by Jon Billman
Many evenings Ash and I would hike up a deer trail to the top of Sarpy Ridge and watch Utah’s lightning, which was better than our own. We’d take Cokes and a blanket, and it was like the Fourth of July. Some nights we would smoke the marijuana Ash had brought with her from Arizona. Most nights it would just be distant heat lightning. We would kiss or make animal sounds in the boredom— birds, coyotes, moose. Sometimes the lightning struck hard and green and beautiful, and it was like a celebration.
Ash was running a study up near the Montana border. She spent a couple days a week up there, counting warrior grasshoppers and Mormon crickets. When she returned, she spent most workdays behind a computer in the map room, long hair pulled back, gold-framed glasses on her big, wind-tanned cheeks, red and serious.
Her expertise was in riparian management, but she taught me that worms do not have eyes, but can sense light through their skin. She taught me that mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue. She told me about the Australian fire beetle. The females are colored exactly like the males, but are a good deal larger. “Size is everything in their mating habits,” she said. “The males are attracted to the largest, strongest females.” Road-train drivers would toss Emu beer bottles onto the roadside. Male fire beetles would come by the hundreds to mate with the bottles, which looked like big female fire beetles.
She taught me how to tell the temperature by counting snowy-tree-cricket chirps. “Count the chirps over thirteen seconds,” she said as we stood in the desert and I held my Indiglo watch to my eyes, listening, counting. “Then add forty.” We compared the Fahrenheit crickets to the thermometer she carried on her belt. The crickets were nearly right-on each time, give or take a degree either way.
I taught her that a smart arsonist can make a time-delayed incendiary device by mixing brake fluid and antifreeze in a Styrofoam coffee cup. Plant the little bomb in some tinder at night and stroll away. Once the temperature reached sixty the next morning, whoomph, fire.
It was a warm summer.
The camp’s cat was named Cinder. He was black as a witch’s cat, and during the day he insisted on sleeping on my bunk. He was a mouser and his ears twitched when he dreamed. Ash bought him half-and-half to put on his dry food. Some of the guys didn’t like cats and weren’t above kicking him when he got in their way.
Raphael, the pilot, bunked out at the dirt-strip airport. He was under Forest Service contract, and we used him for everything from shuttling biologists around the desert to tracking livestock movements to searching for smokes after a lightning storm to dropping boxes of fried chicken to us on the fireline. He was always reading in the little hangar closet he bunked in, feet propped up on a parts crate, sipping a Coke. He read pilot magazines and A. B. Guthrie novels. Very often the Bible. I tried to not like him, but it was not easy. He and Ash slept in a dome tent under the wing of his Cessna when he flew her up to the border for the grasshopper count. She told me when I asked about hotel accommodations on her trips.
His name was Raphael, but they called him Ralph. He kept to himself and wasn’t passionate about fires like the rest of us. The whole of him didn’t quite fit in.
He was a foreigner, from the East, olive-skinned and not tall, with short dark hair. The little extra weight he carried made him appear almost but not quite puffy. Not hard and lean like those of us who swung chain saws and Pulaskis. Ralph was studying to be a minister at one of those little Bible colleges in the Midwest and he drove a 1972 Cadillac ambulance with a bike rack and a CD player. “Don’t you want to fly B-17s, Canadairs, Orions,” I asked him once, “instead of that little Cessna?”
“No,” he said. “I am content with this.” What I thought he meant was that he was content with Ash.
Without thinking of the consequences, I asked him, “Does she haul your ashes?”
“You don’t need to know that,” Raphael said. I expected he was more than just sleeping in that tent with Ash. I expected he would hit me and was a little disappointed when he didn’t.
“Your survival in the wilderness might depend on it,” she said, breaking the green-and-brown hoppers legs at the joints like expensive crab. She popped the insect into her mouth whole. The exoskeleton cracked in her teeth and her neck worked a little as she swallowed.
“Just let me die,” I said.
“I can’t help but to feel for him,” Ash told me after her third or fourth plane ride to the border. “Raphael is an angel.”
“What in hell does that mean?” I knew damn well what it meant to me, but I wanted her take on the matter.
Ash’s eyes told me she would not answer, but not because it wasn’t any of my business. In Wyoming, in the Forest Service, silence is an acceptable response, often encouraged.
That afternoon the mosquitoes were thick. I smeared my arms with government-surplus Desert Storm bug juice. The mint-green paint on my truck door had begun peeling where the sweat from my left arm smeared against it.
Though it looked like I was going to come up the loser in a toss of the I-Ching, I became determined not to let her go before October. She was something to hold on to for a summer in Hams Fork, something many, even most, people there did not have. That summer she was the only thing.
The Eternal Flame was the dump fire that would not go out. It had been burning for years, from deep in the ground where newspapers and plastic diapers and snow tires and condoms and motor oil and couches, beer bottles, and flashlight batteries smoldered and some times torched enough to shoot up a little flame, bigger than a pilot light, smaller than a campfire. Mostly it wasn’t an eternal flame, it was just smoke. They covered it up, but it burned and coughed, burned and coughed. We would get called because from town it sometimes looked like Utah or the western heel of the Bridger-Teton National Forest was on fire. The Smokey propaganda poster over our kitchen stove showed a burned-over Oldsmobile in a black-and-white apocalypse. It said: HARRY’S TRASH FIRE GOT AWAY, DON’T LET YOURS. We knew it was just the dump, but we had to go.
Once there, we might walk out into the dump with eight-gallon piss-pumps on our backs and squirt some water on the little flame. Most often we just looked around at what was new in the dump and made comments about what could have been saved—a couch, a refrigerator, a TV, a mattress.
I lost a Third of July game of cards fair and square and had to be Smokey the goddamn Bear in the Hams Fork Independence Day Parade.
On a supermarket atlas, the southwest corner of Wyoming goes from Bureau of Land Management white to Forest Service green as you run your finger northward. The reason we needed range-land biologists was because of Lapland. The BLM sagebrush desert lapped into our Forest Service sagebrush desert, which slowly turned into thin scrub copse and eventually, as you got higher, thick crops of pine. Nothing is green in Lapland, save for the sage crowns and the few grasses in early spring.
The crew quarters was a good hour’s drive away, over this moonscape, from the nearest forest fire—the deep-pine fires that smelled like smoked Christmas—because Lapland sat between Hams Fork to the south and the real woods of the north. Many cows. Many sheep.
The BLM men were government cowboys who thought like ranchers and had little patience for small and insignificant things like jackrabbits and coyotes. They wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and loved nothing better than running wild mustangs or control-burning thousands of acres of high desert. We couldn’t blame them for that, though we did not always get along and often referred to them as the BM.
Our Forest Service people were government lumberjacks who had little patience for anything that did not grow tall and burn hard. We wore cork-sole logging boots and farmer caps, and we could put an edge to a chain saw in two and a half minutes with a pocket file, overhaul it in twenty with a Swiss Army knife. We worked like loggers. And most of us thought like pyromaniacs. “Let it burn to the road, burn her to the road!”
Ranchers leased BLM and Forest Service land for next to nothing and overgrazed their herds until a grasshopper would starve to death; mining and
logging paid the bills. The cowboys called us the Forest Circus. The Hams Fork Gazette editorial page called the BLM and us “outmoded government tumors.”
The reason we needed Smokey the Bear and his “Only You!” campaign was less apparent than why we needed Ash. For over fifty years Smokey had had an impact on kids and campers. He kept fire to a minimum. We, Smokey and us firefighters, did our jobs so well that the forest had evolved into an unhealthy monoculture of stunted ponderosa pine. In the draws too steep to log were the ironwood trees, pulpy cottonwoods, choked pine starts, and weeds. This treescape was what we called dense fuel, which burned like billyhell when it did catch fire.
Our fires were mostly caused by lightning. After a fire and the spring snowmelt, serviceberries, raspberries, fireweed, and bunch-grass would return. And wildlife—deer, moose, elk, bears, game birds, rabbits—would feed in the new meadows. Fires were a good thing, but millions of tax dollars went each year to try to prevent them and put them out.
Cappy said a forest fire was an educated devil who had made it to the top.
Raphael said fire was a symbol of Gods presence; trying to prevent forest fires was like trying to prevent earthquakes.
Some of the townspeople said they suspected the Forest Service and the BLM were professional arsonists who set “job fires” intentionally so they could collect hazard pay for the long hours it took to put them out. I was invested enough in the firefighting game to know that this could be true. When I first started the job I would have been skeptical, but later I found myself thinking in ways that made arson justifiable.
Ash said, “For a woman to dream about grasshoppers portends she will bestow her affections upon ungenerous people.”
Ash dreamed about grasshoppers. I awoke one night to hear her talking in her sleep.
“They’re everywhere,” she said. Her blanket was on the floor, and I could see her pale nakedness in the thin electric security-light filtering through the uncurtained windows. She scratched at her face and then, with a shudder, jolted upright, breathing hard.
“It’s okay, Ash,” I whispered. “Only a dream.”
A couple of the other guys turned over, and Harley mumbled something about the Minnesota Twins. Out of nighttime weakness I whispered, “Do you want to come over here, bunk with me for a while?” The bunks were narrow, and I guessed Ash would take up more than half of mine. I wanted the temporal weight of her near me. We all did at that hour, though most would have denied it.
“No,” she said.
The next morning over pancakes I told her I had had a dream about bears. “What does that mean?”
She stared at the poster of Harry’s trash fire, chewing. Still staring, she swallowed and said, “Bear signifies overwhelming competition in pursuits of every kind. Killing a bear means extrication from entanglements.”
“Custer killed bear in Wyoming,” said Harley.
One evening in July I drove out to the airport to see Raphael about Ash. Ash was on a solo hike in the desert, something she often did after work. I wanted to get this thing settled. Maybe he would win out, but I wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of the fire season sharing her. But I also knew this: No one won Ash. She wasn’t anyone’s prize, like the office girls in Rock Springs or Logan could be. Her attentions were a good thing during a lonely summer, but they were unpredictable and carnal and not something you wanted to have to suffer through a whole cycle of seasons. Her attentions were humbling when you found yourself counting on them.
The sun was dropping quickly behind Utah and the crickets were chirping. I walked by the old phone booth that waiting passengers used more for a windbreak than for communications—I’d tried to use it before and it never worked—and through the gate in the Cyclone fence, across the dirt runway to the rusty green hangar. The shiny white Cessna glowed in the open bay door. My bootsteps echoed off the steel ceiling. Raphael looked up from his reading.
I knew that he knew why I had come. “I don’t think I’m here to break your nose,” I said.
He bit his lip and looked down at the toe of his tennis shoe.
“Want a beer?” Turning to an old Norge, he pulled the chrome handle and a sheet of cool covered the little room. He took out two beers, and motioned for me to sit on the parts crate, the only furniture he had besides his own rotten-webbed lawn chair.
“We need to get something straight,” I said, already feeling disarmed. There were little pieces of ice in the beer.
“Would it help if I broke your nose?” he asked.
“Might,” I said. “It seems to be coming down to something like that.”
“Got any pistols?” he asked. “We could have a duel.”
“Nope.”
“Swords?”
I looked at my hands and tried to make fists. “No swords. I guess it’s looking like an old-fashioned fistfight.” I took a hard swallow of beer, stood up and walked back into the bay. Raphael followed, and we stood in the big doorway looking at the dull orange horizon of Utah on fire.
“I get the feeling God’s on your side and that bothers me,” I told him. “Anyway, you can’t hit me back—you’re in minister school.”
“I think you’d feel better about coming all the way out here if I clocked you a few times. Be glad to, actually. I could clean your whole plow, if that would make you all the happier.”
“I thought so earlier, but I just don’t have it in me anymore,” I said. “I’ll take that beating another day.”
On the short walk back to my pickup the pay phone rang, once, twice, three times. I looked around, stepped inside, and picked up the receiver. “What would you do if you did have her all to yourself?” he asked.
My manhood and what was left of my pride were riding on the next several words to come out of my mouth. What I’d say would secure my place in the natural order of things for the rest of that summer. What I said was guttural and instinctive. I said what I felt, what was true. I said, “I don’t know.”
In that short arc between my ear and the receiver hook, it sounded as if Raphael said, “God bless you.”
It sounded like he felt sorry for me.
Sage gets elderly and brittle when the natural fire cycle is interrupted, and the silver-and-black sage hadn’t burned in years, so it was especially thick that summer. It was reclaiming the narrow two-track we followed to the ghost town some Sundays, so that it brushed at us as we rode by on our mountain bikes and left cat scratches on our arms and legs. But it smelled good, and Ash said it reminded her of some poem I’d never heard of. I said it reminded me of good restaurant chicken that you could get in Denver but nowhere near here. Ash could ride a bicycle like a banshee. It was hard for me to keep up with her.
Sublette, Wyoming, consisted of twenty-five or so limestone foundations with the skeletons of cookstoves, bedsprings, and flue pipes rusting away inside them. Tin cans, old leather shoes, and pieces of broken bottles stained blue and purple by a hundred years of sun. An old car chassis. Several steel mine vents. Tailings, A jail.
“If a town in your dreams looks dilapidated,” she said one Sunday as we pedaled through, “it means that trouble wall soon come to you.”
“I’d say this town looks dilapidated,” I said, “and you’re about as much headache as I want to take on this summer. You might have to slap me just so I can be sure I’m not dreaming.” Ash turned. She looked taken aback, as if the summer were so simple and natural and I had just unloaded something complicated on her that she wasn’t wired to handle.
The jail was the only building relatively intact. Two cells not much bigger than closets. Ash and I sat in one, and I could tell she was wondering what it must have been like a century ago to have been trapped there. She let me kiss her on the mouth—garlic and marijuana taste. I awkwardly undressed her while licking the salt from her neck and little breasts, going lower to where the taste in the folds was animal.
I carved our names on a pine windowsill with my Swiss Army knife, knowing the wind and rain would sand the nam
es and heart away in a matter of seasons.
In the brown willows along the little dry creekbed, she found a moose antler-paddle a bull had shed. I duct-taped it to my handlebars and we pedaled back to Hams Fork, coasting the gentle down-hills.
On Monday mornings, when I would fill my truck with fuel, coolant, and brake fluid in the gravel parking lot, the Cessna hauling Ash would dip its wings as a goodbye, bank to the northeast, and grow smaller until it disappeared behind Sheep Mountain. I told myself that what I felt for Ash was not love, but I had no other name for it. I realized one Monday as the plane flew north that things weren’t settled and that they probably couldn’t be until October and the end of fire season, when settling things meant packing up and leaving them.
But the summer seemed to warm Ash in a less temporal way. She was a steward, a friend to the land, sure, but without me how could this have been enough? I thought she would have to want me, be grateful for me beyond all hopes. Wasn’t I something out of her most enduring dream? As the summer progressed, it became apparent that she was helping me, showing me things bigger than fire and myself, holding my hand and pointing—see there! did you know that? It’s possible that what she mostly felt for me was sorry.
Ash hated fire duty. It wasn’t her job unless she was available. She called ponderosa pine “weeds.” But though she groused about it, Cappy made her keep her fire pack with her hard hat and fire-resistant Nomex shirt and pants in her truck. He made her keep her hand-held radio on her belt. If she was close enough to a smoke or if we were down on men, she would have to go. She was certified as a crew boss, certified to be in charge of twenty men, but putting out fire was beneath her. Or she was above it in that the suppression of fires has cause an ecological illness that will take decades of controlled burns to cure.