by Jon Billman
My face and fingertips go numb in the sharp midnight cold. The air is thin—another hundred and fifty feet above sea level—and I’m shaky when I get to the top and get the godawful-heavy CO2 tanks hoisted up with us. Heights are not as intimidating in the softness of moonlight. I look down. Who has not thought about what jumping into shadow would be like, before you have to be pushed, knowing from cold memory what is there in the daylight? Would you pass out in the air from fear? Would you still be alive after landing? Without the conviction to pull it off, these thoughts are pretty harmless. I lock the couplings in, adjust the regulator, and Wayne is in business at fifty psi. “I’m cold,” he says. “What took you so long?” But he’s been busy painting in his mind, preparing, sweat beading on his high forehead and breath freezing on his beard in the stinging wind, an athlete. His eyes are dark and intent, pen-and-ink Zeus eyes from junior high textbooks.
I can see the dim reflection on my trailer, across the valley. From here it looks cold and empty, like a beer can in a field, looks like it will blow away and keep blowing and not stop for barbed wire or Nebraska in the western wind. Two window’s are lit at the Afghans, yellow and warm like cabin lanterns. Wayne’s drafty house. Lights are on, Robin is awake, grading papers, pacing, worrying. Coyotes are singing.
The heavy, old, and leaky Paasche airbrush hisses, a high-pressure serpent in Wayne’s hands. His strokes are swift and graceful. He turns his head only to spit over the edge. I watch for police cars and hit him on the back when I see the lights below. We freeze for a moment until the headlights turn away—a bread truck, a mine truck—then he starts in again, blending densities with over-spray, caressing with pressure. His painting becomes a mating dance, which has been rehearsed hundreds of times in his mind. I am cold. Wayne gradually strips as he sweats and soon he’s down to only dark, holey polypropylene underwear and backwards Rockies cap. He pauses, wheezing, only to switch the airbrush tips I retrieve from the rucksack of tools on my back, dump the paint cup, and for me to change colors: True Blue, Grass Green, Spectrum Yellow, Ruby Red. I clean tips and hand the fresh brushes to Wayne like a caddy. It’s hard for me to make out the painting completely. Wayne slows to work in detail. The half hours grow into hours, history.
“You’ll see it when it’s light and it’s finished,” Wayne tells me when I disturb him once to ask what it is. “To tell you now would be to drain my creative energy, to change what I have, risk killing fruition.”
“Okay,” I say. It is all I say for the next few hours. The painting is coming alive.
The moon has moved across the sky It’s getting lighter out. The hills go from midnight moonlit blue to morning lark. I see deep concern in his face—not panic, but he picks up his pace. I trust in Wayne, though cheating time is something even Wayne Kerr cannot do.
“That’s it,” he says, putting his overalls back on. With the finest brush tip I pulled up here, this is what he signs in black letters too small to see from below: w. kerr. I let out the deep part of my breath that I’ve been holding all night. We double-check everything, drop the tanks on the rope, descend the ladder, Wayne first, and hustle to the truck. Wayne gets there before me, cranks the old V-8 over while I collapse the ladder, strap it to the truck, lift the tanks and rucksack in. The cab is warm by the time I open the door, the radio is on, Wayne is whistling.
At my trailer we open beers, unfold lawn recliners in the snow that is my front yard, and wait for sunrise to unveil the nights work. “Apollo, get your dead ass over Sarpy Ridge!” yells Wayne so that the town below might hear. It’s still cold but anticipation is warming, so I forget about it. It’s like ice fishing, snow and cold up to my own lounging ass. Waiting for the picture show. Wayne slips inside for more beer and some old doughnuts.
I use my cordless phone to call in sick from my lawn chair so Wayne cannot hear me apologize. The phone rings in my hand like the last straw before I hit the call button. “Hello?” It is the urgent Mormon accent of my principal. “Sorry, I’m sick today,” I say. “I can’t come in early to meet with you.” Over the phone I hear radio interference in the background; they’re having hot dogs and green beans at the high school, church bake sale tonight, cattle prices are steady. “I realize it may be important. Put it on a big pink slip. I’ll need a sub.” A guy over in Farson took his head off with a snow machine and a barbed-wire fence. “Yes, lesson plans are on my desk.” Game and Fish will limit deer and elk tags next fall. I fake a cough and hang up. U.S. 30 to Jackson is slick in spots. Geologists found the fault, hooked their equipment up, and named it something I couldn’t make out because of the fuzzy AM reception on this cheap telephone. It sounded like “Bring ’em asphalt,” but that isn’t it.
The first real daylight to come over the ridge is softened with clouds and light snow. The legs of the tower reach up into the fog and support an ethereal redhead mermaid, an enormous half-trout, tuna-can Copper. Shaking with tired and cold I raise my monocular to her to see the detail. I take a deep breath to steady myself, my vision clears. She is art. Slender, asexual amphibian hips and stiff traffic-pylon nipples. Her fluent hair is the same color as the stripe down her speckled side that makes her a rainbow troutwoman.
She is sitting on a rock just underneath WELCOME TO HAMS FORK. Below the rock, in flowing cursive letters: Gateway to Zion and the GRAND TETONS. She is holding a trident and smoking a mini-cigar. She is complete.
Hams Fork is waking up. Wives and moms are beating pancake mix, scrambling eggs, not making coffee. An occasional orange mine truck rattles along Antelope Street. A four-wheel-drive with whip antennae and a light bar is spinning up the lane, my front yard. It’s Frank Grant, chief of police. Wayne waves with his beer-less wedding-band hand. Frank gets out not smiling and adjusts the equipment belt under his belly. “Let’s see the hands, Hero,” he says. Wayne smiles a doughnutty grin, sets his beer in the snow, swallows, and lays his palms over like a magician. His hands are enameled black, green, Copper-red. My hands are mostly clean and I hold them up like a child counting to ten.
“I’m an artist, Chief,” says Wayne, voice full of possibility.
In a couple of days photographs of “Wayne’s Rainbow” will hang in both bars in town, next to bowling trophies and framed black-and-white photos of rodeo cowboys on bucking horses. Pictures will be shown to me at my contract meeting. On Sunday morning, in both Mormon wards, they will talk about us: me, Copper, Joseph Smith, Robin, Jesus Christ, and Wayne Kerr. Next falls school calendar is already printed. Copper will apply for a transfer to the city in Texas. Shell get it. She has ridden Hams Fork to exhaustion. Just up and leaving is acceptable, expected in the West.
Robin will keep walking, sweating, and making wind chimes for angels. Looking after Wayne. Loving him despite of, and because of, his passion for art and wildlife.
I’ll get out the atlas I keep in the bathroom with back issues of Wild West magazine and a Gideon Bible, though I’m beginning to see that opportunity here runs only so far that way until it turns into California. Tomorrow I will take a Big Chief tablet and a dull number two pencil into my principal’s office, shove them under his gray nose like a divorce, and say, “Excuse me. Put my recommendation here, you no-balls, Diet Coke-drinking, blacklisting, goddamned son of a bitch.” And he’ll do it.
The Mormons will talk prophetically of select revelations, earthquakes, and visions. And I will be as alone as I have ever felt.
But if you could have been around Hams Fork a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trapping tough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before Mormons, soda ash, and oil, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river—at least a creek—after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here.
Wayne Kerr will continue to shake this lit
tle town like a ball bearing in a paint can.
urt Strain was being sent to a ghost fire. The Monday before Thanksgiving he received orders from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise to act as Incident Commander on a large project fire in the Sioux Ranger District of the Custer National Forest, Camp Crook, South Dakota. He had just returned home to Wyoming from a controlled burn to manage chaparral in central California, thinking his season over. Global warming, he thought. A swamp fire in the South maybe, but South Dakota? Custer Complex, the fire the computer was sending him to now, had burned two years before. Now the Custer Complex was cold as a file cabinet: sixty thousand acres of charred snags, ash, and snow.
They sent resources anyway; the computer had the final word. Logistical arrangements had already been made before the situation could be confirmed by a staff or committee of human beings in the brass echelons of Forest Service management, several of whom were halfway through double Johnnie Walker Reds and a tray of stuffed mushrooms at the Occidental Grill in Washington, D.C., when the order went out. Strain was a computer ghost himself now because the computer was the only commander that kept track of his whereabouts. But he was a good firefighter and he had experience. The season should have been over for him, but instead he was being called to an old fire that had burned out two years ago; he didn’t know this, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. Strain wondered how much longer he would be able to put up with the bureaucracy. He repacked his fire gear, including the six-weight Orvis Western Traveler fly rod and box of nymphs and drys; he planned on digging in.
The season had started in April, southern Arizona, when two nine-year-old boys soaked a Gila monster in gasoline and lit it on fire. The lizard skittered into the juniper, and nine thousand acres later Kurt Strain, the saw boss, found himself supervising four sawyers— out-of-work loggers who knew a great deal about power saws and dropping large trees, and very little about fire behavior. Strain’s objective there had been simple: make sure the sawyers don’t get burned over.
In the desert short-pine savannas of the Southwest they had worked at night, by headlamp and moonlight. The humidity would rise however slightly, the temperature would drop, and the fire would lie down until midmorning. Strain loved night duty, fishing at night with the scorpions and bats. He spoke to himself in the darkness, “Kurt Strain, common tree shrew, learns to fly like the Mexican fishing bat.”
Forest Service records showed that Strain had been officially reprimanded for, among other acts of insubordination, fishing on the job. He lined his crew out on a detail, then rigged up the fly rod he kept in a map tube in his fire pack. The Fire Safety Officer and Division Group Supervisor were not impressed by the rumors, though Strain was somewhat of a cult hero to the firefighters, the ground pounders. He rarely ate MREs, the Forest Service’s surplus military rations: Strain ate fish grilled over the coals of whatever conflagration he happened to be on. In Arizona he had caught endangered Gila trout and Apache trout, a threatened species. These fish he released unharmed, opting to eat the more prevalent rainbows and cutthroats.
An old regulation, still on the Forest Service books, allowed for one bottle of beer with lunch. This didn’t include fire duty, though it wasn’t unusual for beer to get packed into Strain’s spike camp with the water, saw gas, fusees, and bar oil; this was the West, the Forest Service, and drinking beer was not drinking.
Strain’s insubordination started after a campaign on a series of high-desert fires in western Colorado. A unit of hotshots was sent to a mountain to control a fire in heavy piñon juniper and bur oak—nothing salable. Their safety had been sacrificed for a public-relations stunt. Residents of a small subdivision five miles away were watching operations with binoculars from their patios. The prudent thing would have been to let the fire burn up the ridge, then over and down to a Cat line on the other side. It was all desert and didn’t need to be saved. The order went through to stop the fire’s run before it torched out at the ridge. Strain’s crew had been choppered in to help retrieve the fourteen bodies, most of them college kids.
At thirty-six, Strain now realized that the Forest Service was less an overevolved branch of the Boy Scouts than a branch of the military. Catch 22. Once you started questioning logic, nothing on a project fire made sense, and it became very difficult to work six-teen-hour days and nights, taking inane orders, accomplishing little other than comforting a public raised on Smokey Bear. He began fishing. Carrying a concealed fly rod was not legal grounds for dismissal; his supervisors never caught him blatantly fishing on a shift. They knew he did, but couldn’t prove it, so they busted him down to a seasonal firefighter from his full-time position as a timber sale manager. They were sure this would cause him to quit. Instead each fire season got a little longer and he readily made enough money to do nothing other than hunt, ski, and fish all winter long. His true life’s work. Let some Fucking New Guy or lifer charge hell with a bucket of water.
An unprecedented buildup of forest fuels, a severe drought, and consistently dry storm systems that contained much ground-to-cloud lightning had resulted in five million acres burning left of the ninety-eighth meridian by mid-July. Strain was convinced of global warming and he planned to adjust by spending more time fishing. The geographical frontiers gone, he believed the next frontier would be weather: hurricanes, blizzards, monsoons, infernos. The flap of a butterfly’s wings in Argentina does cause a tornado in Texas; we wouldn’t win the war against the elements. When things got bad enough, he would drive to Baja, live off the gutted peso, and take up marlin on the fly.
According to the Forest Service, the world would end in fire. The flammable buildup came on the skids of years of successful fire suppression. Now the fires—most ignited by lightning—burned hotter and faster than ever before. A thick haze hung in the sky over two time zones, and the eastern vacationers stayed on their side of the river and attended ball games and theme parks, played golf, and motored through Civil War battlefields with the windows up. The western smoke reached even the easterners, intensifying their sunsets, turning them a deep salmon, the color of steak closest to the bone.
In August Strain worked as a crew rep, a liaison between three twenty-man Bureau of Indian Affairs handline crews and the fires’ Incident Command teams. Crew reps were minor administrators, glorified baby-sitters, politicians. They made sure the Montagnards carried their fire shelters, washed their feet, and didn’t suck a bottle. Strain slowly led the Indian crew, following lightning fires up western Colorado and back into Wyoming, where they’d started. The Indians, who were often aloof and laid-back to a point of being dangerous to themselves and others, quickly tried his patience, and for Strain the assignment became a painful endurance event. The next time I’m mobilized as a crew rep, he wrote in his post-incident evaluation, I’d better be in charge of real firefighters or a company of sorority pledges from Michigan.
The all-white crews he led approached forest fires as if in war. It had occurred to Strain years before that the white people would never live with the West the way natives could before the advent of the reservations. They would always be battling droughts, floods, snow, cold, heat, infestations, wildfire. He realized he was more like the Indians, in it for different reasons than saving the West’s precious timber resources for Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific shareholders to get richer. Given the choice between summer camp and all-out war, he’d be roasting marshmallows. Call it selfish.
The government policy of suppressing Indians like they suppressed fire was simple on paper, but it went against every natural law, and in turn cost the taxpayers billions. But fire is fire and Strain was indispensable in a tight spot; the men who worked with him knew it.
By October things had cooled considerably and he began a series of controlled burns, pyratory exercises that burned tracts of heavy fuels to improve vegetation and lessen the chances of an uncontrolled, unpredictable fire later. It was doing Gods work in hasty catch-up fashion. The Forest Service had dipped into Smokey Bear funds to run a mu
ltimillion-dollar ad campaign to inform the public about the need for these controlled fires. As he sorted beadhead nymphs and stoneflies and tucked the aluminum fly box into his redpack, Strain remembered thinking a good idea would be to wait for an easterly wind, run a hot line from southern Oregon to Mexico, and burn out the entire state of California. In November his mucus turned from black back to clear. He flew back to Dubois, where he thought he’d have a winter season of fly tying and reading.
A man in a Stetson rancher, jeans, and green Forest Service shirt arrived for Strain in a mint-green pickup. They were headed to the blue-and-orange Bell Jet Ranger on the grass tarmac in a pasture at the edge of town. The chopper was taking Strain to South Dakota to the ghost fire.
In the pickup, Strain studied the faxed incident report. The driver briefed Strain as they drove.
“Where are my resources?” asked Strain.
“Right now? My guess is the casino bar. Initial resources have been ordered. Looks like you’re getting reservation handline crews from Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Standing Rock. They’ll be there as soon as they can sober up and get on the bus, I guess. The pilot’s name is Sherman Two Crows. We call him Mayday. He’s been flying fire all summer. Knows what he’s doing.”
The tail of the chopper read: TOMAHAWK CHARTERS AND HELI-SKI. Mayday was a mercenary. The belly of the craft was smoked black. The Forest Service cowboy walked up to the bubbled window and banged on it with his fist. Mayday started awake. “Yeah, okay,” he said. He had long, oil-black hair and a sparse goatee of long, threadlike whiskers, like a catfish. He wore his headset over a Spokane Indians baseball cap, a Nomex jumpsuit, bright orange like a prisoner’s, and logging boots. Mayday gestured for Strain to throw his redpack in the back and get in the other side.