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PREFACE TO THE 1995 EDITION

Reburn

FIRE ON THE RIM was a book I wanted to write for a long time but didn’t know how and to some extent didn’t know why. There were really three problems, related of course, but also autonomous.

The first was technical. How do you make a profoundly seasonal experience into a coherent narrative? Fire season has a beginning, middle, and end, and so do fire careers, but how to reconcile an annual cycle with a secular one baffled me for many years. The typical solution is to imitate a diary and highlight the bigger events of the chronology or to collapse the whole into a single, composite year. Neither, I decided, was good enough, but in pursuit of an alternative I chased a lot of waterdogs. Eventually I hammered out a format around the idea of a “great season,” framed by initiating and valedictory years, that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. That decision led to the use of the historical present, the creation of composite events, and inevitable distortions as to who did what when. Not least it committed me to a narrative persona more or less fixed at a particular, and timeless, stage in his career. Accordingly I even found it necessary to invent one character to convey certain of my experiences without forcing the narrator to claim them. Still, all this gave coherence to the prose.

The second, more daunting problem was a coherence of purpose. Was this a collection of beer-fogged anecdotes, or did the experience, and through it, fire, acquire a larger significance? If so then the story needed the discipline of literature (with a small “1”). It needed, at its core, some moral drama.

As I read it, the literature of fire falls into three genres, a kind of conceptual fire triangle. One exploits fire as a narrative driver. The chronicle of a fire carries the other plots along with it, and fire illuminates, literally and symbolically, that larger narrative. Probably the classic expression is George Stewart’s novel, Fire. That book captured most of the possibilities of fire as narrative, which is why, despite its technological anachronisms, the book continues to find an audience. The second genre hovers over the central existential drama of firefighting, the tragedy of the burned-over crew. Here is the trying fire, the fire of judgment, the fire that sorts out the living from the dead. It is the prospect of death by fire that, in practice, moves the experience of firefighting beyond the domain of outdoor recreation and that, in principle, elevates its literature beyond juvenile sports stories. But until Norman Maclean wrote Young Men and Fire the genre had few serious practitioners. Possibly Maclean has exhausted the literary prospects. It is difficult to imagine anyone revisting the subject without quoting his vision if not his words.

That leaves the third genre, firefighting as a rite of passage, fire season as a coming-of-age story. This is, by far, the most common experience of wildland firefighting, linked as it is to the seasonal employment of young people. Fire season becomes a time in one’s life, the passage from adolescence to adulthood. What added rebars to the narrative concrete, however, is the fact that the year after I began at the North Rim the National Park Service changed its policy toward fire. An emerging wilderness ideology proposed that firefighting might be fundamentally wrong. So as fire became more important to the crew it became less so to the park, and the crew—the self-mocking Longshots—had to decide for themselves just what it was they were being initiated into. The park would have liked to dismiss them. What made us indispensable was that, whether Grand Canyon National Park cared or not, the fires kept coming.

Still, the transition is there, and it is that life passage to which the title Fire on the Rim refers, attempting to capture the moment through a geographic metaphor. (But while this was, from the beginning, the central metaphor of the book; it became the book’s title only after Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s marketing department flatly refused to promote a book called Flame and Fortune, which had been my working title from the beginning and which remains, to this day, the real title of the book in my mind. In the end I plucked “fire on the rim” from a subhead in the book’s plotted center, the fire on The Dragon, and exchanged it for “flame and fortune.”) Regardless, it was fire-season-as-coming-of-age that I wanted to get into something like formal literature. My barely voiced hope was that Fire on the Rim might become an archetype of its subgenre.

There remained one final conundrum. What did the experience mean to me personally? I hadn’t wanted to leave. I left because the time had become undeniable, because wrenched knees, a bad back, a warped wrist, a growing family, and the burden of an unemployable Ph.D. forced me to leave. Leaving, I knew abstractly, was always a question of when, not whether. I left at the right time. But I wanted the possibility of returning, wanted to search Swamp Ridge once more for its elusive smokes, wanted to wander through the fire cache from time to time in a glow of comraderly nostalgia. I could do that if I left quietly. If I wrote a book like Fire on the Rim, I could not. I, and perhaps by implication the rest of the North Rim Longshots, would be forever persona non grata.

The rangers, in fact, did have their revenge. I interviewed on the Today show to promote the book until I was cut off in mid-sentence by an NBC news bulletin announcing the death of Lucille Ball. (I never did love Lucy.) A few days later the Glendale police staked out my house and nabbed me while, in gym shorts and baseball hat, I was pedaling my bicycle along the Arizona Canal and Diversion Channel. It seems there was another Steve Pyne, different middle name, different social security number, eighteen years younger in age, but this one was wanted on felony charges in Linn County, Iowa. The Iowa authorities cleverly tracked down and arrested (while away from his Uzi-armed bodyguards) the Steve Pyne who appeared on the Today show, not the one named in the warrant. I spent the night in the Madison Street jail with twenty low-lifes, watching my own life swirl down a toilet. Fortunately a MacArthur Fellowship check arrived and we used that to post bail. The episode left me with an arrest record and several thousand dollars poorer (after legal fees), and furthered my conviction that fire had been the right choice. As a postscript I learned that I could not inspect the warrant under which Linn County had ordered my arrest because its provisions were covered by privacy statutes, and not being the person named therein I had no right to see it. The Iowa authorities have not yet unsealed their files.

Closely related to the question of my future relationship to the Rim was the matter of my on-going one. If I was reluctant to distance myself physically from the Rim, I needed to distance myself emotionally. The kind of book that Fire on the Rim would become depended keenly on whether I wrote it while I still worked on the crew, or after I had left the Rim for a few years, or if I told the stories to my grandchildren. When I wrote would influence what I wrote. I thought the ideal time was while the sensory memories, the excitement and tedium both, were still fresh, but after a little distance had helped sort out the vicious from the merely irritating and the juvenile from the enduring. In September 1985, with the help of Jim Olson of the Rocky Mountain Regional Office, I returned for a two-week tour of duty to the North Rim as a grunt firefighter—this after a forlorn summer at Yellowstone trying to rewrite that park’s fire plan. At midpoint during my tour the Longshots gathered for a reunion. The mixture of details reflects my furious notetaking during that brief reimmersion.

Not least, I crashed through the first draft after I had completed manuscript revisions for The Ice, a historical and philosophical meditation on Antarctica. Writing that book had utterly drained me. I had nothing left, not a phrase, not the scrapwood of an idea, not even a stray nail or two in the dirt. I was ravenous for sense impressions, data, details, all the minutiae of place and time and person that Antarctica had leached away. Fire on the Rim was for me an affirmation, the triumph of the senses over abstraction, the reclamation of fire over ice. Probably that accounts for the book’s obsessive detail. Some of what I had gained from distance, I thus lost through reaction.

Nothing—not arrests, not ice, not official displeasure—has in the least dampened my satisfaction at having seen the book through as best I could or in revisiting the North Rim. I return often. I’m never disappointed. For me—for all of us—the North Rim remains the best of places and our seasons there the best of times.

The rekindling of Fire on the Rim is largely due to Bill Cronon, friend, colleague, and editor-in-waiting for the series of histories I have come to call Cycle of Fire. Without his pointed prompting I would never have overcome the implacable inertia of two publishers whose corporate indifference covered the book like a mudslide. Thanks go as well to Gerry McCauley, who skillfully exhumed the copyright, and to Don Ellegood and Julidta Tarver, who have given the book as good a home as an author could ask for. And not least, thanks go to the far-scattered Longshots who from time to time remind me of what it all meant and why it still matters.

Steve Pyne

Alpine, Arizona

April 1995