The Horse in My Garage and Other Stories

by Patrick F. McManus

  Forest fires seldom endanger lookouts, and if a fire should threaten a station there usually is ample time to beat a retreat. But not always. The Sundance Fire in Idaho in the summer of 1967 proved an exception for eighteen-year-old Randy Langston. Stationed on a 7,264-foot Roman Nose Peak, Randy had been keeping an eye on the fire, which had been burning fitfully for several weeks. On the evening of September 1, the fire was about fifteen miles and a mountain range away from the Roman Nose lookout. Then, in a matter of hours, a 60 mph wind whipped the Sundance blaze into one of the worst fires in Idaho’s smoky history. In a single day, the fire made a run of twenty-one miles, eventually threatening towns, farms, and homes along a thirty-mile front. At its worst, it burned one square mile of mature timber every three minutes, and its smoke column rose to a height of 45,000 feet. Trapped in the middle of this inferno, Randy continued to make his radio reports until it became evident that the fire was going to sweep right over his tower. He was ordered to take his radio and try to find shelter in the rocks below the station. The young lookout scrambled down to a rock slide, where he spent the night surround by a violent fire storm. The following morning, a helicopter picked him up and flew him to safety. He was a bit shaken, but unsinged.

  And the lookout tower? Well, it survived, too. It stands now as a lonely and useless sentinel over 51,000 charred acres that made up one of the most beautiful forest areas in Idaho.

  The lookout begins his summer of tranquility by attending a week-long fireguard training school conducted by each national forest. There he learns the various methods of spotting and fighting fires. After completing his training, he usually moves straight into the lookout station he has been assigned to. Most of the stations now have roads leading to them, but a few can only be reached by a horse, helicopter, or on foot. In the early days of lookout stations, the lookout went in and stayed “in” for the season, but now he can usually have a day or two in town each week while a substitute takes his place. In the case of a married couple, the wife can hop in the car and drive to town for a loaf of bread or a divorce.

  The first weeks at the station may be spent clearing trails, stringing telephone wires, maintaining roads, or giving the tower a new coat of paint. Daily weather reports are also made. Once the fire season arrives, however, which is usually in early June, lookouts concentrate on their primary job and every twenty minutes must make a systematic check of the area protected by their station. After a week or so, the twenty-minute check is all but forgotten, because the lookout is in the habit of looking. Indeed, he can hardly stop looking.

  “After a while, they just look around all the time,” a ranger explains. “You can’t hold a decent conversation with them because their heads are constantly turning this way and that. They look like owls.”

  Competition between lookouts becomes fierce. Not only do they check their own territory but each other’s, and it is a major triumph to spot an unreported “smoke” in the other fellow’s range. Working hours as such become purely academic, and lookouts will make a habit of getting up in the middle of the night to make sure a fire hasn’t sneaked into their area under cover of darkness. Needless to say, the Forest Service subtly encourages this spirit of friendly competition.

  New lookouts at first have some trouble identifying smokes. They will report patches of fog, clouds, dust, and, at night, even the lights from each other’s stations. But by the time fire season arrives, they have become experienced enough to know smoke when they see it. Still, they tend to be jumpy and don’t take any chances. Last summer during the height of the Idaho fire season, a lookout reported smoke he had just spotted. As it happened, a plane loaded with retardant to be dumped on another fire was just clearing the runway. It was ordered to the new blaze instead. Fortunately, the pilots are required to make a dry run over each suspected site before they bomb. Down below, the pilot could see a logging crew staring nervously up at him as he roared over at treetop level. The smoke was a plume of blue exhaust fumes caused by starting a bulldozer.

  Base pay for lookouts ranges from $2.15 to $2.40 an hour. They also may earn a monthly increment from 15 percent to 25 percent of their base pay by working an additional twenty-eight hours a week. They must furnish all of their own provisions, but the room—and the view—is free.

  In recent years most of the stations have been “modernized,” which means that wood-burning stoves have been replaced with propane combination stove-refrigerator units. If the lookout’s stove burns wood, he must split it himself, regulations requiring that he keep a two-week supply on hand at all times. Stations unequipped with propane also have no means of refrigeration, thus depriving the lookout of the luxury of perishable foods and cool drinks (one young lookout’s parents eased—or perhaps ruined—their son’s summer on his own by flying their private plane over his station every couple of days and parachuting him a quart of ice cream.) The only time any of the lookouts have running water is if they should break into a sprint while carrying it in a bucket up from the nearest spring.

  The Forest Service is quite concerned that its lookouts not go overboard with the “roughing it” concept. The lookouts are representatives of the U.S. government, the rangers point out, and are expected to create a favorable impression. There is no telling when one of the taxpayers may show up for an impromptu visit, regardless of where the station is located, and he is not to find empty food cans moldering on the floor or shorts and bra hung up to dry on the firefinder. After each sprinkling of rain, the windows—all forty or so panes—are to be polished spotlessly clean. Ledges must be dusted daily and the floors and steps—no matter how many of them—must be swept. The grounds are to be kept free of clutter by burning or burying debris.

  Lookout stations, once merely functional, are now becoming tourist attractions of sorts. They make excellent destinations for hiking clubs. If he gets careless, a lookout who has not seen another human in a month could find himself kicking cans under his bunk, dusting the table with the T-shirt he has just snatched from the firefinder, and setting his abode in acceptable U.S. representative-type order as 37 members of the Hill Hoppers Outing Club ascend his stairs. The government is even publishing little pamphlets describing lookout stations that the public might like to visit.

  The Forest Service currently operates approximately 1,000 lookout stations throughout the country during the fire season. The number has decreased by several hundred during the last few years as many areas changed from detection systems relying almost entirely on fixed ground lookouts to ones employing a few key ground stations supplemented by aircraft patrol. But there is no thought that the ground stations can ever be completely abandoned. Thus, he who would escape for three whole months the grit and grind of people-glutted cities to spend the summer on a Forest Service lookout station will have the opportunity. There is no need to rush. Simply obtain from your local post office and fill out several copies of the Application for Federal Employment, Standard Form 57, and mail them to the ranger district in the national forest of your choice. The Forest Service usually hires its lookouts during January, but a few replacements are taken on as late as May.

  So just imagine it. There you are, relaxing on the tower steps as the sun sinks slowly in the west and the darkness rises out of the pine-clad depths of the mountains, finally to embrace this little penthouse, your room with a view. Touched by the last lingering rays of the sun, the tower glows like the first star of evening in the great blue bowl of the sky. Peace. Beauty. Somewhere off down the mountain, a coyote wails. Then your keen, woodsman-type ear picks up a faint sound. It is the sound of porcupines gnawing the tires off your car. From the edge of an alpine grove, you glimpse a herd of mountain goats approaching your tower stairs. The breeze is picking up, the tower is beginning to sway, and rising in the south, blotting out the stars, is a massive thunderhead. It is times like this that you truly rejoice in your solitude; there is no one around to hear you cry.

  Risk Assessment

  H

  elp! I’m b
eing held captive in a canoe by the most boring person in the entire history of the world!

  Allow me to point out something you already know, and that is that a canoe is a vehicle of very close confinement. Furthermore, if you are on a ten-day canoe trip, you are not likely ever to arrive at a point along the way where you can simply get out and walk home. This is particularly true if the canoe belongs to you.

  If someone bores you on the phone, you can always shout out something like, “Good heavens, the house is on fire! Got to go!” In a canoe, you have no such choice. I suppose you could shout out, “Jump, the canoe is on fire!” then paddle away as soon as your companion was overboard. But it’s way too easy to tell a canoe isn’t on fire. No, you must sit there day after day and listen to the endless prattle of your fellow canoeist. “Prattle,” by the way, is to raise your partner’s level of conversation by an astronomical degree. “Duh” would be a response from him comparable to Archimedes’ cry of “Eureka!”

  “Wow!” you say to your canoe partner. “Look at that sunset!”

  “Duh!”

  But I have no one to blame but myself. I had failed to run a risk assessment on my potential canoe partner. He was a college professor. That in itself should have set off alarm bells, but I failed to detect any. A proper risk assessment can save you endless difficulties in the selection of companions for hunting, fishing, camping, and canoeing.

  Often, though, we will do a risk assessment and then fail to apply it to the appropriate situation. A friend of mine recently told me about a fellow with whom he and some of his other pals hunted. On three separate hunting trips, my friend told me, this fellow’s rifle went off accidentally, once in the car, once as he was getting out of the car, and once in the hunting cabin. As a result of my interest in risk assessment, I started to ask my friend a question.

  “Stop!” he cried, raising his hands. “I know! I know! I know what you’re going to ask. After the first accidental discharge, why did we continue hunting with the guy?”

  “It seems to call for a risk assessment.”

  “He owned the hunting cabin!”

  “Oh, right! A hunting cabin is well worth the risk. Excuse me for even questioning your motive.”

  Obviously, my friend in this instance had made an assessment and concluded a hunting cabin was well worth the risk. That is my point exactly. Risks are often highly rewarding, particularly if you survive. But make sure you weigh them carefully beforehand. Risks are not Brussels sprouts after all. Actually, Brussels sprouts are not without risk, but I don’t want to go into that.

  Here’s a perfect example of what can happen if you don’t weigh risks before undertaking a venture. Kenny, Norm, Vern, and I, my hunting, fishing, and camping companions, were returning from a camping trip high in the mountains. We were all about sixteen. Having been out for a week, and having climbed five mountain peaks that demanded climbing, we were all exhausted. We decided to take a shortcut on our way out of the mountains. The shortcut had hardly started when we came to a high mountain blocking our way—Beehive. The mountain had overlapping layers of rock that resembled the sides of a wild beehive.

  We now had two choices. We could climb up over the top of Beehive in relative safety, or we could drop down through thick woods and brush to the river far below and go around it. And I discovered a third choice. I noticed a narrow rock ledge running around the steep side of the mountain right on our level. It was directly ahead of us. If we worked our way around Beehive on the ledge, we wouldn’t have to climb either up or down. Brilliant! But what if, as we worked our way around Beehive, the ledge started to peter out and eventually disappeared altogether! This was the risk I failed to assess. Halfway around, the ledge began to narrow. Before long, we were leaning into the rock, our boots turned sideways on the ledge and overlapping its outer edge by inches. For some reason I’ve forgotten, we could not turn around and go back. I think it had something to do with having to hop in the air, turn our feet around, and hope we landed back on the narrow ledge when we came down. There was also the problem that each of us carried a heavy pack, which seemed to be pulling us out into empty space. Far down below, we could see the tops of tall pines, the tips of which seemed to be beckoning to us with long green fingers. At this point the group’s confidence in me as a leader seemed to diminish. And then, suddenly, as I inched forward, the ledge widened. A miracle! Saved!

  I turned and assured my fellow campers that ledges like this usually widened at the far end. “Oh, look! This is where the widening starts. I bet you guys were getting pretty worried! Ha!”

  That was the last time I got to lead, which was too bad, because after the ledge I never went anywhere without first assessing the risk. It takes an expert at evaluating risk to even recognize risk in the first place. Take birch trees, for example. Just looking at a slender, graceful birch tree, the average person would never realize it was loaded with risk.

  When Vern and I were about twelve, we discovered that a birch tree could give you a decent ride. In those days, we rode everything that was available: horses, cows, pigs, bicycles, wagons, sleds, rafts, and homemade boats. Each contained its own particular kind of treachery, but none measured up to birch trees.

  Vern and I would select a birch we thought would give us a decent ride. Then we would climb it until the birch began to bend. Then we would inch up farther and it would bend more. Once we had achieved the right amount of bend, we would let go with our legs and swing out away from the trunk, holding on with our hands. Somewhere I have a poem by Robert Frost titled “A Swinger of Birches.” That is what Vern and I were—swingers of birches. Once we had swung out, the tree would begin a graceful bend, lowering us toward the ground. Once we had assessed the risk involved, we would let go simultaneously and drop. Well, actually, we had no other choice at that point.

  We swung from so many birches that one day Vern heard his dad say to his mother, “I think our birch trees have some kind of disease. They’re all bent over.”

  Vern didn’t say anything. He was an expert at assessing risk.

  One day, a new kid moved into our neighborhood and, to make him feel welcome, Vern and I invited him out to swing on birches. I’ll call the kid “Hap.” I don’t remember his real name because he didn’t stay long in our neighborhood.

  As it turned out, Hap had never swung on birches, and we had to teach him the basics, except for one, which we assumed every kid knows.

  Now that there were three of us to swing on birches, we selected a stouter and taller tree than usual. We let Hap go up first, because he claimed to be an excellent tree climber and could teach us some tricks. I was happy to let him lead. Even though I had swung on dozens of birches, this one made me a little uneasy because it was so tall. At last we could feel it begin to bend with the three of us. It bent and bent and bent until we were dangling side by side from beneath the bent portion. We were perhaps eight feet off the ground at that point. Vern, who had assumed command of the operation, said, “OK I’m gonna count out loud, and on the count of three we all let go and drop to the ground. Everybody got it?” Hap and I both answered yes. Vern started counting. “One—two—” at which point he and I let go and dropped to the ground. The birch then snapped up straight and whipped over in the opposite direction!

  That’s when Hap left the neighborhood. We never saw him again. I think his folks may have thought Idaho was simply too wild a state in which to raise a boy. Vern and I felt bad about Hap. He simply didn’t know how to assess the risk of a situation. Any kid should know that when one of the guys says everybody let go on the count of three, everybody lets go on the count of two. It’s just common sense. Why Hap wasn’t aware of that, I don’t know. Maybe he hadn’t thought to run a risk assessment on Vern and me.

  I often ran risk assessments on Vern but not often enough or thoroughly enough. Once when we were about eight, we were pretending that two holes from which stumps had been blasted were trenches in one of our endless boyhood wars. We lobbed chunks of dried
dirt back and forth at each other, the clods bursting harmlessly on one side or the other of us. Incoming clods were easy to dodge. Once, while searching for a suitable clod in the bottom of my foxhole, I glanced up. Vern loomed over me, an immense clod cocked above his head in both hands. KABLOOEY! I almost choked on the cloud of dust that burst around my head. Once again I had failed to run a proper risk assessment, this time on Vern. On the other hand, who would expect an enemy to charge during trench warfare? It was insane.

  Learning early about risk assessment has served me well all my life. During my many years as a freelance writer, a photographer and I were accompanying a mountain-climbing expedition for the purpose of doing a TV feature on the venture. At one point we were traversing a steep slope of hard-packed snow. We had to climb down the slope at a steep angle and then proceed back up. The lead climber was stamping footholds in the snow for the long line of climbers following him. I quickly ran a risk assessment and discovered that at the point where the trail angled back up, my feet had to be in the right sequence to match those of the leader. Otherwise, at the sharp turn back up, I would have to leap in the air, switch feet from back to front, and hope I landed in the right footholds when I came down. My risk assessment allowed me to make this necessary adjustment well before I got to the sharp turn. I naturally assumed my photographer would make his own risk assessment. Alas, he didn’t. When he came to the turn, he leaped in the air, twisted around, and tried to land in the leader’s tracks. He missed, or so I judged from the diminishing “AAAAaaaiii!!” behind me. When I had the opportunity to look back, I could see him zooming down the mountain on his back, his heels sending twin sprays of snow into the air.

  I thought, “Just my luck! Now what am I going to do for film?”

  I think I must have assessed my first risk at about age eight. My favorite book back then was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck had run away from home to escape down the Mississippi River on a raft. I would have loved to escape down the Mississippi on a raft, but all I had available was Sand Creek. The creek flowed through the country side for about three miles, then into Lake Pend Oreille, which emptied into the Pend Oreille River, which connected with the Columbia River, which emptied into the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t know all that at the time, but actually only wanted to float far enough on Sand Creek that I could still get home before dark. I wasn’t in Huck’s class when it came to adventure.