English Creek

by Ivan Doig

Except for the smoke boiling in ugly fashion into the sky, the scene was not as awful as you might expect. Orange flames were a dancing tribe amid the trees, and the firefighters were a rippling line of shovelers and axmen and sawyers as they tried to clear anything combustible from in front of the fire. But then when you got over being transfixed by the motions of flame and men, the sense of char hit you. A smell like charcoal, the black smudge of the burned forest behind the flames. And amid the commotion of the fireline work, the sounds of char, too—flames crackling, and continual snap of branches breaking as they burned, and every so often a big roar of flame as a tree crowned out.

  What told me most about the nature of a forest fire was one single tree, a low scrawny young Douglas fir. It had managed to root high up within a crack in one of the gulch’s rock formations, and as I was gawking around trying to register everything, I saw that tree explode. Spontaneously burst into flames, there on its stone perch so far from any other foliage or the orange feather-edge of the fire itself.

  I found my father and read his face. Serious but not grim. He came over to my pack of sandwiches and plowed into one. I glanced around to be sure Paul wasn’t within hearing, then said: “ ‘It doesn’t look that bad. It just keeps burning, is all.’ ”

  He had to grin at that. “That’s about the case. But I think there’s a chance we can kick it in the pants this afternoon. Those First Avenuers are starting to get their legs under them. They’ll get better at fireline work as the day goes on.” He studied the sky above Roman Reef as if it would answer what he said next. “What we don’t need is any wind.”

  To shift himself from that topic, my father turned to me.

  “How about you? How you getting along?”

  “Okay. I never knew people could eat so much, though.”

  “Uh huh. Speaking of which, pass me another sandwich, would you.” Even my father, conscientiously stoking food into himself. It was as if the fire’s hunger for the forest had spread an epidemic of appetite among us as well.

  My father watched Stanley divvy sandwiches out to a nearby bunch of EFFs. “How about your sidekick there?”

  “Stanley’s doing real good.” Then the further answer I knew my father was inviting: “He’s staying dry.”

  “Is he. Well, that’s news. When he does get his nose in the bottle, you let me know. Or let Paul know if I’m not around. We got to have a cook. One’ll have to be fetched in here from somewhere when Stanley starts a bender.”

  “If he does,” I agreed because of all that was involved, “I’ll say so.”

  • • •

  Through the afternoon I flunkied for Stanley. Hot in that base camp, I hope never to suffer a more stifling day. It was all I could do not to wish for a breath of breeze.

  Stanley too was sweating, his shirt dark with it.

  And he looked in semi-awful shape. Agonized around the eyes, the way he had been when Bubbles butchered his hand. What bothered me more than his appearance, though, he was swigging oftener and oftener at the bottle.

  As soon as Stanley went off to visit nature I got over there to his saddle pack, yanked the bottle out, and sipped.

  It still was water with a whiskey trace. Stanley’s craving thirst was for the trace rather than the water, but so far he hadn’t given in.

  This lifted my mood. As did the continuing absence of wind. I was predicting to Stanley, “I’ll bet they get the fire whipped.”

  “Maybe so, maybe no,” he responded. “Where a forest fire is concerned, I’m no betting man. How about peeling me a tub of spuds when you get the chance.”

  • • •

  “Stanley, I guess this isn’t exactly any of my business, but—have you seen Velma? Since the Fourth?”

  “Now and then.”

  “Yeah, well. She’s quite—quite a lady, isn’t she?”

  “Quite a one.”

  “Uh huh. Well. So, how are you two getting along?”

  Stanley flexed his hand a time or two, then went back to cutting bacon. Tonight’s main course was a casserole—if you can do that by the tubful—of macaroni and canned corn and bacon slices. “We’ve had some times,” he allowed.

  Times with Velma Simms. Plural. The gray eyes, the pearl-buttoned ears, those famous rodeo slacks, in multiple. Sweat was already rolling off me, but this really opened the spigots. I went over to the water bucket and splashed a handful on my face and another on the back of my neck.

  Even so, I couldn’t help resuming the topic. “Think anything will come of it?”

  “If you mean permanent, nope. Velma’s gave up marrying and I never got started. We both know there’s a season on our kind of entertainment.” Stanley slabbed off another half dozen slices of bacon, I peeled away at a spud. “But a season’s better than no calendar at all, is what I’ve come to think.” He squinted at the stacked results of his bacon slicing. “How many more hogs does that recipe call for?”

  • • •

  I was still peeling when the casualty came down from the gulch.

  He was one of the CCs, half carried and half supported by two others. Paul hurried across the camp toward them, calling: “How bad did he get it?”

  “His cawlehbone and awm,” one of the helping CCs answered. New York? Philadelphia? Lord only knew what accent any of the CC guys spoke, or at least I sure didn’t.

  “Get him on down to the trailhead,” Paul instructed the bearers. Then summoned the timekeeper: “Tony, you’ll have to drive the guy in to the doc in Gros Ventre.”

  A limb of a falling snag had sideswiped the injured CC. This was sobering. I knew enough fire lore to realize that if the limb had found the CC’s head instead of his collarbone and arm, he might have been on his way to the undertaker rather than to Doc Spence.

  • • •

  As yet, no wind. Calm as the inside of an oven, and as hot. I wiped my brow and resumed peeling.

  • • •

  “What would you think about going for a stroll?”

  This proposal from Stanley startled me. By now, late afternoon, he looked as if it took ninety-nine percent of his effort to stay on his feet, let alone put them into motion.

  “Huh? To where?”

  His head and Stetson indicated the grassy slope of Rooster Mountain above us, opposite the fire. “Just up there. Give us a peek at how things are going.”

  I hesitated. We did have our supper fixings pretty well in hand. But to simply wander off up the mountainside . . .

  “Aw, we got time,” Stanley told me as if he’d invented the commodity. “Our stepdaddy”—he meant Paul, who was down phoning Chet the report of the injured CC—“won’t be back for a while.”

  “Okay, then,” I assented a little nervously. “As long as we’re back here in plenty of time to serve supper.”

  I swear he said it seriously: “Jick, you know I’d never be the one to make you miss a meal.”

  • • •

  I thought it was hot in camp. The slope was twice so. Facing south as it did, the grassy incline had been drinking in sun all day, not to mention the heat the forest fire was putting into the air of this whole area.

  “Yeah, it’s a warm one,” Stanley agreed. I was watching him with concern. The climb in the heat had tuckered me considerably. How Stanley could navigate this mountainside in his bent-knee fashion—more than ever he looked like a born horseman, grudging the fact of ground—was beyond me.

  Except for a few scrubby pines peppered here and there, the slope was shadeless until just below its summit where the forest overflowed from this mountain’s north side. Really there weren’t many trees even up there because of the rocky crest, the rooster comb. And Stanley and I sure as hell weren’t going that high anyway, given the heat and steepness. So it was a matter of grit and bear it.

  Stanley did lean down and put a hand flat against the soil of the slope as if he intended to sit. I was not surprised when he didn’t plop himself down, for this sidehill’s surface was so tropical I could feel its warmth throu
gh the soles of my boots.

  “Looks to me like they’re holding it,” I evaluated the fire scene opposite us. Inasmuch as we were about halfway up our slope, we were gazing slightly downward on Flume Gulch and the fire crew. Startling how near that scene seemed; these two sides of the North Fork vee truly were sharp. Across there in the gulch we could see the smoke pouring up, a strange rapid creation to come from anything as deliberate as this downhill fire; and close under the smoke column, the men strung out along the fireline. Even the strip of turned earth and cleared-away debris, like a long wavery stripe of garden dirt, that they were trying to pen the fire with; even that we could see. In a provident moment I had snagged a pair of binoculars from the boss tent before Stanley and I set off on our climb, and with them I could pick out individuals. I found my father and Kratka in conference near the center of the fireline. Both of them stood in that peering way men do up a sidehill, one foot advanced and the opposite arm crooking onto a hip. They looked like they could outwait any fire.

  The dry grass creaked and crackled under my feet as I stepped to hand the binoculars to Stanley. He had been gandering here, there and elsewhere around our slope, so I figured he was waiting to use the glasses on the actual fire.

  “Naw, that’s okay, Jick. I seen enough. Kind of looks like a forest fire, don’t it?” And he was turning away, starting to shuffle back down to the fire camp.

  • • •

  When the first firefighters slogged in for supper, my father was with them. My immediate thought was that the fire was whipped: my father’s job as fire boss was done.

  As soon as I could see faces, I knew otherwise. The firefighters looked done in. My father looked pained.

  I told Stanley I’d be right back, and went over to my father.

  “It jumped our fireline,” he told me. “Three places.”

  “But how? There wasn’t any wind.”

  “Like hell. What do you call that whiff about four o’clock?”

  “Not down here,” I maintained. “We haven’t had a breath all afternoon. Ask Stanley. Ask Paul.”

  My father studied me. “All right. Maybe down here there wasn’t any. But up there some sure as hell came from somewhere. Not much. Just enough.” He told me the story. Not long after Stanley and I took our look at things from the slope, with the afternoon starting to cool away from its hottest, most dangerous time, a quick south wind came along Roman Reef and caught the fire. “The whole east flank made a run like gasoline had been poured on it. Jumped our fireline like nothing and set off a bunch of brush. We got there and corraled it. But while we were doing that, it jumped in another place. So we got to that one, got that one held. And in the meanwhile, goddamned if it didn’t jump one more time.” That one flared and took off, a stand of fir crowning into orange flame. “I had to pull the crew away from that flank. Too damn dangerous. So now we’ve got ourselves a whole new fire, marching right down the mountain. Tomorrow we’re going to have to hold the sonofabitch here at the creek. Damn it all to hell anyway.”

  • • •

  My father did fast damage to his plateful of supper and went back up to the fire. He was keeping Kratka’s crew on patrol at what was left of fireline until the cool of the evening would damper the flames.

  Ames’s gang of CCs and EFFs meanwhile were ready to dine. Ready and then some. “Hey, Cookie!” one among them yelled out to Stanley. “What’re you going to founder us on tonight?”

  “Soupa de bool-yon,” Stanley enlightened him in a chefly accent of some nature. “Three buckets of water and one on-yon.” Actually the lead course was vegetable soup, followed by the baconized macaroni and corn, and mashed potatoes with canned milk gravy, and rice pudding, and all of it tasted just heavenly if I do say so myself.

  • • •

  Dark was coming on by the time Stanley and I went to the creek to fill a boiler with water as a headstart toward breakfast.

  From there at creekside the fire lay above us to the west. A few times in my life I had seen Great Falls at night from one of its hills. The forest fire reminded me of that. A city alight in the dark. A main avenue of flame, where the live edge of the fire was advancing. Neighborhoods where rock formations had isolated stubbornly burning patches. Hundreds of single spots of glow where snags and logs still blazed.

  “Pretty, ain’t it,” Stanley remarked.

  “Well, yeah, I guess. If you can call it that.”

  “Tomorrow it’ll be just an ugly sonuvabitch of a forest fire. But tonight, it’s pretty.”

  • • •

  My father had come back into camp and was waiting for Paul to arrive with the phone report from Chet. As soon as Paul showed up, my father was asking him, “How’s Ferragamo?” Joseph Ferragamo was the CC the falling snag had sideswiped.

  “The doc splinted him up, then took him to the hospital in Conrad. Says he’ll be okay.” Paul looked wan. “A lot better off than some, anyway.”

  “How do you mean?” my father wanted to know.

  Paul glanced around to make sure none of the fire crew were within earshot. “Mac, there’ve been two CCs killed, over on the west-side fires. One on the Kootenai, and one on the Kaniksu fire. Snags got both of them.”

  My father said nothing for a little. Then: “I appreciate the report, Paul. Round up Ames and Kratka, will you. We’ve got to figure out how we’re going to handle this fire tomorrow.”

  • • •

  My father and Paul and the pair of crew foremen took lanterns and headed up the creek to look over the situation of tomorrow morning’s fireline. My father of course knew the site backwards and forwards, but the hell of it was to try to educate the others in a hurry and in the dark. I could not help but think it: if Alec . . .

  At their bed ground some of the fire crew already were oblivious in their sleeping bags, but a surprising many were around campfires, sprawled and gabbing. The climate of the Two. Roast you all day in front of a forest inferno, then at dark chill you enough to make you seek out fire.

  While waiting for my father, I did some wandering and exercising of my ears. I would like to say here and now that these firefighters, from eighteen-year-old CCs to the most elderly denizen among the First Avenue South EFFs, were earnestly discussing how to handle the Flume Gulch fire. I would like to say that, but nothing would be farther from the truth. Back at the English Creek ranger station, on the wall behind my father’s desk was tacked one of those carbon copy gags that circulate among rangers:

  Subjects under discussion during one summer (timed by stopwatch) by U.S. Forest Service crews, trail, fire, maintenance and otherwise.

  PERCENT OF TIME

  Sexual stories, experiences and theories

  37%

  Personal adventures in which narrator is hero

  23%

  Memorable drinking jags

  8%

  Outrages of capitalism

  8%

  Acrimonious remarks about bosses, foremen and cooks

  5%

  Personal adventures in which someone not present is the goat

  5%

  Automobiles, particularly Fords

  3%

  Sarcastic evaluations of Wilson’s war to end war

  2%

  Sarcastic evaluations of ex-President Coolidge

  2%

  Sarcastic evaluations of ex-President Hoover

  2%

  Sears Roebuck catalogue versus Montgomery Ward catalogue

  2%

  The meteorological outlook

  2%

  The job at hand

  1%

  From what I could hear, that list was just about right.

  • • •

  Stanley I had not seen for a while, and it crossed my mind that he may have had enough of the thirsty life. That he’d gone off someplace to jug up from an undiluted bottle.

  But no, when I at last spied my father and his fire foremen and Paul returning to camp and then heading for the tent to continue their war council, I foun
d Stanley in that same vicinity. Looking neither worse nor better than he had during our day of cooking.

  Just to be sure, I asked him: “How you doing?”

  “Feeling dusty,” he admitted. “Awful dusty.”

  My father spotted the pair of us and called over: “Jick, you hang on out here. We got to go over the map, but it won’t take too long.” Into the tent he ducked with Paul, Kratka and Ames following.

  “You want me to get your sipping bottle?” I offered to Stanley, referring to the one of whiskey-tinged water in his saddlebag.

  “Mighty kind,” replied Stanley. “But it better wait.” And before I could blink, he was gone from beside me and was approaching the tent where my father’s war council was going on.

  Stanley stuck his head in past the flap door of the tent. I heard:

  “Can I see you for part of a minute, Mac?”

  “Stanley, it’s going to have to wait. We’re still trying to dope out our fireline for the morning.”

  “That fireline is what it’s about, Mac.”

  There was a moment of silence in the tent. Then Paul’s voice:

  “For crying out loud! Who ever heard of a fire camp where the cook gets to put in his two bits’ worth? Mister, I don’t know who the devil you think you are, but—”

  “All right, Paul,” my father umpired. “Hold on.” There was a moment of silence, which could only have been a scrutinizing one. My father began to say: “Stanley, once we get this—”

  “Mac, you know how much it takes for me to ask.”

  A moment again. Then my father: “All right. There’s plenty of night ahead. We can stand a couple of minutes for me to hear what Stanley has to say. Paul, you guys go ahead and map out how we can space the crews along the creek bottom. I won’t be long.” And bringing one of the gas lanterns out he came, giving Stanley a solid looking-over in the white light.

  Side by side the two of them headed out of earshot of the tent. Not out of mine, though, for this I was never going to miss. They had gone maybe a dozen strides when I caught up with them.