Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  THE MANN GULCH FIRE would never have attained its preeminence in the history of forest fires if foreman Wag Dodge had not set his escape fire. It made the Mann Gulch fire a lasting mystery story, unlike much larger tragic forest fires that were open-and-shut affairs, buried forever with only one interpretation. With only one interpretation, a forest fire soon becomes a statistic. But the Mann Gulch fire was not only a tragedy but a mystery story of physical and intellectual dimensions, introducing mistaken identities and explanations accompanied by seemingly unanswerable scientific questions.

  The mistaken identities and explanations start with Dodge’s fire. Sallee and Rumsey, the first to encounter it, mistakenly judged it to be a “buffer fire.” To Dodge it was indeed intended to protect the crew from the main fire, but he intended that the men should lie facedown in its ashes with him and let the main fire burn over them. To those Dodge tried to persuade to lie down in the hot ashes with him, Dodge’s fire seemed unintelligible. Strategically, all they could see was that he had started a fire even closer to them than the main fire. Who knows what they thought of him as a character? They may have thought he had panicked and gone nuts, or at least had lost his guts and turned chicken—and only two hundred yards from the top.

  We have already encountered some of the bitterness aroused by the so-called escape fire in the hearts of those in the world outside who had been close to those who died by the crosses. As we know, the most bitter was Henry Thol, father of the jumper whose cross is closest to the top, who thought Dodge’s setting a fire in front of the main fire was a homicidally incompetent act. It had killed his boy and other jumpers who were close to the top, and prevented others down the hill from escaping the only way that may still have been open to them.

  It is only right for us to have Henry Thol, Senior, state again his case against the Forest Service and Dodge, reminding ourselves that, as a retired Forest Service ranger, he was the only first-class woodsman among the plaintiffs: “When [Dodge] set this fire, he didn’t know what he was doing. Indications on the ground show quite plainly that his own fire caught up with some of the boys up there above him. His own fire prevented those below him from going to the top. The poor boys were caught—they had no escape.”

  Lurking in Thol’s charges is a test that could have been applied to determine their validity but would have had to be applied immediately while the evidence was still fresh and discernible. Thol and Carl A. Gustafson, chief of the Division of Fire Control in Washington, both testified for opposite reasons at the Board of Review that it was easy to follow the outline of Dodge’s fire on the hillside since it burned with much less intensity than the main fire. Powerful evidence, if it appeared as clear on the hill as it sounds in court. Why, then, didn’t at least one of these leading exponents of opposite conclusions challenge the other to return immediately to Mann Gulch with a jury of experienced and impartial woodsmen to study the outlines of Dodge’s fire before autumn rains and winter snow made mud of the evidence? Big talk, but no follow-up—maybe those outlines of Dodge’s fire weren’t as clear on the ground as the witnesses said they were.

  There is another test, of course, that should allow the hillside to reveal the role Dodge’s fire played in the tragedy. Gustafson, who was designated by the chief forester to conduct the first investigation of the Mann Gulch fire, and who before even seeing the gulch was worried about whether Dodge’s fire had killed the men, almost immediately recognized the two questions to which right answers could clear the Forest Service of negligence. The two questions were directed again and again to Rumsey and Sallee: (1) Did you keep to the upgulch side of Dodge’s fire on your race to the crevice after leaving Dodge? (2) Was the crevice where you passed to safety straight or almost straight above where you left Dodge? If Rumsey and Sallee were in front of Dodge’s fire and still were able to run almost straight to the top of the ridge, Dodge’s fire could not have caught the crew angling upgulch.

  In their testimony Rumsey and Sallee more and more agreed that Dodge’s fire went straight upslope, but they were young and were under pressure from officials of the Forest Service to agree to what ranger Jansson scornfully referred to as the “established” version of what had happened. Their increasing agreement needed the support of other evidence—and certainly of evidence on the ground. So almost from the beginning of our serious study of the Mann Gulch fire Laird Robinson and I realized that a positive location of the crevice and the site where Dodge and his crew had separated at his fire would be central to a determination of much of what had happened in the final acts of the tragedy, including the role of Dodge’s fire. Properly locating the lower end of Dodge’s fire not only was essential to reconstructing the story of the Mann Gulch fire but became something of a story in itself, a quest story, obstructed by staggering heat and rattlesnakes looking for holes in which to cool off. This quest story ended happily, with Laird and me, led on by a long forgotten photograph, coming to a place in dead grass where a wooden cross had fallen. What is more, the wooden cross pointed us to a new crevice in the reef above, and at the far end of the crevice to a juniper bush. From this crevice you can do what Sallee did—turn and look back and see that you climbed, not exactly straight up, but close enough to straight up to regard the location of the crevice and the site where Dodge lit his fire as evidence heavily in support of the testimony of the survivors that the fire set by Dodge did not burn his crew.

  Indeed, the primary witnesses—Rumsey, Sallee, the wooden cross, and the crevice—seem so nearly in complete agreement that it is hard not to imagine them irritably demanding, “What more do you want? Why isn’t our agreement conclusive proof?” But a major trouble remains—the agreement among witnesses seems to contradict nature. How can two large fires only fifty yards apart burn in two different directions, one almost directly across the front of the other? The question is made more difficult by the fact that one fire must have been at something approaching maximum speed and intensity, a blowup contributing to its own wind and moving up the gulch with enough speed steadily to gain on the crew, whereas the other fire had started just minutes before and could not have been burning with much intensity—yet this newer, weaker fire seemingly had in its weakness enough power to free itself from the forces that controlled the main fire and go off on its own, defiantly burning across the front of the main fire. Why, when the two fires were almost one, didn’t the forces controlling the more powerful fire also control the weaker one?

  This is one of those tough spots where either our facts are wrong or we don’t know enough about the subject to explain them. Out of deference to our witnesses and ourselves and because we don’t like to start out by admitting we are wrong, let us assume at first that there is nothing seriously wrong with what we “know,” namely, the testimony and the ground, and that, therefore, to explain what we know, we have to put aside some of what we think we already know about nature (which does not contradict itself but just is, even if it blows up and goes in two different directions at once). Nature in this case is the action of two wildfires as they approach each other, one much stronger than the other.

  More precisely, therefore, we may not know enough about the factors of nature determining the direction and speed of wildfires, chiefly fuels, the direction and velocity of the wind, and the slope or pitch of the ground. However, a good look at the ground in the general area where this phenomenon occurred reduces these three possibilities to one. There was no appreciable difference between the fuels the two fires were burning that would cause the fires to burn in different directions. For instance, Dodge’s fire had no rock slide on its up-gulch side that would have turned the fire straight upslope, no thick stand of timber, nothing like that; both fires were burning in dry, waist-high grass—for practical purposes, in the same grass. Likewise, there is no appreciable difference in the grade of the slope on which they were burning. Dodge’s fire was not burning on a suddenly steep pitch on the hillside and the main fire had not come to a depression or plateau, the combined ef
fect of which might have sent Dodge’s fire much more upslope than the main fire. The slope they were both burning on was very steep and would certainly have had an upslope influence on both fires, but whereas that influence was the same on both fires it was not great enough to deter the main fire from moving quickly upgulch and soon passing over and out of the head of the gulch.

  That leaves the wind as the leading suspect, although it doesn’t come easy to picture the wind blowing the main fire one way and the new fire defiantly across its front as the two fires came together. That’s the picture, though, we seem to be left with.

  If the wind was responsible for such an action, it would be natural to think that the main, upgulch wind suddenly changed direction and burned upslope, then turned back and burned upgulch again. And this is what Sallee thought must have happened. In his statement to the Forest Service investigator he said, “There apparently was quite a high wind blowing straight up the slope at the time Dodge set the fire because that fire spread very rapidly straight up the slope and only slowly sideways of the slope.” No doubt the state of knowledge about fire behavior at the time was such that nearly all firefighters familiar with the Mann Gulch fire would have had no other explanation to offer. But it is highly unlikely that a sudden shift in wind would completely control the direction of Dodge’s fire and leave untouched the main fire only a few yards away, which in a few seconds would pass around the lower end of Dodge’s fire to continue upgulch.

  It is much more likely that the reason why Dodge’s fire went straight for the top of the ridge is also one of the reasons, not generally understood at the time of the fire, that converging fires can explode into a blowup. In this modern explanation of the causes of these two natural phenomena—a blowup and two fires going in different directions—the Mann Gulch fire with the passing of time comes to explain itself and helps to explain other things like it.

  An explanation of the blowup that jumped the lower end of the gulch and pursued the crew upgulch depends upon an understanding not only of prevailing winds approaching a promontory but of the wind effect created when two bodies of air of unequal temperature approach each other. That effect may be more easily recalled if it is again called a “convection effect.” A fire can set up a whirling action by drawing the cooler and heavier air from the outside into the vacuum left by its own hotter and lighter air constantly rising and escaping. In case this seems like a theoretical and theatrical construction, you might go to your basement furnace when it is roaring and open its door, put your face in front of it, and feel with sudden alarm that you are about to be drawn into your own furnace.

  The problem, then, of the direction Dodge’s fire took finally comes down to the question of which way or ways the wind blows when two fires approach each other, one much more intense than the other. Something like a big tug of war between two winds would have to take place to control Dodge’s fire, the two winds being the prevailing wind that was driving the main fire upgulch, and an opposite, downgulch wind the main fire had generated by drawing to itself heavier, cooler air to fill the vacuum caused by its hotter, lighter air rising and escaping. If the two fires had been at a distance from each other, this secondary, downgulch wind would have had little effect on Dodge’s fire, but as the main fire drew closer to Dodge and his men, its effect would have increased until a moment came when the upgulch and downgulch winds approached equal force. At that moment of relative equilibrium between opposing winds a moment of relative calm would have fallen on the slope where Dodge struck his match, and one match could burn long enough to start a fire. You can safely bet that where and when Dodge lit his fire with a single “gofer” match there was no wind blowing thirty miles an hour.

  In that moment of calm when the two counterwinds neutralized each other and so roughly eliminated wind as the major factor in determining the direction of Dodge’s fire, the hitherto lesser force of the steepness of the slope took over, and Dodge’s fire, now under the slope’s influence, burned straight or almost straight upslope. At that moment the survivors, the ground, the fires, and the winds were all in agreement—that is to say, testimony and nature were in agreement, and nature while seeming to act unnaturally was actually in agreement with all parts of itself.

  But the moment of the equilibrium of the counterwinds could not have lasted long. What then? The answer is that the convergence of all these convergences in another few minutes completed itself into total conflagration at the head of Mann Gulch. Already the lower branch of the main fire had swept around the lower end of Dodge’s fire and, roaring upgulch and upslope, was closing in on the crew from below. Threatening the crew from above was the fire burning upgulch on top of the ridge. Now behind them were two other fires about to converge, the main fire that was pursuing them upgulch and the fire Dodge had lit that was now for the moment burning roughly at right angles to the direction of the main fire, but soon would be taken over by the main fire and be propelled with it toward the head of the gulch, one indistinguishable from the other. No wonder neither Gustafson nor Thol offered to take the other or an impartial jury back to Mann Gulch to find the lighter outline of Dodge’s fire. With fires by now jumping over or sweeping around each other, or overpowering each other, there couldn’t have been much left of outlines.

  The fire burning along the top of the ridge may have kept pace with the angling crew below and forced them farther and farther upgulch. It may have been the front of Dodge’s fire, turning toward the head of the gulch after reaching the top of the ridge. More likely, it was the upper branch of the main fire, or, as the convergence approached completion, both fires combined. When the survivors and Laird and I were in Mann Gulch in 1978, we split our four votes among these three alternatives, with each of us willing to admit he might be wrong and could never be sure that he was right. But in the conflagration that was about to occur, no component any longer had any individual responsibility for the simple reason that in a moment there were no individual components. Just conflagration. What was happening was passing beyond legality and morality and seemingly beyond the laws of nature, blown into a world where human values and seemingly natural laws no longer apply. Such moments can occur the world over, sometimes even at home as well as on hillsides.

  The Mann Gulch fire was passing beyond issues and settlements into a world of pictures—perhaps more exactly into thoughts that pictorialize and feel and cannot reduce themselves to numbers. These are pictures made largely by us, the amateur artists who are always making pictures inside our heads (that spring from our hearts).

  Part Three

  15

  IT WOULD BE NATURAL near the end to try to divest the fire of any personal liability to those who died in it and to become for a moment a distant and detached spectator. It might be possible then, if ever, to see fire in something like total perspective as it became total conflagration. If you had known something about wildfire, you already would have seen spot fires twisting themselves into fire swirls and fire swirls converging upon themselves. But viewing total conflagration is literally blinding, as sight becomes sound and the roar of the fire goes out of the head of the gulch and away and beyond, far away. The last you saw of the ground was a mole coming out of the smoke, a little more terrified than you, debating which way to go and ending the argument with itself forever by turning back into the impenetrable fire. So it is, when you cannot see the fire because of the smoke, sight becomes sound. You hear the fire as a roar of an animal without the animal or as an attacking army blown up by the explosion of its own ammunition dump.

  Pictures, then, of a big fire are pictures of many realities, designed so they change into each other and fit ultimately into a single picture of one monster becoming another monster. The pictures and the monsters are untroubled by mathematics. The monster becomes one as it extends itself simultaneously as a monster and a real animal or more likely just as a part of a real animal—after it disgorges itself, all that can be seen of it from afar are its fried gray intestines. Oddly, as destructio
n comes close to being total, destruction erects for brief moments into the sexual and quickly sinks back again into destruction. Intestines stretch out all the way to the curvatures of the brain. The two don’t look much different, and they aren’t and they are.

  Thus, pictures which wildfire creates of itself are at least bi-visual, part of the fire’s process of procreating its meanings. So, as the fire at the top of the ridge slithered through the rocks, it stretched itself out into a snake rearing its head to see that it was on course and using its tongue as a torch to cut through obstructions. So, too, a little lower on the hillside, when the main fire paused for a moment in front of the escape fire, the red flames crowded together until they became ravaging military monsters enraged by the precocity of an obstacle in front of them; then for a moment these deranged military monsters, blocked in their advance, raged sideways up and down the line looking for a way to pass—small fires were left behind as the phalanx of flame threw torches ahead, jumped the line, and left something like a smoldering monster in ruins.