I was still a wee one when fire taught me that it was
boss. A few months after my fourth birthday, on a bright
summer day, my mother decided that the omens were right
for burning off the field that sloped up the hill from
our house. (Before my father got a tractor, they burned
to control weeds and preserve the pasture.) While Dad
was at work and my months-old baby sister slept in the
house, Mom and I set out to cleanse the field.
But an unexpected wind kicked up and the fire raced
out of control; so as smoke billowed and my mother furiously
beat out flames, she told me to run up the hill to Grams’
house and have her call the fire department. My little
legs pumped as fast as they could and my lungs were
bursting; I wondered if our house would burn down. In
the end, Mom and a neighbor regained control before
the volunteer firemen arrived; but I will never forget
the fear—and what I later knew to be the adrenaline
rush—that I felt on that day. In the blink of
an eye, fire had taken over and let me know that it
could rock my world.
I hadn’t thought about that in years, but it
all came rushing back as I sat in a fire camp one night
this week talking with a woman firefighter from North
Carolina. And I laughed to myself the next night as
another firefighter told me that everyone has a fire
story. One way or another, human beings are all touched—and
united—by fire. As the Alaskan firefighter said,
it’s primal.
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This Monster Keeps Growing
After taking care of some chores in Grants Pass on
Monday, I lit out for the coast. I had left a message
for the National Forest Service supervisor to whom I’d
been referred, but wasn’t willing to cool my heels
waiting for a call that might never come. So I set out
through Merlin, aiming for another of those “closed
in winter” roads that turn me on. But when I got
to the Bear Camp Road turnoff just short of Galice,
I saw National Guard and a sign saying the road was
closed because of the fire. I stopped and asked about
its status, and a very polite guardsman told me that
he’d heard rumors that the Florence Fire—which
lightning ignited on July 13th in the Siskiyou National
Forest’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness—had finally
merged with Northern California’s Sour Biscuit
Fire. It wasn’t yet official, but we knew this
monster was still growing.
I circled back east through Wolf Creek and got onto
the interstate, then took 42 west. I followed route
101 across Coos Bay and found a lovely campsite in the
Eel Creek Campground in the Dunes National Recreation
Area. The next day, though, the call came saying I was
welcome in the fire camp if I still wanted to visit,
so I played in the dunes a bit more and then turned
around and headed back whence I’d come, east of
my second Selma of the trip.
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Into the Belly Of the Beast
The radio weather reports in southwestern Oregon were
repetitive: Tonight—clear, with areas of smoke.
Tomorrow—sunny, with areas of smoke. The same
tonights and tomorrows, again and again. Last weekend,
people had spoken hopefully of possible rain, but as
I drove north I had encountered nothing more than a
few feeble sprinkles. And now I was going to meet the
people who went into the belly of the beast. I regretted
having wished away my powers of rainmaking.
Information Officer Leah Rosin gave
me directions to the camp, and instructions on how to
get through the heavy-security checkpoint. She also
told me that there was a private campground on Lake
Selmac, just short of the camp, where I could set up
my own base of operation. In and around the campground
I found: t-shirt vendors; contract personnel (such as
Obadiah’s Wildfire Fighters, whose motto is “If
it burns, we deal with it”); masseuses (across
the road, they gave the firefighters free massages);
and a cheering section that erupted every time firefighters
went by.
Security was indeed tight, but I got into camp and
was amazed. A tent city covered most of the valley floor
to the east of the lake. Huge generators hummed night
and day, and trucks of all sizes housed everything from
the commissary (which operated out of a small panel
truck) to the laundry (industrial washers and dryers
had been set up in an 18-wheeler). There was a map of
the camp but people still regularly got lost. The day
crews’ tents were set up in the open; the night
crews’ were in the woods so the firefighters could
sleep better during the day.
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One Tough Cookie
Leah aims to combine journalism and public-lands management.
She was born into the wildfire community—her father
was a smokejumper—and spent four summers during
college on a crew. "I grew up on a farm, I’m
tough as nails, I can throw down a 200-pound sheep,”
she said. “I figured, I can start a pump, I can
run a chainsaw. Might as well do it and make good money,
‘cause it’s a lot better money than you’re
gonna make in any other college job.” Her last
two seasons, she drove a CAF (compressed air foam) engine
(as ground vehicles with water-carrying/-pumping capacity
are known) while patrolling narrow, dirt forest roads.
(The split-shift CAF engine, which has a giant GMC engine
and an air compressor on the back, can haul 1,000 gallons.)
Leah seemed to be as adept at press relations as she
was with big trucks and hand tools; she was a friendly
guide and an invaluable help to me.
It was a journalist’s dream: assistance when
I wanted it but freedom when I didn’t. I roamed
at will through the camp; the only area closed to me
was the firefighters’ tent quarters. Leah put
me in touch with the woman from North Carolina and the
Alaskans, and I ran into a Forest Service mechanical
engineer and a contract water-tender driver from California,
so in a short time I met a tiny cross-section of the
6,000-plus folks fighting the Florence Fire. (The two
fires officially became one on Wednesday. At last count
it covered over 330,000 acres.)
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The Engineer and the Tank
Mechanical engineer Ralph Gonzalez assesses nontraditional
(e.g., logging or demilitarized) equipment for firefighting
potential. During his time in camp he was monitoring
and videotaping a monster German Leopard 1 battle tank
equipped with a dozer blade, a 5,000-gallon water tank,
and a water hose. Aside from helicopters like the Blackhawk
and Chinook and the logging sky cranes, nontraditional
equipment hasn’t been used extensively, so his
project aims to make firefighters aware of other resources
that they can draw upon. “The equipment exists,”
Ralph said. “It’s just a matter of getting
the word out [and getting] people to start using it.”
The videotape will serve as a sort of executive summary,
and there will be an interactive database for people
who want more information.
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Putting
Fire On the Ground
Most of the time, Asheville resident Brandee
Boggs leads the Nature Conservancy’s Mid-Atlantic
prescribed-burn crew. Working mostly in Virginian fire-adapted
or fire-dependent ecosystems, they “put fire on
the ground,” as she expressed it, to support rare
and endangered species such as the red-cockaded woodpecker.
Brandee has a soft, lilting North Carolina accent, cat
glasses, and dreadlocks. (“You don’t see
many dreadies out here,” she said. “You
definitely don’t see dreadlocked women.”)
She also has a degree in forestry and six years of firefighting
experience; in the Florence Fire she serves as a squad
boss on an inter-agency pick-up crew. She’s smart,
funny, and very chill.
We talked of many things, but I especially wanted to
know what it was like to be a woman on the fireline.
Mostly, Brandee said, firefighters are firefighters,
and the pros treat women no differently than they treat
men. (Irregulars pressed into service during especially
bad fire years can sometimes be a different story: Her
worst experiences with sexual harassment—threats,
even—came from those types.) Sometimes, though,
there are advantages, she reported with a laugh. “Being
from North Carolina, we have a lot of chivalry. So I’ll
be out there working my ass off, and at the end of the
day they’ll grab my [chain]saw to carry it for
me. After I just carried the saw up the mountain and
sawed all day! [But then I’ll think], well, I
ain’t gonna argue about it. . . . It’s Southern
pride, and I know how to take that.”
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The Alaskans
And then there were the Alaskans. Nick
Long—a handsome, middle-aged Eskimo of few,
but choice, words—has been fighting fire on and
off since he was 16. The boyish, eloquent Terry
Anderson represents the Alaskan firefighters’
interests and makes things as easy for them as he can—he’s
been fighting fires of all sizes for 20 years, so he
knows what the crews are going through. Pat
Thorp, the Alaskan crews’ admin person, went
to work for the Bureau of Land Management after she
retired from the military. Shy but fiercely devoted
to her crews, she noted that Alaska is the only state
to send an admin person along. When I asked if she knew
why that was, she said, “I don’t know why
other crews don’t,” she said. “Our
job is the paperwork; that’s what we do.”
(“She’s good at that; I’m not,”
said Terry. “I’m a fireman, myself, so my
weakness is paperwork. . . . Pat makes it easy for us.”)
All three are thoughtful, good-natured people who were
extremely generous with their time at the end of a 16-hour
day.
When I asked Nick what makes a person want to rush
to a fire, he said, “It’s almost
fighting something impossible, I guess. Or trying to.
You know you can’t win it alone; it’s just
exciting to be part of a group and see how everything
is done and how it all happens. We’re just a few
people, a few hands, out on one little section of the
fire; but when we see the retardant bombers go by, or
the helicopter water buckets, we stop and look and say,
Oh, this is how they do it!” Firefighting also
gives him and his people an opportunity to travel and
see the lower 48, something they otherwise probably
would not have an opportunity to do. And then there’s
the money: “It’s a job,” he said.
“I’m gonna go back and do what I do at home.
This just adds more money to the kitty for what I have
to do at home.”
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The Fire Family
But everyone with whom I spoke said that they’re
really there because of the people. “It’s
a community of firefighters that come together in different
camps all over the United States, again and again, and
it’s a real brother-and-sisterhood of people,”
Terry explained. “You don’t realize how
small [this business] really is until you start going
to fires.” For example, Brandee was on a crew
in Shenandoah National Park earlier this summer and
ran into three other people who were there because of
the same professor who got her interested. “This
is a big family,” she said. “When I’m
at home, I kind of miss my fire family.”
It was a great privilege to get inside the fire camp,
and I liked it. If I weren’t so lazy, I might
even give it a try. But I guess I’ll stick with
words.
Stay tuned for next week’s installment. . .
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