The Best American Magazine Writing 2014

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  Casting about for options, Cleveland and his shipmates turned to the “trash pump,” the portable gas-powered pump that could be used to supplement the overwhelmed hydraulic units. They hauled it down to the engine room, but the thing wouldn’t start. “We got out the manual because we were trying to figure out if we were missing something simple,” Cleveland remembered. It was funny, maybe, in the grimmest way possible—a few sailors flipping through an old instruction manual while their ship sank and the seas surged around them.

  Twelve

  By the end of the hearings in Portsmouth, the Bounty’s loss had begun to take shape, in the way that shipwrecks often do, as an unsparing aggregation of mistakes. Any one of them, had it occurred in isolation, would not likely have been fatal; it was only gathered together that they acquired such terrible weight. Had Robin Walbridge kept the ship in port, the Bounty might have lived to sail another day, even in her decaying state. If the Bounty had been in better shape, the storm might have been survivable; Sandy was extremely large, but her wind speed never rose above category 1 status, and vessels smaller than the Bounty have weathered much worse. If the generators had stayed online, if the pumps were able to keep up with the rising water, the Bounty might have limped back to shore as she did during her near-disastrous trip past Cape Hatteras in 1998. These are the hypotheticals that haunt a lost ship and her survivors.

  In an interview with CNN in February, Claudia McCann, Walbridge’s widow, said she believed her husband acted honorably in steering the Bounty south, and she has made it clear that she intends to protect his legacy. This will be no easy task—the captain’s crew demonstrated loyalty in their testimony, but the story they told in spite of themselves was a damning one. In the most generous scenario, Walbridge made a single bad decision that was fatally complicated by terrible luck. But it was just as possible that he committed an act of unforgivable hubris, knowingly pushing a dilapidated ship beyond its limits and endangering the young, largely inexperienced crew he had sworn to protect.

  Whether this ambiguous picture translates into legal responsibility may now be a matter for civilian courts to decide. Jacob Shisha, the Christians’ attorney, says he was only attending the inquiry to “listen,” but if a lawsuit is filed, the HMS Bounty Foundation will undoubtedly be the chief target. It is not inconceivable that John Svendsen, as the highest-ranking officer after Walbridge, could find himself named as a defendant as well.

  In November of 2012, the surviving crew members of Bounty went to New York to tape a segment for ABC’s Good Morning America. The producers shot more than an hour of tape, but used barely two minutes of it, a fact that annoyed some of the crew members. After that, they granted few interviews. Some took to switching off their phones or deleting e-mails from reporters without even reading them. Like soldiers returning from a particularly harrowing deployment, they worried that no one else would understand what they’d been through. They became even closer than they’d been on Bounty, sealing themselves off from the world. They started an e-mail listserv to exchange memories from their time on the ship and posted reassuring messages on each other’s Facebook walls.

  Thinking of you, they wrote.

  It will get better, they wrote.

  I’m having bad dreams, too, they wrote.

  On a recent winter afternoon, Doug Faunt stood on the back porch of his house in Oakland, surveying his tangled, overgrown backyard. An aging cat wove between his legs. Even a couple of months on, his stomach still bothered him. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the storm and what happened out there,” he said, pushing a neon-yellow watch cap back over his brow. “I assume it will be that way for a very long time.”

  But the funny thing was, he also couldn’t stop thinking of the things that he missed—the sound of canvas flapping overhead, the slap of saltwater on his skin. Lately he had found himself returning often to tall-ship forums online. Tall ships are typically taken out of commission during the winter months, laid up in October and back at sail by April or May. There was a ship sailing out of New York in the spring that he had his eye on—another full-rigger. Maybe she had room for one more sailor.

  Outside

  FINALIST—REPORTING

  The Granite Mountain Hotshots were struggling to protect the town of Yarnell, Arizona, from an advancing wildfire when nineteen team members were killed. There was one survivor. Drawing on interviews with friends and colleagues of the dead, official reports, and the calls the men made from the scene, Kyle Dickman authoritatively reconstructs the events that led to the greatest number of firefighter deaths since 9/11. Dickman is an associate editor at Outside and a former first responder—he began fighting wildfires when he was an eighteen-year-old college student and was later a member of the Tahoe Hotshot Crew. Founded in 1977, Outside has won five National Magazine Awards for General Excellence and received the award for Reporting in 1997 for Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air.”

  Kyle Dickman

  Nineteen: The Yarnell Hill Fire

  Yarnell, Arizona, a former gold-mining town of 650 people, sits on a precipice at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau. Rising above it are the 6,000-foot peaks of the Weaver Mountains, and nearly 2,000 feet below are the flatlands and cactus of the Sonoran Desert. An hour and a half northwest of Phoenix and an hour south of Prescott, Yarnell is, according to the town’s slogan, “Where the desert breeze meets the mountain air.”

  Weekend drivers coming into Yarnell from the south know they’ve hit town when they see the Ranch House Restaurant, a greasy spoon where the waitresses all look related and the clientele ride Harleys or horses. Across the street is Glen Ilah, a subdivision with a couple hundred homes owned mostly by retirees like Truman Farrell, a seventy-three-year-old air force veteran who up until two years ago was the town’s volunteer fire chief.

  On the night of June 28, Truman’s wife, Lois, was sitting on their back patio in her usual spot by the grape trellises and the koi pond. From there the couple have a sweeping view of the Weaver range to the north, and Lois was watching a dry thunderstorm hung up on the range’s crest. She saw lightning strike the ridgetop and, a short while later, wispy blue smoke drifting toward the clouds. When Lois pointed it out to Truman, he thought little of it.

  • • •

  Around seven-thirty the following night, Robert Caldwell walked through the front door of his downtown home in Prescott. “Zion!” he said as he lifted his five-year-old stepson into his arms, kissed his wife, Claire, and flopped down in a chair at the kitchen table with a can of Coors. At twenty-three, he was the youngest of three squad bosses, a senior position that put him in charge of nine men on the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a team of wildland firefighters based out of Prescott.

  “Go get comfortable, would ya?” said Claire. “You smell like Robert.” By this she meant go clean up because you smell like you usually do: like smoke.

  Robert didn’t want to get up. He’d barely been home since his last time off nearly two weeks ago, and sitting, even in his fire boots, ash-smudged work pants, and sweat-crusted Granite Mountain T-shirt, felt good. Family time was precious during the eight-month fire season, lasting from April through November. He and Claire had been married for a little less than a year, and it still felt like the honeymoon. She was the hippie chick eight years older with an easy laugh; he was the cowboy gentleman wise beyond his years. Robert had an IQ high enough for Mensa and a love of Hemingway. Hotshotting was his identity. He’d fought fire for five seasons, and after two of Granite Mountain’s squad bosses left in March, he was promoted. It was one of the six full-time positions on the crew.

  Since April, he and his Granite Mountain colleagues had spent twenty-six shifts on fires. The week before, they got some local press for saving a few hundred high-dollar homes from the 6,700-acre Doce Fire, a national priority that burned the crew’s namesake, a 7,290-foot peak visible from nearly anywhere in Prescott. For the nation’s only municipally funded hotshot crew, saving homes was a bi
g deal, and the town was calling them heroes. The praise made the crew uncomfortable, especially Robert, who felt that getting paid to camp and work fires in the most beautiful places in the West was closer to selfish than heroic. But it was nice to be acknowledged.

  That night the family ate dinner together at the kitchen table. After putting Zion to bed, Robert drank a cup of coffee while Claire did the dishes, then he pulled her into the bedroom. Before nodding off, Robert removed his wedding ring. “It’s filthy,” he said, showing it to Claire, who lay in the crook of his arm. Ash covered the edges, and the silver was scuffed from the handle of his Rhino, the hoe-like tool he used to dig on fires. Claire took the band and rolled it between her fingers and thought, What if someday this is all I have left?

  • • •

  Across town, three other Granite Mountain hotshots—Christopher MacKenzie, Garret Zuppiger, and Brendan “Donut” McDonough—arrived at the Whiskey Row Pub, a dive in Prescott’s historic downtown. When the hotshots came to drink in groups, as they often did on rare days off, bartender Jeff Bunch gave them a discount. His son was a former crew member.

  The trio sat by the pool tables in the back of the bar. Donut hadn’t seen Garret, a red-bearded twenty-seven-year-old, or Chris, his roommate and a nine-year veteran of firefighting, in a couple of days. Strange as it was, Donut (his nickname was easier to say than his last name) had missed his hotshot brothers. He’d come down with a cold on Thursday night and taken Friday and Saturday off.

  “Donut, what the fuck are you wearing?” Garret asked. He had on a pink tank top: an easy target. The hazing went around the table, moving from Donut’s style to Chris’s poorly trained dog, Abbey, to Garret’s obsession with vinyl records, before the conversation eventually landed, as it always did, on the job.

  “Any idea what the assignment is?” asked Donut. “All I heard was we got work.” He was feeling better and eager to get back on the fire line. Tomorrow was Sunday, an overtime day—nearly twenty dollars an hour.

  “More staging, I think,” said Chris. “We’ve been busting little lightning fires since you left.”

  Seven small blazes had ignited in the mountains around Prescott during the thunderstorm the previous night. One of them, sparked by the lightning strike Lois and Truman had seen on Friday, had become a higher priority blaze after growing to one hundred acres. It had been given a name: the Yarnell Hill Fire. About the time the hotshots were finishing their beers, the incident commander, the general on the fire, had set up headquarters at the volunteer fire station in Yarnell and was ordering additional resources as fast as he could: eight engines, structure-protection specialists, air tankers, and three hotshot crews. Granite Mountain was one of them.

  • • •

  Eric Marsh woke up around 5 a.m. on Sunday at the crew’s quarters, Station 7. The night before, the forty-three-year-old superintendent of Granite Mountain had eaten dinner with his wife, Amanda, at the Prescott Brewpub downtown. Afterward she drove home; he crashed at the station, a tin-sided building on a patch of blacktop six blocks from the restaurant. Sleeping there seemed easier than driving the thirty minutes to their horse ranch outside town, in nearby Chino Valley.

  The crew called Eric “Papa,” and at home, with Amanda, he referred to the nineteen young men as his kids. Until they got to know him, Eric intimidated most of the hotshots. He was quiet, wry, and guarded—in many ways, a typical superintendent. Amanda was his third wife, but he rarely discussed his personal life with the crew. He once drove his men sixteen hours from Prescott to a fire in Idaho and didn’t say a word until they reached the flats of the Utah desert. “I’m getting a divorce,” he said, then remained silent until they reached the fire camp.

  Eric grew up on a ten-acre farm in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains and fell in love with hotshotting when he joined a Forest Service crew as a second-year student studying biology at Appalachian State. He graduated in 1992. Five years later, he moved to Arizona to keep fighting fires, developing a reputation as a canny and cautious firefighter. In 2003, the Prescott Fire Department hired him to help with their fuels crew.

  In the years prior, the city, which is surrounded on three sides by the Prescott National Forest, was named by the Hunt Research Corporation, a California-based risk-assessment group, as one of the West’s ten most likely places to be hit by a wildfire. Out of that danger grew the department’s vision for a fuels crew, one that removed brush and timber growing at the edge of town to provide defensible space. Eric was good at it. He and the crew used chainsaws and chippers to clear flammable material from around hundreds of Prescott homes, setting the National Fire Protection Association’s Gold Standard for defensible space in 2012. But for the longtime hotshot it wasn’t enough. In the hierarchy of wildland firefighting, there are few things less glamorous than a job that demands the same backbreaking work of a fire fight but delivers none of the thrill. Turning the Granite Mountain fuels crew from a wide-eyed group of twenty men not even allowed to set foot on the fire line into certified hotshots was Eric’s singular focus. He accomplished it in five years, an evolution that takes most crews twice that, some even longer.

  Station 7, where the crew moved in 2011, was a point of pride for Eric. He and the wildland division of the fire department had spent the previous six years trying to convince the city council that it would be safer for Prescott to host hotshots rather than just a fuels crew. The station was proof of the department’s victory. Its new headquarters had a workshop, a gym, and a stocked gear cache with a sign on the wall that reads TOTAL COST FOR A WELL-EQUIPPED HOTSHOT: $4000. Granite Mountain’s two $150,000 buggies, burly twelve-person crew hauls kitted out with cubbies for medical equipment and tools, were parked in the garage. Eric’s superintendent truck, a Ford F-550 he’d customized with a welded-steel rack and brake lights in the shape of Granite Mountain’s logo, was in front.

  After rolling out of his sleeping bag that Sunday morning, Eric headed to the parking lot, crossing the black tiles he’d helped install in the white floor to spell out “GMIHC—Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew.” When rookies stepped on the black tiles, they owed the veterans one hundred push-ups. He pulled out his JetBoil stove and a Nalgene full of Bisbee’s specialty coffee grounds—both of which he always carried in his fire-line gear—and brewed up a pot of coffee. Eric had been sober for thirteen years. Coffee was his only drug, and he took it black. There was no milk or sugar on the fire line, so why get used to it any other way?

  With his mug full, Eric went to the ready room, where the crew met every morning. On one wall hung a poster common in wildland fire stations. It shows pictures of wildland-fire fatalities, including the two biggest: Montana’s 1949 Mann Gulch Fire (thirteen deaths) and Colorado’s 1994 South Canyon Fire (fourteen deaths). In both, elite firefighters had been killed battling small blazes that grew with terrifying and unexpected speed. In both incidents, the crews burned to death after being caught off guard with no time to escape. HOW IS YOUR SITUATIONAL AWARENESS TODAY? the poster asks.

  • • •

  The Granite Mountain crew started arriving at Station 7 at five-fifteen a.m. As they awaited the briefing, they sat in the ready room and talked about family and fires. Nearly half of them had children. On the wall were two whiteboards, one covered with a handful of random facts re-upped most mornings by a third-year sawyer named Andrew Ashcraft. That morning’s trivia: “A gorilla’s scientific name is Gorilla, Gorilla, Gorilla” and “Milk cows that listen to music produce more milk.” Robert Caldwell, who usually would have laughed while fact-checking the tidbits on his iPhone, ignored them. He’d been looking forward to days off and had a hard time leaving the house that morning.

  On the other whiteboard was the Granite Mountain Hotshots Daily Physical Percentages, a half-joking, half-serious chart the crew used to take stock of each other’s energy levels, a matter of safety on the line. Eric had written “68%.” Donut put, “Hell ya.” Robert, or Bob as he was known only on the crew, put “Mode
rate Duty.”

  By five-forty, they were all tipping back in their chairs. “We’ve got an assignment to Yarnell,” Eric said to the men. “It’s 300 acres and burning on a ridgetop in thick chaparral. It’s going to be hot—real hot—and that’s all I know.” It was exactly the sort of short, pointed briefing the crew had come to expect from their boss. “Load up.”

  • • •

  The sun had risen by the time the caravan crested the Bradshaw Mountains outside Prescott and descended into Skull Valley, north of Yarnell. Eric drove up front while the buggies followed close behind, with most of the hotshots sleeping inside. Robert Caldwell rode shotgun in one, trying to ignore the music—Rammstein’s “Du Hast”—blasting from the back of the truck. He texted Claire: “So much for days off. Heading to a 500-acre fire in Yarnell. Love you.”

  His first sighting of the Yarnell Hill Fire would have come after rounding a bend just south of Rancho El Oso Road, eight miles from the blaze and on the outskirts of the horse ranches in Peeples Valley, a dispersed community of 428 people five miles north of Yarnell. For the team’s four rookies, like Robert’s cousin Grant McKee, whom Robert had talked into joining the crew that winter, the fire would have seemed entirely unimpressive: a few strands of white smoke drifting near the top of the ridge. Desert fires are deceptive, though, and Robert knew it. He’d worked blazes in the redwoods of California, the spruce stands of Minnesota, and the lodgepole thickets of Montana, but chaparral, where the Yarnell Hill Fire was burning, is a mix of scrub oak and brush that grows so dense it’s a struggle to walk through. When it’s dry, it’s a tinderbox. “It’s the brush that scares me most,” he used to tell his dad. “Fires just move faster in it.”