by Linda Jacobs
She drew a deep breath. Fire was sweeping across the land of her ancestors. She felt as though she could smell the smoky tang of pine forest and feel the comfortable heft of the fire tool. The decision that her job with HFD could go on hold hit her with the swiftness of a blow. Devon could stay with her father for a while.
“I’m going out there,” she told Javier.
“Count me in,” he had agreed. The miraculous thing was that after they had slept on it, neither they nor the other guys who’d sworn aboard had changed their minds. After her mandatory consultation with the department psychologist, the station chief had agreed to let her go. She and the Houston crew had worked the line together only a few days before she was called to be a trainer.
Clare snapped out of her reverie when the truck driver cut the engine. The only sounds were that of a crow’s caw and the brisk crackling of the North Fork. Then the firefighters moved, piling off the tailgate, their boots making hollow sounds on the metal. Voices rose and they passed tools.
Clare felt the odd person out, having come to observe so she could direct others later.
The hotshots’ assignment for the day was to cut a three-mile line along the southeast flank of the North Fork, while aerial bombardment with retardant liquid was used on the most active front. Before they got to the place where they were to work, Clare felt the first trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades.
To build a fire line, the sawyers started, revving up their chainsaws and felling trees over a fifteen-foot wide corridor. Afterward, the hotshots with Pulaskis cleared a two-foot wide swath, careful to hack out every vestige of roots that could keep a fire smouldering.
Clare had thought she was in shape, but the crew had been digging line since mid-June. As the morning wore on, she found that she was only able do about fifty feet an hour, while the others managed to clear at least a full chain, or sixty-six feet.
Toward noon, she fell farther behind. Her back and arms ached from bending and wielding the heavy Pulaski. She stopped frequently for water breaks, figuring that if she got dehydrated, she would be worse than useless. When lunch was finally called, she was torn between whether to sit and risk stiffening or to stand and eat. The sight of the crew lolling on the ground decided her.
With a care for her aching back, she sat and took off her hard hat. Dampening her sweat soaked bandanna in fresh water from her canteen, she attempted to wipe some of the salty grime from her face and hands before eating.
The day wasn’t half over.
After choking back a pair of dry bologna sandwiches, she leaned against a tree trunk and closed her eyes. Against the shifting sparks that decorated the backs of her eyelids, she saw Deering again, smiling at her with teeth that shone white against his skin.
But thinking of last night opened a darker dimension. When she had first seen Steve Haywood, she’d had a distinctly different impression of the park biologist. Going back into the lake after he’d fetched up on shore, he’d seemed a real trouper, not at all like the sodden wretch who had nearly fallen on the floor at the Bear Pit. Shortly after she’d been rude to him, she’d turned from her conversation with Deering to find him gone. Too late, she wished she’d done something to keep him from driving drunk.
Sitting against the tree, she found that even thinking used too much energy. It was just on the borderline between warm and hot, and rest felt so bonelessly wonderful. The sharpness of fresh-cut pine overpowered the undercurrent of smoke while insects droned around her head. Gradually, the voices of the crew muted, then fell silent …
She was inside an apartment complex that was burning faster than the Houston Fire Department could put it out. The wood shingle roofs were igniting from flying sparks so that the flames leaped from building to building. Sirens shrilled as more and more alarms were called.
Inside the smoky apartment hallway, Clare and Frank approached a closed door that poured smoke from around the edges. No other firefighters came from the opposite end of the building, leaving them alone to assault this cell of the larger conflagration.
“All for us,” Frank said through the mask on his air pack. She imagined the usual twinkle in his deep brown eyes.
Facing away from the door, Clare raised her leg and brought it back into a mule kick. The panel swung wide, back against the interior wall with a bang.
Light suffused the hall. Heat struck out and pounded. She crouched and turned to face the inferno. She’d been in worse situations, but couldn’t shake a bad feeling. Her rapid breathing hissed in her mask and she told herself she could stay the course.
Frank cracked the valve and sent up a power cone. Steam rose and hot water began to fall like rain, running down her helmet and into the neck of her coat. Over the fire’s roar was an overprint of snaps and pops that didn’t sound right.
She took a hand off the hose. Immediately, over a hundred pounds of pressure threatened to tear it from her remaining hand and Frank’s. Nevertheless, she clutched his arm, with the strength born of premonition. “Don’t go any farther!”
“Son of a bitch! Will you look at that?”
Clare jerked and her heart took off like a greyhound after the mechanical rabbit. She stared through open eyes at the afterimage of the flaming apartment. Gradually, she realized that she sat beneath a tree with the midday sun slanting through the branches, hoping she’d not called attention to herself.
“No shit, man,” someone replied to the request to ‘look at that.’
Clare swiveled toward the unmistakable crackling and saw what had happened. Not a hundred yards back, the North Fork had jumped the line, rendering the morning’s work useless.
CHAPTER SIX
July 27
Randolph Mason.” The Secretary of the Interior greeted Steve Haywood. Mason’s entourage had stopped this afternoon on the road from Norris Geyser Basin to Mammoth Hot Springs.
The Secretary’s handshake was firm, his presence more commanding in person than through the filter of television. He carried his tall frame elegantly, his coal black hair lending a distinguished air to his jeans and chambray shirt.
“Pleased to meet you,” Steve replied, hoping Mason didn’t catch the tremor in his hand. He had slept in his truck last night at Old Faithful, too drunk to drive.
He looked past the Secretary at fire general Garrett Anderson, moving with startling agility down the steps of the TW Services bus. The big man wore a ball cap decorated with a flaming tree and the words Rocky Mountain Incident Mgt. Team. Last night after Clare had walked away, a firefighter had told Steve she was a friend of a friend of Garrett, who’d pulled strings to get her an employee cabin at Old Faithful.
Steve looked up from the roadside parking lot at Roaring Mountain, a bare, bleached slope that smoked from hundreds of steam vents. It always came as a surprise, after driving for miles through the unrelenting corridor of pine, to come upon the scar that looked as though it had been quarried.
A cluster of press piled off the advance bus. The Washington contingent looked as though they’d bought their stylish outdoor clothing at Abercrombie and Fitch just before boarding the plane. The press corps, mostly westerners, wore rugged jeans and scarred footwear that was suitable for rough terrain.
Secretary Mason smiled at the reporters.
A lanky cameraman with an untidy coffee-colored ponytail stepped in closer. The stocky young woman with him thrust her mike at the Secretary’s face. “Carol Leeds, Billings Live Eye.” Her mane of red hair spilled over the shoulders of her denim jacket. “Is it true the Park Service made a serious error in judgment when they let the fires burn out of control in the park?”
Garrett Anderson murmured to Steve, “Cutting right to the chase.”
Mason studied Carol Leeds with sharp blue eyes for so long that the group of reporters broke ranks.
“Mr. Secretary … “
“Secretary Mason … “
“Do you support the Park Service …?”
Mason raised his hand and waited for quiet. �
��Certainly, I support the men and women in whose hands lies the stewardship of Yellowstone, our national’s crown jewel.”
Steve thought that he could never be a politician. He would have told them wildfire was natural, that in Yellowstone man had been just standing in the way of the inevitable since before the turn of the twentieth century.
For when Native Americans dominated the land, the Smoky Bear phenomenon hadn’t existed. They used fire to clear fields and forest undergrowth and early settlers followed their lead. How ironic during this season’s blowup that Yellowstone had been the first place in the nation with fire patrols, set up by the U.S. Army in 1886. Fire suppression for a hundred years had let the forests grow until the level of fuels was at an historic high.
“What’s going to happen at Old Faithful?” blurted the freckle-faced journalist Mason chose next.
Garrett Anderson interceded. “Mr. Secretary, if I may?”
Mason nodded.
“We’ve got a thousand firefighters digging line and setting backfires west of Old Faithful,” Garrett told the press. “For the time being, I feel safe to say the danger to the complex has been averted.”
Impatient to get his part of the program over, Steve took the lead onto a foot trail that wound along the base of Roaring Mountain. Park Superintendent Tom King, a beanpole of a man, fell into step, his neatly pressed uniform of gray jacket and darker pants made a sharp contrast to the Secretary’s vacation wear. The press followed like a pack of hounds.
As the hill steepened, Steve felt the incline. His heart started to pound and his dry mouth made him aware of his hangover. Garrett Anderson caught up with him. The thick-waisted fire general put it on Steve as they continued to climb. “You met Clare Chance,” Garrett said in the soft accent of a fellow southerner.
“Things were happening a bit fast for us to be properly introduced the day that chopper crashed.” He failed to mention how he’d distinguished himself last night at the Bear Pit.
“Clare’s quite a gal.”
“I thought so.” Steve tried not to sound out of breath.
Garrett smiled. “Friend of mine at the Texas A & M fire school recommended she train the troops to fight fire.”
Clare went up another notch in Steve’s estimation. Last night he’d been looking at her bare shoulders and legs and thinking she looked all woman. Now, he was reminded how she’d saved him from the Shoshone and realized if she were going to train the military, she must be one tough woman.
“If we have to bring in soldiers,” Steve tempered.
“When.”
He figured Garrett had the experience to be a reasonable judge.
“Next week we’re bringing in the experts at predicting fire behavior.” Garrett removed his cap and mopped his head with a bandanna. “But you mark my words.” He swept his arm to encompass the pine-studded plateau. “If we don’t get rain soon, all this will look like that.”
He pointed to the smoking ruin of Roaring Mountain.
Steve chewed on that while he made it to the place he’d planned to show the visitors.
“Are you ready for your fifteen minutes of fame?” Superintendent King asked with a flash of smile.
Through his now-throbbing headache, Steve grinned back. Park HQ at Mammoth was a small town and he knew Tom King well.
Stepping into the middle of a clearing on the backside of Roaring Mountain, Steve waited while the press fanned out. Secretary Mason wore an attentive look on his hawklike face.
Raising his voice for the crowd, Steve began, “Nine years ago, a lightning strike started a fire here.” Long trunks of the fallen lay scattered, and a few silver ghosts still stood, having weathered the weight of snows and the ravage of high winds.
“It looks like hell to me.” The heckler seemed to be part of the press.
“We call these doghair thickets.” Steve pointed to patches of seedlings that grew cheek by jowl. “It takes a fire to open the cones of the lodgepole and release the seeds. When it happens, every hundred to four hundred years, many thousands of small trees grow back right away.”
“Who’d want to vacation here, though?”
Steve saw him this time, the ponytailed cameraman from Billings.
“Many burned areas don’t look this bad,” Steve tried. “Often the debris on the forest floor smoulders slowly, leaving the mature trees with damage only to the lower branches, like over here.”
There was no response from either the press or the visiting entourage. So, how many laymen were interested in listening to a biologist blather?
Steve faced the crowd squarely. “What’s at stake in Yellowstone this summer is a basic question of how to manage wildfire. In the northern Rockies, the climate is too dry and cold for decomposition, so the fuels continue to build until there’s a fire. After nearly a century of suppression, in 1972 the park decided to manage its resources differently. That meant no putting out natural fires, those started by lightning.”
“So what happened?” Carol Leeds from Billings asked.
“Very little.” He gestured toward the burn he’d been showing them. “Between 1972 and 1987 around thirty-four thousand acres, or less than three percent of the park was renewed. Until this summer.”
“I believe that this morning’s report tallied over eighty-eight thousand acres,” Garrett Anderson spoke up.
As Steve started to lead the way to another section, he noticed that the Secretary of the Interior seemed most impressed with this last statistic.
Three hours later in Mammoth, Steve opened the basement door into the Yellowstone Park archives. Upstairs, in the stone headquarters building that had once been Fort Yellowstone’s bachelor officers’ quarters, tourists studied exhibits of old uniforms and weapons.
“Everybody buy your story about fire being natural, like granola and alfalfa sprouts?” Walt Leighton asked from inside his office.
“What do you think?” Steve shut the door harder than he’d intended.
Walt, the park historian, uncoiled his long frame. He came out of his closet-sized office into the main room lined with filing cabinets. “I’d say the important thing is whether Randolph Mason bought it.” His bushy brows knit above his narrow nose.
Steve leaned against a table topped by a microfiche reader and looked up at Walt, who was easily six-four against his own five-ten. “What can Mason do? Superintendent King decided days ago that this season’s fires would not be allowed to burn free.”
“The Secretary of the Interior can change policy for the long term.” Steve recognized Harriet Friendswood’s voice and turned.
She came out of the back room where historic documents were stored. Meticulously, she stripped off white cotton gloves that kept skin oils from antique papers and looked at her purple plastic Timex. “Quittin’ time.”
Steve smiled and her soft brown eyes lighted. Harriet wasn’t bad, early thirties, medium build, and shoulder length chestnut hair. Although she had been pursuing Steve in earnest for the entire six months she’d been here, he figured that if there were a spark he would have known right away.
“I’ve got a roast in the oven.” She gave a come-hither look. “Plenty for two.”
He’d tried one of her dinners and come home with the conclusion that he was the better cook. “Oh, no thanks. I’m just gonna go through some documents here.”
“Your loss.” Harriet secured her purse, told Walt good evening and walked out with her shoulders square beneath her flowered print dress.
Steve watched her go and found the historian’s sharp eyes on him. For years, Walt had been trying to get him to come out of his shell as far as women were concerned. Now he said nothing as he prepared to leave for the day. Although the archives were officially closed, Walt seemed to understand that Steve’s fascination with history kept his mind off his lost wife and child.
He wondered what Walt would think of him comparing Clare Chance with Harriet. If Clare had invited him to dinner, he might have gone.
With careful
hands, he opened a filing cabinet. The familiar and ordinary folders inside held treasure that could never be measured in dollars and cents. His cotton-gloved fingers skipped across the tabs that revealed the vintage of the ancient documents, primary sources of historic information. Here were the records of the military commandant of the park in the year 1892, handwritten notes that mentioned the grand opening of the new Lake Hotel, with a lavish party thrown by its owners, the Northern Pacific Railroad.
By 1900, park headquarters had acquired a typewriter and carbons. Tissue thin papers revealed a long correspondence with an eastern procurement officer, an effort to put the soldiers who patrolled the park into Norwegian cross-country skis. The letters began politely enough in January, but by April a single terse sentence appeared beneath the salutation—Send skis now.
With a grin, Steve opened the next file of letters. He turned a nearly translucent page and noticed a fresh wave of the familiar, faintly musty smell of the basement archives.
Beyond the windows, golden afternoon beckoned, so he took the folder to a picnic table beneath a spreading cedar. There, he immersed himself in the life of the old fort, where horses and Army wagons had used the very path he sat beside.
Half an hour later, a shadow fell across his notes. He heard a pressurized pop and release and looked into the label of an Olympia can. Walt, wearing jeans instead of his ranger uniform, slid a hip onto the table and climbed up, propping his booted feet on the seat. “Beer?” He set down a paper bag that looked to contain the rest of a six-pack.
Steve had never heard of Oly when he was growing up in North Carolina, but he’d learned to appreciate the finer things of the West. He could just about taste the clean effervescence as he reached.
“Why are you doing this to yourself?” Clare Chance had surveyed him coolly, with eyes that reminded him of the finest amber liquor. She was something else, as he’d realized last night lying in the bed of his truck, and again when Garrett Anderson had praised her on the trail up Roaring Mountain.