pumper, I point out a log that has a center section neatly sawn out of it; the width of the cut is exactly the size of a truck. Later we discover another log, cut the same way; there is a blazed tree; crossing a shallow depression, we think we can detect the ruts of ancient wheels. We have uncovered an old fireroad. It is taking us to the Grail fire.
When Dana arrives at the fire, it is nearly dark, and the flames are subsiding. He corrals it with a scratch line, but mop-up will be a mess; there is more smoldering fire than Recon 1 reported. We decide to request an additional pumper, and today that means the Forest Service—always happy to oblige. One of its ground tankers, a model 20 commanded by General Tom, has been hovering around the Shinumo Gate like a turkey vulture. “Take W-4A to the orange flagging,” Tim tells the General. “Then follow our tracks.”
When they catch up with us, we are about a third of a mile from the fire and continuing to crawl delicately through the woods. Their swamper arrives clothed in brush turnout gear, more suitable for the chaparral of the Angeles National Forest than the North Rim. I point out the evidence of the ancient road. They are astonished at our labors. “We never go to this much work,” the Angeleno remarks. “The Forest would never have abandoned the road,” says General Tom. “The Forest would have built a real road,” says the Angeleno. If this were a Forest Service fire, a Cat, not people, would be swamping, they declare. We walk by the glimmer of our headlamps, searching for evidence of the old road or new routes. Then we sight the fire, a huge orange glow against the Canyon.
Dana shouts a greeting, and Tim and I loudly congratulate ourselves on getting the pumper in to the fire. Never has anyone in the Park driven so far in to a fire. Never, the Angeleno confides, has he been to a Forest Service fire to which he has had to walk so long.
The problem is not the springs but the fact that they cross fireroads, which means that they intersect matters of policy. The fireroads are opportunistic, and often arbitrary. The Forest Service recognizes the character of the Plateau and constructs its roads along ridgetops, but the Park puts them wherever it can, mostly through or across ravines. Many Park “fireroads” are nothing more than easy routes through the woods during the dry season; some simply traverse meadows; nowhere are there provisions for drainage. But all the roads emanate from the crest line, and since the early-season fires gather at the points, which dry sooner than the interior, access by road demands that the higher, wetter elevations be breached first. The Plateau’s geography of water will not be joined easily to the Rim’s geography of fire. Where they intersect, there are bogs.
The fireroads are means that are no longer reconciled with ends. What may be opportune at one time, when the surface is dry, can become a bog at another. The fireroads cannot be repaired and they cannot be traversed with vehicles adequate to their state of disrepair and they must be crossed, as often as not, in defiance of the curious hydrology of the Plateau. Yet crossed they must be, by administrative decree. The Park will neither repair the roads nor close them. The reason the fireroads were constructed—access to fire—is no longer compelling to the Park, yet the Park does not want to give up access to the backcountry entirely. It wants the means, though it cannot decide to what ends they should be put.
Joe and I propose to try a double-winch arrangement, and Wil recommends that if that fails, we use the white powerwagon as a fixed point from which to attach a snatch block. The two SWFFs nod indifferently. Whatever happens we will be late for dinner.
MODEL 22
The primary fireroads are open, and we plan to spend the day in the Area, reconditioning tools and vehicles. Joe, our self-appointed Head Trucker, ponders the Slip-on Question.
The Park has acquired a set of Forest Service model 20 slip-on units, with two-hundred-gallon tanks and pumps positioned in a special cage to the rear of the truck. Unfortunately, the Park has not also acquired a set of Forest Service trucks to carry the slip-ons, and some adjustments to ours will be necessary, for the model 20s take up nearly the entire truck bed, add 420 pounds additional weight, and on decaying fireroads will cause the trucks to be torqued and battered in ways their designers could never have imagined. The new slip-ons are the beginning of the end for our old powerwagons. (The white powerwagon holds on grimly—Joe swears that he could drive it through Lava Rapids if the need arose—but its transmission failed when rookie Draper popped the clutch as the truck rolled backward down E-1A, and the rest of the vehicle tumbled into junk soon afterward.) The immediate conundrum is how to mount the model 20s to our old trucks, but the larger issue is how we get to fires at all—and whether the Park really wants us to get there.
Joe surveys our fleet—two Dodge powerwagons and a Three-quarter-Ton Chevy pickup. Nothing is left of the water truck—a 1943 war-surplus Chevy tanker—except the unbaffled one-thousand-gallon tank which has to be lifted onto the big dump with a backhoe and lashed down with heavy chains. The old truck blew a rod as Dana was whining down Lindbergh Hill. Dana later showed the truck to the Park mechanic, pointing out where the truck had a “problem.” Staring at a hole the size of a softball in the engine block, Daddy Pat admitted through his half-chewed cigar that “that’s a pretty good sign somethin’s wrong.”
Each pumper (or “ground tanker,” according to Forest Service nomenclature, or “engine,” to follow later National Interagency Incident Management System terminology) is a rolling fire cache. A pumper offers access, via fireroads; water, from a two-hundred-gallon tank, a pump, assorted hoses, and hydraulic fittings; handtools and accessories, from flagging tape to batteries to first aid; rations, drinking water, sleeping bags; chain saws, with extra chain oil, saw mix, chains, wedges, and sledge; and, of course, gear for vehicle repair and extrication. On the pumpers we hang our firepacks, and by means of pumpers we go for jobs out of the Area, at least two crewmen to a vehicle. Whatever else they are used for, the pumpers are fire vehicles first, and whatever jobs we may be assigned, fire has primacy. We take our firepacks everywhere; we gas and retool the pumpers nightly. And every week or so we inspect in detail those that are still functioning. The new slip-ons, and their advent at the opening of fire season, have complicated that chore.
The Head Trucker puzzles over the model 20s, while the fire crew—those working on the vehicles and those in the cache—drift off singly and in pairs for cups of coffee. There are serious design problems embedded in the Slip-on Question: there is no place to attach our saw racks, tools, or firepacks; there is nowhere to hang a spare tire; there is no way to enter the protective cage over the engine to work a starter rope. Joe feels a momentary thrill when he discovers that the pump is designed for an electric starter, yet the euphoria fades as he realizes that to install a cord will require that we drill a hole through the bed of a General Services Administration vehicle. GSA will not allow any holes, and the Park mechanic will not assist us with the wiring without a hole. Hot coffee in hand, Tom asks the Head Trucker how he proposes to stabilize the slip-on unit without drilling holes for machine bolts. Joe sighs and walks to the Fire Pit. Time for a phone call to GSA.
The General Services Administration is a bureaucracy that has moved beyond Kafka’s nightmares. Joe knows what the response will be, but the query is for show, not substance. GSA will tell him not how to do something, only that he is not allowed to do what he needs to do. The agency is sublimely indifferent to any nuance of North Rim life and geography. It will not supply a vehicle adequate to the loads and wear to which it will be subjected; will not allow the Park mechanic to make repairs (that means repairs cannot be made because we are eighty-five miles and a tow truck away from the nearest authorized garage); will not even recognize that, on primitive fireroads, tires wear by spalling and gouging, not by a uniform attrition of tread, millimeter by millimeter. Joe is not even sure he wants to argue for a new vehicle. Last season (“only that long ago?”) Harding flew to the South Rim and hitched a ride to the GSA motor pool at Holbrook and picked up a badly needed replacement truck. On the return trip he stopped for lunch at Jacob Lake, only to have the transmission freeze up. GSA towed the truck away, and we arranged to send Harding back for a second vehicle. This time he got no more than fifty miles out of Holbrook before he blew a rod; GSA had neglected to put oil in the engine block. Eventually we got from the Navajo Reservation a recycled pickup that died before the season ended. The phone rings, but Joe already knows what the reply will be. GSA will deny authorization for any modification in the vehicle. Joe calls the Park Service garage on the South Rim. Do not anger GSA, he is told; do not reinstate the old slip-ons; do not install the new slip-ons without securing them; do not call and complain anymore.
The crew returns. Joe watches them pass by the door of the Pit. The solution to the Slip-on Question ultimately resides with the Park, not with GSA. The problem is that we need water to fight fire. Water requires slip-on units because there are no sources of surface water on the North Rim. The slip-ons require special vehicles. The vehicles demand at least a minimal road system to be effective. Fireroads—their presence and maintenance—require a clear policy on fire. The Park will not solve the Slip-on Question because it will not address the fireroad question. “What do we do?” Tom asks.
“Drill the holes,” says the Head Trucker. No one else, he reasons, will ever want or get stuck with these vehicles, so we might as well treat them as permanent acquisitions. Attaching the two slip-ons should occupy the crew for the remainder of the day. Joe walks to the fire cache. The first order of business will be to hoist the slip-ons with a block and tackle attached to the roof joists.
Ralph suggests that the new slip-on should be known as model 22.
THE TANK
The struggle to get to fires and to get water on fires is endless.
The CCC solved both difficulties by laying out a system of roads and by constructing water storage tanks. In effect, it brought to the surface and rationalized the subterranean drainage of the Kaibab and imposed a reference system for the surface topography. The roads had a logical nomenclature, complemented the network of permanent and temporary (tree) towers, and carried a truck to within a couple of miles of any site on the North Rim. A few additions were added during the Reusch era—E-1A, to improve access to Saddle Mountain, and W-6A, which improbably scales a ridge at right angles. A fire map dated 1955 shows the system at its apogee. The year also commemorates the first entry on the Tipover Tank by a smokechaser.
The origins of the Tank are obscure. But it (or the spring that feeds it) probably dates from CCC days. The corps erected a series of artificial springs, some no more than hollow logs fed by pipes jutting out of hillsides; it improved several old stockman ponds like Greenland Lake, Robber’s Roost Spring, and Basin Spring; and it added some unnamed ponds and springs of its own. We suspect that Tipover Spring was developed to supply the CCC camp at Shinumo Gate with potable water. During the tree tower reconstruction program, we upgraded a few of the old CCC sites and erected several new tanks as water sources—the most elaborate being the one at Swamp Point. Within a couple of years, however, the pine to which the tank had been attached yellows, dies, falls over the Rim, and carries the tank with it. The only survivor of the system is Tipover.
The Tank seems, in fact, to be tipping over. The logs on which the Tank rests are decaying. The base of the log foundation itself is eroding. The tank—all three thousand gallons of it—sits at a junction of two ravines, where dark conifers and leafy aspen give way suddenly to meadow. The site is lovely, but the immediate, the overwhelming impression is that the Tank is about to topple downhill.
Words string across the Tank like vines. “Built by James Kennedy and C. E. Chamberlain.” There is no date given. “Walter Lay. Smokechaser. 1955.” The Tipover Tank is the Inscription Rock of the North Rim. New crewmen pencil in their names and dates, and veterans update their list of seasons. To formal names are added, willed or otherwise, occupational nicknames: Pinyonfoot, John-Boy, Greenback, The Dancing Pole. When Swift transfers to the rangers, “Rim Roach” is scrawled over “Smokechaser.” When Stiegelmeyer decides to dedicate the Tank to himself in bold letters as the Stiegelmeyer Memorial Tank, an “S” is inserted before “Tank.”
And not without reason. The Tank reeks. In its original design the Tank was apparently fed by a pipe from a spring located uphill, but the system fell into disrepair, and for most of its existence the Tank has been filled only by direct precipitation. The top is screened off by a two-by-four frame covered with chicken wire. It is only partially effective. Conifer needles collect in slumps. Dead birds float on the surface. The tank is filled with a vile green brew. In dry years a rookie is sometimes condemned to scour out the inside in the hopes that the plumbing can be activated. It never is. Still, there is a revival of sorts one season, and an ingenious construction project again brings water from the spring to the Tank along what is labeled the BOT Memorial Aqueduct, named for its builders, Brueck, Owen, and Tally. But this misses the point.
The Tank is not an effective reservoir of water. It taps a deeper watershed. It exists to record names, seasons, experiences. Signing the Tipover Tank is the final gesture in the opening of the fireroads. It is the mark of good planning that the fireroads can be opened with sufficient synchronization that all the crews converge at Tipover late one afternoon. Away from the Rim, the Tank is our one true reference point.
The fire is somewhere along the Park boundary, and Duane—laid-back Duane with the stringy, long black hair—is determined to reach it before the Forest Service. The smoke lies within the mutual aid zone: it belongs to the vehicle that can reach it first. The odds are that we won’t be able to get the pumper to the fire anyway, but Duane insists that we stop by the Tipover Tank while en route and try to fill our empty tank. The Tank is a fetid swamp of organic debris. It is full, however, and we draft water from its middle. Duane is galvanized by the thought that the Forest Service might beat us. “It’s our fuckin’ fire,” he insists.
The area beyond the Shinumo Gate was logged late last autumn. Everything to the north of the boundary is a surreal jumble of torn earth and half-burnt slash; the roads are, if anything, confusingly abundant. Park fire maps show an old road, W-4C, that once reached out from the CCC camp at Shinumo, paralleled the boundary, and in a few places moved in and out of an otherwise impermeable aspen worm fence. The derelict road cannot be found. Instead, there are new logging roads, not yet numbered, and a tangle of skid trails. We pick our way as best we can among the wreckage. Duane steers by dead reckoning. There is no sense to the land: it is possible to drive everywhere and go nowhere. Yet we are at least driving, and we hope to maneuver as closely as possible before abandoning the truck, climbing the aspen fence, and walking into the fire. The ponderosa forest is open. Duane figures one of us can take a saw and a fedco, and the other, two fedcos. “And a couple of shovels, of course. And pulaskis.”
But Recon 1 has become bored with our laborious maneuverings and has departed on a general survey of the Park. It will return only when we request it. We work our way to what we take as our best guess and call blindly into a dead radio for the plane to return. Duane is wild with apprehension. “Christ,” he says through clenched teeth. “Let’s drive.” We traverse the boundary another quarter mile, bouncing over roots, stumps, rocks, then catch sight of some smoke drifting on southwesterly winds through the woods. Duane powers the truck to where the smoke intersects the fence. There in front of us—in all its wild improbability—is a gate, surely a relict of the old W-4C fireroad. We swing it open and drive forty yards through the open forest to the fire. We drop the snag, buck up the larger burning logs, douse them with water; the fire will be mopped up by evening.
A Forest Service engine crew, carefully following our tracks, appears near the old gate. Do we need help? they ask plaintively. “No,” crows Duane. “We have a pumper on the fire.” And yes, we have ample supplies of water. The gate, the skid roads, the Tank—it is like something out of a movie, and Duane names it the Hollywood fire. The drive back ensures that we will even pick up a few hours of overtime.
When asked later about its location, Duane replies evasively, “East of Swamp and west of the Twilight Zone. You know, the Tipover area.”
KENNY SIGNS ON
When we arrive at the Tank, there is more graffiti, this time in bright red ink. Steadily, like a malevolent mistletoe, the names of people other than fire crew members have spread across the Tank. Rangers with no fire experience. Fee collectors. Interpreters. Vandals all. Even the road to Tipover is formally eliminated because it passes through a meadow. Official vandalism.
Closed or not, the walk from W-4 to the Tank is easy, and we make it often. During springtime the site is rank with greenery. In the autumn the deep hillsides of Tipover Canyon sway with the yellow and orange of aspen. Lunch at the Tank has a serene, bittersweet glow. The site is too remote from the Rim for there to be many fires—a fact for which we are grateful. Surrounding ravines are unusually steep, and the forest is satanically dense. One fire southeast of Tipover forced a party of smokechasers to cross three ridges, each steeper than the last. As they marched back and forth with fedcos, they named the ridges—Devastation, Desolation, Destruction. This is not a scene for fires, but it is an ineradicable part of the geography of fire. We travel here not for fires but for the Tank.
The Tank’s status remains ambivalent. It will not be forcibly removed, yet it will never be integrated with the managed geography of the North Rim. Lenny and I add another year below our names. Dash tries, without success, to erase the name of a particularly obnoxious fee collector. The galvanized metal holds the ink like a brand. Kenny, a rookie, searches for an empty space on which to write. “Hey, what should I call myself?” he asks, almost shouting as the rest of us leave the Tank for lunch under the aspen. Smokechaser, FCA, fire guard, fireaid, fire management specialist—all have fallen into disuse. “Longshot,” Donnie tells him. “We’re Longshots now.”
Dash marvels that the wonderful Tank has not yet toppled down.
