The Norman Maclean Reader

by Norman Maclean

  It was a world of still-warm ashes that had incubated once-hot poles. The black poles looked as if they had been born of the gray ashes as the result of some vast effort at sexual intercourse on the edges of the afterlife. When the vast effort was over, it was discovered the poles were born dead and the ashes themselves lived only because the winds moved them. It was the amphitheater of the afterlife where passion had destroyed life, but passion devoid of life could be reborn. A little farther into the fire a black pole would now and then explode and reproduce a progeny of flames. A cliff would tear loose a tree it had kept burning in a secret crevice and then toss the sacrifice upon the rocks below, where the victim exploded into flames and passion without life. On the fire-lines of hell sexual intercourse seems to be gone forever and then brutally erupts, and after a great forest fire passes by, there are warm ashes and once-hot poles and passion in death.

  Not far up the creek my brother-in-law stopped the Power Wagon. Ahead, the creek came close to the road, and standing in the creek was a deer terribly burned. It was drinking and probably had been for a long time. It was probably like the two Smokejumpers, Hellman and Sylvia, who did not die immediately and could never put out their thirst, drinking at every chance until they became sick at the stomach.

  The deer was hairless and purple. Where the skin had broken, the flesh was in patches. For a time, the deer did not look up. It must have been especially like Joe Sylvia, who was burned so deeply that he was euphoric. However, when a tree exploded and was thrown as a victim to the foot of a nearby cliff, the deer finally raised its head and slowly saw us. Its eyes were red bulbs that illuminated long hairs around its eyelids.

  Since it was August, we had not thought of taking a rifle with us, so we could not treat it as a living thing and destroy it.

  While it completed the process of recognizing us, it bent down and continued drinking. Then either it finally recognized us, or became sick at the stomach again.

  It tottered to the bank, steadied itself, and then bounded off euphorically. If it could have, it probably would have said, like Joe Sylvia, “I’m feeling just fine.” Probably its sensory apparatus, like Joe Sylvia’s, had been dumped into its bloodstream and was beginning to clog its kidneys.

  Then, instead of jumping, it ran straight into the first fallen log ahead.

  My brother-in-law said, loathing himself, “I forgot to throw a rifle into the cab of the truck.”

  The deer lay there and looked back looking for us, but, shocked by its collision with the log, it probably did not see us. It probably did not see anything—it moved its head back and forth, as if trying to remember at what angle it had last seen us. Suddenly, its eyes were like electric light bulbs burning out—with a flash, too much light burned out the filaments in the bulbs, and then the red faded slowly to black. In the fading, there came a point where the long hairs on the eyelids were no longer illuminated. Then the deer put its head down on the log it had not seen and could not jump.

  In my story of the Mann Gulch fire, how I first came to Mann Gulch is part of the story.

  From Young Men and Fire*

  Chapter 8 from Young Men and Fire opens the second of the book’s three parts and contains one of Maclean’s major statements about art, including the “slow time” of art. He defines his belief in tragedy as the ultimate literary form and the tragic aspirations of the book he is writing—a haunted, haunting “fire report” that defies generic classification. He also firms up the many analogies he sees between the fate of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry at Little Bighorn and those young Smokejumpers from Missoula who died in the blowup. These analogies suggest that in Young Men and Fire Maclean finally wrote the book he could not complete with Custer as his subject in the 1960s.

  We enter now a different time zone, even a different world of time. Suddenly comes the world of slow-time that accompanies grief and moral bewilderment trying to understand the extinction of those whose love and everlasting presence were never questioned. All there was to time were the fifty-six speeding minutes before the fire picked watches off dead bodies, blew them up a hillside ahead of the bodies, and froze the watch hands together. Ahead now is a world of no explosions, no blowups, and, without a storyteller, not many explanations. Immediately ahead we know there is bound to be a flare-up of public indignation and the wavering candlelight of private grief. What then? It could be a slow fade-out of slow-time until all that’s left of the memory of Mann Gulch are cracking concrete crosses on an almost inaccessible hill and a memorial tablet with the names to go with the crosses beside a picnic ground at the mouth of the next gulch upriver.

  After the autumn rains changed ashes into mud slides, the story seems to have been buried in incompleteness, pieces of it altogether missing. As a mystery story, it left unexplained what dramatic and devastating forces coincided to make the best of young men into bodies, how the bodies got to their crosses and what it was like on the way, and why this catastrophe has been allowed to pass without a search for the carefully measured grains of consolation needed to transform catastrophe into tragedy. It would be natural here, looking for at least chronological continuity to the story, to follow the outcries of the public and at the same time to try to share some part of the private sufferings of those who loved those who died. But always it would have to be conceived as possible, if an ending were sought in this direction, that there might be a non-ending. It is even conceivable that most of those closely connected with the catastrophe soon tried to see that it got lost; when the coming controversies and legal proceedings were added to all the rest of it, clearly the whole thing got so big it frightened people. They wanted it to go away and not come back.

  Even so, there may somewhere be an ending to this story, although it might take a storyteller’s faith to proceed on a quest to find it and on the way to retain the belief that it might both be true and fit together dramatically. A story that honors the dead realistically partly atones for their sufferings, and so instead of leaving us in moral bewilderment, adds dimensions to our acuteness in watching the universe’s four elements at work—sky, earth, fire, and young men.

  True, though, it must be. Far back in the impulses to find this story is a storyteller’s belief that at times life takes on the shape of art and that the remembered remnants of these moments are largely what we come to mean by life. The short semihumorous comedies we live, our long certain tragedies, and our springtime lyrics and limericks make up most of what we are. They become almost all of what we remember of ourselves. Although it would be too fancy to take these moments of our lives that seemingly have shape and design as proof we are inhabited by an impulse to art, yet deep within us is a counterimpulse to the id or whatever name is presently attached to the disorderly, the violent, the catastrophic both in and outside us. As a feeling, this counterimpulse to the id is a kind of craving for sanity, for things belonging to each other, and results in a comfortable feeling when the universe is seen to take a garment from the rack that seems to fit. Of course, both impulses need to be present to explain our lives and our art, and probably go a long way to explain why tragedy, inflamed with the disorderly, is generally regarded as the most composed art form.

  It should be clear now after nearly forty years that the truculent universe prefers to retain the Mann Gulch fire as one of its secrets—left to itself, it fades away, an unsolved, violent incident grieved over by the fewer and fewer still living who are old enough to grieve over fatalities of 1949. If there is a story in Mann Gulch, it will take something of a storyteller at this date to find it, and it is not easy to imagine what impulses would lead him to search for it. He probably should be an old storyteller, at least old enough to know that the problem of identity is always a problem, not just a problem of youth, and even old enough to know that the nearest anyone can come to finding himself at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells him about himself.

  When I was a young teacher and still thought of myself as a billiards player, I had the pleasure of wa
tching Albert Abraham Michelson play billiards nearly every noon. He was by then one of our national idols, having been the first American to win the Nobel Prize in science (for the measurement of the speed of light, among other things). To me, he took on added luster because he was the best amateur billiards player I had ever seen. One noon, while he was still shaking his head at himself for missing an easy shot after he had had a run of thirty-five or thirty-six, I said to him, “You are a fine billiards player, Mr. Michelson.” He shook his head at himself and said, “No. I’m getting old. I can still make the long three-cushion shots, but I’m losing the soft touch on the short ones.” He chalked up, but instead of taking the next shot, he finished what he had to say. “Billiards, though, is a good game, but billiards is not as good a game as chess.” Still chalking his cue, he said, “Chess, though, is not as good a game as painting.” He made it final by saying, “But painting is not as good a game as physics.” Then he hung up his cue and went home to spend the afternoon painting under the large tree on his front lawn.

  It is in the world of slow-time that truth and art are found as one.

  . . .

  The hill on which they died is a lot like Custer Hill. In the dry grass on both hills are white scattered markers where the bodies were found, a special cluster of them just short of the top, where red terror closed in from behind and above and from the sides. The bodies were of those who were young and thought to be invincible by others and themselves. They were the fastest the nation had in getting to where there was danger, they got there by moving in the magic realm between heaven and earth, and when they got there they almost made a game of it. None were surer they couldn’t lose than the Seventh Cavalry and the Smokejumpers.

  The difference between thirteen crosses and 245 or 246 markers (they are hard to count) made it a small Custer Hill, with some advantages. It had helicopters, air patrol, and lawsuits. It had instant newspaper coverage and so could heighten the headlines and suspense as the injury list changed from three uninjured survivors, two men badly burned, and the rest of the crew missing, to the final list on which the only survivors were the first three. The headlines flamed higher as all the burned and all the missing proved dead.

  The Forest Service knew right away it was in for big trouble. By August 7 chief forester Lyle F. Watts in Washington appointed an initial committee to investigate the tragedy and to report to him immediately, and on August 9 the committee flew over the area several times, went back to Mann Gulch by boat, and spent three hours there. Like General Custer himself, who liked to have reporters along, the investigating committee took with them a crew of reporters and photographers from Life magazine. The lead article of Life’s August 22, 1949, issue, “Smokejumpers Suffer Ordeal by Fire,” runs to five pages and includes a map and photographs of the fire, the funeral, and a deer burned to death, probably the deer that Rumsey and Sallee saw come out of the flames and collapse while they were ducking from one side of their rock slide to the other.

  Accompanying the Smokejumpers on their August 5 flight was a Forest Service photographer named Elmer Bloom, who had been commissioned to make a training film for young jumpers; Bloom took shots of the crew suiting up and loading, of the Mann Gulch fire as it was first seen from the plane, and of what was to be the last jump for most of the crew. There are five frames from his documentary reproduced in Life, and for all my efforts to find the film, this is all I have ever seen of it. I did find an August 1949 letter from the regional forester in Missoula to the chief forester in Washington saying in effect that the film was too hot to handle at home so he was sending it along. Nobody in Washington can find it for me. I’m always told it must have been “misfiled,” and it may well have been, since there is no better way in this world to lose something forever than to misfile it in a big library.

  It is hard to believe the film could be anything other than an odd little memento, but very early the threats of lawsuits from parents sounded in the distance and the Forest Service reversed its early policy of accommodating Life’s photographers to one of burying the photographs they already had.

  The leader of the public outcry against the Forest Service was Henry Thol, the grief-unbalanced father of Henry, Jr., whose cross is closest to the top of the Mann Gulch ridge. Not only was the father’s grief almost beyond restraint, but he, more than any other relative of the dead, should have known what he was talking about. He was a retired Forest Service ranger of the old school, and soon after the fire he was in Mann Gulch studying and pacing the tragedy. Harvey Jenson, the man in charge of the excursion boat taking tourists downriver from Hilger Landing to the mouth of Mann Gulch, became concerned about Thol’s conduct and the effect it was having on his tourist trade. His mildest statement: “Thol has been very unreasonable about his remarks and has expressed his ideas very forcefully to boatloads of people going and coming from Mann Gulch as he rides back and forth on the passenger boat.”

  The Forest Service moved quickly, probably too quickly, to make its official report and get its story of the fire to the public. It appointed a formal Board of Review, all from the Forest Service and none ranked below assistant regional forester, who assembled in Missoula on September 26, the next morning flew several loops around and across Mann Gulch, spent that afternoon going over the ground on foot, and during the next two days heard “all key witnesses” to the fire. The Report of Board of Review is dated September 29, 1949, three days after the committee members arrived in Missoula, and it is hard to see how in such a short time and so close to the event and in the intense heat of the public atmosphere a convincing analysis could be made of a small Custer Hill. In four days they assembled all the relevant facts, reviewed them, passed judgment on them, and wrote what they hoped was a closed book on the biggest tragedy the Smokejumpers had ever had.

  In this narrative the Report and the testimony on which it was based have been referred to or quoted from a good many times, and an ending to this story has to involve an examination of the Report’s chief findings. But the immediate effect of the Forest Service’s official story of the fire was to add to its fuel.

  By October 14, Michael (“Mike”) Mansfield, then a member of the House of Representatives and later to be the distinguished leader of the Democratic senators, pushed through Congress an amendment to the Federal Employees’ Compensation Act raising the burial allowance from two hundred dollars to four hundred dollars and making the amendment retroactive so it would apply to the dead of Mann Gulch.

  The extra two hundred dollars per body for burial expenses did little to diminish the anger or personal grief. By 1951, eight damage suits had been brought by parents of those who had died in the fire, or by representatives of their estates, “alleging negligence on the part of Forest Service officials and praying damages on account of the ‘loss of the comfort, society, and companionship’ of a son.” To keep things in their proper size, however, it should be added that the eight suits were filed by representatives of only four of the dead, each plaintiff bringing two suits, one on the plaintiff’s own behalf for loss of the son’s companionship and support, and the other on behalf of the dead son for the suffering the son had endured.

  Henry Thol was the leader of this group and was to carry his own case to the court of appeals, so a good way to get a wide-angle view of the arguments and evidence these cases were to be built on is to examine Thol’s testimony before the Board of Review, at which he was the concluding witness.

  Thol had become the main figure behind the lawsuits not just because he alone of all the parents of the dead was a life-long woodsman and could meet the Forest Service on its own grounds. Geography increased his intensity: he lived in Kalispell, not far from the Missoula headquarters of Region One and the Smokejumper base. In addition, Kalispell was the town which had been Hellman’s home. Thol knew Hellman’s wife, and his grief for her in her pregnancy and bewildered financial condition only intensified his rage. There is also probably some truth in what Jansson told Dodge in a sympathetic lette
r written after the fire: Jansson says that Thol, like many old-time rangers, felt he had been pushed around by the college graduates who had taken over the Forest Service, so he was predisposed to find everything the modern Forest Service did wrong and in a way designed to make him suffer. In his testimony every major order the Forest Service gave the crew of Smokejumpers is denounced as an unpardonable error in woodsmanship—from jumping the crew on a fire in such rough and worthless country and in such abnormal heat and wind, to Dodge’s escape fire. The crew should not have been jumped but should have been returned to Missoula; as soon as Dodge saw the fire he should have led the crew straight uphill out of Mann Gulch instead of down it and so dangerously paralleling the explosive fire; Dodge should not have wasted time going back to the cargo area with Harrison to have lunch; when Dodge saw that the fire had jumped the gulch and that the crew might soon be trapped by it, he should have headed straight for the top of the ridge instead of angling toward it; and so on to Dodge’s “escape” fire, which was the tragic trap, the trap from which his boy and none of the other twelve could escape.

  The charge that weighed heaviest with both Thol and the Forest Service from the outset was the charge that Dodge’s fire, instead of being an escape fire, had cut off the crew’s escape and was the killer itself.

  While the fire was still burning, the Forest Service was alarmed by the possibility that the Smokejumpers were burned by their own foreman. The initial committee of investigation appointed by the chief forester in Washington was headed by the Forest Service’s chief of fire control, C. A. Gustafson, who testified later that he had not wanted to talk to any of the survivors before seeing the fire himself because of certain fears about it which he wanted to face alone. In his words, this is what brought him into Mann Gulch on August 9. “The thing I was worried about was the effect of the escape fire on the possible escape of the men themselves.”