He nonetheless remained on a friendly, first-name basis with the aviation officers of the Gila, who always said hello via the air-to-ground frequency when they flew over his mountain on their redundant recon missions. He thought their work essentially bogus and profligate, not to mention needlessly risky with human life, but that did not prevent him from liking the people who did it, nor they him. He knew fire season was on for real when the smokejumper plane waggled its wings at him as it passed by his tower on its first flight into the fire base at Grant County Airport each spring. Like the men and women in that plane, he loved to fly circles over beautiful country—and had to admit it was quite the caper for the flyboys and flygirls to have found a way to get paid for doing it.
THE EARTH WHERE JOHN was found dead had burned in his last major wildfire as a lookout. That fire started on Mother’s Day, around three in the afternoon, just off the Signal Peak Road. At first John only saw topsmoke rising out of the canyon to his north, so he made a quick call to dispatch with a tentative location in order to get firefighters moving that direction pronto. Then he checked with me to see if I had eyes on the fire. Just as I reached for the binoculars, I saw a curl of smoke rise over a ridge, twenty-two miles west of my tower and just north of his. Our triangulation of azimuths confirmed the location he had offered the dispatcher: Township 16 South, Range 13 West, Section 9. According to John’s anemometer reading, winds were twenty-six to thirty-two miles per hour, with gusts to forty-two, out of the northwest—which placed him directly upslope and downwind of the fire, about the worst place to be.
An engine crew had driven to his mountain that afternoon, stopping by on a patrol of roads and campgrounds in the vicinity. When the smoke first popped up, the crew members were standing in the tower, visiting with John and Teresa, so they were unusually well-positioned to respond as the initial attack force: they could see with their own eyes exactly where they needed to go. They reached the scene within fifteen minutes, by which time the fire had grown to two acres in size by making wind-driven runs uphill. The engine crew leader assumed the role of incident commander. He performed a quick size-up and requested additional resources. He and his men began constructing a hand line on the north side of the fire, near its point of origin, where it backed downslope into the wind. Within minutes the erratic behavior of the flames upslope from them forced them to disengage and reassess. They moved instead to the west flank of the fire and started scratching new line there.
Windy conditions made dropping smokejumpers untenable, so the jumpers arrived from the aerial fire base by vehicle, hard on the heels of a hotshot crew. Together the jumpers and hotshots conducted burnout operations between the Signal Peak Road and the northern edge of the fire, intending to use the road as a firm fuel break and an anchor point for the fire line. The leading southern and eastern edges remained too dangerous to fight. Ignited in grass, the fire had quickly leapt into the timber. Once it climbed the canopy, it became a running crown fire, with flame lengths of fifty feet and more.
John and Teresa knew they could not remain in the tower. They declined the offer of a helicopter evacuation, concerned for others in greater danger than they were, people who might need a lift from the chopper if the fire turned into a monster—hikers, campers, private property owners with forest inholdings whose only path out was blocked by the fire. With the burn moving generally east, John and Teresa had a safe escape route off the west side of the mountain, down the main trail to the highway. Before they left, they turned off the propane line to the tower, parked John’s vehicle in a clearing on the edge of the helicopter LZ, and loaded their packs with a few irreplaceable items, uncertain whether the tower would still be standing upon their return.
Sometime that evening the fire crested the ridge at the base of the lookout, and the heat of the flames half-melted the flamingos John had arranged as a wry gesture of suburban lawn ornamentation. The tower escaped harm as the fire paused on the top of the ridge, leaving one side of the mountain green, the other black, with malformed pink plastic birds marking the boundary line. I later thought of them as John’s final work of art, a spontaneous collaboration between his sense of whimsy and a force of nature—a force that stalled out thanks to the arrival of a back-door cold front from the east. Only the change in weather prevented the fire from growing ten times larger than its final tally of 5,484 acres and threatening the little town of Pinos Altos down below the green side of John’s mountain. Overnight the humidity rose and the temperature dropped into the twenties. More crucially, the northwest wind changed to a light east one, turning the fire back upon itself. That allowed firefighters to corral the south and east sides with hand line the second day, with help from helicopter bucket drops of water on the hot spots.
But it hadn’t been purely a force of nature—no lightning had been reported in the area by lookouts for weeks, and none had appeared on lightning maps available in the dispatch office. A human hand was clearly implicated in the fire’s ignition. As in all such cases, two law enforcement officers (LEOs) made a pyroforensics investigation, searching for evidence as to the cause and responsible party. The prevailing assumption among the general public is that a wildfire erases evidence of itself. On the contrary, it tends to create it—if you know how to look.
The forest LEOs arrived on scene within half an hour of John’s smoke report. The incident commander showed them the two-acre area he had encountered on first contact with the fire. The LEOs marked the area and departed so as not to get in the way of the suppression effort. They spent the rest of the afternoon patrolling the general vicinity in search of anyone who might have seen something suspicious.
On the following afternoon, the crew chief and the two LEOs walked the original two-acre perimeter, first clockwise, then counter-clockwise. They did so with an eye to fire-direction indicators they could trace toward the specific point of origin. Something as simple as the shape of a burned oak leaf, for instance, could offer a clue; typically green leaves curl in such a way that they point toward oncoming heat. The angle of the char on standing tree trunks provides another clue. Advancing fire—pushed by wind or moving upslope—will leave a line of char on trees at a higher angle than the angle of the slope, with the low side indicating the direction from which the fire came. Backing fire—that is, fire moving into the wind, or down a slope—will leave char on a line parallel to the ground all around the tree trunk. In grass, advancing fire burns all but the very base of the stem, while backing fire consumes the base so that some stems fall unburned, the seed heads generally pointing in the direction from which the fire came. Finally, in low-intensity fire—often close to the source of ignition—signs of “protection” will be visible, meaning fire will burn only one side of a tree trunk or fallen log. When looking at the protected, unburned sides, a human faces the origin of the fire.
By following these directional indicators backwards, reversing the path of the fire’s movement, the LEOs eventually focused on a ten-by-ten-foot patch of disturbed ground that represented a transition zone where backing and advancing fire converged: the point of origin. The fire appeared to have started in or near a burnt stump. The LEOs found two bullets inside the remains of the stump, and next to it an empty one-ounce bottle of Fireball liquor and two cigarette butts. Because they could not determine the precise place where an ignition source first came into contact with flammable material, they never named an official cause. It may have been residual heat from the bullets in the stump hole, assuming they had just been fired. It may have been one of the cigarettes or a match used to light it. It may have been some other ignition source that the guilty party was smart enough not to leave behind.
Several possible witnesses were interviewed in the ten days following the fire, and despite tantalizing clues—there was more than one mention of a light-colored SUV in the area around the time the smoke first boiled up—the person or persons responsible never faced any consequences.
TWELVE DAYS AFTER fleeing his mountain, John had returned
and resumed lookout duties when three students from Silver City flew over his tower in a private plane. Their charter high school, named in honor of Aldo Leopold, emphasized outdoor education and experiential learning, and it took seriously Leopold’s proposition that Wilderness could serve as “a laboratory for the study of land-health.” With that idea to guide their efforts, the students monitored soil conditions in a recent burn scar, tested water quality on the Gila River and its three headwater forks, and kept watch over more than a dozen study transects in the forest, tracking vegetation changes. One of those transects—number seven—just so happened to run along the north slope of Signal Peak. Now it had burned, which only amplified the importance of their work. They were eager to have a look at the changes.
Two of the kids were sixteen years old, the other fourteen. All were sophomores and members of the school’s Envirothon team, which competed in an annual statewide science contest. Their team, in fact, had won the state championship six weeks earlier. The boy among them, Michael Mahl, had just been selected student body president for the next year—the youngest ever at the school—in an election that was uncontested because everyone knew he would win. Blond-haired and blue-eyed, he possessed an impressive collection of cheap sunglasses that often hid those eyes behind a mirrored surface. He loved playing “The Legend of Zelda” video game series, which helped him overcome his early struggles with reading. A dedicated musician, he taught himself to play a didgeridoo he had fashioned from a yucca stalk with his own two hands. He performed most Sundays with his family at a church in Silver City led by his pastor grandfather. In addition to his major passion for the guitar, he played drums, ukulele, and mandolin.
Ella Sala Myers rode her horse Gracie six days a week—a big Dutch mare with a spirit to match her size—and wrote two novels before she earned a driver’s license. Tall and fair-skinned, she had the dignified posture of a trained equestrian competitor, with specialties in jumping horses and dressage. She played the violin and fiddle and took beautiful, almost abstract photographs of clouds from the back door of her family’s home. She had just been awarded a scholarship for a summer course at the Art Institute of Chicago on the basis of a short movie she had shot and directed herself. I once shared dinner with her and her family and some mutual friends at a Mexican restaurant in Silver City, during which the two of us traded stories of our writing endeavors. At the time we had each written one book, though she was twenty-six years younger than me. Hers won a Regional Scholastic Arts Award, but she was shy about it. Her older sister Raven, like a diligent publicist, kept nudging her to go on and say more whenever she appeared on the verge of clamming up.
Ella Jaz Kirk, the youngest of the three, had an easy grace earned by dancing ballet from a young age. Brown-eyed and willowy, with a long mane of dark hair spilling past her shoulders, she too had an aptitude for music. She wrote poetry and songs and, accompanied by her mother and several friends, recorded her first studio album when she was twelve, playing the fiddle and singing lead vocals. When the Interstate Stream Commission in Santa Fe began making serious noises about destroying the Gila River with a diversion dam, she set to work collecting more than 6,400 signatures on her self-authored petition to protect the river’s free-flowing beauty, making of her own voice a megaphone she shared with others. She delivered her petition to the governor and testified about the issue before a state legislative committee with the poise of someone thrice her age, an act that inspired the community of conservationists around Silver City.
The three students were more than colleagues, they were good friends. The Ellas played fiddle together in a group that sometimes got together to make music, and unbeknownst to the rest of the world, Ella Jaz and Michael Mahl had recently admitted their mutual attraction and held hands while watching a thunderstorm play on the horizon. Normally eco-monitor work called for a team leader, but they respected each other too much to elevate one above the others. Together they decided that Ella Myers was the soul, Ella Jaz the voice, and Michael Mahl the heart of their trio, and they chose an egalitarian approach to their work by which each of them took the lead on one aspect—Michael Mahl soils, Ella Jaz the watershed, Ella Myers forestry. At so tender an age, they already knew the truth of a line from the poet Mary Oliver: Attention is the beginning of devotion.
As the forestry leader, it fell to Ella Myers to make inquiries with the Forest Service about getting a look at their transect. She first sought permission to drive in on the Signal Peak Road, a request the Forest Service denied due to the hazard of falling trees in the burn scar. The area remained closed to the public—closed to everyone but John and our USFS colleagues. Aware, then, that the only way to see the transect was from the air, she asked whether she and her fellow students might ride along on a Forest Service reconnaissance flight. The agency rejected that request too, for liability reasons.
On the very last day of teacher meetings for the school year, three days after classes had ended for the students, an unexpected opportunity arose. That morning Steve Blake—the science teacher who oversaw their eco-monitoring projects and coached their Envirothon team—had an idea. He learned from his wife Denise that her first task of the day was to pick up a doctor she worked with at the Veterans Affairs health clinic in Silver City. Every other Friday Peter Hochla flew in his own private plane from his home base in Albuquerque to Whiskey Creek Airport, in Silver City, in order to treat psychiatric patients at the VA. He did the same at numerous other clinics around New Mexico, flying somewhere almost every weekday. He had arranged his professional life around the project of serving underserved veterans in the rural parts of a poor state. Now and then one of his far-flung patients required emergency transfer to the VA in Albuquerque. When that happened he would personally offer to fly family members in if they couldn’t afford to travel to be with their loved one—another sort of air-angel impulse.
On days when he flew to Silver City, Denise Blake often met him at the airport and drove him the final ten minutes of his journey to work. More than once Dr. Hochla had offered to take the Blakes along on his flight back to Albuquerque, if they ever had reason to travel there. Although they had never taken him up on the offer, it now occurred to Steve Blake to wonder whether the doctor might be willing to make a quick jaunt over the Signal Fire scar before flying home that day, as a favor to him and his students. A beloved educator, the most popular teacher at the school and, in the words of a colleague, a “brilliant maverick,” Steve Blake was always on the lookout for ways to give his students exciting learning experiences. He knew time had almost run out ahead of summer break, when the kids would scatter, and here was a devoted caregiver with an airplane and a generous disposition.
“Do you think there’s any way that he would consider taking the eco-monitors over the burn site?” Steve Blake asked his wife Denise.
She said she would put the question to him when she picked him up at the airport.
“It sounds like a worthy project,” Dr. Hochla said, when Denise brought it up. “I need to think about it.”
BY LUNCHTIME, having had a chance to mull over Blake’s request and ask a few questions about the nature of the students’ project, Dr. Hochla indicated he was inclined to say yes. He cautioned that the students shouldn’t count on it, because he had a personal policy of never flying in bad weather. If he saw lightning in the area ahead of time, he would have to call off the flight. Meanwhile he would need permission slips signed by the parents, in the event the weather cooperated.
Tied up in meetings at the school, Blake didn’t have a chance to discuss the idea with his students in person. Instead he sent them a text message, alerting them to the potential of a flight over their transect, and urging them to procure permission slips from their parents if they wanted to go. He told them not to get too excited—it wasn’t a sure thing—but to be prepared in case it came off as planned.
I have something at 6, Ella Jaz texted back. How long would this take? Do you think we’ll be done by 6?
&n
bsp; Planes don’t stop at stoplights, Blake replied.
THE STUDENTS HAD intended to be at the school that afternoon to wrap up work on a Youth Conservation Corps grant application for the coming year, so it was no inconvenience to meet up with Blake in time for a three o’clock flight.
Ella Myers’ mother, Jennifer Douglass, delivered her permission slip to the school in person and talked with Blake about the flight. He told her how the doctor flew all over the state visiting VA clinics for his work. Dr. Hochla, Blake said, never flew in bad weather—indeed he once stayed over with the Blakes when storms prevented him from returning to Albuquerque safely. If the weather looked unfavorable, the trip would have to wait.
Michael Mahl’s father signed his son’s permission slip and asked if there was room on the flight for one more. If so, he’d like to go along for the ride. The question was passed along to Dr. Hochla, and the answer came back no—only three empty seats and a weight limit besides.
Until that moment Blake had assumed he’d accompany his students on the flight, but now it was clear there would be room only for them.
When Ella Jaz mentioned the flight to her mother, Patrice Mutchnick called the main number at the school to inquire about the details. As the single parent of an only child, Patrice, by her own admission, took extra caution with the safety of her daughter, whose father had died when Ella Jaz was two years old. The secretary who answered the phone claimed no knowledge of the trip, so Patrice asked to speak directly with Blake. He repeated what he had told Jennifer Douglass about the doctor’s experience flying around the state to rural VA clinics, about his aversion to flying in bad weather, and how the flight would be called off if they saw any lightning.
A Song for the River Page 5