On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  What Grant didn’t tell him was that the roommate had left because Grant had constantly badgered him about not meeting Grant’s strict cleanliness standards. In any case, Woyjeck was thrilled. Living with Grant was an easy fix to the housing problem, and it seemed to be a step toward solidifying their friendship. But later that night, when the crew staged a wrestling match, Grant took the opportunity to assert his dominance—another act of posturing. Somehow Woyjeck, the slightest guy on the crew, had handled a few of the older and bigger veterans. He was feeling good when he came to his future roommate. With the other hotshots forming a circle around the wrestlers, Grant quickly undercut Woyjeck’s legs and pinned him with skill and savage enthusiasm. Then Grant made the point he’d been trying to make in his confrontation with Tony a week earlier on the Hart Fire: He might be a rookie, but he wouldn’t tolerate disrespect.

  “Now you know who the man of the house is,” Grant said, loud enough that the hotshots surrounding the wrestlers whooped collectively, as if to add an exclamation mark.

  —

  Bunch sat alone watching Thompson Ridge burn itself out. He’d sharpened and cleaned his chainsaw and the chains. After that, there wasn’t much to do but think about Janae, Ben, Jacob, and the baby who was coming soon. Bunch had three more weeks on the fire line before he left the crew in the beginning of July.

  Bunch hadn’t talked to Janae since June 11. The crew had been heading back to their sleeping area, and the short ride in the buggy provided the only time the hotshots had to talk to their families—the campsite didn’t have service. The back of the buggy was a clamor of unconnected conversations. There always seemed to be some tidbit of news that came out of their brief calls. One day Scott learned that his sister had given birth.

  “Congratulations Mama!!” Scott texted. “I’ll call you after we eat in a little bit. So proud of you and love you bunches.” His sister had never known Scott to be so emotional. Another day, the crew heard from Chris. His mom’s surgery had gone well. She was in remission, and Chris planned to rejoin the crew when the hotshots returned to Prescott.

  That day, Bunch’s conversation with Janae didn’t include any news. She just told him how things were going. She never actually used the words “Please come home,” but it was the only thing she was really saying to him. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but Bunch heard it now.

  The pregnancy plus two boys was getting to be too much. Jacob had been throwing fits without his dad around, and Ben, still in diapers, demanded more attention than Janae could provide by herself. She had taken the kids to her mom’s house and was staying there, but that added a new and different dimension to her stress.

  Bunch’s time away from the family was nothing new to Janae. They’d gone to high school together—Bunch was a wallflower; she was the wild one—but hadn’t started dating until after they’d graduated and bumped into each other at a local coffee shop. Janae had given birth to Jacob months earlier and was now a single mom. She was reading the Bible—a rare quiet escape from the madness of the past few months—when she saw Bunch walk in. Small talk wasn’t Janae’s thing, or, for that matter, Bunch’s. She turned her back to avoid eye contact, but Janae “kind of had to look up when Bunch stopped directly in front of me.”

  Weeks later, he was telling her about his love for hotshotting. She thought the flames sounded impressive and the job dangerous, maybe even a little sexy, but she wouldn’t realize how uncomfortable dating a hotshot could be until the summer of 2011. That year, Bunch was gone on assignments 120 days. He never tired of sleeping under the stars. When the crew finally got days off, Bunch would set up camp in the backyard, and the family would fall asleep under Prescott’s clear night sky.

  On Thompson Ridge, Janae called her troubles with the kids “normal fire-line whining,” but both of them knew that when Bunch left the crew in a few weeks, he wouldn’t have a job. With the new baby coming soon and two kids to deal with already, their savings wouldn’t last. A few more weeks of work could mean a few more grand.

  Janae and the boys could wait, Bunch told himself. They’d have to.

  —

  Donut was holding line with Clayton and Wade. It was nearing 3 A.M. and, as sometimes happened, Clayton started sharing lessons from the Bible.

  “I don’t want to be a Christian until I’m ready to be a good Christian,” Donut said. He toyed with his Pulaski in the white ash of a fire long since cooled. “And honestly, I don’t think I’m ready to be a good Christian.”

  “You know you can still make mistakes,” Clayton said. “It’s not like you sign up and have to live a perfect life forever after or you end up in hell. It’s just that after accepting God into your life, you find yourself wanting to live better.”

  This made sense to Donut. In many ways, a relationship with God sounded similar to his relationship with Granite Mountain. After coming to the hotshots, Donut had made a concerted effort to refocus his life around habits that were far more productive. It wasn’t the easiest of transitions. Once, while the men were returning home from fighting fires in Idaho, they stopped in Las Vegas for the night. Marsh rented rooms for the men near the Strip. The hotels were cheap, but putting Granite Mountain up close to the action was Marsh’s subtle way of rewarding the crew with a chance to let loose. Before letting the hotshots go, he asked the men to be back at the buggies at 7 A.M., an hour later than normal.

  Donut was later still. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but the older guys bought him booze and then happily disappeared to the bars, leaving Donut to find his own adventures. Sometime after sunrise, he stumbled back into the hotel with a collection of new stories—true, false, or exaggerated—that involved a stripper’s lap-dance offer to sleep with him, a fall from a moving train, and a men’s-room spat with a man in a wheelchair. The night culminated back at the hotel, where, Donut said, a lesbian couple licked him simultaneously. When he got back to the buggies, he had some of the best stories the hotshots had heard in years.

  Donut had never taken part in church traditions, but if what Clayton said was true and God really could forgive his behavior, Donut could consider Christianity.

  “God forgives,” Clayton reassured him. Then Clayton and Wade took Donut’s hand, and in the soft glow of the dying fire they prayed for Donut to come to God.

  —

  Given Renan’s incident, the lack of sleep, and the urgent slop-over, Grant’s first full two-week fire tour had been harder than most hotshots’, which was probably why he felt so poignantly disappointed when Steed told the crew that they had an opportunity to spend another two weeks on the line without going home. A new fire in southern New Mexico was growing rapidly, threatening to become the largest fire in state history. The incident commander needed crews.

  The hotshots were gathered behind the trucks at fire camp, leaning on bumpers or squatting while staining the ground with tobacco spit. Steed laid out the options. Because they’d already worked two weeks straight and the SWCC wasn’t requiring them to head south, he let the men decide whether they wanted to keep rolling to fires or return to Prescott. Another fire assignment could earn the men a few thousand dollars. It also meant as many as fourteen more days away from their families. The decision was unanimous: The men wanted to go home.

  Steed and the squad bosses headed into the camp to deal with the trail of paperwork—hours worked, medical incidents, vehicles repaired—that makes it possible for the NIFC to track the location, on almost an hourly basis, of the nation’s firefighting resources. Filling out all of the paperwork took Steed and the squad bosses the better part of an hour. When they finished, Granite Mountain was officially released from Thompson Ridge.

  The first thing Steed and Clayton did was walk across New Mexico Highway 4 to a row of trailers parked across from the fire camp. Every one of the half-dozen trailers was occupied by a vendor printing and selling T-shirts that portrayed cartoonish scenes of Thompson Ridge. Among other things, the designs included an air tanker flying low over oversize fla
mes and hotshots working in the foreground. THOMPSON RIDGE FIRE, SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST, MAY–JUNE 2013 was written across the top.

  These vendors chase smoke columns around the West. Usually, locals or firefighters who see fewer flames than hotshots buy the shirts—enough for these vendors to make a modest living. It’s taboo for hotshots to buy the shirts. The tees are garish. But Steed and Clayton had a plan; they picked the loudest tie-dye off the rack.

  When they returned to the buggies, the men again gathered around.

  “Before we head home, we’ve got a little announcement,” Steed said. “Bunch has got another boy on the way. He told us a few nights ago that he needed to spend time with his family. This is his last tour with us.”

  Most of the men already knew as much—there are few secrets on a crew. During the slow shifts on the line, his and Janae’s conversations kept replaying in his head, until Bunch finally decided to put his family above all else. Losing a few grand over the coming weeks would sting a little bit, but missing the birth of his child would stay with him forever.

  The hotshots chanted his name. “Bunch! Bunch! Bunch!”

  “But before he goes, we’ve got a little something to thank Bunch for his years of hard work,” Steed said as he presented him with the T-shirt. “You’ve earned this.”

  —

  Before the advent of cell phones, fire assignments were a lot like a sailor shipping off to sea. When firefighters left home, their families might not hear from them again for weeks. The odd calls, when they did come in, were usually made from pay phones at gas stations in the innumerable tiny ranching and mining towns that break up the empty roads of the West. Each hotshot might get five minutes in the booth to talk to a spouse or parent, deal with a late mortgage payment, or leave a heartfelt message on an answering machine before the next firefighter in line was tapping on the Plexiglas and pointing at his or her wrist. With a time limit on gas station stops, few things caused fights between hotshots like pay-phone lines.

  Cell phones reduced the tension to small squabbles about charger space in the cigarette lighters. On the drive home from Thompson Ridge, the text messages flew out of Granite Mountain’s buggies by the dozens.

  GRANT: This drive is going to take forever. When we get back we have to wash the buggies, clean up…

  LEAH: Home at 6?

  LEAH: I’m cleaning the house.

  GRANT: I’ve been sleeping in the dirt for two weeks.

  LEAH: That’s exactly why I’m doing it!

  But for many hours, the hotshots droned through the flat, windswept high desert that lies between Jemez Springs and Prescott. The crew didn’t pull into the base until after seven and weren’t done cleaning the buggies and preparing the trucks for the next fire until an hour after that. Grant left the station the moment Steed released the crew. Bunch, though, lingered, taking a moment to look around the place that had been at the center of his life for the past four years. There was no doubt he was going to miss the station. Small things suddenly felt sentimental—Clayton’s antique chainsaws and ever-growing piles of thrift-store kitsch, a broken hand tool with TURBY TOUCHED THIS written on it, the locker his old squad had painted Granite Mountain’s logo across.

  Clayton was also slow to leave. He’d been Bunch’s squad boss for two of his four years, and Clayton and his wife had been the only two guests at Bunch and Janae’s wedding. Before that fire season started, Bunch had mentioned to Clayton that he and Janae were eloping.

  Even though it wasn’t technically an invitation, Clayton took it as one. Just moments before the ceremony started, he and his wife, Kristi, ran into the courthouse. “No way I was letting you get married alone,” he told his buddy.

  Saying goodbye was as hard for Clayton as it was for Bunch. When he saw Bunch head out to his black Toyota pickup, he whistled to him across the parking lot and jogged up.

  “Hey…” he called. “I’m proud of you for leaving the crew for your family.” Then Clayton gave Bunch a hug. Bunch, shorter than Clayton by a head, gave him a half smile and turned his head into Clayton’s shoulder to hide welling tears. The goodbye had a formality to it that made Bunch’s departure uncomfortably real. He pounded Clayton’s back hard several times and quickly left the station.

  While Grant and his crewmates finished up their duties, Leah had rushed out to get a manicure and pedicure and was a few blocks from home when Grant pulled up behind her in his Dodge Neon. Her heart fluttered. He was leaning entirely out of the window, waving with his left hand and driving with his right. Fifteen days was the longest they’d been apart.

  For the couple, Grant’s two days off were bliss. They slept late and ate real food, heading to dinner at a local restaurant where Grant, now old enough to buy alcohol, splurged on microbrewed beers and ate the better part of two meals for dinner. At home, Grant nested. He built a fire pit in the backyard and spent the afternoon stacking wood in a pleasant rhythmic delirium. When he was done, he put on the Forever Lazy onesie—blue adult pajamas complete with booties, which Grant’s grandma had given Leah for Christmas. Leah didn’t like wearing them. But being swaddled in fleece helped Grant relax. He tried to forget the stress of the past couple of weeks and tried hard not to think about the fact that he’d be back at work on Tuesday. That night, he fell asleep to Tommy Boy.

  The days off weren’t so different for the other guys. Each man tried to squeeze two weeks of normal life into two short days. Scott met his nephew for the first time. He held the baby like a vase he was afraid to drop while his sister laughed at how uncomfortable he looked. “I’m going to teach him to shoot a gun when he’s three,” Scott declared.

  Donut spent time with his young daughter, Michaela, a toddler now, towheaded and fast learning to abuse the power of the word “no.” He had dated Michaela’s mom during high school, and they were no longer on the best of terms, but she watched Michaela full-time while he was away on fires, and they shared custody of the little girl when Donut returned home.

  One night, after dropping Michaela off at her mom’s, Donut went out to Whiskey Row. A friend of his, a semi-professional mixed-martial-arts fighter, had just gotten out of the military. After hours of partying, hopped up on cinnamon-flavored whiskey and testosterone, the two ended up in a fight with six guys. Donut fought two of them while his friend apparently took care of the other four, and they ran back to Donut’s apartment higher still on adrenaline.

  One corner of the living room was dedicated solely to Michaela’s toys, but the place was surprisingly clean, considering that the only people who ever lived there were two young hotshots and a baby girl. Chris was trying to sleep back at home when Donut and his friend bounded up the stairs and pounded on Chris’s bedroom door.

  “Dude, get up!” Donut said. “It was fucking crazy.”

  He swung open Chris’s door and immediately began pantomiming the motions of the fight—pushing, ducking, punching—so frenetically that it took him a long moment to realize that a woman was in bed beside Chris. When he finally did, Donut slammed the door shut and buckled over in laughter.

  CHAPTER 14

  NEW STARTS

  On June 18, the hotshots were back at work and had barely finished their first run in weeks when somebody spotted white smoke curling over the Bradshaws, to the west.

  “That’s not a good place for a fire. There are million-dollar homes up there,” Donut said to no one in particular. “If they don’t catch that in an hour it’s gone.”

  It was 11:30 A.M. and already well into the eighties, with winds gusting to nearly thirty miles per hour. The fire was burning in chaparral, a mix of five or six oak-related species that cover parts of the Southwest and Southern California. When it’s dry and windy, as it was now, chaparral, with its woody trunks and light and flashy leaves, acts as both the metaphoric wick and the dynamite.

  Chuck Maxwell, the forecaster in Albuquerque, was watching the factors—drought, grass growth, temperatures, the monsoon—align over the Prescott area. Two days earl
ier, on June 16, he’d issued a warning to all firefighters in the Southwest. The season had shaped up more or less as he’d predicted it would back in May. Monsoonal thunderstorms had already extinguished the large fires in parts of New Mexico and southern Arizona, but the north and central part of the state had just entered its terrifying prime. Prescott hadn’t seen a drop of rain, or cloud cover, for that matter, since the beginning of May.

  The monsoon rains were still weeks out, and until they arrived, fire danger would only get more volatile. Since the 1st of June, temperatures had climbed past the high eighties every day, and the humidity consistently hovered in the teens but at times dropped as low as 4 percent. The National Weather Service had issued a Red Flag Warning, the first of many to come in the weeks ahead, and the ponderosa pines and chaparral surrounding Prescott were so dry that the probability of ignition—a calculation that measures the chance that a spark will kindle into a blaze—was at the exceedingly rare 100 percent.

  Maxwell was unequivocal about the dangers. “Firefighters should acknowledge that the fire growth and fire behavior they encounter this year may exceed anything they have experienced before,” he had written. “Normal strategies and tactics may need to be adjusted to account for the drought factor.”

  “Fucking send us already,” Donut said. He ran inside to use the bathroom, and by the time he was out, Steed was yelling for the hotshots to load up.

  Once on the road, Grant texted Leah.

  “We’re on a fire in town. I won’t have my phone.”

  “OK be safe. I can see the smoke.”

  Bunch could see it, too. He was on the way to his new job, screwing cabinets together. Janae’s dad had gotten him the position, which he already found boring, and, watching the column rise, milk white and growing fast, he felt a flash of guilt. He wanted to be there with his crew.

  The new start was called the Doce (pronounced “doh-see”), after the shooting range it had started beside. It was the same name given to a blaze outside Prescott that the Perryville handcrew had fought in the same area in late June 1990, shortly before six of them died on Arizona’s Dude Fire. The new fire was burning in a contiguous chaparral-and-juniper thicket that ran from its ignition point, six miles to the north, up and over the crew’s namesake Granite Mountain, and straight onto the flats near the Prescott suburb of Williamson Valley. With conditions so extreme, the Doce could close that distance in a matter of hours.