On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  The call had come from Bob Caldwell, the squad boss working at the back of the scrape. After five seasons fighting fires, Bob had proven himself a strong leader and over the winter of 2013 had earned one of the three coveted squad-boss positions on Granite Mountain. At just twenty-three, Bob was the youngest, least experienced, and baldest of them. In all likelihood, he was also the smartest. He loved Hemingway, Coors beer, and hotshotting; on a trellis in his backyard, he’d hung a wooden sign that read, I’D RATHER DIE IN MY BOOTS THAN LIVE IN A SUIT.

  In addition to keeping the scrape’s pace steady, Bob’s job during the training day was quality control. With a tiny hand rake called a monkey paw, he swept from the line whatever the others left. He checked the dirt berm for flammable material. He ordered sawyers to fell dead trees that could burn through and fall across the line and had hotshots with Pulaskis chop back pockets of light brush that could kindle a fire. He paid attention to the line’s width and the depth of trenches dug below steep slopes to keep burning pinecones from skipping across the line and igniting the unburned forest below the men. There was a certain art to deciding where trenches were needed. Sometimes three feet deep, with berms of the same height, trenches took extra time and effort to build and slowed line production. Build too many and the crew would be too slow to catch the fire; build too few and you’d jeopardize the work already put in.

  “Pulaski and two rhinos back!” Bob yelled forward more than once that day when he wanted the men to deepen a trench or widen a piece of line.

  It was now, before the fire season really began, that the rookies and new guys needed to learn the crew’s standards. The line is the mark that hotshot crews use to judge one another, and Marsh, Steed, and now Bob all insisted on perfection.

  The crew had settled into a pace after a few hours of cutting line. Up front, the chainsaws whined steadily and the men swinging hand tools worked amid the syncopated rhythm of metal slamming into dirt. All day, Steed had been moving between the head of the flag fire, to scout, and the back, to rejoin the crew. When he returned, he’d dive in to help the scrape or the swampers, and his very presence drove the men to work harder. But that afternoon, Steed stepped up the challenge. He called the squad bosses on the radio.

  —

  Something was up. Steed mentioned a spot fire, a small blaze ignited by sparks thrown out ahead of the main fire. The occurrence of spot fires is a classic warning sign that a fire is becoming increasingly active and dangerous. Moments later, the radio crackled again: Steed couldn’t handle the spot alone.

  The saws fell quiet and all the hotshots hustled back to where Steed had already started cutting line around a new series of pink flags hung in the woods. If they didn’t catch it, the spot might become slop-over—when a fire jumps a piece of line and takes off running through the forest. If that happened, Granite Mountain’s work would be for nothing, and the men would be exposed to flames. The pace approached a sprint. Scott stood in a shower of wood chips as he and the sawyers redlined their saws and tore a path through a pine stand. Behind them, Joe and the swampers grabbed cut brush, saplings, and branches by the armful and threw the vegetation over the edge of the line. Bob pushed the scrape to move faster still. “Hit and lick!” he screamed. The scrape followed the order, stepping forward after each frenzied tool stroke.

  The crew couldn’t move fast enough. Steed announced more new fires every few minutes. Another spot fire appeared out ahead of them. Then still another. Catching the spots was never the point of the drill. Granite Mountain needed to escape.

  Before they left the station that morning, each hotshot had equipped himself with a training fire shelter, a green plastic version of the aluminum heat shield that every firefighter in the country carries on the line.

  Weathering flames beneath the cover of a heavy blanket isn’t a new concept. During the Corps of Discovery’s trip westward in 1804, Captain William Clark noted the use of very basic fire shelters.

  “The prairie got on fire and went with such violence and speed as to catch a man and woman and burn them to death. Several escaped. Among [them was] a small boy who was saved by getting under a green Buffalo skin. They say the grass was not burnt where the boy sat,” Clark wrote in his journal.

  Today’s shelters are effectively aluminum pup tents that act as one-time-use heat shields. They’re not designed to withstand direct contact with flames—they melt—but lying beneath them, firefighters have survived entrapments even when temperatures outside the tents reached into the thousands of degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures inside climbed above three hundred degrees. Each shelter weighs just four pounds and is carried in a bread-loaf-size pouch on the underside of a backpack. Since the late seventies, when the Forest Service mandated that all of its wildland firefighters carry such shelters, they’ve been deployed more than 1,230 times. Between 1926, when reporting statistics became reliable, and 2012, 392 American wildland firefighters have been burned to death. Without shelters, that number would likely be much higher.

  Despite evidence of their effectiveness, shelter use isn’t universal. In Australia and Canada, countries that also vigorously fight wildfires, firefighters don’t carry shelters, and fatality rates are comparable to those in the United States. Australia’s and Canada’s logic is that simply having a last-ditch survival mechanism increases the likelihood that firefighters will make the types of risky decisions that lead them to depend on an aluminum tent to survive. In other words, they believe carrying a shelter makes firefighters gamblers. Some hotshots in the United States subscribe to this belief, but the vast majority accept the extra weight as a reasonable, though unreliable, safety net that they hope never to use.

  Granite Mountain moved together in a line as Steed led the hotshots through the pillars of pines. A few men broke into a jog just to keep up. Occasionally Steed glanced back, as if the fire were behind them and getting closer, and the farther they hiked, the faster they moved. Steed’s intention was to teach the hotshots how to cut through the drowning hum of their heartbeats and default to their training. Finally, he ordered them to drop their packs.

  “Grab your shelters,” Steed yelled.

  Grant, toward the back of the line, undid his waist buckles, grabbed a bottle of water, and ripped the fire shelter from the bottom of his pack. The pause took no more than thirty seconds, and the men left their gear scattered throughout the forest. The single-file line dissolved into a loose pack, and they continued to flee through the forest. A few tripped on logs and bushes, pushing themselves up with gloved hands, while the crew’s three squad bosses howled behind them: “Go! Go! Go!”

  Steed pushed the crew for longer than was comfortable, then longer still. Finally he gave the order: “Deploy!”

  With a few hurried tool strokes, Grant cleared away the pine needles that could ignite below him in a real fire. He flicked open the practice shelter as if spreading a quilt over a bed, pulled the tarp over his head, and fell face-first into the cool dirt, with his boot heels toward the flag fire and his gloved hands pinning the shelter to the ground. He dug a small hole in the dirt to bury his nose. Cool air sinks. Sunlight filtered through the green plastic training shelter, and he waited in the green glow and the smell of dust.

  Grant heard the rustling of other hotshots settling into their places, the slowing of his heartbeat, footsteps drawing closer. Suddenly, somebody grabbed the peak of his tent and jerked it—up, down, left, right—to simulate the hurricane-force winds, sometimes as high as sixty miles per hour, that accompany fast-moving flames. Grant pushed his weight into the tarp and held on, lowering his head as the plastic beat against his helmet. Firefighters have survived under their shelters for more than an hour. Steed let his crew lie in the dry heat for a fraction of that, but a few minutes was plenty of time for Grant to contemplate the horrors of a fire entrapment.

  CHAPTER 3

  MARSH’S CREW

  By the time Granite Mountain finished its deployment exercise, the Arizona sky glowed with the bril
liant pastel colors of a Southwest sunset. For the hotshots, the flag fire was over, but even after a long day, Steed had no intention of capping off the training event of the season with a pretty sight. The men lined out behind their captain, and once again Steed took off up the hill.

  Renan Packer, a quiet and solidly built rookie who sat across the aisle from Grant in Alpha’s buggy, was wearing down. After cutting line all day, his tool felt as heavy as his mouth felt dry, and every step taxed muscles long since drained of energy. He hiked so close to the man in front of him that when the pace slowed on the steepest pitches, he slammed his helmet into the underside of his crewmate’s pack.

  Renan glanced uphill, where he hoped to see the terrain flatten or, even better, see the buggies. He saw neither, nor did he see Marsh approaching. The crew’s superintendent had moved the buggies to camp and walked down the trail a few hundred yards to watch the men hike in. For the longtime superintendent, twenty men marching together as a single unit was a beautiful sight. But a glitch marred the symmetry. Renan had tucked the handle of his tool into the back of his pack to ease the burden on his exhausted arms. The unconventional approach broke with procedure, and even if he wasn’t acting superintendent, Marsh wouldn’t let that fly on Granite Mountain.

  “Fix it, Renan,” Marsh said. “Carry that fucking tool the way you’re supposed to!”

  Marsh’s scolding snapped Renan from his exhaustion-induced delirium, and he dropped the rhino to his flank, where it was supposed to be. He put his eyes straight ahead and tried to shut out the torrent of expletives still pouring from his boss’s mouth. The veteran hotshots told stories of Marsh bawling out new guys for sticking the tips of their running chainsaws into the dirt, falling out of hikes, or misusing a Pulaski. One said that the first time Marsh spoke to him, it was with his middle finger raised—a joke, but one the rookie found intimidating. The ass chewings their superintendent delivered and his general surliness were the stuff of legend. Regrettably, Renan now understood what the veterans were talking about.

  —

  Superintendents shape their crew’s personality. A superintendent’s relationship with his crew is like that of a coach to his athletes, but Marsh held his men even closer. He called the hotshots his kids—they called him Papa—and Marsh joked with his wife, Amanda, that they didn’t need children because they had nineteen already.

  Marsh wasn’t a westerner by birth, but the West had always appealed to him. He grew up the only child of a biology teacher in a small town in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. As a kid, he was outdoorsy and used to steal bareback rides on his neighbor’s horses, but in high school, Marsh temporarily abandoned his outdoorsy passions, trading his western garb for Polo and earning the nickname Biff, as a reflection of his preppy dress. After high school, he spent a few years dabbling in a wide range of pursuits. He worked construction, learned to weld, and was an aspiring horseman, a rock climber, and an avid mountain biker. He learned to shape leather into saddles, fixed bikes, and painted logos on ambulances. He studied biology at Appalachian State University. He married young.

  Marsh took his first fire job—with an engine crew in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest—while still in college. At season’s end he returned to North Carolina to finish his degree, which he completed in 1992. Following a divorce, he left the South and started over in Arizona. He quit fighting fire for five years and bounced between jobs throughout the nineties. During his hiatus, Marsh took classes in practical skills—Microsoft Office Applications—and got by with odd jobs that relied on his ability to work with his hands.

  In 1998, he returned to work for the Forest Service as a firefighter. Marsh was twenty-eight then and the agency hired him as the captain of a two-to-five-person engine out of Globe, Arizona. In that remote and dusty mining town, Marsh felt the allure of hotshotting. When the Forest Service’s Globe Hotshots needed an extra hand, he occasionally filled in as a squad boss in charge of as many as ten men. Though Marsh never worked full-time as a member of Globe’s overhead, or even spent a full season as a crew member, the fires he fought with the hotshots left a lasting impression. The speed and quality of line construction, the rookie intimidation, the brooding way the superintendent distanced himself from the crew—many elements of Globe’s firefighting style would resurface on Granite Mountain when Marsh became the crew’s superintendent almost a decade later.

  Despite his attraction to the job, Marsh took five more years before fully committing himself to wildland firefighting. He was married again. He’d met his second wife, Kori Kirkpatrick, in the early nineties while battling a blaze in Texas. Kirkpatrick was also a firefighter. Driven and cerebral, by 2000 she had begun making plans to found a fire academy. Marsh, apparently in need of change, left his engine captain’s position in Globe after just two fire seasons, and the couple moved northwest to the cooler air of Prescott. For the next few years, as Kirkpatrick got the fire academy up and running, Marsh pieced together jobs, working as an emergency medical technician on a local ambulance, as a supervisor for a small industrial company that employed a fire engine for safety measures, and eventually, for a few short months, as an instructor at his wife’s fire academy. But by the spring of 2003, Marsh was thirty-three and tiring of jobs that rarely exceeded $12 per hour. He applied for a career-oriented, full-time position with the City of Prescott’s new Wildland Division, which specialized in proactively preparing the city for wildfires.

  In the years before, California’s Hunt Research Corporation had named the Prescott area one of the ten places in America most likely to be hit by a wildfire. Because of this humbling reality, the city formed Crew 7 for the sole purpose of creating defensible space, or thinning the thick ponderosa forests and brush around town. The area of thinned vegetation was designed to prevent fires that started on the outskirts of town from burning buildings. Depending on budget, crew size oscillated anywhere between three and twenty members. Initially, Prescott hired Marsh to be a squad boss, and he quickly moved up to be second-in-command on Crew 7.

  The work required all the sweat and labor of a firefight but offered little of the challenge and none of the pride. For Marsh, who learned to love the firefight while working with the Globe Hotshots, that posed a problem. Soon after becoming the captain, he made it a personal goal to turn Crew 7 into professional firefighters. He had a long way to go.

  Most jobs on Crew 7 paid only slightly better than minimum wage, and because of this, it didn’t attract career-driven firefighters. The city outfitted the men with fire-resistant clothes torn from years of use and relegated the crew to a barn situated amid a formation of granite domes, by an almost toxic lake. Not only was the city dump across the way, but in the 1980s, a radiation test at a well house not far from the station had detected radon—a gas emitted by the unusually high uranium content naturally found in the granite—at the highest levels ever measured indoors.

  “We’d leave to go for a run and the fucking rats would eat our lunches,” said Phillip Maldonado, a hotshot who was with the crew from the beginning, until early 2013. The city’s structural firefighters didn’t welcome Crew 7, either. They couldn’t understand why a bunch of feral wildland guys were allowed to wear the proud emblem of the state’s oldest fire department. Once, at a department Christmas party, one of the structural firefighters walked up to Maldonado and asked, “Who the hell invited you?”

  As captain, Marsh was heir apparent to the downtrodden crew. He regularly fought with the city on the men’s behalf, arguing that they needed more money for equipment and gear, and higher pay. But his troubles were bigger than Crew 7’s hard luck. His second marriage, to Kirkpatrick, was falling apart, and though he couldn’t hide the hurt—his colleagues considered him a moody guy—neither could he bring himself to talk about it. Once, halfway into a twenty-hour road trip to Idaho, Marsh told the only other guy in the truck, “I’m getting a divorce.” Then he didn’t speak for the rest of the trip.

  As his personal life unraveled, Marsh beca
me hard to be around and discontented with his job. In one six-month performance review in 2005, he wrote that by the next year, “I would like to be the superintendent of Crew 7.” His supervisors rebuffed the request. For all of his competence as a teacher and organizer, and all his skill as a firefighter—“he knows what to do on the line in wildland fire situations,” his supervisor wrote in 2005—he had shortcomings as a leader and seemed unable to separate work from his private life. He had a tendency to distrust his subordinates and micromanaged. One review said, “He needs to learn not to yell when jobs are not performed to his standards…he becomes very agitated and does not accept positive criticism well. Blames other people for his misgivings.” His score for interpersonal relations was “Does Not Meet Expectations.”

  —

  Marsh’s situation started improving toward the end of 2006. He’d finalized his second divorce. Crew 7’s superintendent left, and Marsh’s supervisors had decided that his job performance had improved enough for him to take over. The year before he became superintendent, Crew 7 had earned the status of Type 2 Initial Attack Handcrew, which is a certification one tier below hotshot. They were now qualified to fight fires anywhere in the country, but that didn’t guarantee they’d get many opportunities to travel. If the fire risk was high around Prescott, Crew 7 would assuredly be kept behind to guard the home front. Hotshots, though, are a nationally controlled resource available to fight the country’s highest-priority blazes regardless of the fire situation at home. Marsh craved for Crew 7 the same freedom and prestige he’d seen on the Globe Hotshots. But he couldn’t get it without the city’s approval.

  Few people in Prescott saw the point, though. If Crew 7 were to become hotshots, they’d be spending less time thinning brush and more time on the front lines of the nation’s biggest fires. City officials, whose approval he needed to start the project, preferred to keep Crew 7 at home to protect Prescott, not the hundreds of other western towns threatened by fires every summer. Let the feds and their bottomless budgets do that.