Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  The Smokejumpers were on their way to a blowup, a catastrophic collision of fire, clouds, and winds. With almost dramatic fitness, the collision was to occur where vast geological confrontations had occurred millions and millions of years ago—where old ocean beds, the bottoms of inland seas, were hoisted vertically by causes too long ago to be now identified and were then thrust forward by gravity into and over other ocean beds, cracking and crumbling them and creasing them into folds and creating a geological area called in the subdued language of scientists the “Disturbed Belt,” a belt that includes in its geological history much of not only northwestern Montana but western Alberta and eastern British Columbia.

  The “Disturbed Belt” in turn is a loosely tied part of a much larger geological formation scientists call the “Over-thrust Belt.” This overthrust formation not only includes the front or face of the Rockies from western Alberta and eastern British Columbia on down through Glacier Park and northwestern Montana (the “Disturbed Belt”); it extends in both directions to northern Canada and Alaska and all the way to central Mexico. Prior to the formation of this gigantic extrusion some 150 million years ago, large portions of the western margin of our continent, which then lay several hundred miles east of our present Pacific Coast, were covered by deep layers of sedimentary rocks, limestone and sandstone, deposited there by transient inland oceans which must have been something like Hudson Bay. As the western continent was raised, squeezed, and compressed, great slabs of sedimentary layers slid over each other inland or eastward for a distance varying from a few miles to a hundred miles or more.

  The present cliffs in the Gates of the Mountains are the rearings and collisions and roarings of the bottoms of oceans as they stood up like sea beasts struggling to prevent anything from finding a way around them. The cliffs on the sides of each canyon are bases to arches that once rested on the cliffs, as is proved by the matching strata on the opposite cliffs, but the key to the arch that once joined the cliffs has gone off somewhere and been replaced by the eternal arch of Montana sky.

  In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.

  When the Missouri escapes at the Gates from around a bend or from under a mountain it is still clear, but almost immediately after entering the plains it turns yellow like the plains and from then on there are plains and plains and plains, yellow plains parted only by a yellow river.

  Do not be deceived, though, by the scenic beauty of the Gates of the Mountains into believing that the confrontations and terrors of nature are obsolescences frozen in stone, like the battles of satyrs in Greek bas-relief, remnants of mythology and witnessed if ever by dinosaurs and now only by seismographs. It is easy for us to assume that as the result of modern science “we have conquered nature,” that nature is now confined to beaches for children and to national parks where the few remaining grizzly bears have been shot with tranquilizers and removed to above the timberline, supposedly for their safety and our own. But we should be prepared for the possibility, even if we are going to accompany modern firefighters into Mann Gulch, that the terror of the universe has not yet fossilized and the universe has not run out of blowups.

  Yet we should also go on wondering if there is not some shape, form, design as of artistry in this universe we are entering that is composed of catastrophes and missing parts. Whether we are coming up or down the Gates of the Mountains, catastrophes everywhere enfold us as they do the river, and catastrophes may seem to be only the visible remains of defunct happenings of millions of years ago and the Rocky Mountains only the disintegrated explosions that darkened skies also millions of years ago and left behind the world dusted with gritty silicon. At least I should recognize this as much the same stuff as the little pieces of glass which in 1980 Mount St. Helens in Washington sprinkled over my cabin in Montana six hundred miles away, and anyone coming down the Gates of the Mountains can see that the laminations of ocean beds compressed in the cliffs on one side of the river match the laminations in the opposite cliffs, and, looking up, can see that an arch, now disappeared into sky, originally joined both cliffs. There are also missing parts to the story of the lonely crosses ahead of us, almost invisible in deep grass near the top of a mountain. What if, by searching the earth and even the sky for these missing parts, we should find enough of them to see catastrophe change into the shape of remembered tragedy? Unless we are willing to escape into sentimentality or fantasy, often the best we can do with catastrophes, even our own, is to find out exactly what happened and restore some of the missing parts—hopefully, even the arch to the sky.

  EVEN ON THE FIRST RUN over the fire, all pertinent pieces of the plane and its universe began to fall into place and become one, preparatory to the jump—the crew, the overhead, the pilot, the airplane, the gulch, the fire in it, and the sky between, all readying themselves for the act. Jumping is one of the few jobs in the world that leads to just one moment when you must be just highly selected pieces of yourself that fit exactly the pieces of your training, your pieces of equipment having been made with those pieces of yourself and your training in mind. Each of the crew is sitting between the other’s legs, and all this is leading to a single act performed between heaven and earth by you alone, all your pieces having to be for this one moment just one piece. If you are alive at the end of the act, it has taken about a minute—less, if you are not alive. The jump is that kind of beauty when everything has to be in perfect unison in order for men to commit themselves to what once done cannot be recalled and at best can be only slightly modified. It becomes the perfectly coordinated effort when a woof is heard on earth as the parachute explodes open within five seconds after the jumper steps into the sky. If it’s more than five seconds, a handle has to be pulled to release the emergency chute.

  The pilot now was circling to see how close he could get the plane and the jumpers to the fire. The circles became closer by becoming smaller and nearer to the ground. Sometimes a Smokejumper pilot gets so near to the ground after the crew jumps but before he can pull his plane out of the face of a mountain that he returns to the base in Missoula with evergreen boughs in his landing gear. That is also beautiful, but mathematically can’t happen often.

  It was the time now for the drawing together of the overhead and the pilot. The spotter and the foreman lay on the floor with only the open door between them; the spotter and the pilot were joined together by earphones. The pilot was Kenneth Huber, a good one. He had been flying for the famous Johnson Flying Service for four years and during the war had transported paratroopers.

  The Johnson Flying Service did all the flying for the Smokejumpers in Missoula on contract and was as much a western legend as the jumpers themselves. In the Northwest, Bob Johnson, the owner, was a kind of Paul Bunyan of the air. Huber told Cooley over the earphones that his altimeter showed the plane had dropped a thousand feet in a few minutes and that because of the suction of air in the gulch he was going to jump the men above the ridge—at two thousand feet instead of the customary twelve hundred. Cooley knew as a result that the crew and cargo on landing would be scattered more than usual, and this information affected Cooley’s and Dodge’s choice of a landing area.

  If Bob Johnson had been piloting his own plane, he probably would have taken it into the gulch and arrived back in Missoula physically exhausted from lifting his plane out of the cliffs, and the plane would have been ornamented with Christmas boughs.

  On their first pass over the fire, the pilot, the spotter, and the foreman were already looking for a possible jump site, but the job of picking one was primarily the spotter’s. The pilot’s job, since he generally uses instruments when jumping his men, is to report what he can see on his instruments, and he had already re
ported considerable wind turbulence in the gulch. Both Cooley and Dodge, looking through the open door, immediately noticed a possible jump area, right on top of the ridge and right in front of the fire on its upgulch side. But almost immediately they said “no” and shook their heads in case “no” could not be heard across the open door. Naturally, they were trying to drop their men close to the fire—but without endangering them or their equipment, and a change in the wind, which was blowing upgulch from the river, so close to a fire front might have been the end of both. They were starting with the knowledge from the instruments that the wind had dropped the plane a thousand feet in minutes, and to this they could add their own stored-up knowledge that the top of a mountain is a world particularly devoid of equilibrium. As Cooley, the most experienced of the overhead, said later in explaining his rejection of this landing site, if you have wind turbulence to start with, you should know ahead of time that there will be even more of it at the top of a mountain and that, at the top, one side will have an upwind and the other side a downwind. Those who died later died near the top of a mountain in the upwind.

  On the next pass Cooley selected a jump area near the head of the gulch on its north side where “the slope gradually goes off into the bottom and your jumper more or less hits equilibrium.” Cooley later told the Forest Service’s Board of Review that he estimated the jump area to be “a strong half mile from the closest point of the fire” and five hundred feet below it in elevation—not only below it but on its flank and, important also, with few trees and rocks. Dodge finally accepted the site, although first objecting because a helicopter couldn’t land there in case injured men had to be brought out.

  So they all tried to think of everything, but the pilot thought primarily of his instruments, and the foreman thought primarily of his crew, and the spotter thought primarily of everything and made the decision.

  Then the crew began to stir. They were sitting straddle-legged on the floor, their backs to the cockpit, each man fitting snugly between the legs of the man behind him so that all sixteen jumpers and their equipment could be packed into the plane. They were almost literally one body—the equipment of each man next to him where the seat had been and each man between the legs of the man behind. Since the beginning of the flight, the assistant spotter, Jack Nash, had been checking their equipment. Now the men stirred to check themselves, figuring they had better do their own checking since they were going to have to do their own jumping.

  On the next pass over the fire the assistant spotter stood by the side of the open door and dropped the hunter orange drift chutes, and on the next circle the spotter estimated the distance and direction the wind had blown the chutes so he could tell how far ahead of their target he should drop the jumpers.

  The first “stick” stood up, a stick being the number of men, usually three or four, who are jumped on each run over the landing area. They stand in front of the open door, one behind the other, the front man with his left foot forward. They are closer together than ever. The man behind the first man stands with his right foot forward so that after the first man jumps the second man can make one step forward with his left foot and be where the first man was.

  It is the assistant spotter’s job to snap the jumper’s static line to a rod in the roof of the plane. The other end of the static line is snapped to his parachute. It is twelve feet long and, if all else goes well, will automatically open the jumper’s parachute after he has fallen twelve feet. So as the moment for the jump approaches, the men and the plane get closer and closer together. Some jumpers won’t allow the assistant spotter to snap their static line to the plane—they do it themselves. They also have to be careful when they jump not to hang themselves in their own lines. One has. On the next pass they started jumping. The foreman jumped first.

  NEARLY EVERY JUMPER FEARS THIS moment. If he continues to miss sleep because of it, he doesn’t tell anybody but he quits the Smokejumpers and joins up with something like the crew that makes trails. Whatever he tries, it is something close to the ground, and he never tries jumping again because it makes him vomit.

  Fear could be part of the reason they were jumping only fifteen men on this day—one had become sick on the flight over. Although he was an experienced jumper, his repressions had caught up with him and he had become ill on each of his flights this season and had not been able to jump. This was a rough trip, and after he had vomited and crawled out of it and his jump suit, he must have made his decision. When he landed back in Missoula, he resigned from the Smoke-jumpers.

  It was a record temperature outside and the air was turbulent, so much so that Sallee once told me that they were all half sick and trying to be in the first stick to jump and get on the ground. But, weather aside, it was hard to know on what day this or that good man had built up more anxiety than he could handle, and at the last minute on this day this crew of fifteen was jumping four sticks of 4-4-4-3. On the ground, however, the crew was to pick up another firefighter who had been fighting the fire alone, so when the showdown came the crew was again sixteen.

  The fear of the jumpers is a complicated matter, because in some ways a part of each of them is not afraid. Most of them, for instance, believe that God is out there, or a spirit or a something in the sky that holds them up. “You wouldn’t dare jump,” they say, “if it was empty out there.” Also they say, “Why be afraid? You are jumping in a parachute, and the government made the parachute, didn’t it?” This is connected with their thinking that guys who hang glide from the tops of the big mountains surrounding Missoula are crazy. “They’re crazy,” the Smokejumpers say. “They don’t have a government parachute.” So in some strange way they think they are jumping on the wings of God and the government. This does not keep them from worrying some nights—maybe every night—before they jump, and it does not keep some of them from vomiting as they are about to jump.

  Understandably, Smokejumpers have an obsession about their equipment. Although they change from one fixation to another, equipment is nearly always somewhere on their mind, and, as they get close to the jump, equipment is about all that is on their mind. They know they are about to live or die on a man-made substitute for wings furnished by the government. They start saying to themselves, as if it had never occurred to them before, “What the hell does the government know about making a parachute that will open five seconds after it starts to fall? Not a damn thing. They just farm it out to some fly-by-night outfit that makes the lowest bid.” As the jump nears, their general fears focus on what seems the least substantial and the most critical piece of their equipment—the static line that is supposed to jerk the parachute open with a woof twelve feet after it drops from the plane.

  The attention the jumper has to pay to the elaborate and studied ritual of jumping helps to keep his fears manageable. He stands by the spotter lying on the left of the door, who holds the jumper by the left foot. The next signs are by touch and not by word—the whole flight is made with the door open, unless it is going to be a very long one, so words can’t be trusted in the roar of the wind. Using the sill of the open door as a gunsight, the spotter waits for the landing area to appear in it and next allows for the wind drift. The spotter then says “Go,” or something like that, but the jumper doesn’t step into the sky until he feels the tap on the calf of his left leg, and in his dreams he remembers the tap. With the tap he steps into the sky left foot first so that the wind drift will not throw him face-first into the plane’s tail just to his left. He leaves for earth in the “tuck position,” a position somewhat like the one he was in before he was born. This whole business of appearing on earth from the sky has several likenesses to nativity.

  The jumpers are forced into this crouched, prenatal moment almost by the frame of things. The jumper, unlike the hang glider, is not up there for scenic purposes. He comes closer to plummeting than to gliding. He is to land as close as possible to the target the spotter has picked, and all the jumpers are supposed to do the same so no time will be lost i
n collecting and piling their stuff in the same pile and being off to the fire. In order to drop as straight as possible, the jumpers originally would stand straight up in front of the door of the plane and the spotter would say, “Do you see the jump spot down there?” But if the jumper was a new man, the spotter wouldn’t look to see if the jumper was seeing. He knew the jumper would be standing rigid with his eyes squeezed shut, looking as if he were looking at the distant horizon. But the spotter, needing to be sure that at least he was heard, would ask again, “Do you see the jump spot down there?” And the new jumper, frozen on the horizon, would say, “Yes, sir.” Then he would get the tap on the left leg, but before he could jump he had to crouch in the tuck position because the favorite plane of the early Smokejumpers was the Ford TriMotor that had just a small opening for a door. So it was more or less the frame of things that forced a Smokejumper to be born again as he jumped.

  His whole flight to the ground takes an average of only a minute. This minute is about the only moment a Smoke-jumper is ever alone, and it is one of the most lonely moments in his life. A Smokejumper never is sent alone to a fire; the minimum number is two; at their base Smokejumpers live in their dormitory with roommates or, if they live in Missoula, with their families; at night they are with their girls and often with other Smokejumpers who are with their girls, and if they get into a fight at a bar they are immediately supported by these other Smokejumpers. For the eternity of this one minute Smokejumpers are alone. It is not that they lose faith in God for that moment. It is just that He is not there anymore or anywhere else. Nothing is there except the jumper and his equipment made by the lowest bidder, and he himself has thinned out to the vanishing point of being only decisions once made that he can’t do anything about ever after.