Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  Despite having been alone here for a good long while, I move with ease and even joy into the domestic realm. One of our pastimes involves collaboration on a big pot of chili, and today is the perfect day for it. One of us begins with sautéed onions, a little garlic, some sausage browned in the skillet. We take turns adding this and that over the course of several hours, until we’ve got it right—or as right as it can get with the spices on hand. While the pot bubbles on its blue flame we play cribbage, notching our respective victories along opposite edges of the board, our very own World Series and almost as intense, minus the 50,000 screaming fans. In cribbage the scoring happens so quickly that keeping track with pen and paper is impractical, unless you’re waiting out a snowstorm in a remote mountain cabin, where any old method will do. The horse-race element of the lap around the board with leapfrogging pegs adds a frisson of excitement and encourages trash talk. Our board is a curious piece of work. Made some years ago by Mandijane’s husband Sebastian on a similarly fogged-in day, it was fashioned from a length of two-by-four two feet long, the peg holes bored out with a cordless drill we keep on the premises. Each lane is painted a different color—red, white, green—and so are the matching pairs of nails we use for pegs. The board could easily double as a billy club; you could use it to beat a rabid fox to death if you had to.

  Amid the drowsy-making heat of the woodstove, our concentrations suffer and we abandon the fourth game midway through. One of us drifts to the bed with a book. One of us fixes a snack. The dog gets a treat and a scratch behind the ears, the humans a guilt-free nap. This is about as civilized as you could hope to live out here in the wild, though the mist will eventually grow tiresome. Past a certain point it can no longer be called mist; it’s clear what we are is lost in clouds. For twenty-one hours we are denied a view beyond the meadow on top. The cloud ceiling exists somewhere far below us. Visibility extends a hundred yards. If Martha weren’t here I might go a little nutty from the lack of a view, a view being the thing you’d assume I could take for granted up here. Sun and sky and distant desert are my media. When they disappear I’m like a sailor trapped inland, far from his boat. This time, though, alone with Martha on our island in the sky, I’m happy to be marooned.

  Our idyll is over in forty-eight hours. Duty calls to Martha in the world below. Her departure always sends me into a funk. Adjusting to her presence here is simple; accepting her sudden absence is a foul and brutal process. I mope about the mountain tossing stones at trees, gathering wood, staring forlornly at the far-off desert. I feel raw and tender in the middle of my being, as if one of my ribs has been wrenched loose with rusty pliers. Only the dog offers solace.

  I let Alice out of the cabin to play our favorite game, in which she jumps for a stick I hold aloft at shoulder level. She quickly tires of this and wanders off, sniffing around the meadow. I turn my back on her for less than a minute; when I glance again in her direction, I catch a glimpse of her hindquarters disappearing at a dead sprint into the tree line. I know what this means. She has caught Martha’s scent and she’s not coming back. I’ve been careless; this has happened before. After Martha’s visits I typically keep Alice locked down in the cabin for at least two hours, until she forgets that Martha was ever here. In my melancholy I abandoned protocol. I know it’s too late to call her back or catch her now. She won’t stop running until she comes upon Martha, and I won’t see her again until I return to town for days off. My funk deepens: I’ve been repudiated, my company judged inferior. Or maybe Alice simply likes the thrill of the chase. Either way it stings.

  That my feelings could be hurt by a dog—that I do not greet her flight as a liberation into purer solitude—is evidence of a revolution in my attitude toward domesticated pets. Until we adopted Alice, I’d never felt much of an impulse toward dog ownership. Experience with the dogs of family and friends indicated they were odoriferous, overbearing beasts, dedicated to immediate gratification of whatever urge bubbled up in their tiny little brains, their owners perversely in need of unconditional love and mindless diversion. But Martha kept telling me her existence felt unnatural without a dog—she’d had one all through her childhood and most of college—and what kind of husband would I be to force an unnatural existence upon my wife, or at least more unnatural than the one I’ve already foisted on her? My hundred-day sojourn on a mountain each summer makes our marriage unusual enough. I suppose in some way Alice represented a compromise, whereby I’d continue to be that rare creature, a married lookout, and Martha would be compensated with a canine companion in the family unit. Now that Alice has been in our lives for three years, I see her for what she truly is: an odoriferous, overbearing beast dedicated to immediate gratification of whatever urge bubbles up in her tiny little brain, and a reliable and even comforting source of unconditional love and mindless diversion.

  Also, she’s pretty cute.

  For weeks I’ve been dreading the arrival of my relief. A rookie named Ben, he will require a thorough tutorial in the art of lookoutry. I’ve never considered myself much of a teacher, and the skills required of a person here, aside from the use of the Osborne Firefinder, are more intuitive than mechanical and therefore difficult to impart. It’s one of those jobs you can learn only by doing. Plus I’ve become accustomed to having the facilities all to myself, each tool hung on its proper hook; now I’ll be forced to share the premises. This place may be part of the public domain, open to visitors any hour of any day, but I’ve become possessive of it, and anyway the day hikers never stay more than an hour. The arrival of my relief is something altogether different. It’s as if I’m about to take vacation and surrender my house to a stranger. Who knows what debauched rituals will be enacted in my absence?

  On the other hand, visitors bring the power to lift me from my loneliness, so when my young colleague and his mule packer radio shortly before their arrival, my spirits brighten. I descend the tower and greet them in the meadow, Les again on horseback, leading a single mule, Ben on foot looking a little bit whipped and a good bit lost.

  I’d heard that he was a raw youth mere days out of high school—thus his late arrival, nigh on June—but I’d chosen to picture him a budding scholar, introverted but likable, at ease in his own skin and wise beyond his years: basically, the polar opposite of myself at his age. Instead what I find is a gangly kid hardly in need of a proper shave for more than one square inch of his chin, his eyes betraying the pained realization that he now resides far from the comforts he has taken for granted as an American in the twenty-first century. After we unload his supplies and stack them on the porch, his first move is to wander around the meadow with his cell phone in hand, searching for a signal. “It keeps showing two bars,” he says, “but it won’t let me send a text.”

  “Now and then a day hiker claims to get a signal, but I think a lot depends on your service provider.”

  “I thought for sure I’d be able to text,” he says.

  “It’s only four days you’re out of reach.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got a girl down in El Paso.”

  “Invite her to visit.”

  “She don’t hike.”

  I look at Les. He rubs his beard and shrugs his shoulders, climbs up onto his horse, says goodbye and good luck. He aims to beat feet ahead of another round of storms. In my head I’m already calculating the odds of the kid’s lasting the month of June, much less the whole season. Shy of even money, I figure, studying the slightly haunted look in his eyes.

  Nonetheless I proceed as if he’s here to stay. I can be an ingratiating host—the residual habits of the professional bartender, to which I have access at any moment. Sit right down. Make yourself at home. Let me pour you a drink.

  I lead him on a ten-minute tour of the mountaintop—the cabin, the outhouse, the old corral, the likeliest places to collect firewood. I show him where to find all the tools he’ll need, how to hook up a new propane tank if one goes empty. I demonstrate the use of the cistern. I point out the stash of extra toilet pape
r. I help him stow his food in the cupboards. Among his supplies are three cases of bottled water.

  “Didn’t anyone tell you about the cistern?”

  “I guess they mentioned it, but they never said it was safe to drink. Besides, I don’t like regular water.”

  He holds up a single-serving packet of Kool-Aid drink mix, demonstrates for me the magical marriage of sugar-free flavor crystals and mineral-enhanced purified water in a see-through, petrochemical container. The color of it is striking, the concept pure genius: entice a person to pay for something he can find for free by providing it in a package ergonomically designed to fit in his hand and perfectly engineered for absorbing an additional value-added product without the need for a pesky spoon. God bless America, land that I love.

  We climb the tower and I begin the spiel I’ve practiced over the years on the curious and the uninitiated. I point out the major landmarks. I demonstrate the use of the Osborne Firefinder. I explain the principle of triangulation, how you cross your azimuth line with that of another lookout using the strings on the map. I enumerate the features of his radio: the various channels and their purposes, the scan function, the knobs and toggle switches. It’s not long before he’s plainly bored. He graduated from high school five days ago; he’s through with teachers and lessons and for that it’s hard to blame him. I must seem another old-timer possessed of a trove of dubious knowledge, enthralled by all the little things I know and he doesn’t.

  “That hike wore me out,” he says. “If you don’t mind I think I’ll head down and take a nap here in a bit.”

  “Fine with me.”

  “Pretty good view, though.”

  “That’s why we’re here.”

  For a while we sit in silence. Along the Black Range storm clouds swell, cumulonimbus rising like misshapen bread dough, their shadows darkening the crest. I can feel their power deep in my bones—the stillness that descends in their gathering a kind of deception, the proverbial calm before the storm. Les radios from the pass, lets us know he rode back safely. The animals are in the trailer and he’s headed down the road. I use this little exchange as a teaching tool in the proper use of the radio. Ben seems attentive, if a little overwhelmed.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll go over it a couple more times in the morning. With a little practice you’ll be an old pro.”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  The first lightning strike hits, the flash and the crash damn near synchronous. I see it to the north of us a quarter to a third of a mile, a livid filament. Ben claims to have seen it to the south of us about the same distance. Either it was a forked strike and we each saw one of its fingers, or it was a single strike and one of us was fooled by its reflection in the windows of the tower. Either way it struck awfully close.

  “I think I’ll take that nap now,” Ben says.

  He hotfoots it down the steps like a man late for a court date. I’m not inclined to judge him for that. The first time I saw a strike so near the tower I nearly shat myself, and where there’s been one others often follow. I sit on the cot with my knees tucked under my chin, swiveling my head this way and that to follow the progress of the storm. Strikes pound the ridges to the south and east, and each one makes me twitch. I have heard more than once the story of a lookout who was sitting in this tower when it was zapped by lightning, and though the structure is grounded with copper wires running to bedrock, the force of the energy through its metal frame blew his shoes off his feet and knocked him unconscious for something like five minutes. Some who knew him claim that ever after he was not the same man. I have no desire to repeat the experiment—I’m comfortable with my eccentricities as they stand—but I’d hate to miss a smoke the instant it showed. I choose to play the odds and hope. Fingers crossed; sphincter clenched.

  The storm moves off. The clouds break apart. An hour passes without incident. I look at my watch and see I’ve stayed past quitting time. I hang my binoculars on their hook, tidy my stack of radio logs, on which I note each communication to and from my post, and prepare to knock off. Then I see it. Nearly due north, six hundred yards at most. A single lightning-struck tree sending faint tendrils of blue smoke up the ridge. I consider rousting Ben from the cabin for a real-time, hands-on lesson but decide against it. The smoke will still be here when he wakes, and I’ll guide him through the process then.

  I plot the fire’s location—very simple from this distance—and call it in to dispatch. It smokes at the highest reaches of the Cobre Creek drainage, so I name it the Cobre Fire. Because of the waning daylight and the fire’s considerable distance from a road, my superiors decide they’ll attack it in the morning with smokejumpers, winds permitting. With the forest damp from recent rains, the fire is unlikely to spread. A cool night of high humidity will deny it the conditions it needs to thrive. Come morning it will hardly be alive.

  Smokejumpers have a long history on the Gila. Since 1947, a contingent has been stationed just south of the forest, first at Deming, then later at the aerial fire base near Silver City. They arrive each spring from bases up north—Missoula, Montana; McCall, Idaho; Fairbanks, Alaska—and spend a couple of months here. The elite corps of wildland firefighters, they’re dispatched on initial attack to smokes in some of the most remote and difficult country in the West, places beyond the reach of roads, places to which it would take a day or more to get a regular crew on the ground.

  The first jump of a wildfire occurred in July of 1940, in the Nez Perce National Forest in Idaho. The men tossed burlap sacks out of the plane’s cargo hold in order to test the winds; they jumped wearing padded leather football helmets with wire-mesh face masks to protect against head injuries. Many of the earliest smokejumpers were conscientious objectors during World War II. Opposed to killing men in Europe and Asia but not to serving their country, sixty of them happily signed on to fight fires in the forests of the American West. Their experiments were closely monitored by the U.S. Army, which borrowed the lessons learned in jumping wildfires and applied them to the formation of paratrooper units, such as the 101st Airborne.

  In addition to possessing a colorful history, the smokejumpers were blessed to have a poet write a beautiful book about them. Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire is the one and only masterpiece ever written on the subject of American wildfire. Better known for his novella A River Runs Through It, which Robert Redford made into a movie starring Brad Pitt, Maclean worked summers with the Forest Service when he was only a teenager, an opportunity he was afforded because able-bodied woodsmen had gone to fight in World War I. In 1920, Maclean went east to college at Dartmouth, to study English. When he finished, he returned home to Montana and worked again briefly in the mountains of his youth. It was a moment that divided his past and his future forever. He often looked back at a career that might have been—a career in the woods, in logging camps, fighting fires and packing with mules and playing cribbage in the bunkhouse. Instead he went to the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate and later held the post of William Rainey Harper Professor of English. He taught there for more than forty years, mostly Shakespeare and the Romantic poets, and each summer decamped from Hyde Park for Montana, where he spent three months at his family’s cabin on Seeley Lake—not far from where the smokejumpers made some of their first practice jumps in the summer of 1940.

  Nine years later, Maclean was home again for the summer when he heard about a fatal wildfire in Mann Gulch, a steep side canyon near the breaks of the Missouri River. Thirteen smokejumpers had died when a fire they were fighting blew up below them. A few days later Maclean arrived at the scene of the conflagration, with the fire still burning in stump holes and scattered trees. The smell and the look of the gulch haunted him the rest of his life. After his retirement in 1974, he would spend years attempting to reconstruct what had happened to the men who died there. Young Men and Fire is, in one sense, the story of an unforeseen disaster, in which smokejumpers accustomed to unifying earth, wind, and fire found themselves overwhelmed by that f
inal element, which they could not outrun. It is also, as Maclean put it, a story in search of itself as a story—or, to say it another way, a tragedy in search of a tragedian. Late in the book he writes:

  Those who know something about the woods or about nature should soon have perceived an alarming gap between the almost sole purpose, clear but narrow, of the early Smokejumpers and the reality they were sure to confront, reality almost anywhere having inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous, and the upgulch breeze can suddenly turn to murder. Since this principle comes about as close to being universal as a principle can, you might have thought that someone in the early history and training of the Smokejumpers would have realized that something like the Mann Gulch fire would happen before long. But no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man—namely, that generally a first principle can’t be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and become a second principle.

  To tell the story, Maclean taught himself the latest wildfire science with dogged precision, coaxed a friend to help him mark time on the hill, and read and reread the official report on the fire. He plumbed the recollections of the fire’s three survivors, two of whom he led back to the scene to revisit their close encounter with death. The smokejumpers’ foreman, Wag Dodge, had lit an escape fire and lain down in its ashes as the big fire whirl passed over his men: he tried in vain to persuade them to join him, the only hope for survival most of them had, though none of them listened. “With the flames of the fire front solid and a hundred yards deep he had to invent the notion that he could burn a hole in the fire,” Maclean wrote. “Perhaps all he could patent about his invention was the courage to lie down in his fire. Like a lot of inventions, it could be crazy and consume the inventor. His invention, taking as much guts as logic, suffered the immediate fate of many other inventions—it was thought to be crazy by those who first saw it.”