Young Men and Fire

by Maclean, Norman

  To see how Dodge’s life as a woodsman shaped his thoughts in an emergency and to follow his thoughts closely, one more tick must be added to the tock of his makeup. In an emergency he thought with his hands. He had an unusual mechanical skill that helped him think, that at least structured his thoughts. It was a woodsman’s mechanical skill—he liked to work with rifles, fix equipment, build lean-to’s or log cabins. He wasn’t fancy, he was handy. And in fact that spring he had been excused from training with the Smokejumpers so that he could be maintenance man for the whole Smokejumper base—no doubt part of the cause of the tragedy he was about to face with a crew only three of whom he knew. The foreman, then, was facing this tragic emergency alone, withdrawn as he often was into his own thoughts, which were the thoughts men and women have who are wired together in such a way that their brains can’t start moving without their hands moving at the same time.

  The present question, then, in its purest form is, How many brains, how much guts, did it take in those fiery seconds to conceive of starting another fire and lying down in it? In its maximum form, the question would be, Did Dodge actually make an invention when 250 or 300 feet of solid flames were about to catch up to him?

  Two of the Forest Service’s greatest fire experts, W. R. (“Bud”) Moore and Edward G. Heilman, Moore’s successor as director of fire control and aviation management for the Forest Service’s Region One, have told me they never heard of this kind of escape fire before Dodge’s use of it, and their experience corresponds to my own, which, though limited to summers when I was young, goes back to 1918. Rumsey and Sallee say under oath that in 1949 nothing like it had been mentioned in their training course, and, as Rumsey adds, even if it had been explained to him and he had seen it work, it seemed crazy enough so that he wasn’t sure he would have stepped into it if it had been for real.

  A lot of questions about the woods can’t be answered by staying all the time in the woods, and it also works the other way—a lot of deep inner questions get no answer unless you go for a walk in the woods. My colleague at the University of Chicago Robert Ferguson pointed out to me that James Fenimore Cooper had something like Dodge’s fire burning in his favorite of his own novels, The Prairie, first published in 1827. Cooper’s eastern readers are held in suspense throughout most of chapter 13 by the approach of a great prairie fire from which the old trapper rescues his party at the last moment by lighting a fire in advance of the main one and having it ready for human occupancy by the time the sheet of flames arrives. He stepped his party into the burned-off grass and moved them from side to side as the main fire struck.

  Cooper’s readers clearly were not expected to know of this device or there would be no justification for the prolonged suspense which the chapter is supposed to create, but the escape fire on the prairie is no literary invention.

  Mavis Loscheider of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, an outstanding authority on the life of the Plains Indians, sent me evidence showing that something like this kind of fire was traditionally set by Plains Indians to escape from grass fires and that pioneers on the plains picked up the invention from the Indians.

  In his second volume of The American Fur Trade of the Far West, Hiram M. Chittenden describes how the prairie escape fire worked in the early 1800s:

  The usual method of avoiding the danger of these [prairie] fires was to start one in the immediate vicinity of the person or company in peril. This fire, at first small and harmless, would soon burn over an area large enough to form a safe asylum and when the sweeping cohorts of flame came bearing down upon the apparently doomed company, the mighty line would part as if by prearrangement and pass harmlessly by on either side.

  There are still good grounds, however, to believe Dodge “invented” his escape fire. Why doubt his word before the Board of Review that he had never heard of such a thing before? Even if it was known to mountain men, it could not have been much used in timbered country, if for no other reason than that it would seldom work there. The heat of a timber fire is too intense, and the fire is too slow and prolonged and consumes too much oxygen to permit walking around in it. Chances are Dodge’s fire wouldn’t have worked (wouldn’t even have been thought of) if Dodge had been caught on the other, timbered side of Mann Gulch where the fire started. Moreover, Dodge’s escape fire differs in important ways from the escape fires used by Indians and pioneers. Dodge’s fire was started so close to the main fire that it had no chance to burn a large “asylum” in which the refugee could duck and dodge the main fire. Not being able to duck and dodge and remain alive, Dodge lay down in the ashes, where the heat was least intense and where he was close enough to the ground to find some oxygen.

  Of course, Dodge had a Smokejumper’s knowledge that if you can’t reach the top of the hill you should turn and try to work back through burned-out areas in the front of a fire. But 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. Perhaps, though, his biggest invention was not to burn a hole in the fire but to lie down in it. 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. Somebody said, “To hell with that,” and they kept going, most of them to their deaths.

  Dodge later told Earl Cooley that, when the fire went over him, he was lifted off the ground two or three times.

  “This lasted approximately five minutes,” he concludes in his testimony, and you and I are left to guess what the “this” was like. His watch said 6:10 when he sat up. By that time, death had come to Mann Gulch.

  Dodge himself was allowed to live a little over five years more, what then was thought to be about the maximum time one who had Hodgkin’s disease could live. However, he would never jump again. His wife knew when he entered the hospital for the last time that he knew it was for the last time. Like many woodsmen, he always carried a jackknife with him in his pants pocket, always. She told me that when he entered the hospital for the last time he left his jackknife home on his bedroom table, so he and she knew.

  WHEN RUMSEY AND SALLEE REACHED the crevice, the main fire had reached the bottom of Dodge’s escape fire. They were ahead of the flames, or at least thought they were, but couldn’t be sure because of the rolling and un-revealing smoke. Rumsey fell into what he thought was a juniper bush and would not have bothered to get up if Sallee hadn’t stopped and coldly looked at him. In the summer of 1978, when Rumsey and I were where he thought the juniper bush must have been, he said to me, “I guess I would be dead if he hadn’t stopped. Funny thing, though, he never said a word to me. He just stood there until I said it to myself, but I don’t think he said anything. He made me say it.” They ran upgulch on the top of the ridge for a hundred yards or so and staggered down the slope on the other side of the ridge. There they stumbled onto a rock slide “several hundred feet long and perhaps seventy-five feet wide.” The dimensions hardly seem large enough, but there weren’t any other rock slides around. Within five minutes, the fire, coming down from the top of the ridge, had reached them.

  Although Rumsey says they were both “half hysterical,” they were objective enough to see that the fire as it approached them was following the patterns of a fire coming over a ridge and starting down the other side. At the top of the ridge it burned slowly, veering back and forth in the way fires do as winds from opposite sides of a ridge meet each other. It flapped, sometimes it turned downhill toward them, and once it turned sideways and jumped a draw with a spot fire and, well started there, it jumped back again. Once below the fluctuations at the top of the ridge it settled down and burned straight toward them. It burned with such intensity that it created an updraft, sucking in its center so that it was now a front with two pincers. It hit the rock slide on two sides. Rumsey and Sallee, like the
early prairie pioneers, tried to duck and dodge in their asylum, but there wasn’t much room for running. Rumsey says the fuel was thinner near the top of the ridge. “The flames were only eight to ten feet high.”

  A form like a solidification of smoke stumbled out of the smoke ahead and died in the rocks. It was a four-point buck burned hairless except for the eyelashes.

  After the fire passed the rock slide “it really started rolling” downhill, replacing trees with torches.

  Soon they heard someone calling from far off, but it turned out to be “only thirty yards away.” It was Bill Hellman. His shoes and pants were burned off, and his flesh hung in patches. When asked at the Review, “Did Hellman at that time seem to be suffering tremendously?” Sallee answered, “Yes.” To the next question, “Did he make any statement to you?” Sallee’s reply was, “He just said to tell his wife something, but I can’t remember what it was.”

  They laid him on a long, flat rock to keep his burns out of the ashes. As Rumsey says, “There wasn’t much else we could do,” having thrown away all their first-aid supplies on their flight from the fire.

  Suddenly, there was a shout and a form in the smoke. It was Dodge answering the shouting that had gone on between them and Hellman. He “didn’t appear excited,” but he “looked kind of—well, you might say, dumbfounded or shocked.” His eyes were red from smoke and his clothes black with ashes. He obviously was not his fastidious self, but he still had a characteristic about him.

  They didn’t say much about anything, least of all about whether the missing were alive. Dodge, in coming over the hill, had seen one alive and couldn’t remember his name except that it began with “S” (Joe Sylvia). When Dodge sat up in his own fire he heard someone “holler” faintly to the east and, after a long time, found him only 150 to 200 feet upgulch and, oddly, below him, perhaps 100 feet. He was badly burned and euphorically happy. Dodge moved him to the shelter of a big rock and cut the shoes off his swollen feet, but there was no use in Dodge leaving his only worldly gift with him, his can of Irish white potatoes, since Sylvia could not feed himself with the charred and useless remains of his hands. In the hours to come, he would be without water because he could not lift his canteen.

  Evidently Dodge hadn’t seen any others as he came up the hill or crossed to the other side, and, as he said at the Review, by the time he reached Rumsey, Sallee, and Hellman he “didn’t think any of [the others] were still alive.”

  Rumsey and Sallee had come to a more hopeful conclusion once the fire passed them by in the rock slide—after all, they had made it, and, besides, once they understood the intention of Dodge’s fire, they believed it would work and assumed at least some of the crew behind them had understood Dodge’s fire and crowded into it. But Dodge’s arrival eliminated that possibility, so there was very little they dared to talk about. After a while Dodge and Sallee left Hellman in Rumsey’s care and started back uphill through the ashes without saying just why. Since none had been saved with Dodge, the assumption now was that any survivors would have made it over the hill, as Rumsey and Sallee had, so their search was a short one. Besides, the heat was still so intense it soon drove them back. They didn’t have to explain why they didn’t have anything to say when they returned.

  It was getting dark. Hellman already had drunk most of their water, even though it made him sick. He could see the glare of the Missouri a mile and a half below, and it inflamed his thirst, but he was not allowed to think of walking. He did revive enough to become talkative. It was here that he told Rumsey he had been burned at the top of the ridge, and it was partly on the basis of this remark that Sallee formed his assumption that Hellman had reached the top of the ridge by following the downgulch side of Dodge’s fire and so had had no buffer between him and the main fire raging upgulch. Once burned, though, like a wounded deer, he had started downhill for water but had collapsed after a few hundred yards. He was told to lie still on the rock and keep talking to forget the pain. Rumsey stayed with him, and at dusk Dodge and Sallee started for the river, Dodge leaving with them his canteen of water and his can of Irish white potatoes.

  Dodge and Sallee had a tough time getting down to the river. They had to go half a mile or more before they could find a weak spot in the fire front through which to work their way. They had no map or compass, and when they reached the river they went the wrong way.

  6

  FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS, the Smokejumpers who had landed in Mann Gulch passed from human remembrance perhaps as completely as they ever will. There were only five known to be alive at that moment, two of these soon to die, one with a name that began with “S.”

  Although Hellman had made it over the top of the ridge, he was despairing and smelling of burned flesh and was praying with Rumsey, who had been left to take care of him. They both had let their church attendance lapse and could not remember their prayers, so in embarrassment they prayed silently. From their position near the top of the ridge they could see, when the smoke opened, reflections of the fire in the Missouri River below, and Hellman had to be told again and again that he could not run to the river and immerse himself.

  Dodge had left his can of white potatoes with Hellman because Rumsey would be there to feed him, but instead of eating the potatoes Hellman drank the salt water in the can and further inflamed his thirst.

  For Dodge and Sallee on their way to the river, it was a never-never land in the night and the smoke, and without a map or compass. Both were near exhaustion and shock when they reached the river, and going downstream, which was easier for the water, also seemed easier for them. A boat passed that did not see them, then turned and went back upstream, and on this slight evidence they turned around too. They didn’t know much about the world anymore, not even whether it was up or down.

  Among other things, there were eleven of the crew they didn’t know anything about. The missing were probably in a world one hundred by three hundred yards—the world between the boy with a canteen of water and no hands to lift it and Hellman on the other side of the ridge, who was looking for forgotten prayers.

  The two top men in the Helena National Forest, supervisor Moir and assistant supervisor Eaton, had left Meriwether in haste for the fire at York because they and Jansson had agreed it was probably more important than the Mann Gulch fire. They had left in special haste because they could not reestablish radio contact with the crew on the York fire to determine its extent and the psychological stability of the crew that was fighting it. Matters got no more composed after they left when Jansson found out that the receiver of the radio at York had been dropped and broken by a hysterical volunteer sobbing for help. Both men and equipment were breaking.

  Dodge and Sallee had been going downriver to nowhere. At the same time, coming downriver from above were hordes of picnickers. Full of beer and the desire to be mistaken for firefighters, they landed at the Meriwether picnic grounds and crowded into the guard station to hear whatever they could get near enough to hear. Soon it became impossible for Jansson to tell the picnickers from his volunteer barflies, so he tried by radio to stop all except official boating on the river, but the radio operator at Canyon Ferry was off somewhere.

  Jansson forever held himself guilty for not being concerned about the jumpers at this time, although it is hard to see the justice of his continual prosecution of himself. As everyone did who did not think of them, he assumed the jumpers were too good to be caught in a fire—they either had joined up with Hersey’s crew on the Meriwether ridge or had escaped over the head of the gulch into Willow Creek or perhaps hadn’t liked the looks of things from the very first and had not jumped at all.

  Once Jansson did try to radio Missoula about the jumpers, but another frequency kept cutting him off. Then he went back to the job of trying to get some coherence in his camp. As he knew, there is no better way to do this than to start a training school—he tried to make a fire foreman out of one of the three men who had been on a fire before, and he tried to make a radio operator
out of another volunteer, but his best luck was with two picnickers pretending to be firefighters whom he trained to be camp cooks for a crew that had now grown to thirty-five. A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

  JANSSON WAS ALSO KEEPING AN EYE on the fire near the top of Meriwether ridge where he had sent alternate ranger Hersey and his crew of nineteen men with two hold-at-all-cost orders: (1) hold the trail from the east open so that the jumpers could come down the ridge and join them, and (2) above all, hold the perpendicular trail behind them open so that, if they had to, they could escape back to the camp and, if they had to, from there into the river. The fire now was definitely moving down the Meriwether slope.

  As it darkened, Jansson began to see flames making movies of themselves on the faces of the cliffs fifteen hundred feet straight above him.

  Hersey says that when some of the crew saw the cliffs reenact the fire they tried to jump off them.

  In the wide world, Hersey was probably the only man in whose mind the Smokejumpers were constantly present. Their absence was heightened by the fact that Hersey had followed Harrison’s tracks on the trail to the top of the ridge and the front of the fire—his tracks were easy to follow because he had been using his Pulaski as a walking stick, and going up that stepladder trail he had relied on it as if he and his Pulaski were a cripple and a crutch. What worried Hersey most was that at the top of the ridge Harrison’s tracks headed into some second growth that the fire was already burning. Hersey spent most of his time organizing his crew into a fire-line and giving them another speech about how to face danger. He gave them a speech about facing danger every time he walked around the head of the fire and every time the fire ran a reel of itself on a cliff. It would be interesting to know what he told them, because it seems to have worked fairly well. Anyway, his crew stayed on the line even after the trail up the ridge to the east had disappeared in flames. His crew, though, were drinking gallons of water more than seasoned firefighters would have, so he had to send one of them all the way down to Meriwether Station with a canvas sack for another load.