Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  It was a long lunch and a long time before we got back to Mann Gulch. On the way toward finding the truth there is a lot of mud in the geyser between the bubbles and the smoke.

  IT WAS EVEN LATER THAN PLANNED before we returned to Mann Gulch. We had planned to be there by the first of July before the temperature started to set records, but these plans were made before the ex-foreman of the Smokejumpers remembered this was the time of year when salmon run the rivers of British Columbia. Accordingly, he weakened his shock absorbers over two thousand miles of Canadian dirt roads only to discover that fifty-pound salmon have no trouble breaking sixty-pound test line. I found myself pleased to tell him on his return, “Hell, you’re too old to believe fishing-tackle manufacturers. On the Blackfoot, where I don’t expect to catch trout over two or three pounds, I always use eight-pound test leader.” I added, “Even then, I stop a couple of times a day to tie a fresh leader.”

  So when we finally started for Mann Gulch on July 24, 1979, it was 94 degrees in Helena, not quite so hot as the record 97 on the day of the fire but hot enough to prompt us to divide jobs toward the end of the afternoon to get the day’s work done. I was to sidehill to the crosses and end the day by hitting the top of the ridge and following it back to the head of the gulch, there to meet Laird, whose late afternoon mission would take him up the bottom of the gulch. On my way back I quit worrying about dying from a heart attack. Even before I reached the top of the ridge, death from dehydration seemed more immediate, but even so I knew that, thanks to the variable winds that abide on the tops of ridges, I couldn’t be in such imminent danger as Laird—in the bottom of the gulch not a thing stirred but Laird. So when we met at the head of the gulch, both of us just short of death, I asked him out of curiosity, “How hot do you think it is in the bottom?” “Between 120 and 130 degrees,” he answered. “Now, be serious,” I said, “and remember 140 degrees is getting toward lethal.” He said, “Between 120 and 130 degrees,” and he has been in a lot of heat in his day. “But you remember,” he added, “that temperature is taken in the shade, and there is no shade in the bottom of Mann Gulch.”

  In many ways the trip turned out to be all we could have hoped for, partly because the heat gave us some sense of what men suffered in Mann Gulch on August 5, 1949.

  We could never have realized our plan to come into the head of Mann Gulch by way of Willow Creek without the kindness of the Montana Fish and Game Commission. They not only gave us permission to enter by way of Willow Creek, which is on the old Jim McGregor ranch the commission bought for a game preserve, but furnished us with saddle horses and trucked the horses to the end of the road, where our four-wheel drive could go no farther. Maybe I could have made it into the gulch without a horse, but my body would have had to wait for a helicopter to bring it back.

  Even on the way in, I was given a disturbing glimpse of what I was going to suffer for having done so much easy climbing with my old Dunham climbing boots—without noticing it, I had worn the lugs on their soles too smooth to climb a 76 percent slope slick with dry grass. On the way in, while spelling my horse by leading her through a rocky stretch, I slipped and fell under her legs. I could see it happening in all its parts, part by part. I could see I was falling uphill under her legs and I seemed to have time to try to reverse the direction and fall away from her, and then, fast as it was happening, I had time to see I was powerless to make any decision and time still to see I couldn’t see what her back legs were doing but fortunately time to see that her front legs were curling as if her bones were soft and were curling to bring her hoofs down on the hill just above my head. After all this, there was time to start loving my horse.

  This was just a premonition of what was coming in the afternoon when I had to climb the 76 percent slope, pulling myself from one fistful of grass to the next. Even so, I did not suffer as much from my hands as from thirst.

  When we reached the head of Mann Gulch, we stood looking for a tree to tie our horses to, nearly all of the trees, burned thirty years before, having rotted at the roots and fallen. So we had to settle for a couple of rotten fallen trees which might possibly hold, and we tied our horses to them, but all day I watched my horse at a great distance, expecting to see her pull out for home. She was such a good horse that I am sure she could have pulled loose. But she didn’t, and it must have been terrible to have been tied there in that heat.

  Paul Lloyd-Davis had come with us on this trip to help run our hundred-yard tape measure. He is an ex-firefighter, an old friend of Laird’s, and at the time was a reporter for a Missoula television station, and we were glad to have another ex-firefighter along to share our sufferings.

  Lloyd-Davis and I started sidehilling toward the crosses from the head of the gulch with what had developed into a two-prong plan to close in on the origin of the escape fire and to leave no doubt behind. One prong was to start at the most reliable mark on the hillside, Sylvia’s cross, and from it measure backward to Dodge’s fire, using Dodge’s estimate of the distance from where he lay down in his fire to where he found Sylvia afterwards beside his flat rock. The second prong had been added to our original plan of attack in the winter. I had been rearranging my files, as I do now and then to remind myself what is in them. In a file marked “Yonts, Susan: Washington, D.C.,” I found a photograph of the site of the Mann Gulch tragedy taken on August 16, 1949, with the origin of Dodge’s fire marked on it. At the time Susan Yonts found this photo for me, she was working in the Forest Service’s Office of Information in Washington and I was just starting a serious study of the Mann Gulch fire. Before long, I happened to mention to her that I was the son of a Presbyterian minister and she said she was the daughter of one herself, and pretty soon she knew as much about the Mann Gulch fire as I did, maybe more. And certainly, she soon had produced more documents about the fire out of various archives than I could understand or knew what to do with. This photograph, which is reproduced on pages 12-13 of the photo gallery, I had enough instinct to take with me.

  Whoever made the notations on this photograph had trouble spelling “received,” and we were almost certain that the notation “Rumsey-Sallee—Hellman crossed here” does not point to the right crevice. But we were guessing that the location of Dodge’s fire in the photograph might be correct because in the file with it was another photograph which, in the same handwriting as “recieved,” records the same date, August 16, 1949, and the reason for the occasion: “Men in foreground are placing crosses.” So August 16, 1949, is the day of the wooden crosses, one of which had been placed where Dodge lit his fire.

  Laird immediately became attached to the photograph. He is many fine things, including a fine photographer. But first of all he is a woodsman, and you aren’t a woodsman unless you have such a feeling for topography that you can look at the earth and see what it would look like without any woods or covering on it. It’s something like the gift all men wish for when they are young—or old—of being able to look through a woman’s clothes and see her body, possibly even a little of her character. This may help to explain why there are few really good woodsmen and many who hope to be.

  Laird said, “Let me study that photograph.” And so we had the second prong to our attack. While Lloyd-Davis and I were to sidehill from the head of the gulch toward Sylvia’s cross with the tape measure, Laird would cut directly for the bottom of the gulch, locate the spot where the August 16, 1949, photograph had been taken, and see if from there he could match the photograph’s location of the escape fire with the topography. We hoped his route would take him to where Dodge’s testimony would take me.

  We both knew that when and if Laird found the photograph and the topography matching, he was not going to see anything that on first glance would look much like the photograph. In the photograph many of the trees killed by the fire are still standing. By now most of the trees had rotted and fallen, and there had been almost no regrowth in the thirty years since. So Laird would be looking at a body with almost no covering, a long dead, unbu
ried body.

  It should now be possible to accompany both Laird and me on our separate ways with our different evidence guiding us, we hoped, to the same place. To accompany Laird, you should first study this photograph as if you were a forensic pathologist preparing to identify a victim in court by matching two views of the dead body. The first view (the photograph) is of the body when it was still clothed, so you are forced to look through the clothing to match the second view, the view of the skeletal remains (the ground as it is today).

  As a forensic woodsman, you will have a fairly good idea after studying this photograph of what you should be looking for even before you enter the gulch. At least, you might try to test yourself as a woodsman. It becomes a case of getting from the photograph the line that you will follow to the wooden cross (you hope). What you should first look for on the ground are those three white rocks in the lower right corner of the photograph, marked “Cargo Spot”—they are on the edge of a finger gulch and form a line somewhat parallel to it. The three white rocks, unlike most of the standing trees in the photograph, should still be there and comparatively easy to see. They should be your “location point.”

  The three white rocks serve as a rear sight on your rifle. To find your target, you have to turn back to the photograph, run a line from the three white rocks through the cross that marks where “Dodge Set Fire,” and then continue the line up the ridge until it passes close to something in the photograph that is still there on the ground and is big and highly visible.

  Such a line, when extended, almost runs between two giant rocks on the reef.

  Then put the photograph back in your packsack to keep it from getting soggy with perspiration and start climbing toward the two rocks. You will know you are starting right if you cross two finger gulches, one straight and fairly deep and the next a curved offbranch of the first. Shortly afterwards, if Sal-lee remembered correctly, there should be a tall lone tree—fallen now, but if your line has been straight you should spot it in the grass when you get close. Beyond, there should be many fallen trees, as there are many standing trees in the photograph, confirming Sallee’s testimony that, just when he and Diettert and Rumsey came out of a patch of timber after dropping their tools, they looked ahead and saw Dodge bent over lighting his fire on a grassy slope.

  If you now join Laird and follow such a diagonal of topographical remains from three white rocks on the lower slope of the gulch to a pair of giant rocks on the reef, I hope that on the way you will stumble upon me waiting for you near a fallen dead tree on a grassy slope. With luck, there will also be a wooden cross somewhere close by in the grass.

  I WAS WAITING. I could see Laird working slowly up the hill in my general direction. There were three or four obvious reasons why he was coming slowly, but only one why he never looked up at me. He felt it would be cheating to know in advance where the course he was following should lead him.

  Lloyd-Davis and I were sitting where our tape measure had taken us from Sylvia’s cross. We had stuck together, partly because it takes two to run a hundred-yard steel tape measure on a hill where you need at least one hand to hang on to the grass. Also, if Lloyd-Davis had gone with Laird, he would just be going through the bottom of a bottomless gulch; with me he would be walking through the length of the crosses, from the Four Horsemen who ran farthest and fastest to those who gave out soonest.

  I walked through the lowest tier of crosses, heading as directly as possible to my memory of Sylvia’s cross; Lloyd-Davis moved from cross to cross just above me. The crosses are almost indistinguishable from the bunch grass dried to hay and the gray-white crumbled sandstone washed down from the reef through the millennia. Sometimes you come to the cross-after-next before you realize you have missed one, and nearly always you have to part a wreath of wild hay to find the name in bronze. We shouted the names back and forth to each other, usually upper tier to lower tier and back again: David Navon called down and Marvin Sherman called back; Leonard Piper called down and Robert Bennett called back; then James Harrison called down and I knew we were almost there. The names echoing up and down the hillside might have been a roll call in Arlington National Cemetery: Navon (first lieutenant, 101st Airborne Division); Sherman (seaman second class, United States Navy); Piper (also United States Navy); Bennett (United States Army medical technician). As the hillside became ceremonial, old lines of poetry started through my head: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row….”

  I couldn’t make myself go any farther in the poem. Nothing but the crosses fitted. “Poppies,” hell. Everything was dead on the hillside—crumbling concrete crosses, rotting trees, and dead grass. As for “rows,” there was a cross anywhere a body ran out of brains for lack of oxygen and rolled downhill into black death—if it was lucky, after being dead.

  Already I was getting dehydrated and afraid I couldn’t think straight. However, enough oxygen somehow got to my brain to enable me to observe that we hadn’t seen a rattlesnake on this snake-infested field and to conjecture that rattlesnakes, being cold-blooded and therefore sensitive to extremes of temperature, were in their holes to keep from frying. It is not possible away from that hill to feel its heat—it was hot enough so that I was becoming more and more afraid I could not think when I needed to. It frightened me that this was probably my last trip into Mann Gulch and my last chance to find out the truth of its tragedy. I kept myself going by reminding myself that the only poem I had a chance of writing about the Mann Gulch fire was the truth about it. I kept saying to myself, “Remember, you’ve got to keep thinking straight even if you’re too dry to swallow.” I added, “Or to recite poems.” I added a final truism for myself, “True poems are hard to find.”

  Lloyd-Davis and I met at Sylvia’s marker next to the big flat rock. Even after I had warned myself not to become overpowered by memory, I kept picturing Sylvia tottering on the rock and occasionally calling for help and then lapsing into unconsciousness so that it would take the rescue team a long time at night to locate his occasional conscious cries. We had only enough water left for a short drink apiece, so we decided to save it since we were sure to be in worse need later on. Instead, we started with the steel tape. I took the front end of it and went straight upslope. Lloyd-Davis stayed at Sylvia’s cross to stop the tape when I had dragged out a hundred feet of it.

  Since we were measuring Dodge’s estimates backwards, we first went 100 feet upslope from Sylvia’s cross and then 150 feet laterally toward the mouth of the gulch. I made a pile of rocks where Lloyd-Davis called out “One hundred feet,” waited until he climbed to where the pile was, and then started laterally toward the mouth of the gulch as near as I could on the same contour for 150 feet, where I made another pile of rocks and sat down. Lloyd-Davis remained at the first pile of rocks so Laird could see where both of Dodge’s estimates had landed us.

  While Laird kept working uphill in a general direction toward us but not looking at either of us, I wondered whether climbing straight upslope or sidehilling constituted the more cruel and unusual punishment, and decided that there was no difference in the degree of punishment, only in the direction from which it came—when I was climbing upslope in my smooth, worn climbers, I fell downhill, and when I fell sidehilling, I fell slightly uphill. Already weakened from falling uphill and downhill, I wondered if I could ever get back to my horse. I was afraid by now to look and see if she was still there.

  Otherwise, we just sat and waited on what must have been one of the hottest hillsides in what I remembered had been described as one of the roughest pieces of country east of the Continental Divide.

  Laird kept coming in my general direction until he was twenty or thirty yards below me, still on his diagonal, probably still heading for the two giant rocks on the reef. Then he looked up and saw me. When he did, he changed his course and came straight upslope. I didn’t like it that he evidently had to change his course to reach me. Finally, he sat down beside me and gulped but could not swallow or speak.

>   When words could get out of his throat, he said, “No, we don’t quite meet.” When he had recovered sufficiently to give an explanation, he said, “To have met you on the course I was following, you should have been fifteen or twenty yards farther toward the mouth of the gulch.”

  I told him, “I can move 50 feet more that way and still keep within Dodge’s estimates. Remember, Dodge said Sylvia was about 150 to 200 feet upgulch from his fire, but on purpose I came only 150 feet so I could go 50 more feet if I needed them and still be inside his estimate.”

  He looked only partly relieved. He said, “Even if you were fifty feet farther downgulch, I think you still would be at least that much too high upslope to have been on the line I was following.”

  I wasn’t quite so quick to meet that objection. In our operations, Laird had tended to designate me as the keeper and master of the documents, and I had tried not to disappoint him—at a minimum I tried to know the most crucial ones by heart. Even in the heat when everything seemed odd, I was able finally to explain the oddity of why I was sitting fifteen or twenty yards higher upslope than his angle would have projected him.

  “Yes,” I said, “I think we are both dead on line. The location of Dodge’s fire on your photograph is almost certainly the location of the wooden cross, and it almost certainly marks where Dodge lit his fire. But I have followed an estimate that Dodge made of the distance between him and Sylvia when Dodge stood up after the main fire had passed him by. Where Dodge lit his fire and where he lay down in it are two different places and are marked that way on the 1952 contour map as two different points with two different legends—point 8 marks where Dodge set his escape fire, and point 9, farther upslope, has the legend, ‘Dodge survived here.’” Laird had reservations about the 1952 map, and I had some myself. But I had come to believe in it on most important points, even if part of my belief rested on the a priori reasoning that it was issued at the time the Forest Service was faced with parental lawsuits charging negligence. Certainly Henry Thol, for one, would instantly have recognized any factual mistake the Forest Service made.