The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  No doubt, much of their power to make such an observation is genetic, but I am sure some of it can be taught. If I did not think so, I would not have spent fifty years of my life trying to teach literature, in good times and in bad times.

  Black Ghost*

  “Black Ghost,” found in Maclean’s papers after his death, seems the inevitable beginning of Young Men and Fire because it reveals the book’s autobiographical sources of Maclean’s obsession with the 1949 Mann Gulch fire. Maclean links his own experience being chased by a wildfire, alluded to in USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, with his initial visit to Mann Gulch about a week after the August 5, 1949, blowup. In this powerful story, Maclean’s encounter with a burned, blinded deer in Mann Gulch recalls a nightmarish image (the “black ghost”) from his own adolescent race against a “blowup.” “Black Ghost” suggests the second life Maclean imagined for himself: that of a career Forest Service employee, possibly a wildland firefighter, even a Smokejumper.

  It was a few days after the tenth of August, 1949, when I first saw the Mann Gulch fire and started to become, even then in part consciously, a small part of its story. I had just arrived from the East to spend several weeks in my cabin at Seeley Lake, Montana. The postmistress in the small town at the lower end of the lake told me about the fire and how thirteen Forest Service Smokejumpers had been burned to death on the fifth of August trying to get to the top of a ridge ahead of a blowup in tall, dead grass. In the small town at Seeley Lake and in the big country around it there are only summer tourists and loggers, and, since the loggers are the only permanent residents, they have all the mailboxes at the post office—the postmistress, of course, has come to know them all, and as a result knows a lot about forests and forest fires in a gossipy way. Since she and I are old friends, I have a box, too, and every day when I came for my mail she passed on to me the latest she had heard about the dead Smokejumpers, most of them college boys, until after about a week I realized I would have to see the Mann Gulch fire myself while some of it was still burning.

  I knew, of course, that a fire that big would be burning long after it had been brought under control. I had gone to work for the Forest Service during World War I when there was a shortage of men and I was only fifteen, four years younger than Thol, the youngest of those who had died in Mann Gulch, so by the time I was his age I had been on several big fires. I knew, for instance, that the Mann Gulch fire would be burning for a long time, because one November I had gone back with my father to hunt deer in country close to where I had been on a big fire that summer, and to my surprise I had seen stumps and fallen trees still burning, with smoke coming out of blackened holes in the snow.

  But even though I knew smoke would probably be curling out of Mann Gulch till November there came a day in early August when I could not listen to any more post office gossip about the fire. I even had a notion of why I had to go and see the fire right then. I once had seen a ghost, and the ghost again possessed me.

  The big fire that had still been burning late into the hunting season had been on Fish Creek, the Fish Creek that is about nine miles by trail, as I remember, from Lolo Hot Springs. Fish Creek was fine deer country, and the few homesteaders who had holed up there made a living by supplementing the emaciated produce from their rocky gardens with the cash they collected from deer hunters in the autumn by turning their cabins into overnight hunting lodges. Deer, then, were a necessary part of their economy and their diet. They had venison on the table twelve months a year, the game wardens never bothering them for shooting deer out of season, just as long as they didn’t go around bragging that they were getting away with beating the law.

  Those of us on the fire crew that had been sent from the ranger station at Lolo Hot Springs were pretty sure that the fire had been started by one of these homesteaders. The Forest Service had issued a permit to a big sheep outfit to graze a flock of a thousand or so on a main tributary of Fish Creek, and you probably know—hunters are sure they know—that sheep graze a range so close to the ground that nothing is left for a deer to eat when the sheep have finished. Hunters even say that a grasshopper can’t live on the grass sheep leave behind. The fire had been started near the mouth of the tributary, on the assumption, we assumed, that the fire would burn up the tributary, which was a box canyon, all cliffs, with no way of getting sheep out of it. From a deer hunter’s point of view, it was a good place for sheep to die. The fire, though, burned not only up the tributary but down it to where it entered Fish Creek and could do major damage to the country. We tried first to use Fish Creek as a “fire-line,” hoping to stop the fire at the water’s edge, but when it reached thick brush on one side of the creek it didn’t even wait to back up and take a run before it jumped into the brush on the other side. Then we were the ones who had to back up fast. At this point, Fish Creek is in such a narrow and twisted canyon that the main trail going down it is on the sidehill, so we backed up to the sidehill trail, which was to be our second line of defense.

  I was standing where the fire jumped the trail. At first it was no bigger than a small Indian campfire, looking more like something you could move up close to and warm your hands against than something that in a few minutes could leave your remains lying in prayer with nothing on but a belt. For a moment or two I could have stepped over it and fought it just as well from the upstream side, and when it got a little bigger I still could have walked around it. Instead, I fought it where I stood, for no other reason than that all of us are taught to be the boy who stood on the burning deck. It never occurred to me that I had alternatives. I did not even notice—not until I returned the next day—that if I had stepped across the fire I would have been on a side of it where the fire would soon reach a cedar thicket whose fallen needles had made a thick, moist duff in which fire could only creep and smolder.

  The fire coming up at me from the creek in the bunch and cheat grass stopped for only a moment when it reached the trail we were hoping to use as a fire-line. The grass on either side of the trail did not make such instant connections as the brush had on the sides of the creek. Here the fire rocked back and forth like a broadjumper before it started toward the takeoff. Then it jumped. One by one, other like fires reached the line, rocked back and forth, and they all made it.

  I broke and started up the hillside. Unlike the boys on the Mann Gulch fire, who did not start running until they were nearly at the top, I started running near the bottom. By the testimony of those who survived, they weren’t scared until the last hundred yards. My testimony is that I was scared until I got near the top, when all feelings—fright, thirst, desire to stop for a moment to pray—became indistinguishable from exhaustion. Unlike the Mann Gulch fire, though, the fire behind was never quite a blowup; it was never two hundred feet of flame in the sky. It was in front of me, though, as well as behind me, with nowhere to go but up. Above, it was little spot fires started by a sky of burning branches. The spot fires turned me in my course by leaping into each other and forming an avalanche of flame that went both down and up the mountain. I kept looking for escape openings marked by holes in smoke that at times burned upside down. Behind, where I did not dare to look, the main fire was sound and heat, a ground noise like a freight train. Where there were weak spots in the grass, it sounded as if the freight train had slowed down to cross a bridge or perhaps to enter a tunnel. It could have been doing either, because in a moment it roared again and started to catch up. It came so close it sounded as if it were cracking bones, and mine were the only bones around. Then it would enter a tunnel and I would have hope again. Whether it rumbled or crackled I was always terrified. Always thirsty. Always exhausted.

  Halfway or more toward the top I heard a voice beside me when the roar of the main fire was reduced for a moment to the rattle of empty railroad cars. The voice sidehilled until it was on my contour and said, “How’re you doing, sonny?” The voice may have come down with a burning branch, or it may have belonged to a member of our pickup crew whom I
had never seen before. The only thing I noticed about him at first was that he didn’t slip because he wore a good pair of climbing boots with caulks in them.

  In answer to his question of how sonny was doing, I answered, “I keep slipping back,” pointing back but not looking back. I also pointed at my shoes.

  I was in my second summer in the Forest Service, so I knew what good climbing shoes were and how hobnails in them weren’t enough to make them hold on hillsides, especially on slick, grassy hillsides, but I was young and still trying to escape such harsh realities as growing up and paying half a month’s wages for a good pair of shoes. Consequently, I had gone to an army surplus store and bought a pair of leftover shoes from World War I. They were cheap shoes and wouldn’t hold long caulks so I had rimmed them with hobnails, and hobnails soon wear as smooth as skates. The ghost in the caulks climbed straight uphill and never slipped, but I had to weave back and forth in little switchbacks and dig in with the edges of my soles.

  Being sorry for myself made me feel that I couldn’t go any farther; being terrified made me feel exhausted; waiting for the ghost in caulked shoes to help me made me feel exhausted; being so thirsty that I couldn’t form words to ask for help made me feel exhausted. As a fire up a hillside closes in, everything becomes a mode of exhaustion—fear, thirst, terror, a twitch in the flesh that still has a preference to live, all become simply exhaustion. So upon closer examination, burning to death on a mountainside is dying at least three times, not two times as has been said before—first, considerably ahead of the fire, you reach the verge of death in your boots and your legs; next, as you fail, you sink back in the region of strange gases and red and blue darts where there is no oxygen and here you die in your lungs; then you sink in prayer into the main fire that consumes, and if you are a Catholic about all that remains of you is your cross.

  The black ghost that could walk in a straight line came closer to me and took a look. I looked back but out of fright. The black ghost had a red face. In more leisurely times he could have been an alcoholic, but certainly much of the red now was reflection from the flames. “Could I be of any help?” the red face asked, becoming a voice again.

  I thought I was beyond help, but I swallowed the thirst in my throat to find a word and said, “Yes.” When I was able, I said, “Yes, thanks.”

  The black ghost came closer, the red in his face burning steadily. Then suddenly in his face there was a blowup, a reflection of something either behind him or in him, and he slapped me in the face.

  “My God,” I said, and reeled sideways across the hillside. All I knew while I staggered was that if I fell I might never get up. I burst into tears even while I was staggering, but came to rest standing. When I could recover my breath and hold the hot air in my lungs, I cried out loud, especially when I realized that all that could save me now was my army surplus boots. Still in tears, I proceeded to climb almost straight uphill almost without slipping until I reached the contour where I had been outraged. Here I stopped and went looking for what had done it, but he was far up the hill, peering down at me from the mouth of a cave that now and then opened in a red cliff of flame.

  This is all I know about the violent apparition that was just ahead of the fire. It must have been a member of the fire crew that had been picked up in the bars of Butte. I had never seen him before and have never seen him since. Maybe he was a Butte wino demented by thirst. Maybe he was a Butte miner with tuberculosis whose lungs were collapsing wall to wall from the heat of the air they were trying to breathe. It is even possible something was working on him besides the fire as he tried to keep ahead of it, something terrible that had been done to him for which he had to get even before his consignment to flames. In either of these cases, at just the right moment I may have appeared out of smoke, young and paralyzed and unable to do anything back if he did what he wanted to do, so he did it.

  Above, the crevice in the red cliff opened now and then. From its entrance a figure retreated and ascended into the sky until he hung like a bat on the roof of a cave. He was always watching me, but I don’t know what he hoped to see. Finally, he was hanging upside down by his claws.

  I have no clear memory of going up the rest of the ridge, except that when I reached the top I had to put out the fire that smoldered in my shoelaces. I didn’t think of the crew or where I might find them. I didn’t think of the ghost. After I reached the top of the ridge, for a time I couldn’t think of anything behind me. I thought of things ahead, the nearest of which was a hunting lodge up the main fork of the Fish Creek where my father and I had stayed the last two hunting seasons. It was run by a woman, Mrs. Brown, who looked something like my mother but more like an Indian with brown crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes. In addition, she was a fine shot so that if one of her guests didn’t get a deer she would run out for an hour or two the last morning and shoot one for him. I thought, if I follow the ridge upstream and then drop into the creek bottom where her cabin is, Mrs. Brown will be able to do something for me, even if I am in pretty bad shape. I thought she might even shoot a deer for me, and then I thought, no, that’s wrong—I don’t need a deer, but go anyway. You need something.

  Now that I had started thinking again I became exhausted again. Mrs. Brown can help men who cannot help themselves, I thought, and I am exhausted beyond comprehension. It took me until nearly dark to get within a quarter of a mile from her cabin. Then I put exhaustion out of mind and ran the last quarter of a mile to get there in time, although time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning. I did not collapse, but I rocked on my feet from the suction of air she caused when she opened the cabin door.

  She did not ask a question. She said quietly, “Come in and lie down. You look very white.” I was baffled. I was sure I was black. “No,” she said, “you’re very white.”

  She felt the water in the pail but it was evidently lukewarm, so she went down to the creek and dipped out a cold pail. Then she said, “I told you to lie down.” She still hadn’t asked a question. If you have spent your life in a cabin, you know that there are times when you have to do things before you try to find out what things are all about.

  She washed me in cold water again and again, taking my pulse each time she did. Then finally she took my pulse again, nodded her head, and threw a whole dipper of water on me to signify my convalescence period was over. She buttoned my shirt and said, “When you go deer hunting this autumn, you’ll get your limit.”

  Not until then did she try to find out what had happened to me and how I had got there. “Did you try to stop the fire?”

  “Mrs. Brown?” I asked. “Mrs. Brown, did you start it?” I finished asking.

  “You’ll have no trouble getting your limit next deer season,” she reassured me.

  I knew that she wasn’t going to say anything more and that I’d better not ask anything more.

  “For a preacher,” she said, “your father is very handy with a rifle.”

  I said, “He’s also good with a scatter-gun.”

  Then she said, “I’ll write him tomorrow and let him know what happened.”

  I said to her, “Skip it. He knows I can take care of myself.”

  I wasn’t sure I should have come to her for help, now that I didn’t need help anymore. Even tough women who are good with the rifle get motherly when it’s all over.

  She advised me, “Stay here and take it easy until tomorrow. Then go back to Lolo Hot Springs and report to the ranger station there.”

  After a pail and a half of cold water I no longer needed an Indian mother, and I wanted to make this clear. I said, even if she was a good shot, “Thanks, I’ll stay over tonight, but tomorrow I’ll go back to the fire and see if I can find the crew.” I didn’t add that mostly I wanted to see where the fire had jumped the trail and I had started up the ridge ahead of it, fear being only partly something that makes us run away—at times, at least, it is something that makes us come back again and stare at what made us run away.

&
nbsp; Although I was very tired the next morning, I hurried to where the fire had jumped the trail. It was not until I stared that I realized if I had stepped across a little fire and been on the side of it where the cedar duff was that I would not have had to race a giant uphill for my life or been stopped by a ghost along the way.

  I have several times returned to that spot on the trail. The autumn of the same year of the fire I said to my father, “Let’s hunt another season at Mrs. Brown’s in Fish Creek.” It was while hunting in Fish Creek that November that I saw smoke coming out of black holes in the snow.

  . . .

  While I listened to the postmistress in the record heat of early August of 1949, my memory turned to snow with smoke curling out of it. When the smoke started mixing at night with my dreams, I locked my cabin and drove the 150 miles to Wolf Creek and picked up my brother-in-law, who had fought a few days on the Mann Gulch fire as a volunteer. He and I borrowed a Dodge Power Wagon from the Oxbow Ranch, because we knew it would be tough going ahead. Then we drove up the dirt road on the east side of the Missouri until we came to the Gates of the Mountains and to Willow Creek, the creek north of Mann Gulch where the fire was finally stopped on its downriver side. The road went up the creek for a way and then dead-ended, and it and the creek had been used by the crew—on the whole, successfully—as fire-lines. Only occasionally had the fire jumped both of them, and where it had the crew quickly controlled it again. By the time we reached the fire the crew had put it out for several hundred yards back of the road or creek, sawing down the still-burning trees and either burying them with dirt or pouring water on them when they were near the creek. Since there was no danger of the fire jumping the lines again, the crew had moved on, leaving the fire to burn itself harmlessly in its interior.