Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  It was becoming a world where thought that could be described as such was done largely by fixations. Thought consisted in repeating over and over something that had been said in a training course or at least by somebody older than you.

  Critical distances shortened. It had been a quarter of a mile from where Dodge had rejoined his crew to where he had the crew reverse direction. From there they had gone only five hundred yards at the most before he realized the fire was gaining on them so rapidly that the men should discard whatever was heavy.

  The next station of the cross was only seventy-five yards ahead. There they came to the edge of scattered timber with a grassy slope ahead. There they could see what is really not possible to see: the center of a blowup. It is really not possible to see the center of a blowup because the smoke only occasionally lifts, and when it does all that can be seen are pieces, pieces of death flying around looking for you—burning cones, branches circling on wings, a log in flight without a propeller. Below in the bottom of the gulch was a great roar without visible flames but blown with winds on fire. Now, for the first time, they could have seen to the head of the gulch if they had been looking that way. And now, for the first time, to their left the top of the ridge was visible, looking when the smoke parted to be not more than two hundred yards away.

  Navon had already left the line and on his own was angling for the top. Having been at Bastogne, he thought he had come to know the deepest of secrets—how death can be avoided—and, as if he did, he had put away his camera. But if he really knew at that moment how death could be avoided, he would have had to know the answers to two questions: How could fires be burning in all directions and be burning right at you? And how could those invisible and present only by a roar all be roaring at you?

  ON THE OPEN SLOPE AHEAD of the timber Dodge was lighting a fire in the bunch grass with a “gofer” match. He was to say later at the Review that he did not think he or his crew could make the two hundred yards to the top of the ridge. He was also to estimate that the men had about thirty seconds before the fire would roar over them.

  Dodge’s fire did not disturb Rumsey’s fixation. Speaking of Dodge lighting his own fire, Rumsey said, “I remember thinking that that was a very good idea, but I don’t remember what I thought it was good for…. I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe.”

  Sallee was with Rumsey. Diettert, who before being called to the fire had been working on a project with Rumsey, was the third in the bunch that reached Dodge. On a summer day in 1978, twenty-nine years later, Sallee and I stood on what we thought was the same spot. Sallee said, “I saw him bend over and light a fire with a match. I thought, With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us?”

  It shouldn’t be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hillside and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn’t understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, “We thought he must have gone nuts.” A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him.

  4

  WHEN AT APPROXIMATELY FOUR O’CLOCK that afternoon the parachute on the radio had failed to open, the world had been immediately reduced to a two-and-a-half-mile gulch, and of this small, steep world sixty acres had been occupied by fire. Now, a little less than two hours later, the world was drastically reduced from that—to the 150 yards between the Smokejumpers and the fire that in minutes would catch up to them, to the roar below them that was all there was left of the bottom of the gulch, and to the head of the gulch that at the moment was smoke about to roar.

  Somewhere beyond thought, however, there was an outside world with some good men in it. There were a lot more men sitting in bars who were out of drinking money and also out of shape and had never been on a fire before they found themselves on this one. There are also times, especially as the world is blowing up, when even good men land at the mouth of the wrong gulch, forget to bring litters even though they are a rescue team, and, after having gone back to get some blankets, show up with only one for all those who would be cold that night from burns and suffering.

  One good man from the outside had come close to the inside. At about five o’clock, roughly about the time the crew had tooled up and started from the head of the gulch toward the fire, one good man had started up Mann Gulch from the river, had seen the fire blow up around him, then had been trapped by it and lost consciousness while running through a whirl that had jumped to the north side of the gulch.

  So about the time that Dodge and his crew were hurrying downgulch into the blowup, ranger Robert Jansson at the lower end was running from the blowup back to the river.

  Jansson was ranger of the Helena National Forest’s Canyon Ferry District, its station located then on the Missouri River about twenty-three miles northeast of Helena. With roads now nearly everywhere, planes and helicopters overhead, and word spread almost instantly by telephone or radio, it has become much easier and quicker to get men on fires, and, as a result, many Forest Service districts have merged and disappeared. Today, Canyon Ferry District and the Helena District are one, but in 1949 the Canyon Ferry District alone was a big piece of country, somewhere between two hundred fifty thousand and three hundred thousand acres and extending far enough downriver to include Mann Gulch. Mann Gulch at the time of the fire was the responsibility of a dedicated ranger, not easy to work for, and, like others who came close to this fire and survived, he was never to escape it. As a ranger he had always been obsessive in his dedication; as often as he could, he walked on mountains, watching and working and expecting his men to do the same. When, for instance, he should have kept only a skeleton crew on the Fourth of July and let the rest of his crew go to town, he kept all his men at work chasing fires he had faked, and he was a Methodist and did not drink or smoke. Unlike most rangers, he was a sensitive, vivid writer, and both his official position and the things in him that saw and felt compelled him to write report after report on the Mann Gulch fire, two of which should be listed in the literature of forest fires, if there is such a listing and such a literature. His reports are in official prose and depend upon reporting and not prose, and so have to be exceptionally good reporting to be good.

  Jansson starts fitting together when we come to understand his love of his district, his sense that it was his protectorate, and his constant fear that it was about to blow up or already had and he didn’t know where. He was constantly in the field even when the district would have been better off if he had been in the ranger station. But he knew his district inch by inch and had made a fire plan for every gulch and every possible blowup, and he worked his men illegal hours and holidays so that the blowup would be averted or at least spotted immediately. He makes us think of ourselves as we would be if we were made responsible for two hundred fifty thousand or three hundred thousand acres of some of the roughest country anywhere on the Missouri River, and knew that, when the fire blew, our help would be mostly bums picked up in bars and college students on summer vacation. We would be trying to do everything ourselves all at once all the time and trying to get everybody else to do the same, and we would have been, as he was, chronically ill, telling his close friends that it was hereditary but never saying what “it” was.

  There was a big streak in him of those old-time rangers who had 1910-on-the-brain. Rangers for decades after were on the wa
tch for fear that 1910 might start again and right in their woodpile. Some even lost their jobs because a fire got away from them. So Jansson was part old-time ranger, part us, and part John Robert Jansson.

  In fact, he had been one of the first to spot and report the Mann Gulch fire. About four o’clock the previous afternoon, August 4, a lightning storm had passed over Helena and the Gates of the Mountains while Jansson was in Helena attending a meeting with several other rangers in the office of supervisor Moir. Lightning was heavy and immediately eight fires were reported, four in Jansson’s Canyon Ferry District. The rangers hurried off to get on their fires. Jansson spent the rest of that afternoon and the evening “taking suppression action on three lightning fires and one camper fire.”

  In addition to fires that appear almost immediately after a lightning storm, there are usually a few “sleepers” that take a day or more before they can be spotted, fires often caused by lightning striking a dead tree with only rocks and a few dead needles underneath, so that only after a time do enough ashes fall to get a ground fire started with smoke showing. Accordingly, Jansson and his supervisor agreed that Jansson should wait until eleven the next morning before making an air patrol in order to give the dew time to dry and the sleepers to awake.

  On August 4, the day the lightning storm blew by, fire conditions were not critical. On August 5 they were. At Canyon Ferry Ranger Station, the fire danger rating was 16 out of a possible 100 on August 4, but on the next day it was 74 out of 100; when questioned as to how such a rating should be classified, Jansson answered, “Explosive stage.”

  Jansson had tried to reach Jim Harrison, the guard at Meriwether Station, on the evening of August 4 by radio, but atmospheric conditions were bad and it was the next morning before he made contact. Harrison told him that there had been many lightning strikes north (downriver in the direction of Mann Gulch) the afternoon before, but Jansson told him he should clean up the picnic grounds first and not start on patrol until eleven o’clock so he would miss no late sleepers.

  The next morning at eleven o’clock Jansson flew from Helena down the Missouri to within a mile west of where the Mann Gulch fire was to appear and on the way back flew directly over the spot. But he returned to Helena having seen only one small smoke coming from a sleeper reported earlier in the morning. He even flew low over Harrison’s patrol station, hoping to get a signal from him, but Harrison by now had probably spotted the fire and was on his way back to his Meriwether camp, where, after trying unsuccessfully to radio Canyon Ferry Ranger Station, he tacked his last message on his door. He and his mother did not know it, but he was on his way to rejoin the jumpers, and they were on their way to all that she feared.

  Although nothing new had shown up from the air, the moment Jansson’s plane landed at Helena a smoke rose from the Missouri but seemingly farther downriver than they had flown. When Jansson reported this new smoke to the supervisor’s office, he was told that the lookout on Colorado Mountain had just reported a fire in Mann Gulch, but Jansson did not take this location as gospel since Colorado Mountain was about thirty miles from Mann Gulch. Not being sure that this new fire was even on Forest Service land, he decided to fly the Gates of the Mountains once more.

  Now smoke could be seen from the river as his plane approached Mann Gulch. The fire was burning on the ridge between Mann and Meriwether but at that time entirely on the Mann Gulch side and seemingly not spreading except at its upgulch edge. He estimated it to be eight acres in extent (six acres by a later survey). When asked at the Review whether it was “an exceptional experience for a fire to be eight acres an hour after a ranger had not been able to see it,” Jansson answered, “In my judgment, that was unusual.”

  While still observing the Mann Gulch fire from the air, Jansson had spotted another fire to the south, which was to be called the “York fire.” York is on Trout Creek, which has a number of summer and even permanent homes on it, so the damage a fire in that location could do was considerably greater than what one in Mann Gulch could do. In fact, there were times during the coming day and night when it looked as if the best men and equipment should be sent to Trout Creek. In addition, the first sleeper found that morning was now starting to smoke up. Maybe men and equipment should be sent to it. Evidently it was going to be one of those days when one of the biggest problems in facing danger was to figure out the biggest danger and not to have a change of mind too often or too late or too soon.

  It is hard to know what to do with all the detail that rises out of a fire. It rises out of a fire as thick as smoke and threatens to blot out everything—some of it is true but doesn’t make any difference, some is just plain wrong, and some doesn’t even exist, except in your mind, as you slowly discover long afterwards. Some of it, though, is true—and makes all the difference. The first half of the art of firefighting is learning to recognize a real piece of fire when you see one and not letting your supervisors talk you out of it. Some fires are more this way than others and are good practice for real life.

  On the return of Jansson’s plane to Helena, cloud formations were noted which the pilot said meant high and variable winds. Forest fires need high and variable winds, and can make their own updrafts once they get started. The clouds were cumulus clouds, white, uneven, and puffy, caused by updrafts from variable heat conditions on the ground. In this story about Smokejumpers, clouds and winds are to be closely observed, even to the end and even if no one can tell for sure what details are going to make a difference.

  BY THE TIME THEY LANDED again in Helena, Jansson had made a tentative “man-and-equipment order.” For the Mann Gulch fire, he ordered “fifty men with equipment and overhead, two Pacific pumps with three thousand feet of hose, and fifty sack lunches.” Soon he added twenty-five Smoke-jumpers to the order, because he believed the fire to be in an almost inaccessible area and the only chance to hold it to a small fire would be to get men on it in another few hours. Supervisor Moir agreed and telephoned the fire desk in Missoula, but was told that, although enough jumpers were available at the base, all planes except one were on mission, and the one plane, a C-47, could hold only sixteen jumpers with equipment. Jansson and Moir said no to sending a second plane later in the afternoon. That would probably be too late to get the jumpers on the fire before dark. This was at 1:44. At 2:30 the one plane left Missoula.

  In the meantime, Jansson ate lunch in the office while he waited for the fifty-man emergency crew to be rounded up. Which brings up again the practice the Forest Service used to make of recruiting large crews of volunteer firefighters for emergencies. In those days the Helena National Forest Service thought it had an agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Canyon Constructors to send men on call. But as it turned out, it was the Bureau’s understanding that the plan was to operate only when its men were off shift, and at the time of the Mann Gulch fire practically none of them were. So when not enough Smokejumpers could be dropped on a threatening fire and there were other threatening fires to think about, the Forest Service soon would be combing the bars for stool-bums, and stool-bums, apart from not being much good on a fire, are not easy to get off their stools. Like the rest of us but perhaps more so, they would rather remain alive on a stool exposed to the possibility of being converted by the Salvation Army than be found dead on a fire-line with a Pulaski smoldering in their hands.

  So after a while when nobody showed up, Jansson and alternate ranger Henry Hersey left the office and started working the bars, ending up with ten, not fifty, customers who thought they needed a breath of fresh air. The ones who were still drunk when they got to the fire may well have been better off than the ones who had sobered up and found out where they were.

  Jansson located a Forest Service horse truck, loaded it with bedrolls, put the ten recruits on top of the rolls, and at 2:20 started for Hilger Landing twenty miles from Helena and nearly another six miles by boat from Mann Gulch. The owner of an excursion boat had telephoned to report the fire and had said he would hold his boat at Hil
ger Landing for the use of the Forest Service. Since it was 2:30 when the Smoke-jumpers left Missoula for Mann Gulch, Jansson and his crew were leaving Helena at about the same time, but it would be hours before they located each other.

  By three o’clock Hersey had collected nine more revolving bar stools and started for Hilger Landing.

  Jansson arrived at Hilger Landing only to discover that the owner of the excursion boat had left with a load of paying tourists so they could see firsthand the smoke coming out of the mouth of Mann Gulch. The ranger was sore as hell, but as a Methodist interested in working with young people he says only that he was “thoroughly peeved.” There wasn’t anything he could do, though, but wait. There was no road through the Gates of the Mountains in 1949, and because it is designated wilderness, the area still has no roads. Even today you need a boat to get through the cliffs of the Gates, and the boating is fine if you can get a boat, because some nine miles below the mouth of Mann Gulch there is a big power dam that has made a small lake of the river and backed it up clear to the upper end of the cliffs of the Gates, where Jansson was waiting with a crew and no paddle.

  No wonder he was “peeved”; he had already worked out his plan with Hersey, and there was nothing constructive he could do while he waited. The plan was for both him and Hersey to land at the mouth of Mann Gulch and then, since it would be getting late in the day and the crew was in poor shape, to set up camp there and wait until the next morning before hitting the fire. Hersey would take charge of the fire crew while Jansson would scout Mann Gulch, find the jumpers, and bring them back to camp, where they could put up a coordinated fight. It was a good plan, except that it did not allow for the wit of the universe and the mental lapses of man.

  While Jansson waited at Hilger Landing, the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, was alone on the Mann Gulch fire. Jansson had to wait fifty minutes with his ten volunteers before the owner of a private boat, Fred Padbury, a Helena druggist, pulled up to the landing and took on Jansson and his crew and some of their equipment.