On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  Steed’s best tool for taming the impulses of nineteen young men was exhaustion. His morning workouts only got harder as the men’s fitness improved, and after a couple of hours of running, hiking, sit-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups, he sent them to thin the forest and brush in J. S. Acker Memorial Park, a city park so overgrown that the police often busted meth addicts getting high in its thickets. Day in and day out, the men ground through the same routine: Steed’s training followed by five or six hours of running chainsaws and chipping brush.

  The men invented ways to stave off the monotony. Alpha and Bravo competed in anything that could be made a competition: Ultimate Frisbee, cake eating, saw work. Then there were the shenanigans. The squad bosses, Clayton Whitted and Bob Caldwell, both balding, shaved their heads at work and forced Grant to do the same. He shrugged when he showed Leah the buzz cut. Thus far, he’d protested most hazing because he found the rituals childish and a little insulting. This one he couldn’t avoid, though: Bob, his cousin, was involved. He had to support him. “Sometimes you just have to give in,” Grant said to Leah.

  He gave in again on his twenty-first birthday.

  “Don’t tell anybody,” Renan had warned Grant. “Everybody’s going to give you shit if they find out.”

  But Grant either didn’t care, didn’t believe him, or actually wanted to be the center of attention, because that morning he let the news slip. When Steed heard, he concocted a birthday cake from MREs: crackers, pound cake, and cookies frosted with packets of peanut butter and chocolate-hazelnut butter churned together. The crew sang “Happy Birthday” and laughed as Grant ate a barely digestible few thousand calories of sugar before the morning workout. He couldn’t finish, and Renan chipped in to help, but Grant still vomited up his birthday cake during that day’s training.

  The calm finally broke on a warm and breezy evening in early May. Outside, plastic bags and wrappers from the food stand across the street pinwheeled into the chain-link fence, where they caught and flapped in the breeze. It was nearly time to go home for the day. Some of the hotshots were sharpening tools or putting an edge on their chainsaw chains, but most of the crew lounged about the saw shop. They perched on the workbenches, snacking on the cookies and crackers taken from MREs and arguing the finer points of hoppy vs. cheap beer. As usual, Renan didn’t add much to the clamor. From the first day of the season, his goal had been to earn the Rookie of the Year award, an annual honor that would get his name on a plaque beside Wade Parker and Andrew Ashcraft, two hotshots on track to securing permanent fire jobs—exactly what Renan wanted. To avoid getting singled out, he did the opposite of Grant and kept his head down and his mouth shut.

  Renan listened to the endless drone of radio transmissions coming through a speaker set up in the station: a city engine returning to quarters, a battalion chief going off duty for the day, a car wreck. He usually ignored the radio chatter, but today Renan was listening more intently. That morning, during the daily briefing in the ready room, Steed and the crew had talked about the Red Flag Warning the National Weather Service had issued for the Prescott area. It meant that that day the region had entered a period when dry fuels, warm temperatures, and strong winds were aligning. In such conditions, wildfires threaten to be explosive and extremely difficult to control.

  Renan felt a surge of adrenaline when he heard radio traffic about a wildfire burning in grasslands near a subdivision twenty-five miles north of the station. Granite Mountain was a half-hour away. Dispatch might send them.

  He ran across the pavement to the buggies and pulled his line gear off the shelf and into a pile on his seat. He checked every pocket of the bag to be sure he had everything he needed: extra AA batteries for his headlamps and radio, six quarts of water, an MRE, a warm layer, a Clif Bar, chewing tobacco. He’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

  —

  Some men and women seem born to be firefighters. They’re woodsmen from places where the trucks are lifted and the high school parties are held around bonfires on ridges with views of towns like Truckee, California; Missoula, Montana; and Redmond, Oregon. Prescott is such a town. Like nearly half of the crew, Renan grew up there, but none of the guys he went to high school with ever expected that he’d become a hotshot, even if he was a gifted athlete.

  At sixteen, Renan contracted the West Nile virus and developed neurological complications related to the pathogen. The symptoms—deafness, paralysis, and seizures—left him in a wheelchair for two months during his freshman year of high school. By his senior year, thanks to a combination of physical therapy, a cocktail of drugs, time, and learning how to better manage the stress that often triggered the seizures, he’d brought the condition under control enough to play catcher on Prescott High’s varsity baseball team.

  After high school, he wanted to work with his hands. He set his mind to becoming a structural firefighter. He craved the feeling of accomplishment that physical labor provided. He took fire science classes at Yavapai College. But there are far more candidates than jobs in structural firefighting, which requires more education, earns slightly better pay, and offers more professional stability. Despite applying to a few departments, he couldn’t get a position. Like Grant, Scott Norris, and many of the other guys, Renan saw Granite Mountain as a way to distinguish himself from the other applicants. Marsh didn’t hire him when he first applied to Granite Mountain in 2011; neither his résumé nor his physical aptitude stood out among the twenty or thirty men and women who applied that year. Renan came back prepared in 2013.

  This time, he passed the physical test easily. He wore a shirt and tie to the follow-up interview, a highly unusual formality among hotshot crews. As a means of communicating the seriousness of becoming a hotshot, Marsh required his applicants to dress up and interviewed applicants in the ready room.

  When Renan arrived, Marsh sat at the head of a long Formica table in front of the whiteboards. Flanking him were his squad bosses and lead firefighters—five hotshots in total, all wearing their yellow fire shirts tucked into green pants. They asked Renan to sit alone at a table facing them.

  Marsh always asked the same question first: “Tell me how Granite Mountain started.”

  Renan stammered through the answer: fuels crew to hotshots in six years. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses kept firing questions his way: “Have you ever lied at work?” “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever been through?” Renan paused for a moment before answering the last one. He never intended to bring up the illness. He hadn’t relapsed in years, and the doctors didn’t think his fighting fires would pose a danger to him or the crew.

  “The two months I spent in a wheelchair,” said Renan. He told the whole story: the haunting numbness that crept up his spine and signaled a seizure’s approach, the exhaustion that lingered for months after, the white void of blindness, the fear that his sight might never return, the struggle to accept what he couldn’t control, the decision not to let it hold him back. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses listened to Renan intently. Interviews didn’t usually turn up such captivating stories.

  Renan was working as a valet attendant at a Scottsdale golf resort when Marsh called to tell him that he wasn’t getting the job. Marsh judged the risk to be too great—too much liability for the city and the crew. That afternoon, Renan drove the hour and a half back to Prescott so he could ask Marsh to his face what it would take to change his mind. He told Marsh that the illness had passed and that if he hired him, he’d do everything to stand out—his career was at stake. A week after that meeting, one of Granite Mountain’s top applicants accepted another job. Renan was again parking cars at the golf course when he got another call, this time from Steed. “How would you like to be a part of the crew?” he asked. Renan danced a celebratory jig while Izod-clad retirees milled about the clubhouse.

  —

  Back at the station, the door of the saw shop swung open and Steed marched in. “Load up! We got a fire!” he boomed.
The men hustled to the rigs, and by the time Grant got in the back of the Alpha buggy, Renan’s seat belt was already buckled.

  The hotshots caravanned—Steed’s supe truck up front, followed by Alpha and Bravo—as they drove across the flats of the Prescott Valley and toward a plume of light gray smoke. Around noon, the grass alongside Perkinsville Road had caught fire, and gusty winds had pushed the flames to nearly a thousand acres.

  Donut, who controlled the stereo, put on a rap tune, “Bugatti,” by Ace Hood: “Damn, life can switch on you in a matter of seconds.” Donut slapped the ceiling with the flat of his hand, yelling out the chorus: “I woke up in a new Bugatti!”

  Kevin Woyjeck, a twenty-one-year-old rookie on Bravo squad, thumbed out a text message to his dad, who was a firefighter in Southern California.

  WOYJECK: 25 miles away…We see smoke.

  DAD: Calm…Get your calm on.

  WOYJECK: Everyone’s calm. Don’t worry. I’m super. Calm.

  Renan peered out the window, hoping to glimpse the fire. A helicopter worked the blaze, and sunlight glinted off the fire engines already on scene. He paid closest attention to the column.

  Smoke tells a fire’s story; it’s the signature. The obvious by-product of combustion, smoke is a mix of evaporated moisture and released gases. Bits of charred wood and soot wafting upward give the visible vapor color. Heavy materials—timber, oil, and houses among them—that burn hotter and more slowly also tend to produce darker smoke. But on the prairie fire, the smoke was thin and white, angling eastward over the plain with the breeze. It told Renan that the blaze was a wind-driven brush fire: cooler than a timber burn but in quick-burning brush and grasses. Firefighters tell legends of brush fires that, during the windiest days in Southern California, keep pace with interstate traffic. Grass and brush fires are the most volatile burns.

  “Yellow up, boys,” Clayton, Alpha’s squad boss, yelled to the back from his seat in the cab. Renan’s mouth was dry. He and the other hotshots put on their fire-resistant shirts.

  —

  When they arrived on scene, the fire turned out to barely justify Donut’s choice of the “Bugatti” song. A total of thirteen engines, an air tanker, and a hundred-some firefighters had beaten Granite Mountain to the blaze. The blitzkrieg had worked. The fire was mostly out.

  While Steed went to get Granite Mountain’s assignment from the incident commander, Renan took in the whole scene. The fire’s scar looked like burned cropland. Countless wisps of smoke screwed skyward, but only one pocket of active flames remained. The hotshots had shown up too late to catch the large air tanker dropping slurry near the subdivision, but a helicopter still worked overhead. One of the engines on scene was still knocking down the flames with a stream of water.

  “Hose!” one of the enginemen yelled.

  The call signaled to his crew members that they needed to extend what’s called a progressive hose-lay. One of the crew dropped to his knees and shut off the water just behind the nozzle by pinching the hose closed with an industrial-strength clamp. Meanwhile, another man added a hundred-foot length to the end of the lay, reattached the nozzle, and released the clamp. The whole operation took less than a minute, and with water and a hundred more feet of hose to drag along the fire’s edge, the crew resumed spraying down the flames. With engines on all flanks of the fire, there wasn’t much work left for Granite Mountain. Had they arrived when the blaze started, they may well have witnessed some incredible fire behavior—spot fires, little flaming tornadoes. Instead, the wind died, and so did the flames.

  There wasn’t much work left for Granite Mountain to do. Steed directed Alpha’s and Bravo’s scrape to put in a quick line. He sent a few guys to burn out a small pocket of unburned grass inside the fire’s interior, thereby limiting the likelihood of spots by controlling the burn’s intensity. Once that was done, he and the hotshots “mopped up,” or used hand tools, dirt, and water laced with foam to douse the dangerous embers closest to the lines. The shift barely constituted hotshot work.

  Donut and the veterans hung around the spots of cooling ash, loud and laughing, as they poked fun at one another and agreed that mopping up, slow as it was, was a lot better than running chainsaws at J. S. Acker Memorial Park. The prairie fire was little more than a welcome smell on their clothes. Not even Renan was terribly impressed. But as the sun slid beneath the horizon, Renan, working amid the twists of light smoke with ash covering his hands, couldn’t help feeling pleased.

  CHAPTER 5

  JUSTIFIABLE RISK

  Early one Sunday in May, little Ben and his big brother, Jacob, climbed out of their new race-car-shaped beds and picked their way through the flotsam of Tonka trucks and open books in the hallway. The boys pushed open their parents’ bedroom door and crawled into bed with Brandon Bunch and his wife, Janae. Bunch groaned. He was twenty-two, with the dark-haired good looks of a NASCAR driver, but at five-eight and 140 pounds, the fourth-year sawyer was one of the smaller guys on Granite Mountain. He liked sleeping in on his days off. The boys curled into balls against their parents, and for a few short moments the family lay quietly. Then Jacob asked when Garret was coming.

  “Not yet, Jakey. He’ll be here in a few hours,” Bunch muttered with a slight lisp.

  Janae, who was seven months pregnant, got out of bed. She knew Jacob was too excited to stay quiet. Garret Zuppiger, one of Bunch’s closest friends on the crew, was coming to breakfast before church. Janae led her boys to the kitchen—Jacob first, Ben dragging his blanket behind—put on coffee, popped bread into the toaster, and tuned the TV to the Cartoon Network. Bunch emerged from the bedroom shortly after. Sleeping through the shrieking of Dora the Explorer wasn’t possible.

  One perk of the season’s slow start was that the hotshots had more time with their families. Considering the hotshots’ youth—their average age was twenty-seven—Granite Mountain was more family-oriented than most crews. Whether they were from Prescott, like nine of the guys, or were recent transplants, most of the hotshots shared small-town values. Many of the men went to church together. Eleven of the hotshots were married, three more were engaged, and nine had kids. Collectively, the hotshots had fathered fourteen children, and by year’s end four more, including the Bunches’, would come into the world. If the hotshots hadn’t already sunk their roots deep in Prescott, many were starting to.

  The Bunches owned a two-bedroom home in a new subdivision twenty miles north and east of Prescott and rarely locked their doors. When Zup arrived a few hours later, he walked right in. Jacob sprung up from the TV.

  “What’s up, buddy?” Zup said as the boy attached himself to Zup’s leg. The hotshot, who had cropped red hair, freckles, and ZUPPIGER tattooed across his stomach in ornate script, pulled off his Seattle Mariners cap and twisted it onto the two-year-old’s head.

  With Jacob still fastened to his leg, Zup hugged Janae, who was grilling chocolate chip pancakes and bacon at the stove, and poured himself coffee. He took a seat at the table with Bunch.

  “Boys are good, I see,” Zup said. “And that one?” He pointed to Janae’s stomach. Janae had recently learned that she was having another boy.

  As the adults caught up about parenthood, Ben, the youngest, perched on the counter in the kitchen and Jacob sat cross-legged on a pillow eight inches from the TV screen. He worked the better part of his fist into his mouth. The cartoons still blared.

  “Jakey, dude, can you sit on the couch, please?” Bunch asked. Jacob was Janae’s child from an earlier relationship, but before they married, two years earlier, Bunch had insisted on adopting him as his own son. Jacob looked at his dad for a long moment, then pulled himself far enough from the TV to spare his retinas. The boy had showed signs of autism, and the Bunches were still figuring out how to cope with the possibility that their son might have the condition.

  “It’s hard enough having two normal kids,” Bunch said. “And now we’ve got another coming…”

  Zup was single but empathetic. At twenty-seven, he
couldn’t yet imagine raising kids or the turmoil the Bunches must have felt. He knew what it was like to get hard news, though. Not long before starting his rookie season in 2012, Zup’s girlfriend at the time had taken her own life in the Prescott apartment they shared. He rarely spoke about that dark period of his life, and that morning at the breakfast table he steered the conversation to lighter topics.

  Garret told the Bunches about his new girlfriend, and a story from a few nights earlier, when Garret had gone to a bar with Donut, Chris MacKenzie, and the young rookie Kevin Woyjeck. After a few drinks, Chris had started frisbeeing the rookie’s hat across the bar. Woyjeck would pick it up and sit back down, only to have Chris rip the hat back off and once again fling it across the bar. Zup, who had a business degree from the University of Arizona, was a gifted writer and a quirky storyteller, even keeping a lighthearted blog, I’d Rather Be Flying! His recounting of the bar scene made Bunch feel like he was on the barstool, laughing with the other veterans as Woyjeck’s hat floated across the pub.

  —

  Bunch had been with Granite Mountain since 2010, the crew’s second year as hotshots, and he remembered the men back then being “nasty dudes who never took their yellows off. We were proud to be hard.” Marsh’s standards were high, and Bunch did everything he could to meet them. He was a quiet person to begin with, and nervousness scared him nearly silent for the first few months of his fire career. In an attempt to prove himself, Bunch once worked himself to heat exhaustion and had to spend an hour sitting in the shade. He returned to work that same afternoon.