Fire Season

by Connors, Philip

  Dodge would die five years later, still haunted by his inability to show his men the way to their afterlife through and beyond the fire. Maclean returns repeatedly to a version of the event as a kind of Passion play, with Stations of the Cross scattered up the hill, marked now by literal crosses where each of the dead men fell, monuments to their unimaginable end. Although Maclean never says so explicitly, Dodge resembles a kind of Jesus figure, misunderstood in his message at the moment it counted most for the world, that world for Dodge consisting entirely of young men running uphill in a gulch and a wildfire running faster forever and ever—the nightmare scenario of all who have ever fought fire.

  Though he worked on the story for most of the last fourteen years he lived, the manuscript remained unfinished upon Maclean’s death. When it was published in 1992, Young Men and Fire was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award—a sadly posthumous tribute to a genius of American letters whose only other book was short-listed for a Pulitzer in 1977, a year when the judges deemed no book worthy of the award and abstained from offering a prize in fiction. But having started writing so late in life—he began A River Runs Through It only after he retired from teaching at the age of seventy—he was never angling for prizes. He was angling for immortality, and with both of his books he achieved it.

  The next morning the Cobre Fire hardly shows any smoke. Nevertheless, the jumper plane lifts off from Grant County Airport at 8 a.m. It circles the fire for half an hour, the spotter assessing likely jump spots and dropping paper streamers, testing the wind. The streamers unfurl and float into the treetops, bright pennants of yellow and pink, weighted slightly on one end with a pouch of sand to ensure they don’t just float for miles. Their colors make them easier to follow than those original burlap sacks, and the weight of the sand and the length of the streamer are calibrated to mimic the drift of the average-size smokejumper. The spotter judges the winds light enough to jump. The open meadow on Apache Peak provides the target for landing. From our privileged perch, Ben and I watch as first one jumper and then another leaps into midair, chutes abloom above them in an instant. They swoop toward the mountain amid swirling ridge-top winds, soaring like giant birds.

  One of them, fooled by a sudden wind gust, slams into the meadow with an audible thud and performs an awkward half-somersault. The other lands smoothly but manages to hang his chute in a tree. Their para-cargo—food, water, tools, tents, sleeping bags—follows soon after in a box with its own chute. I amble over to greet them, make sure they’re still in one piece. The first of them beams at me, still geeked up on the thrill of the leap. “Dawson,” he says, extending a hand. “Not very often we jump at this elevation. Those ridge-top winds were gnar-gnar”—jumper shorthand for gnarly times two. I tell Dawson what I know of the fire and how to get there, while Ben helps the other jumper, Chris, untangle his chute from the branches of a wind-stunted pine. We learn they’re BLM jumpers from Alaska. In half an hour their gear stands neatly stacked in the meadow, and they’re ready to begin their hike to the fire.

  “Looked from above like we could take a leak on it and that would be that,” Dawson says.

  “Cocktails and cribbage at six, then?”

  Chris smiles and flips me the thumbs-up.

  “Deal me in,” he says.

  All day long I scope the surrounding country for sleeper smokes, snags hit by lightning that may have smoldered overnight. None appears. By early afternoon the Cobre Fire no longer shows. I try to engage Ben in conversation, but it becomes clearer by the moment that, being half my age, he regards me as something of a bewhiskered fogey. That I would write letters to friends on a typewriter, sit with them for days making notes in the margins, hike down the mountain with them and drop them in a mailbox to be trucked overland across the country, strikes him as about as antiquarian as sending word by smoke signal or semaphore. He becomes animated only when I ask about his high school’s rivalries with other local towns. He tells me he and his buddies in Truth or Consequences, better known in these parts as “T or C,” or simply Torc (rhymes with dork), have a particular hatred for the boys of Hatch, a town just down the road that proudly calls itself the green-chile capital of the world. After football games the boys of each town honor an unspoken agreement with their rivals to gather in the parking lot of the Sonic drive-in, dump Jim Beam into their Styrofoam soda cups, say unkind things about the size of each other’s genitalia, and, when properly lubricated, “throw down on the little sissy bitches,” as Ben puts it. Good, clean American fun.

  Around four o’clock, Chris and Dawson tramp into the meadow. Their fireproof Nomex uniforms look as fresh as the day they were laundered. They laugh about how easy a fire it was to put out. “A few shovelfuls of dirt and it was nap time,” Chris says. Hardly the stuff of tragedy or even poetry—more like farce, that the Forest Service, in a spasm of institutional habit, would drop men from an airplane on a fire that would have burned out on its own after skunking around in a stump hole for a day or two.

  Yet I have been provided with a skilled cribbage player, and for that I’m grateful. Dawson and Ben decline my invitation to the cocktail hour, but Chris grabs the deck and begins to shuffle. I simmer a packet of creamy noodles to supplement Chris’s Top Ramen. We find a ball game on the radio, hoist a glass of spirits, toast our benefactor: To the United States Forest Circus, aviation and prevention divisions.

  “Dude, the jumpers back at the base are gonna hate me,” Chris says. “Whisky, cards, chocolate, a baseball game—this is the cushiest jump I’ve ever made.”

  “Don’t forget coffee in the morning,” I remind him. “Freshly ground, organic, grown in the shade.”

  “We should’ve called the fire a half-acre and stayed another night.”

  For four days I leave the mountain to Ben. Even as I reacquaint myself with the pleasures of “syphilization,” as Edward Abbey called it, a part of me can’t help but wonder how the kid is holding up. Storms roll through all weekend, and the local newspaper, the Silver City Daily Press—or Daily Press Release, as it’s more accurately known—reports several new fires on the forest. I’m tempted to leave my radio on all weekend, scanning for news. Because we live on a hill south of downtown, I can make out the dispatcher, Cherry Mountain, and Apache Peak too if I set my radio on a bookshelf in the living room. For a day and a half I resist the temptation but on Saturday afternoon I break down and eavesdrop for a few minutes. From what I can gather in bits and pieces of half-broken transmissions, it seems a fire crew is lost in the Black Range, somewhere north of Apache Peak. They’ve run out of water, so a helicopter has been dispatched to drop them some and save them from dehydration. Ben sounds panicky and overwhelmed, the dispatcher exasperated, the helicopter spotter bemused. This is what my Forest Service friends call a Class C clusterfuck. I can’t bear to listen very long. Later I will learn that the crew thought they could hike cross-country from their fire to Wright’s Saddle, a distance of seven miles across tough country, traversable only by mule deer and elk.

  I mention none of this when I return to the lookout on Tuesday. Ben is sitting on the porch when I arrive, his bedroll looped to his pack. Our transition, totaling maybe three minutes, is curt and sort of sad.

  “I’m still young,” he says. “I need to be around people. I got so lonely I hiked out Sunday night and drove into town. I hiked back up the next morning.”

  “Are you cashing it in for the summer?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  Thinking about, hell. His pack is enormous. He’s cleaned all his canned food out of the pantry, leaving only a few packets of dried fruit and the bottled water. He’s burned more wood than he cut, committing one of the cardinal sins of lookoutry. I can’t work up much in the way of outrage, though. Almost every year one or two souls spend a day in a tower on the Gila and never return. Just last year one guy got on the radio his second night on Loco Mountain, not long after dark, and called the Beaverhead work station to say his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. It t
ook half an hour of coaxing over the radio by the station manager to calm him down, and the next day he hiked out and was never heard from again. When you consider a person has to be free of a fear of fire (pyrophobia), a fear of confined spaces (claustrophobia), a fear of being alone (isolophobia), a fear of heights (acrophobia), a fear of steep slopes and stairs (bathmophobia), a fear of being forgotten or ignored (athazagoraphobia), a fear of the dark (nyctophobia), a fear of wild animals (agrizoophobia), a fear of birds (ornithophobia), a fear of thunder and lightning (brontophobia), a fear of forests (hylophobia), a fear of wind (anemophobia), a fear of clouds (nephophobia), a fear of fog (homichlophobia), a fear of rain (ombrophobia), a fear of stars (siderophobia), and a fear of the moon (selenophobia), then it’s little wonder most people aren’t meant to be lookouts.

  As Ben lumbers off under the weight of a giant pack, I know I’ve seen him for the last time. Unless my superiors find another relief lookout in a hurry—unlikely, given the prerogatives of government paperwork—more extended tours and overtime await me. I can’t say I’m disappointed by this. Martha’s about to go east and visit family for a month, an annual ritual, and I’ll be left with little for which to pine back in town. Instead I’ll reapply myself to the unfinished project of learning how to think like a mountain. And if the silence begins to disquiet me, I can listen in on my radio’s tactical channels. The west side of the Black Range has caught fire in my absence—two new lightning starts called the Diamond and the Meason—and for the next several weeks their smoke will hug the mountains to my north. These fires, it’s been decided, will not be suppressed. The time has come for the forest to burn.

  3

  June

  Man always kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness. Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?

  —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

  Aldo Leopold & the world’s first wilderness * the joys of walking in cities & mountains * a look back at the McKnight Fire * Meason & Diamond fires on the move * fish rescue in South Diamond Creek * camping in Apache country * scenes from the Victorio War * the wisdom of Marlin Perkins

  Among the high holy days I observe each summer, the third of June holds a special place. On this day in 1924, Aldo Leopold’s plan to preserve a roadless core surrounding the headwaters of the Gila River received approval from the regional office in Albuquerque. The proposal had been under consideration for two years, during which his draft memo and the accompanying maps were for a time misfiled and presumed lost. From a logistical perspective alone, the ruling was impressive: it banned roads, auto travel, hotels, summer homes, and hunting lodges from an area nearly the size of Rhode Island. From a cultural standpoint, though, Leopold’s vision for the Gila marked a decisive turn in America’s treatment of wilderness. Never in history had a government body, American or otherwise, surveyed the values of so large a piece of country and decided that its highest use lay not in economic exploitation or—as in the case of the national parks—scenic wonders, but in no use at all except by the nonmotorized traveler. If country can be thought of as a text, then the Gila ought to be considered the first rough draft of the wilderness prospect in America.

  Two forces shaped Leopold’s thinking as he mulled his proposal for the Gila Wilderness—one practical, one intellectual. His inspections of the national forests in New Mexico and Arizona offered the practical perspective. When he’d first seen the territories in 1909, six areas of between half a million and a million acres contained no roads. In Arizona, these included the Tonto Basin, the Kaibab Plateau around the Grand Canyon, and the Blue Range and adjacent White Mountains. In New Mexico the same held true for the Jemez and Pecos divisions of the Santa Fe National Forest and the Gila River drainage of the Gila National Forest. By 1919, roads had punctured all of them but the Gila. Only the rough and broken nature of the country had spared it.

  The second major influence on Leopold’s thinking occurred when he met a young Forest Service architect in December of 1919. Arthur Carhart, like Leopold a native Iowan, was the first full-time landscape architect to be employed by the agency. Among his early assignments was to survey the shoreline of Trappers Lake in the White River National Forest of Colorado, a site of sublime alpine beauty, in preparation for the development of summer homes. Carhart returned from his mission with a surprising proposal: leave the lake alone. Summer homes would only mar it.

  A colleague of Carhart’s, aware of the preservationist instincts he shared with Leopold, arranged for the two of them to meet. Their discussion had an impact out of proportion to its footnoted place in the history of American conservation. Though they were hardly the first to express concern over the disappearance of wilderness, their meeting of the minds galvanized an effort within the Forest Service to preserve wilderness before it vanished. While Leopold turned his attention to what remained of the Southwestern wilderness, Carhart became a proponent of protecting what we now call the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota.

  Carhart later recorded the essentials of their talk in a memo for Leopold: “The problem spoken of in [our] conversation was, how far shall the Forest Service carry or allow to be carried man-made improvements in scenic territories, and whether there is not a definite point where all such developments, with the exception perhaps of lines of travel and necessary signboards, shall stop.” Their shared thinking centered on the idea of limits: “There is a limit to the number of lands of shore line on the lakes; there is a limit to the number of lakes in existence; there is a limit to the mountainous areas of the world, and in each one of these situations there are portions of natural scenic beauty which are God-made, and the beauties of which of a right should be the property of all people.”

  Starry-eyed notions of wilderness conservation far predated Leopold’s vision for the Gila. In 1810, the poet William Wordsworth described England’s Lake District as a “sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy.” In 1832, the painter George Catlin, famous for his richly colored portraits of Plains Indians, argued in favor of preserving a “nation’s Park” on the northern prairies, a kind of museum of the natural world, to include both wild animals and native people. Forty years would pass before the creation of anything resembling Catlin’s idea. By the time the U.S. Congress voted to establish Yellowstone National Park, indigenous people almost everywhere had been killed, imprisoned, or shunted onto marginal reservation land. Yellowstone was saved mainly in the interest of preventing private exploitation of its geothermal wonders. Those who fought to protect it thought of it as a collection of natural curiosities, not a functioning wilderness. The railroads, after coveting the park’s resources for years, saw a chance to profit nonetheless: if they couldn’t be given access to the timber, they could at least transport, feed, and shelter visiting tourists from the East. Camping out of doors for the pleasure of it remained an eccentricity, and the park was duly developed with roads and hotels to serve the masses. New York’s Adirondack Forest Preserve, established in 1885, also found its reason for existence in a utilitarian rationale: it offered protection to the major water source of New York City.

  As Leopold developed his plan for protecting the Gila, he tried to synthesize two divergent schools of conservationist thought. One of them, exemplified by the bearded sage John Muir, advocated preserving wilderness both for its own sake and as a natural cathedral for the human spirit, where man could come face-to-face with higher values. “Mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers,” Muir wrote, “but as fountains of life.” He called the forests of California “God’s first temples,” and spoke in rapturous prose about trees “proclaiming the gospel of beauty like apostles.” When he’d encountered a rare orchid, Calypso borealis, on his rambles through the swamps of the Great Lake
s region, he’d sat down next to it and wept at its beauty and fragility. He sensed a profound interconnectedness in all of nature. “When we try to pick out anything by itself,” he wrote, “we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

  The other school of thought was led by Gifford Pinchot, President Teddy Roosevelt’s right-hand man on conservation matters. Pinchot argued that the scenic or spiritual qualities of a landscape were not sufficient reason to protect them. He fought against “a fundamental misconception that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generations. There could be no more serious mistake.” When scenic values came into conflict with the material needs of the American people, scenery had to give way to “highest use.” How far development should go, or who was to decide what constituted the highest use of any particular natural resource—these were slippery questions Pinchot left unanswered.

  The two men’s differences are neatly illustrated by an event that occurred while they were on a group outing in the Grand Canyon during the summer of 1896. They were part of a commission assessing the forests of the West—some of them already part of the reserve system, others soon to be—and during one of their walks they came upon a tarantula. Pinchot raised his boot to squash it, but Muir stopped him. As Pinchot later wrote in his memoirs, “He wouldn’t let me kill it. He said it had as much right there as we did.” For Muir, all of creation was sacred, including the gnarliest arachnid; he celebrated “the essential oneness of all living beings.” Pinchot believed man ought to be the arbiter of what in the natural world was useful and what was not. Although Pinchot enjoyed Muir’s gifts as a storyteller, and they found common cause in their desire to protect the Western forests from abusive commercial interests, they would clash repeatedly in years to come over how those forests should be managed.