On 5 February 2010 the pilot mentioned blowing a tire on landing at Whiskey Creek Airport. While this could have been a defect with that particular tire, it was more likely not. This is representative of a landing that was too fast or too long requiring heavy braking to stop the airplane on the remaining runway…
Flying is such a multi-faceted and complex endeavor that it is not uncommon to have a weakness in one area. I believe the incident pilot’s weakness was landing the airplane in gusty conditions. I believe that under any other circumstance the pilot would likely have gone around or even diverted to another airport; he had exhibited this decision-making in the past… Unfortunately once a pilot starts operating outside of normal boundaries then there remains no guidepost whereby to recognize boundaries.
The key words in that passage, under any other circumstance, lead us to the second half of Lewis’ two-part conceptual framework: the theory of mission completion bias. As articulated by Lewis, it proposes that when a conscientious person feels an unusual urgency to complete a task, that urgency can alter his decision-making process in adverse ways. This was not a routine flight for him, this was a special flight; a sightseeing flight for children, Lewis wrote. It is my opinion that he felt pressure to conclude the mission as promised to the concerned parents and teachers waiting back on the ground. This concept is not at all rare, and is in fact one of the many external pressures that pilots are cautioned against.
Another way to say it is that the laws of gravity and physics do not change because a plane carries special passengers—in this case, other people’s kids—but a pilot’s thinking might be affected if he’s not careful, the self-imposed pressure to complete the mission overriding his training and experience.
If Lewis was right, it was Dr. Hochla’s urgently felt desire to get the students safely back on the ground that caused him, in an excruciating irony, to do just the opposite.
THE WEEK FOLLOWING THE CRASH, when I cruised into Silver City for my days off, I found a community wounded and bewildered, and an ongoing process of commemoration about which I had known nothing. Having buried a brother gone far too young, I had more than an inkling of what those closest to the dead were feeling. Some of them felt an understandable wish to be gone themselves. Patrice, with whom I had friends in common, was in the care of people who took the precaution of removing the knives and pills from her home. She had been one of the first people on scene at the crash, and it seared images in her memory that would haunt her for years. Steve Blake, with whom I also had friends in common, was on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch, heavily medicated and practically catatonic, speaking only to say, over and over, that he wished he had been on the plane. He would teach one more year at the school before retiring, unable to continue working with kids.
If I had acted as a proper citizen of my community, I would have participated in the public process of mourning the dead. It would have been entirely natural to join the collective effort of making meaning from their brief, passionate lives. But coming off my mountain to belatedly enter the circle of grief felt awkward in a way I couldn’t quite pinpoint in the moment. The best I can surmise is that for the first time in a dozen years I felt disadvantaged by the solitude of my vocation. I could not assimilate the facts of the matter into my reality. I could not accept the absence from the world of those kids. Not long before I had sat in the same classroom with Ella Myers and Ella Jaz, both of them participants in a writing workshop I conducted for their English class. Even more recently I had sat at the bar in Silver City’s finest public gathering place, Diane’s Parlor, and listened to Michael Mahl sing and play acoustic guitar at an open-mic event. To think of them gone forever, their voices silenced, was both appalling and preposterous.
Reality being insistent, I became at first discombobulated, then angry. Instead of recognizing my anger and confusion for the selfish impulses they were, I used them as a shield to deflect my attention from the loss of those three beautiful human beings already well along a path of artistry and civic engagement, not to mention the pilot who had volunteered his time to enrich their education.
A thousand people attended the kids’ memorial service in Silver City, but I was not among them. Nor was I there when Patrice gathered with friends to scatter some of Ella Jaz’s ashes in the river near the headwaters confluence, everyone swimming together with them, laughing and crying amid the ashes’ swirl and flow. My work having granted me a certain remove from the immediate shock of the crash, I resolved to maintain my stance apart. I would find some private means of honoring their lives.
That aloof and contorted pose would last another two weeks, until news of John’s accident reached me through a telephone.
If I had wanted distance from death, death had other ideas.
BIRTHDAY FOR THE NEXT FOREST
SUMMER 2013
BY SHEER DUMB LUCK I happened to be facing the lightning when it struck: a livid filament that reappeared on my eyelids when I blinked. A blue puff of smoke bloomed skyward from the top of the ridge, superheated sap boiled to vapor in an instant. It dispersed on the breeze so quickly I wondered whether I had imagined it—whether, having become at last clinically pyromaniacal, I had willed the tree to catch fire and conjured the evidence to prove it.
I reached for the field glasses where they hung from a hook in the ceiling of the tower, an instinctual move made without looking away from the spot of the strike. I lifted the binoculars to my eyes, focused on the ridge line. Waited. Remembered to breathe. Waited some more. Nothing amiss. Nothing new or different along the contour of the hill.
Then it happened: the slightest rupture in the continuity of the view, a light white fog that ghosted the length of the tree and twisted through its branches, only to disperse again on the breeze. This smudge of smoke confirmed that I hadn’t been hallucinating—that indeed a bolt from the clouds had lit the tree on fire, and I had been witness to the genesis. I set the binoculars aside, crouched behind the peephole of my Osborne Fire Finder, and waited for the smoke to puff again. When it did, I aimed the crosshairs through the viewfinder and noted the azimuth to the fraction of a degree.
This fact in hand, I turned to my maps and compared what they told me with the topography surrounding the smoke, noting its relation to the nearest prominent feature on the landscape, a small but unmistakable peak. Confident I had pinned the fire within a single square mile on the map, I called the dispatcher with my report: lightning-struck snag, narrow column of light-colored smoke, compass direction from me expressed in degrees azimuth, location by township, range, and section. The Silver Fire: named for nearby Silver Creek.
This one appeared poised to go big and stay awhile.
The conditions of the forest where it occurred foretold what the fire became; or as we say in the business, fuel structure aligned with weather to offer high spread potential. All the ingredients for a conflagration were in place. For the sake of cattle forage and stability on the watershed and a pleasing view of dense green trees from a tourist highway and a dozen other excuses that taken together amounted to outmoded and contradictory dogma, the surrounding country had been starved of fire—every new smoke suppressed as quickly as possible—going back a hundred years, an astonishing feat of military technology and human hubris. The result was an overgrown, unhealthy patch of forest further stressed by the realities of climate change. Thousands of dead white fir trees, killed by beetles a decade earlier, sprinkled the surrounding hillsides, and fuel moisture in the living trees had been sapped by years of substandard snow pack and above-average temperatures. The weather forecast predicted the trifecta of hot, dry, windy conditions in the days ahead. All available smokejumpers had been dropped on two other fires earlier in the afternoon, so none were still on call for initial attack. Despite being well outside the Wilderness, the topography was too steep and thickly forested for helicopter landings, so the only option for suppression was to send an engine crew whose members would have to hike cross country from the end of a bad dirt roa
d, a trip that took four hours, drive time included.
For two full days I had a grandstand seat as my colleagues performed their suppression efforts—first the ground crew scratching a containment line around the fire, then air tankers dropping fire-retardant slurry from above. The containment line didn’t hold because big conifers kept toppling and rolling downslope, starting new spot fires below the crew, who had no choice but to flee for their lives. I stayed in service with them past midnight that first night, scanning their radio traffic on the tactical channel, eavesdropping on their progress and offering a communication link if they needed one, but I was of no use to their doomed efforts.
The next day’s repeated slurry drops didn’t hold because the fire had grown too hot, actively burning through the sundown hours when agency planes were forbidden to fly for safety reasons. They offered an impressive spectacle by daylight, two alternating bombers flying low over the ridge, first one, then the other, load-and-return from the aerial fire base all day long. The red-tinted mud unfurled in translucent streamers, dispersing into the treetops like a poison mist, but every drop of it—50,000 gallons of slurry, plus another 30,000 of water—was for naught. It was one more run at the old game, putting out fires with emergency money in liquid form, but the rules of that game had been written in a previous century, under conditions that no longer applied. A hotshot crew sent to scout the country for containment strategies reported back that there were none that didn’t risk injury or death.
On the fire’s second night, I stood in the meadow on top of my mountain and watched the flames rupture the dark like lava spewing from a fissure in the earth. The slow-motion momentum of a natural catastrophe exerted a powerful spell: the sight menaced and titillated in equal measure. Even after I called out of service for the evening, I couldn’t step away for more than half an hour before returning to the tower and staring some more. The fire had spread over seventy acres. The question now was whether the entire length of the Black Range would burn, or if some portion would be spared.
Late in the morning of day three, a running crown fire took off in the canopy as the wind pushed the flames upslope toward the crest of the range. Two hundred acres burned in the span of an hour, trees torching like Roman candles in flame lengths of 100 feet. Mesmerized, I watched the smoke—first white, then darkening through various shades of gray, finally culminating in black—rise skyward like the plume from a muddy geyser.
The order to evacuate came just after lunch. I was told I had forty-five minutes to grab the possessions dearest to me and lock up the facilities for a departure of indefinite duration. A helicopter would soon spool up to pluck me from the peak and deliver me to the trailhead, where my truck was parked directly in the path of the fire.
I hauled my gear out to the Marston Mat helipad—typewriter, box of books, backpack full of clothes, cooler of perishable food, a few other odds and ends—and made one last walk around the mountain, noting the various man-made flammables. Among them were the aspenwood hitching post I had just rebuilt, the picket fence around the propane tanks, the sign welcoming visitors, the old log cabin. Whether any or all would remain when I returned was an open question.
Oblivious to the drama playing out five miles south, hummingbirds clustered at the feeders I had hung for them. They drank my simple syrup mixture, chittering and whistling, flaring their wings to mime dominance or dislodge a seat at the table. The syrup would be gone in a day or two without me around to replenish it—but the fire would force the birds to find new feeding grounds anyway. They would move on. They would survive.
Soon the distant buzz of the chopper made itself heard, a low percussive hum that gathered strength until it roared over the meadow. The grass bent beneath the force of the rotor like seaweed swaying in the tide. Two helitack personnel ducked out the side door and loaded my supplies, a perfunctory job, performed wordlessly. It was a humbling and even sort of sickening feeling to board the machine for the flight out. More than a hundred times I had come and gone from the mountain over the years, mostly under power of my own two legs, a few times by the legs of a horse. To leave by the magic of internal combustion was as dispiriting as it was novel, almost equal parts elation and despair, with a side helping of guilt given my devotion to non-motorized Wilderness travel. The point of the work is early detection: the sooner you spot a fire, the more options you give firefighters to manage it. When you’re airlifted by the whirlybird, their options have dwindled, and so have yours—to none but run.
Over the course of eleven summers, I had sat in my mountain minaret and marveled at the harshness and beauty of the view, but to see it for the first time from a bird’s perspective astonished me anew. As the chopper rumbled along the crest toward the trailhead, I looked out the window upon a forbidding landscape, east-west canyons dropping sharply from the top of the divide, each of them cradled by shark-fin ridges and brutal bluffs—a forest of Douglas fir and white pine on the high peaks, pockets of aspen on the north-facing slopes, ponderosa on the south aspects, here and there a piñon pine. The smooth white bark of certain aspens still showed cowboy dendroglyphs carved almost a century ago. Amid them stood gnarly survivor trees whose bark had been corkscrewed by lightning. Others were marked by the scars of old ground fires at their base. A few of them had been almost like friends to me, sources of wonder and comfort. Their cool breath. Their proud bearing. Their highly individual shapes. Being among the most rooted of life forms—challenged by changing climatic conditions, unable to flee more immediate catastrophes—they were uniquely vulnerable organisms, which only added to their beauty. I tried to fix them in my imagination even as I bid them goodbye.
When we landed at the pass, I stepped from the chopper and removed my flight helmet to watch the smoke rise and spin like a cyclone to the south, a vortex of unimaginable heat. Ash fell like flakes of snow on the hood of my pickup truck, and the growl of the fire could be heard more than a mile away.
I joined the Black Range district ranger and three firefighters standing on the edge of the paved overlook, none of us quite capable of articulating the awe we felt at what we saw and what it meant for a forest we knew well and loved. I reminded myself that the mountains had always known fire, were in fact born in a cataclysm of fire, during a great volcanic explosion in the Eocene Epoch, an event orders of magnitude more dazzling than even the most spectacular wildfire.
Created in fire, the mountains would naturally succumb to it for renewal and rebirth. June 7, 2013, happened to be the day they did so.
WHEN I FIRST BECAME A LOOKOUT, during the fire season of 2002, I was as green as they come. About the only thing I knew for sure was which end of the binoculars to attach to my face. No one offered me a primer on the necessity of burns for maintaining the health of fire-adapted ecosystems. No one told me that the Gila National Forest was smack in the middle of a highly flammable swath of the American Southwest, although I would learn soon enough. At the time I didn’t care much about fire. I mostly marveled at the fact that I had stumbled into a paid writing retreat with beaucoup views. I studied the maps and listened closely to the voices on my radio. I wanted to be good enough at the essentials of the job to keep being asked back.
The next season changed my relationship with the country—or rather gave me the beginnings of one. Throughout the summer of 2003, I sat in my tower enthralled as the Dry Lakes Fire meandered through the southern portion of the Gila Wilderness, scarring nearly 100,000 acres in the end. At night spots of open flame glowed on the horizon like bonfires at a reunion of nomadic tribes. By day an observer plane kept in contact with ground crews, monitoring the progress of the burn from above. On my two-way radio, I heard talk of how the fire was “backing slowly off the ridge tops” and “burning nicely in the pondo” and “doing exactly what we want it to.” The smoke was beautiful to behold, a vast conglomeration of lazy white gossamer pennants rippling in the wind, and the language used to describe it unfailingly affirmative. The sunsets were bonkers, the mornings redolent of
campfire. I was astonished. I was hooked.
Every autumn thereafter, when the fire season was over, I would visit a fresh burn scar somewhere in the forest’s 3.3 million acres, poking around in the char. Far from being barren hellscapes devoid of life, as I had imagined, the burn scars quickly became magnets for birds, small mammals, black bears, deer, and elk. It was true that the disturbance to the land left an eerie calm at first, since anything that could run, fly, burrow, or slither away did so, but the initial post-fire rain jump-started a whole series of complex interactions, beginning with the formation of new communities of mosses and fungi in the uppermost layer of soil. Wood-boring insects found new homes in standing snags. Woodpeckers and sapsuckers pecked away at the flourishing insect life. Rodents emerged from their burrows to thrive on the regrowth of seed-bearing forbs and grasses, fattening into targets for hawks and owls. Elk and deer foraged on the leaves of replicating aspen. Bears found sustenance in new little colonies of raspberries and gooseberries, and in acorns from resprouting oak. For some forms of life, of course, wildfire signaled the end of the dance. For others it represented the first notes of a new song.
In 1978 the Gila had announced that, for the first time in any national forest anywhere in the US, an area of 30,000 acres in the Wilderness would be allowed to burn in “prescribed natural fires” if the conditions were right—a belated recognition that the land had burned for millennia, with no paramilitary force in place to stamp out smokes until the first years of the 20th century. At the time it was a radical leap to think of that much of the forest being allowed to burn in one fire.
A Song for the River Page 7