On the Burning Edge

by Kyle Dickman

  Scott told her the story of Donut and Chris crawling out of the thicket a few days earlier, the twenty-foot flames whistling and crackling behind them. He wasn’t sure they knew just how close they’d come. “It was awful,” he said, and leaned on the kitchen island by the bookshelf. “In seven years of firefighting, I’ve never seen anybody so close to being burned over.”

  Heather and Scott sometimes talked about the dangers of their respective jobs. They’d even discussed what to do if the unthinkable happened and one of them was killed at work. Heather promised him that if Scott died, she’d break the news to his sister and parents. If Heather died, he’d do the same. But the chance that somebody would pull a gun on her during a routine traffic stop seemed more likely than Scott—or anybody on his crew—getting caught by a fire.

  “It was close, but the last time hotshots—guys who really knew what they were doing—got burned was in 1994,” he told her. “Storm King.” She knew the story. He’d told it to her before at an IHOP restaurant, drawing on the back of a napkin to illustrate what happened. He’d penciled in the fire line through thickets of oak scrub, the winds of an approaching cold front, the spot fire that had started below the firefighters, the ridgetop where one smoke jumper outran the blaze, and the places where fourteen firefighters who couldn’t had died.

  For those chilling moments on the Doce, Scott had seen the same fate befalling Donut and Chris. Heather smoothed her hands down his forearm; he’d run nine tanks of gas through his chainsaw that day, and his muscles were still as taut as a steel cable.

  “Storm King was nearly twenty years ago,” Scott said. “It happens, but it’s really rare.”

  Then they went to bed, and he and Heather lay wrapped in each other’s arms until his alarm went off at 4:30 A.M. On the way out to the car, he dropped a wet washcloth in the dust by the front door, then wiped it across his face to cover the evidence of his illicit cleanliness.

  —

  After seven shifts on the Doce, the incident management team released Granite Mountain on June 25. The Doce wouldn’t be declared 100 percent contained until early July, but it never again ran like it had in that first terrifying shift. Sciacca’s well-coordinated initial attack had helped end the Doce quickly. So had the flashy way chaparral burns: Unlike the timber on Thompson Ridge, which could smolder for weeks, chaparral burns as if soaked in white gas, but only when conditions align. When they don’t, brush fires tend to be relatively tame. On the Doce, the winds never returned.

  The hotshots spent the next two shifts at the station. The workday returned to normal nine-to-fives, which in one very important way felt like days off: After work, all the hotshots could go home and do as they pleased.

  Kevin Woyjeck moved in with Grant and Leah. The last week of June was the first opportunity since Thompson Ridge that Kevin had time to actually move his stuff. A night later, Grant, Leah, Kevin, and their fourth housemate celebrated his arrival by heading to a steak house for dinner and margaritas. After a couple of strong drinks, Kevin bounced around in the backseat on the drive home, singing the chorus to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”—“She’s up all night to the sun, I’m up all night to get some, she’s up all night for good fun, I’m up all night to get lucky.”

  He called it his song of the summer, an ode to his inability to get laid. Grant, also buzzed, howled with laughter in the front seat while Leah drove, chuckling. Living together, though they’d done it for only two days, had drawn Kevin and Grant closer. It helped that Kevin was a good housemate. He was tidy, motivated, and funny. Leah kept pointing out that Grant, whose hyper-cleanliness alienated some of his previous roommates, had finally found somebody other than her that he could live with.

  The crew spent the couple of station days they had after the Doce taking care of minutiae overlooked in the hustle between fires. Scott and the sawyers cleaned their chainsaws, replaced fuel filters, and put an edge on their backlog of dulled chains. Meanwhile, Grant, Woyjeck, and the other rookies removed trash bags of empty water and Gatorade bottles from buggies and sharpened their hand tools. New boxes of MREs were loaded into the buggies, the drip torch fuel, bar oil, and gas were all replenished, and the hotshots were ready for their next assignment.

  While the rest of the crew used the string of down days to rest up, Scott Norris remained exhausted. He’d been staying up all night to see Heather. One day, he fell asleep on the bench press in the weight room and Donut, seizing the opportunity, tied him to the bench with flagging while the other hotshots snickered in the background.

  Marsh returned full-time to the superintendent position that week, too. One of the first things he did was recap for the guys what had happened on the Dude Fire. June 26 marked that fatal blaze’s twenty-third anniversary, and many of the environmental factors that had led to that catastrophe were once again aligning over the Southwest.

  Chuck Maxwell, over in Albuquerque, and other fuels and weather experts had issued a litany of dire warnings over the past ten days. First came the Fuels and Fire Behavior Advisory that warned of fire growth and behavior more extreme than anything seen in the past fifty years. The Doce had confirmed Maxwell’s predictions, and since then the weather had only gotten hotter and drier.

  The National Weather Service issued an Excessive Heat Watch for Yavapai County for the last week of June. Near-record high temperatures of 105 to 117 degrees were predicted through the weekend of June 28–30, with an increasing chance of thunderstorms. Monsoonal moisture was sweeping into Arizona. As the leading edge of the atmospheric tide crept closer to Prescott, the humidity ticked up. Rain was coming. Arizona’s fire season was nearing its end, but lightning would precede the moisture. So would high winds associated with the thunderstorms.

  Marsh’s message to the crew was to not get lulled into a false sense of security. He’d heard from Steed that the hotshots had proven themselves on the Doce Fire and on Thompson Ridge, but it was not by chance that the Dude Fire fatalities had coincided with the onset of the monsoon. Historically, the Southwest fire season’s last gasp was incredibly dangerous. Dry fuels and hot days, plus thunderstorms and strong winds, produced a volatile mix of conditions—particularly in the chaparral.

  So the hotshots kept up their station chores—Woyjeck cleaning the bathroom, Grant sweeping the floors—waiting for a fire to break and soaking in the slow shifts in the meantime. On one such relaxed evening, Renan Packer stopped by the station. Since getting back from Thompson Ridge, he’d been lying low. Per doctor’s orders, he’d stayed in bed for much of the past two weeks. Before heading over, he’d bought chewing tobacco for the men and candy for Grant, but somehow he managed to forget the gifts at home. No bother, Renan thought. He’d drop them by later.

  At the station, after catching up with a few of the guys, Renan met with the overhead. He looked frail, but he was walking. During the ride home from New Mexico, Marsh had offered Renan the chance to come back to the fuels crew. Renan had said he’d think on it, but he simply couldn’t stomach the idea of working for Granite Mountain without actually fighting fire. Chipping brush was not why he’d signed up to be a hotshot. He didn’t share these thoughts with Marsh and Steed, though. Instead he told them that he needed more time to recover.

  As they sat in Marsh’s office, Steed, Clayton, Bob, and Travis Carter talked for a long time about his intention of returning to the hotshots in the future. Renan maintained that the muscle cramps were an unfortunate fluke. The doctors said it was a back spasm unrelated to his health issues in high school. The condition, spurred by dehydration and exhaustion, could befall any hotshot. Renan wanted back on the fire line. He asked for a recommendation for the city firefighting jobs he planned to apply for in the meantime. Clayton readily agreed.

  Eventually, Renan stood and shook hands with Marsh and the squad bosses and followed Steed into the saw shop, where the men had already gathered in anticipation of being sent home for the night. The hotshots gathered around Renan, slapping his back and wishing him well. Steed gave t
he floor to Renan.

  “I’m not going to be coming back, and I’m not going to be working for the chip crew, either,” Renan said. “I need the time to regain my strength. I want to thank you guys”—his voice cracked and his eyes welled. “Working here was the most fun I’ve ever had.”

  At which point Steed stepped in and stopped him from choking up too much. “Tunnel!” he yelled, calling for another one of his rituals. The men instinctually paired up and made a long triangle with their bodies. As Renan ducked and ran under their arms, the hotshots smacked his backside. It was childish, a relic from high school football teams, but for Renan it was poignant.

  The guys broke apart and headed to their cars. Some grabbed Renan’s shoulder for a moment to say goodbye, and others pounded his back hard—We’ll see you around, dude. Take care of yourself—no more spasms, you hear?

  Renan walked with Grant to his Dodge Neon. Renan updated his battle buddy on his condition, and Grant told Renan stories about the Doce. They laughed as Grant told him about the theater skits Renan had missed on Thompson Ridge.

  “All right, brother,” Renan said. “I gotta get out of here. Love you, man.”

  CHAPTER 16

  FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

  Lois Ferrell, a seventy-four-year-old retiree who lived in Glen Ilah, a subdivision in the 650-person town of Yarnell, Arizona, saw the lightning strike. It was Friday, June 28. She was gardening by the koi pond in the backyard, watching the thunderstorm flicker over the six-thousand-foot peaks of the Weaver range, to the north.

  The sky flashed and rumbled every few minutes. Some fifteen thousand feet above Glen Ilah, the flat base of the cumulonimbus clouds seemed to be boiling. Ice crystals and dust caught in the clouds’ chaos rubbed against one another, creating an electrical field. Not unlike the glow of static electricity seen when freshly washed laundry is pulled apart, the flashes twitched and jumped between the clouds.

  All at once, the negatively charged particles in the clouds drew a filament of positively charged particles upward from a brush-covered granite outcrop on the long ridge north and west of Lois’s house. In a hundredth of a second, a stream of negative particles raced down from the clouds toward their opposite. Where the opposing charges met, the circuit closed. The electricity flashed earthward and the hair-thin bridge between sky and ground pulsed as temperatures surrounding the lightning bolt reached fifty thousand degrees—five times hotter than the surface of the sun. Just as fast as it came, the bridge broke and the lightning snapped back into the clouds. The supersonic boom followed, rattling the glass panes of the windows behind Lois.

  A short while later, a wisp of blue smoke twisted up from the ridgeline. When Lois saw it, she called to her seventy-three-year-old husband, Truman, who was inside watching TV. A retired Air Force mechanic with a full head of gray hair, Truman had been the town’s interim volunteer fire chief until two years earlier. The smoke caught his attention, but he figured professional firefighters would take care of it before too long.

  By evening, Russ Shumate, an incident commander for the Yavapai County Fire Department, had taken up a scouting position across the street from Glen Ilah at the Ranch House Restaurant, a small-town diner with a sweeping view of the surrounding mountains. He scanned the hills for smoke.

  After sixteen years battling fires in Yavapai County, he knew that dry lightning in late June usually sparked not one fire but dozens. Already there were nine burning around Prescott. Shumate expected more to appear in the drier peaks of the Weavers.

  He called the Prescott dispatch and requested that an Air Attack plane fly over Yarnell. These small prop planes orbit fires and carry one-to-three-person teams of highly trained firefighters who, in addition to scouting the fire’s spread and helping incident managers plan the operations, also coordinate the aerial attack. Air Attacks serve as lead planes that guide in large air tankers, help helicopters pinpoint their bucket drops to the places they’re needed most, and orchestrate the movement of all of these resources to avoid a midair collision. Along with a strong tolerance for airsickness (turbulence beside smoke columns can be violent), the job requires responding to and keeping track of radio traffic that pours in from as many as nine different radio frequencies.

  It was late evening when Shumate heard an Air Attack plane whining over the Yarnell area, and by dark, the aerial firefighter and Shumate had located four new fires in the hills outside town. Truman was right about the one Lois had spotted on the ridge to the west. It was half an acre max, burning in a boulder field, with one active corner, low spread potential, and no structures or people at risk. Still, Shumate wanted it out. Late June was the wrong time of year to let brush-fires burn. But it was so small that Shumate determined that a hotshot crew wasn’t needed to handle the fire. Instead he put in an order for an engine, two inmate crews, and a light helicopter to be on scene early next morning. And he gave the fire a name: Yarnell Hill.

  —

  A day after the fire started, on the evening of the 29th, Marsh was having dinner with his wife, Amanda, at the Prescott Brewing Company when the local dispatch called. The crew needed to be at the station first thing in the morning to pick up any more fires that had sprung up in the area. With all the new starts, it wasn’t yet clear which fire was going to be the most pressing, but Yarnell Hill had become a problem.

  That afternoon, the winds kicked up and the fire began to threaten Yarnell and Peeples Valley, a smaller ranching community to the north. Shumate upped his resource order considerably from the day before. Now there were fourteen engines, two structure-protection specialists, air tankers, three hotshot crews, two bulldozers, and a Type 2 incident management team assigned to handle the increasingly complex fire. Marsh didn’t know any of this yet.

  “Just another lightning bust” is what the dispatcher had told Marsh, and what Marsh told Amanda. Always the southern gentleman, Marsh excused himself after getting the call and notified Steed, who was at home drinking a Coors Light on his porch and watching Caden and Cambria swing in the backyard. Steed called Clayton and Bob, who called the men of their squads while Marsh, a painstakingly slow eater, settled back down and worked his way through his meal.

  Prescott felt sultry that Saturday night. The pulse of moisture that had brought the dry lightning storms to Yarnell had pushed the humidity into the twenties for the past few days. After dinner, Marsh and Amanda stepped outside to enjoy the arrival of the monsoon and the onset of the Southwest’s most pleasant weather. They walked hand in hand under the elms surrounding the courthouse, past children racing around a Rough Rider statue and young couples flirting on the park benches. Whiskey Row ran along one side of the square. Inside Moctezuma’s, one of six bars lining the street, Brandon Bunch’s dad poured drinks for Donut, Chris, and Zup. They’d stopped in for a beer and claimed seats in the back of the bar by the pool table and TVs replaying Wimbledon and baseball highlights.

  “Why the fuck would you wear that?” Zup said to Donut. He was talking about his friend’s pink tank top, which looked straight out of Southern California. “Respect yourself.”

  “What are you doing out of your cage?” Donut came back. It was good to be back out with the guys. “Shouldn’t you be home listening to vinyl records with your girlfriend?”

  Donut had come down with a nasty cold the morning before and hadn’t worked the past two days. The father of a close friend of his had passed away, and Donut had spent that morning at the funeral before hanging out in front of the TV with Chris’s poorly behaved dog, Abbey, a cattle dog with a big personality that Chris refused to discipline. The apartment felt empty without Chris; they’d been inseparable since he got back from California, and without his friend around, Donut felt restless and lonely. TV and video games could do only so much to fill the void. Heading out with the guys felt good.

  “So what’s the plan for tomorrow?” Donut asked. “Anybody know?”

  “Another lightning fire, probably,” Chris said.

  The hotshots had spen
t all of Friday evening cutting line around a twenty-two-acre blaze near a mountaintop northwest of Prescott, one of the other small blazes that had broken out after the storm. They slept in a campground that night and woke up on the 29th with another small fire to deal with in the chaparral outside Skull Valley, about halfway between Yarnell and Prescott. That blaze was awful: no shade, little action, and nothing but sweat, smoke, and a growing irritability among the guys from lack of sleep. During that shift, Scott backed into a cactus and spent the afternoon pulling spines out of his ass. It was both annoying and a little humiliating, but it wasn’t as bad as the time a skunk had sprayed him. Really, Donut hadn’t missed much over the past few days. The biggest news was that after a couple of months chipping brush, John Percin had finally returned to the crew from his knee injury.

  Percin had come to Prescott from a Portland, Oregon, suburb, joining Granite Mountain after a stint in rehab and a job waiting tables at a Mexican restaurant. While the rest of Granite Mountain fought New Mexico’s Thompson Ridge Fire, Percin had stayed home doing inglorious fuels work in Prescott. Then he missed the Doce and saving the juniper. When he returned to the hotshots, he’d promptly gone down with heat exhaustion on the Skull Valley fire.

  But other than Percin’s unfortunate introduction to crew life, Donut hadn’t missed more than a few hundred bucks of overtime. Zup and Chris didn’t know where the hotshots were headed in the morning, nor were they very concerned about it. Whatever assignment they drew meant, most important, more overtime. Granite Mountain had taken only two days off since the Hart Fire, and June was shaping up to be a profitable month for the crew. They’d already racked up 261 hours of overtime that year: more than $3,000 for each seasonal hotshot.

  —

  At Heather’s place outside of town, Scott Norris couldn’t sleep. Heather was working graveyard. To pass the time alone, Scott played with their puppy, watched TV, showered, and did the dishes and the laundry. He paced and resigned himself to the fact that he wouldn’t see her. He wasn’t pleased.