On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  The Doce now spread across more than five thousand acres, an area that, for reference, took the Thompson Ridge Fire four days to burn. Spot fires, thrown more than a half-mile ahead of the main blaze, had spread flames nearly three miles beyond the ignition point. Fire ran all the way over the top of 7,600-foot Granite Mountain and was pushing into the subdivision of Sundown Acres. Families, convinced their houses were going to burn, started stashing valuables in boxes and loading them into cars, while air tankers dropped thousands of gallons of red slurry on their backyards and local engines raced into the threatened subdivision against the flow of fleeing evacuees. Protecting Sundown Acres was triage.

  An Incident Command Post was set up at Prescott High School, and the SWCC in Albuquerque ordered personnel and resources from all around the country, including the Forest Service’s only two DC-10 supertankers—converted commercial aircraft capable of dropping an eleven-thousand-gallon payload that covers a three-hundred-foot-wide, quarter-mile-long strip. In one shift on the Doce, specially trained firefighters working out of the Phoenix-Mesa Gateway airport reloaded the DC-10s with retardant, and the planes dropped a million dollars’ worth of slurry on the fire—so much that the red lines were visible from space with the naked eye.

  This was exactly the kind of “adjustment in normal tactics and strategies” that Chuck Maxwell had said would be needed to contain fires in such fierce drought conditions. So far, it seemed to be working. By morning, just a few fingers of black reached between the houses in Sundown Acres; no homes had burned.

  “We aren’t out of the woods yet,” Sciacca warned during a press conference. He knew that, at best, the slurry would check the Doce’s spread, but if the winds returned, the retardant wouldn’t hold back the blaze. Sciacca didn’t feel that his management team would have a solid handle on the Doce until hotshot crews and bulldozers lined the entire fire perimeter. Accomplishing that task required building fifteen miles of line; Sciacca expected it to take seven to ten days.

  Fourteen hotshot crews were ordered to build the line. With the possible exception of the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, none knew the area better than Granite Mountain. It was for this reason that the men were given a special assignment on the fire’s far western edge. Out there, in the bottom of a dry and still-unburned canyon, there stood a two-thousand-year-old alligator juniper—among the world’s oldest and largest specimens.

  “That’s the kind of loss you can’t quantify,” a Forest Service biologist had argued to Sciacca’s management team. Granite Mountain drew the assignment of protecting the tree.

  The tree was less than twenty miles as the crow flies from their station, but for more than an hour the buggies bounced down dirt roads that passed beneath Santa Fe Railroad trestles built in the 1880s, herds of longhorn cattle grazing among cholla and teddy bear cactus, and the massive white skeletons of drought-killed cottonwoods. Officially, this was called Division B.

  Back in high school, the hotshots who grew up in Prescott had come out here to party. Since then, Donut had visited the spot periodically to shoot guns in the pullouts and makeshift ranges that spring up beside road signs, but he’d never seen the juniper.

  The buggies followed a series of increasingly smaller dirt roads until the drivers parked where the terrain was too hummocky for any vehicle but a dirt bike. For thirty minutes, the hotshots hiked down a gently sloping arroyo. The forest air felt so dry, it seemed to crackle as if clicking with countless cicadas. Near the intersection of the wash and a rolling canyon, the hotshots saw the giant’s canopy rising a few dozen feet above the other trees in the forest. But what set the tree apart more than its height was its sweeping, anvil-shaped top. Its trunk was fourteen feet in diameter. Donut thought it looked like something out of The Lion King.

  An alligator juniper’s thick and scaled bark looks like the skin of the reptile it’s named after. Over time, the giant tree had become frayed from weathering, and great strips of dried bark hung from the branches. Many of its enormous limbs were long dead, a defensive mechanism that allowed the tree to save water by allocating it only to the most productive branches. Now the system that had kept the tree alive for millennia threatened to kill it. The old juniper was a great woodpile, its green canopy stacked atop dead branches that were effectively cured lumber.

  Granite Mountain didn’t have much time to save the tree. Behind it, a wall of knee-high flames was backing down the canyon’s gentle flanks. One squad carved a circle out of the brush surrounding the ancient juniper while the other put in a quick piece of line just wide enough to burn off.

  Steed put Bob in charge of burning out the brush around the tree and assigned two hotshots to help him, then led the rest of the men back to the buggies at a fast clip. Bob gave Steed and the others a few minutes to get out ahead, and in those few moments, Bob and the others climbed into the tree’s limbs and snapped photos to document what they knew could be the last time anybody saw the ancient juniper standing. Then they set fire to the slopes and hiked out the arroyo as if racing a lit fuse.

  A few days after their hurried burnout, Steed and the crew anxiously hiked back into the canyon to check on the tree. The slopes behind the juniper burned hot. When the brush, now gnarled and black, went up in flames, it had almost certainly sent a flurry of embers drifting upward. How the wind happened to be swirling in the canyon when Bob lit the backfire had determined whether the embers bent back into the juniper or, as the hotshots hoped, were swept northward in the general direction of the prevailing wind and the main fire. As it happened, the winds probably did both.

  “Got a duffer up here!” Steed said, referring to a barely smoldering ember that sat in the teacup-size hole it had burned into the wood. Steed was straddling a branch eight feet up in the tree, and he extinguished the last remaining hot spot on the juniper. The tree still stood, but the heat had shriveled and curled back nearly a third of the green branches nearest the burnout.

  Nobody could know whether the ancient juniper had the strength to recover from the stress of the wildfire. Some, like Donut, thought it would surely die. How any being, especially one so old, could survive such a severe burn was beyond him. Other hotshots weren’t so convinced, but collectively, their mood was ebullient. If nothing else, they’d given the juniper a fighting chance.

  For a short while, the men spread out around the tree and mopped up any remaining spot fires in the vicinity, but few remained. The chaparral had little wood left to harbor a spark. After, the men sprawled out in the shade of the juniper’s branches and, while eating lunch, made deliberately crass jokes about visiting the tree during firewood-collection season.

  Steed called for a crew photo after the men ate. Traditionally, Granite Mountain’s crew shots were taken during their most exotic tours or after their hardest shifts. One was on a California beach not long after receiving their hotshot status; another was during the fire burning mysteriously in the rains of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; and a third after wrestling into submission an unexpectedly dangerous blaze on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. Clayton framed the photos with wood scraps and salvaged materials, and each picture hung proudly on the station walls. Over the course of a season, most hotshots spent hours lingering before the photos, studying the faces of men who came before them. Each image hinted at a crew’s particular legacy. There, before the wall, they heard stories from veterans about a certain sawyer, or the fastest swamper the crew had ever seen, or some crazy one-year wonder who took a swing at a bouncer. Perusing the pictures of past hotshots made each man wonder what would be said of him when he left.

  The hotshots fanned out into the tree. Wade and Clayton scooted out on some of the taller limbs and hung from them, grinning and swinging like orangutans, while the others leaned against a branch, as thick as most trees, that jutted out parallel to the ground. Donut, in a pair of aviator sunglasses, crossed his arms and adopted a look and posture that said hardened hotshot. Scott held his hands in front of him—quiet and respectful—and Grant s
quared up to the camera and gave a smug grin.

  After the photo was shot, Steed yelled “Pyramid!”—one of the impromptu team-building exercises, like the theater moment on Thompson Ridge, that he sometimes liked to spring on the crew. Along with four of the bigger hotshots, Steed got down on all fours and, in decreasing order of size, the men climbed atop one another. The structure collapsed a few times, the men laughing in a jumble, before Grant was able to climb up the other men’s backs to the second-to-last of the five tiers. Beside him was William Warneke, a twenty-five-year-old ex-Marine from California who had served a tour in Iraq. Billy, a rookie on Granite Mountain, had a wife and a baby on the way. With Billy and Grant in place, Woyjeck scampered up the juniper and lowered himself onto their backs—the top of the pyramid. Chris snapped a quick photo. In it, nobody is posturing, but everyone is smiling.

  —

  Granite Mountain’s saving of the juniper became the biggest story to come out of the Doce. To the few locals who had hiked into the desert to see the enormous tree, the crew’s act felt personally important. But for most people, something else was at work. Many townspeople knew of the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, across town, but didn’t know that the city employed its own hotshots until the Doce—until Granite Mountain had protected an ancient tree on the flanks of its namesake peak. It was a great story. The Prescott Daily Courier ran an article about Granite Mountain’s efforts and talked to Marsh about what it was like to have saved the iconic tree.

  “It feels right, you know?” Marsh told the reporter. He hadn’t been there when the crew saved the juniper. During the first stages of the initial attack, the incident commander had tapped Marsh to oversee a division of the fire, and once again he hadn’t worked with Granite Mountain at all on the Doce. But he understood that the newspaper story wasn’t just about the tree.

  The hotshots’ work often goes unappreciated, since it’s usually done so far away from towns, Marsh noted. After so many years of working to protect Prescott, the recognition was well earned.

  Granite Mountain was news. The men joked nonstop about being anointed heroes. In a show of thanks, locals brought to the station sleeping bags, doughnuts, muffins, and Gatorade. How any of Prescott’s residents ascertained that the unmarked compound on an industrial street corner was Granite Mountain’s station, the guys couldn’t figure out. None of the public had ever stopped by before.

  Another perk of fighting fire in their hometown was that the hotshots, unlike the out-of-town crews, could skip the chaos and discomfort of a crowded fire camp. After the juniper, the hotshots spent five more shifts improving indirect dozer line miles away from the main fire. Running chainsaw in the heat made for long, hot, and physically taxing days. After their days on the line, the hotshots slept at the station. Steed and Marsh wouldn’t let the hotshots leave—they were technically on assignment—but they let the men’s families visit every evening.

  The station had the atmosphere of a carnival. Leah came the first night.

  “What do you want me to bring?!” Leah texted Grant.

  “Beer!”

  But Grant knew Leah couldn’t bring beer, and not just because she wasn’t twenty-one. Decades earlier, hotshots could drink on fire assignments, but that ended in the 1960s when a hotshot crew got drunk on a fire in Oregon and rioted, throwing chairs and tables out the windows of a scenic train they’d taken on the way home from an assignment.

  Marsh and Steed wouldn’t let Granite Mountain drink at the station. So Leah brought Grant his backpack with speakers in it and his preferred vice: candy. When she got there, Grant proudly introduced her to his crewmates. She met his new battle buddy, Sean Misner, and his wife, Amanda, and Clayton and his wife, Kristi—even Anthony Rose, who had been the hardest on Grant at the beginning of the year. Whatever tension existed between the hotshots at the start of the season was gone. After the flurry of introductions, Grant and Leah sat alone together in the parking lot.

  He winced in pain as he took off his boots. His feet were literally rotting. An angry shade of red spread across the tops and bottoms of his feet. Grant had been changing his socks regularly and had even tried some of those weird toe gloves, in which each individual toe sits in its own cloth sleeve, but still, the long hours in his boots was taking a toll. Leah was washing Grant’s feet with warm, soapy water when Chris MacKenzie came up behind.

  “You’re not really helping him with that?” he asked.

  “I’m spraying him down,” said Leah, her hands working between his toes.

  “You’re absolutely doing that,” Chris said, and walked away gagging.

  Grant smiled at Leah. He no longer felt like an outsider. He kept comparing fighting the Doce to winning the home game in high school football. For Grant, the newspaper coverage made real the often intangible fact that, occasionally, their normally remote job had real results for people in towns. He was warming to the idea of being a hotshot.

  Grant missed Renan, but in his absence, he also felt like he was making more friends on the crew. During a break in one of the long shifts building indirect line, Grant told Scott Norris about Leah’s grandmother. Her ninetieth birthday was coming up. She’d compiled a life list, and every birthday she made it her goal to check off a bold objective that year. She’d gone skydiving at eighty-six and asked to smoke marijuana at eighty-eight. Grant had helped with the latter—in front of all the guests at her birthday party, he presented her with a rolled joint. Now Grant wanted to top that for her ninetieth. He wanted to get her arrested.

  “Heather’s a cop!” Scott said. “She’d do it for sure.” And so they schemed up a way to pretend to arrest Leah’s grandmother. Leah loved the idea.

  —

  Oftentimes, the men parked their trucks in a row beside the station, and in the evenings, some of the men chose to sleep in the backs of their pickups instead of on the ground. One night Clayton and Zup had happened to park next to each other. Clayton and Kristi were quietly talking in his truck when Zup stuck his head through her window and said, “Let me know if you guys want any privacy, if you know what I mean.”

  Kristi rolled her eyes. Zup let out a laugh and then jumped into the back of his pickup, just three feet away. For Kristi there was something priceless about being with Clayton at the station. She saw him operating in the world through which he defined himself. Watching Clayton and the easy way he had as a leader satisfied a curiosity in her. It gave her pride. For many of the couples, the evenings at the station felt stolen.

  A few nights later, as the crew returned from another long shift, Grant texted Leah and asked her to bring his ukulele to the station. She thought it an odd request. Grant was tone-deaf and couldn’t play a chord. But Leah brought it anyway, and Zup grabbed it from her when she arrived. He tuned the little instrument and sat on the concrete and began slowly picking his way toward a rhythm.

  After some time, a song emerged, and Zup ad-libbed nonsensical lyrics about the Doce and the hotshots. The men, their wives or girlfriends, and a half-dozen kids gathered in a loose circle around Zup. Soon the other men started contributing made-up lyrics, and everybody laughed because it was contagious and fun. Clayton grabbed Kristi’s hands.

  “Shhh,” Clay said. “Papa Bear”—his nickname for Marsh—“is sleeping. We don’t want to wake him up.”

  They stepped into the center of the group and started dancing. Grant followed immediately after. He pulled Leah into the circle, and there, in the station’s parking lot, with their friends and families surrounding them, the couples danced beneath the off-colored glow of the sunset filtered through drift smoke.

  —

  After the other hotshots’ girlfriends and families left the station, the men laid their sleeping bags down around the compound. Scott put his by the buggy barn, near the gate, and dozed until sometime around midnight. Then his phone vibrated and he woke quietly, took his beanie and placed it on his pillow, and filled out his sleeping bag with extra clothes to make it look like he was still in
there. Then he crept out of the station gate, the way lit dimly by the streetlights.

  Heather Kennedy never made it to the station during those evenings after the Doce. She couldn’t; she worked the late shift. But during any free moments she could find, she and Scott texted with a frequency that bordered on neurosis.

  Heather, still wearing her uniform, had parked in a dark section of an alley behind the station. Scott slid into the passenger seat beside her, and they kissed for a long time.

  After Thompson Ridge, whatever fears Scott had about losing Heather had been put to rest. They headed back to their apartment in Prescott Valley, twenty minutes to the north.

  In rapid-fire stories, Scott told Heather everything about the Doce, even things she probably didn’t need to know, like the time Donut, who was afraid of snakes and refused to head alone into the bush, “took a shit in front of the whole crew, just right there beside the line.” Scott told her about the plan for Leah’s grandmother, and they talked about the articles in the paper. He didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about Granite Mountain’s actions.

  “Do you think of yourself as a hero?” Scott asked Heather. They’d had this conversation before. “I don’t think of myself as a hero at all. We’re glorified landscapers.”

  At home, while Heather got changed, Scott showered. They met in the kitchen, where he fell quiet and thoughtful. He’d been doing that around Heather a lot lately, pausing in the middle of conversations for what seemed like minutes. A few nights earlier, he’d stammered out, “I…I…I’ve never been so happy in my life. I’m so in love with you.” They’d been talking about buying a house together, and the word “marriage” found its way into their conversations with increasing frequency. But this time he had something far less tender on his mind. He looked afraid.