Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  Suddenly we felt the need for something we had needed for a long time without recognizing it—to get the two living survivors of the fire back into Mann Gulch with us. Suddenly we also realized that we probably didn’t know about a lot of things we thought we did but maybe only dead men knew. Survivors after nearly thirty years sound unreal enough to be dead, and, as far as we knew at the time, one or both of them might be. Nobody even at the Smokejumper base in Missoula knew whether they were legendary but alive or just burned-out flames burnished with legend.

  WE KNEW, OF COURSE, that of the three survivors of the fire, Wag Dodge had died soon after (in 1955), but we had a hard time finding out whether Walter Rumsey and Robert Sallee had addresses on this earth. You will discover, if you ever try to find out about a mass tragedy, that people believe the few who survive die soon after it. There is always that strong mental connection between a first-class catastrophe and the “kiss of death,” and, in the case of the Mann Gulch fire, it seems there had been such a lasting kiss, since not only Dodge but the pilot, Kenneth Huber, were dead soon after the fire, as if they were also its victims. When I found that nobody at the Smokejumper base was sure whether Rumsey and Sallee were alive, I began to think of a poem by Sandburg about a “little fliv of a woman” who wrote a letter to God but it went to the Dead Letter Office, “where all letters go addressed to God and no house number.”

  Fortunately, the basic tools of scholarship are much the same the world over, whether they are used under the ever-ready pigeons on the edge of the roof of the British Museum or in the presence of the white mountain goats that flit among the Gates of the Mountains. Wherever, you had better soon start looking for “first-hand sources” and, in order to discover what they are and where you can find them, you had better be good at “bibliography.” Scholars of the woods know that one of the best bibliographical reference works to consult is the postmistress of a nearby logging town. An ex-postmistress at my second home of Seeley Lake, Montana, who is a sort of yellow-pages directory of the loggers of the Northwest, told me she knew of a Sallee who was related to another Sallee and this other Sallee might be the Sallee I was looking for—if so, he was working in a sawmill west of Missoula toward French-town.

  There is a Hoerner Waldorf-Champion paper mill out there, and it was going full blast when I arrived. The outside, at least, looked just like the mills I had worked in when I was too young to work in a mill. I couldn’t find anybody in the offices, least of all in the personnel office, where there was a sign saying as always that they didn’t need any more help. Only one of all these offices was occupied; it said “The Nurse.” So the composition of a successful sawmill must still be the same as when I was first a millhand and was told I would never be an honest-to-God millhand until I lost a couple of fingers in the saws. The truth on which this ancient adage rests is that a sawmill is a large building full of moving chains, belts, and saws, all the chains and belts pulling toward saws, so if you or your clothes get caught in a chain or a belt, you know where you are going—you are going to the nurse. The composition, then, of a successful sawmill is a sign saying “No Help Wanted,” all the wanted help inside the big building working close to belts and saws, and the only office occupied by one nurse who can sew on fingers.

  I felt encouraged. The nurse looked and sounded as if she were a French-Canadian from Frenchtown. She said, “What can I do for you?” and I replied, “Do you know whether a guy by the name of Sallee ever worked here?”

  She asked, “Which Sallee? If you shake all the pine trees between here and Frenchtown—maybe between here and Superior—a lot of Sallees will drop out. Either a Sallee or a Des-champs or a LaCasse. What’s the name of your Sallee?”

  I said, “Robert.”

  “Isn’t that funny!” she said. “I have some friends by the name of Cyr who just got back from a vacation on the West Coast, and they stopped and visited Robert Sallee in Portland. If you’ll wait just a moment, I’ll telephone the Cyrs and get his address.”

  So some lessons about the bibliography of the woods are fairly simple, such as the one about the postmistress. It is also simple if you are looking for a French-Canadian in the woods—all you have to do is find another one.

  I flew to Portland to have a talk with Sallee, and he told me that he was sure Rumsey was alive, although he hadn’t seen him in years. When he last saw Rumsey, he was in charge of some kind of soil conservation work and lived somewhere in the Southwest, but Sallee couldn’t remember where, although he thought he had the address at home. The address he later sent me was not in the Southwest but in Boise, Idaho, and a month or two later Rumsey answered me from Lincoln, Nebraska, where he and my letter had been transferred.

  When first seen in person, the two survivors were unexpectedly real, and it is surprising to find that ghosts are real. They seemed big men for ghosts; both had become very successful in their professions, and it showed; both remained professional outdoorsmen, and that also showed. Sallee has stayed with timber and the mountains and works for Sandwell International, a consulting engineering firm. Rumsey returned to the plains from which he came and specialized in irrigation and soil conservation; he was to be killed in an airplane crash in 1981.

  It didn’t take long after meeting them to discover they depended upon being curious. Among other things, they were curious about me. They couldn’t quite figure “what I was up to” and “what my game was,” and it took a winter of letter writing to make myself seem real to them and on the up-and-up. But it worked both ways. Laird and I were curious about them, as you would have been. I wanted to see them in the crack of the earth through which they had crossed from death. Since both of them had told me they had spent much of their afterlife trying to forget the fire that they alone could remember, I also became interested in seeing what they did and didn’t remember. I thought, just as an intellectual exercise, it would be interesting to observe what real ghosts remember of the death they did not die but those only seconds behind them did. And, of course, it would be moving to see two real ghosts together again who had been roommates in the first life and so had helped each other to a second life. I was not surprised to find that my chances of getting them back into Mann Gulch depended upon their being curious about the same things I was, which they were. Out of curiosity, then, all four of us agreed to spend the day of July 1, 1978, in Mann Gulch.

  The shortest possible version of the long story of finally getting together in Mann Gulch is that finally we did. Even this shortened version should include the detail that Laird’s boat wouldn’t work after he had dragged it over the Continental Divide from Missoula to Helena the evening before. But he remembered a hunting pal who lived twenty-nine miles out of Helena on the Missouri River and had a jet-propulsion boat, the kind that can be landed in shallow water, and you can bet there are no docks where we were going to land. At three o’clock in the morning, Laird returned to Helena with the borrowed boat. We gave him a couple of hours in bed before pushing the boat into the Missouri and heading for the Gates of the Mountains.

  WE LANDED THE BIG BOAT at the mouth of Rescue Gulch, which must be among the earth’s special gulches to Rumsey and Sallee. When they crawled through the reef out of Mann Gulch, they crossed into Rescue Gulch, and it is near the head of Rescue Gulch that they found the rock slide in which they dodged from one side to the other as the main fire flapped by them. It is the head of this gulch that Hellman reached after the fire caught him crossing out of Mann Gulch, and it is up this gulch that Jansson and Sallee led the rescue crew the night of the fire and met Rumsey coming down trying to reach the Missouri at midnight for a canteen of water for Hellman.

  Approaching Mann Gulch from Rescue Gulch is approaching Mann Gulch from the side, and Mann Gulch can’t be seen until you look down into it after reaching the top of the ridge. However, if you know where to look from the mouth of Rescue Gulch, you can see Hellman’s cross close to the top. It is up this gulch that Jansson took Gisborne, and Jansson, having been head of the r
escue crew, knew where Hellman’s cross was and from the mouth of Rescue Gulch pointed it out to Gisborne, who took two hours getting there, stopping every hundred yards by prior agreement. Probably it was because Gisborne died of a heart attack on the way out that the others with me insisted I not try to make the climb, being twenty years older than Gisborne was when he died and, like him, having had heart problems. They even said they had been told in Missoula not to let me go. Finally, I had to get personal and tell them, “Look, there is a mountain downriver no farther than twelve miles from here by air that also looks over the Missouri. It was named by my wife when she was still a girl, and she named it Mount Jessie after herself, although she lived an otherwise modest life. At her request her ashes are there now. Nobody should feel bad if I should remain behind on one of these hills that looks her way.” Sallee reached over and took my pack off my shoulders, and we started climbing.

  He and Rumsey walked ahead toward the top of the hill. They seemed to get bigger instead of smaller as they climbed. Sallee, who at seventeen had been underage for the Smoke-jumpers, remained almost oversized. The afternoon I talked with him in Portland, in the board room of Sandwell International, he looked big just sitting there. He answered questions suddenly, especially if he didn’t like them. Almost as soon as we sat down, I asked, “Is it true you lied about your age to get into the Smokejumpers?” He never moved from his elbows. “Who told you that?” he asked. When I said, “Somebody from Frenchtown,” he said, “Yes.”

  Not long afterwards I asked him how he accounted for the fact that he and Rumsey, the two youngest and most inexperienced members of the crew, were the only ones to survive. This brought him off his elbows. “What do you mean, the most inexperienced? What difference does it make that we were in our first year as Smokejumpers? Jumping had nothing to do with what happened in Mann Gulch. Mann Gulch was nothing but a footrace with a fire. I was brought up in the backwoods in northern Idaho, where I had to go four miles each way to school, and I ran it. I was the best walker in every crew I worked on, and I made a point of showing I was, because it showed I wasn’t underage. Rumsey was from the plains and from a small town, and he was tough. We were roommates, and, if things didn’t go right, we saw that we never got far apart.”

  Probably one reason Sallee has done so well in business is that he doesn’t fool around with questions. He himself attributed his position at Sandwell to his absolutely white hair. Probably both reasons are about the same.

  Rumsey was a lanky Kansan and liked to have time to think and to remain in doubt about quite a few things, partly because, as a Kansan, he found it uneconomical, even dangerous, to think of too many things at once. He was the one who thought only of “the top of the ridge, the top of the ridge.”

  Walking behind, Laird and I could see the two in the same picture frame and, high above in the same picture, the cross of Hellman. We should like to have had a photograph of the two climbing toward the cross, but the cross was too far away to have shown—only in our memories are all three in the same frame, two returning and one forever there. We kept wondering what they were talking about, although we made a point of staying far enough behind so we could not hear.

  Then they stopped and waited for us to catch up. Sallee said, “Hellman’s cross is not in the right place.” Rumsey said, “I agree.” The cross was still a half mile above, and the grass everywhere was a foot or more high. I said, “We’re lucky we can see the cross from here,” but I didn’t argue. It was Rumsey who had started down Rescue Gulch at midnight to get water from the Missouri for Hellman, and it was Sallee whom he had met halfway up leading Jansson, the doctors, and the rescue crew. The two together had had no trouble finding Hellman in that land which in the dark had lost its identity. Twenty-nine years later they were going to give themselves a test to determine whether, unlike most mortals, they could find their way in this world and the world that died behind them.

  Sallee said, “The cross is too close to the rock slide where the fire went around us.” He said to Rumsey, “Remember, we yelled after the fire went by, and Hellman answered about thirty yards away.”

  Rumsey said, “I don’t think his cross is even on the right side of that draw.”

  Sallee said, “I’m positive,” a word combination he likes. “On our way back this afternoon, let’s go by the rock slide and check.”

  Later that afternoon, when we came back and were looking down toward the cross but were still quite a way from it, Rumsey said, “I think we are right. It should be farther from the rock slide, on the other side of the draw and lower down. His answer came from below.”

  Sallee said, “I know positively it is wrong. There was a big, flat rock lower down on the other side of the draw, and we put him on it to keep his burns out of the ashes.”

  “That’s it,” they said when we got close to the flat rock. “His cross should be here.”

  Sallee said to Rumsey, “We could be doubly positive if we could find the tin can Dodge left you when he and I started for the river and help. Remember,” he said, “he left you a can of Irish white potatoes and his canteen. He had thrown everything else away.”

  Rumsey looked behind him and said, as a Methodist, “By gosh, there’s a rusty old can.”

  I started to reach for it, but Rumsey stopped me. “Don’t touch it. Let me think for a minute.” Then he said, “Of course, I didn’t have a can opener with me—only my jackknife. Besides, Hellman didn’t want the potatoes, just the juice, even though it was salty and would make him more thirsty, so I jabbed my knife twice into opposite sides of the top of the can, one of them to let in air for the juice to come out the other one.” Then Sallee reached down and handed Rumsey the rusty can, and it had two knife jabs on opposite sides of its top. They had passed their own test.

  So Hellman’s cross is not properly placed, as two ghosts who are woodsmen could tell a half mile away. It should be over thirty yards to the west of the rock slide, across a draw, lower down the hill, and next to a big, flat rock.

  THE NIGHT BEFORE IN HELENA, while Laird was down on the Missouri somewhere trying to find a very special kind of friend who owned a special kind of boat with a motor that worked, Rumsey, Sallee, and I sat several hours around the dining table before carrying out the dishes. We were sure that tomorrow there would be four men in Mann Gulch who collectively knew more about its tragedy than would ever be assembled there again. Two were the only living survivors, both of them still outdoorsmen; another was one of the Smokejumpers’ finest modern foremen, who had become information officer at the Smokejumper base in Missoula, answering all questions the public could think of asking about getting to a fire and back again; and I had been on some big fires too, and, if that was before the other three were born and made me a little slow of foot, I compensated by having collected the best existing file of documents on Mann Gulch, including statements Rumsey and Sallee had made soon after the fire, which I intended to carry in a packsack with me into Mann Gulch the next day when we convened as a complete court upon ourselves—plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, attorneys, judge, and jurors. In such distinguished company, including the packsack, it would be hard for any one of us to remain far wrong. At least, not for long.

  Since it takes a lot of daytime just to get in and out of Mann Gulch, we were selecting our targets in advance so we wouldn’t end up tomorrow as scattered over Mann Gulch as the cargo had been after it was dropped from the plane. Inevitably, our sights all lined up on the same target, the scene of the catastrophe and the crosses.

  You would have picked the place of the crosses yourself; nearly anyone would, so ancient and binding are the connections between drama, religion, and the top of a hill. The Christian scene of suffering, where hill meets sky, has been painted so many thousands of times that something within it must direct it to paint itself.

  On pages 10-11 of the photo gallery in this book is a photograph in which much of what was left of the catastrophe of Mann Gulch appears in quiet composition but is short
of being classic in the composition of catastrophe. I found it in a Forest Service file and so for a moment felt that nature had composed it, only later realizing that it is the work of a partly informed photographer with a good enough eye to combine the standard principles of photographic design with much of the ground on which the historical and dramatic catastrophe happened. But it is short of a perfect combination of art and history because an error in photographic art seriously divests it of the intensity of the real thing, and, what is more, it omits a slice of adjoining ground which would not have been hard to include and on which two of the most important events in the tragic story occurred. Still, it was the best of the historical photographs of the scene of suffering I had found, so it was the photograph Laird and I had to work with as we started our quest for the missing parts, and you too should start with it.

  Despite its faults, this composition of the scene effectively observes the traditional three-part division of foreground, middle distance, and something at the top to frame it, each of these topographical and aesthetic formations making visible a separate dramatic and historical part of the tragedy, with each given its proper size.

  The foreground is the darkened land of death extending completely across the bottom of the picture—dead trees, burned, fallen, and rotten, a broken stub of one of the fallen trees standing close to and as high as the cross to expose its death. A thistle, the only thing living, fronts the white cross of Stanley J. Reba, which is the lowest on the hill of all the crosses and which possesses all the rest of the photograph and says what the rest is all about. Topographically, historically, and dramatically the end of this tragedy properly rests upon this dark foreground.

  The upper frame of the tragedy is also composed of topography, history, and drama. The reef of rocks at the top was probable salvation if it could be reached. Near the top is the highest standing tree on the slope (marked X on the photograph). It comes out of the middle distance, but its top connects visually with the reef and even the sky, suggestively just to the left of an opening in the reef that might be the crevice with a juniper bush on the other side. Likewise, the dead tree might be the tree Dodge stood beside when he lit his escape fire. Above the frame is one faint semi-arid cloud, perhaps a reminder that Smokejumpers sooner or later return to the sky from where they are dropped, certainly a sign that rain will not come for days.