Читать книгу Fire on the Rim - Stephen J. Pyne - Страница 9

PREFACE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION

Fire Call

A FEW MONTHS after I turned eighteen, a day after I graduated from high school, I reported for work as a common laborer to the South Rim of Grand Canyon. Even as I signed my papers, an opening appeared on the fire crew at the North Rim. Because I was on the scene, I was offered the job. I accepted.

I returned to the North Rim every summer for the next fifteen years. In my fourth season, I became foreman.

I saw the North Rim through fire and smoke. I saw it as a seasonal employee. I knew no one on the crew outside of fire season. Sonja and I dated each other for six summers before marrying. Our individual lives and our collective character were contoured by the geography and the rhythms of fire on the Rim and by the structure and cadences of Park Service bureaucracy.

Each year I lived twice. I knew two springs and two autumns. I knew one life on the Rim and one apart from it. It was a wonderfully schizophrenic existence. It was then, and it remains, an eternal present, lived and remembered.

This is a story of that place, those times, and the fires—those marvelous fires—that made it all possible.

… and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.

—HUCKLEBERRY FINN, ON MARK TWAIN

… and after the fire a still small voice.

—1 KINGS 19:12