Young Men and Fire Read online

  Now that I had started thinking again I became exhausted again. Mrs. Brown can help men who cannot help themselves, I thought, and I am exhausted beyond comprehension. It took me until nearly dark to get within a quarter of a mile from her cabin. Then I put exhaustion out of mind and ran the last quarter of a mile to get there in time, although time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning. I did not collapse, but I rocked on my feet from the suction of air she caused when she opened the cabin door.

  She did not ask a question. She said quietly, “Come in and lie down. You look very white.” I was baffled. I was sure I was black. “No,” she said, “you’re very white.”

  She felt the water in the pail but it was evidently lukewarm, so she went down to the creek and dipped out a cold pail. Then she said, “I told you to lie down.” She still hadn’t asked a question. If you have spent your life in a cabin, you know that there are times when you have to do things before you try to find out what things are all about.

  She washed me in cold water again and again, taking my pulse each time she did. Then finally she took my pulse again, nodded her head, and threw a whole dipper of water on me to signify my convalescence period was over. She buttoned my shirt and said, “When you go deer hunting this autumn, you’ll get your limit.”

  Not until then did she try to find out what had happened to me and how I had got there. “Did you try to stop the fire?”

  “Mrs. Brown?” I asked. “Mrs. Brown, did you start it?” I finished asking.

  “You’ll have no trouble getting your limit next deer season,” she reassured me.

  I knew that she wasn’t going to say anything more and that I’d better not ask anything more.

  “For a preacher,” she said, “your father is very handy with a rifle.”

  I said, “He’s also good with a scatter-gun.”

  Then she said, “I’ll write him tomorrow and let him know what happened.”

  I said to her, “Skip it. He knows I can take care of myself.”

  I wasn’t sure I should have come to her for help, now that I didn’t need help anymore. Even tough women who are good with the rifle get motherly when it’s all over.

  She advised me, “Stay here and take it easy until tomorrow. Then go back to Lolo Hot Springs and report to the ranger station there.”

  After a pail and a half of cold water I no longer needed an Indian mother, and I wanted to make this clear. I said, even if she was a good shot, “Thanks, I’ll stay over tonight, but tomorrow I’ll go back to the fire and see if I can find the crew.” I didn’t add that mostly I wanted to see where the fire had jumped the trail and I had started up the ridge ahead of it, fear being only partly something that makes us run away—at times, at least, it is something that makes us come back again and stare at what made us run away.

  Although I was very tired the next morning, I hurried to where the fire had jumped the trail. It was not until I stared that I realized if I had stepped across a little fire and been on the side of it where the cedar duff was that I would not have had to race a giant uphill for my life or been stopped by a ghost along the way.

  I have several times returned to that spot on the trail. The autumn of the same year of the fire I said to my father, “Let’s hunt another season at Mrs. Brown’s in Fish Creek.” It was while hunting in Fish Creek that November that I saw smoke coming out of black holes in the snow.

  While I listened to the postmistress in the record heat of early August of 1949, my memory turned to snow with smoke curling out of it. When the smoke started mixing at night with my dreams, I locked my cabin and drove the 150 miles to Wolf Creek and picked up my brother-in-law, who had fought a few days on the Mann Gulch fire as a volunteer. He and I borrowed a Dodge Power Wagon from the Oxbow Ranch, because we knew it would be tough going ahead. Then we drove up the dirt road on the east side of the Missouri until we came to the Gates of the Mountains and to Willow Creek, the creek north of Mann Gulch where the fire was finally stopped on its downriver side. The road went up the creek for a way and then dead-ended, and it and the creek had been used by the crew—on the whole, successfully—as fire-lines. Only occasionally had the fire jumped both of them, and where it had the crew quickly controlled it again. By the time we reached the fire the crew had put it out for several hundred yards back of the road or creek, sawing down the still-burning trees and either burying them with dirt or pouring water on them when they were near the creek. Since there was no danger of the fire jumping the lines again, the crew had moved on, leaving the fire to burn itself harmlessly in its interior.

  It was a world of still-warm ashes that had incubated once-hot poles. The black poles looked as if they had been born of the gray ashes as the result of some vast effort at sexual intercourse on the edges of the afterlife. When the vast effort was over, it was discovered the poles were born dead and the ashes themselves lived only because the winds moved them. It was the amphitheater of the afterlife where passion had destroyed life, but passion devoid of life could be reborn. A little farther into the fire a black pole would now and then explode and reproduce a progeny of flames. A cliff would tear loose a tree it had kept burning in a secret crevice and then toss the sacrifice upon the rocks below, where the victim exploded into flames and passion without life. On the fire-lines of hell sexual intercourse seems to be gone forever and then brutally erupts, and after a great forest fire passes by, there are warm ashes and once-hot poles and passion in death.

  Not far up the creek my brother-in-law stopped the Power Wagon. Ahead, the creek came close to the road, and standing in the creek was a deer terribly burned. It was drinking and probably had been for a long time. It was probably like the two Smokejumpers, Hellman and Sylvia, who did not die immediately and could never put out their thirst, drinking at every chance until they became sick at the stomach.

  The deer was hairless and purple. Where the skin had broken, the flesh was in patches. For a time, the deer did not look up. It must have been especially like Joe Sylvia, who was burned so deeply that he was euphoric. However, when a tree exploded and was thrown as a victim to the foot of a nearby cliff, the deer finally raised its head and slowly saw us. Its eyes were red bulbs that illuminated long hairs around its eyelids.

  Since it was August, we had not thought of taking a rifle with us, so we could not treat it as a living thing and destroy it.

  While it completed the process of recognizing us, it bent down and continued drinking. Then either it finally recognized us, or became sick at the stomach again.

  It tottered to the bank, steadied itself, and then bounded off euphorically. If it could have, it probably would have said, like Joe Sylvia, “I’m feeling just fine.” Probably its sensory apparatus, like Joe Sylvia’s, had been dumped into its bloodstream and was beginning to clog its kidneys.

  Then, instead of jumping, it ran straight into the first fallen log ahead.

  My brother-in-law said, loathing himself, “I forgot to throw a rifle into the cab of the truck.”

  The deer lay there and looked back looking for us, but, shocked by its collision with the log, it probably did not see us. It probably did not see anything—it moved its head back and forth, as if trying to remember at what angle it had last seen us. Suddenly, its eyes were like electric light bulbs burning out—with a flash, too much light burned out the filaments in the bulbs, and then the red faded slowly to black. In the fading, there came a point where the long hairs on the eyelids were no longer illuminated. Then the deer put its head down on the log it had not seen and could not jump.

  In my story of the Mann Gulch fire, how I first came to Mann Gulch is part of the story.

  Young Men & Fire

  Part One

  1

  IN 1949 THE SMOKEJUMPERS were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses. By this time they were also sure they were the best firefighte
rs in the United States Forest Service, and although by now they were very good, especially against certain kinds of fires, they should have stopped to realize that they were newcomers in this ancient business of fighting forest fires. It was 1940 when the first parachute jump on a forest fire was made and a year later that the Smokejumpers were organized, so only for nine years had there been a profession with the aim of taking on at the same time three of the four elements of the universe—air, earth, and fire—and in a simple continuous act dropping out of the sky and landing in a treetop or on the face of a cliff in order to make good their boast of digging a trench around every fire they landed on by ten o’clock the next morning. In 1949 the Smokejumpers were still so young that they referred affectionately to all fires they jumped on as “ten o’clock fires,” as if they already had them under control before they jumped. They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy.

  It is true, though, that no technical advance was to influence the Forest Service’s methods of spotting and fighting wildfires as much as the airplane, which arrived early in the century about the same time as the Forest Service (1905). Two world wars hastened the union between airplanes and fire-fighting. By 1917 chief forester Henry S. Graves was conferring with the chief of the Army Air Corps about the possibility of army planes flying patrol missions over western forests. By 1925 the Forest Service itself started using planes from which fires could be spotted more quickly and thoroughly than from scattered lookouts. By 1929 planes were dropping supplies to firefighters, and it seemed that soon firefighters themselves would be dropped, but psychological difficulties and difficulties with equipment held back the development of parachute jumping on wildfires. It was only after several years of experimenting and training that the first parachute jump on a forest fire was made, one of the two jumpers being Earl Cooley, who was to be the spotter on the C-47 that carried the Smoke-jumpers to the Mann Gulch fire and, as spotter, tapped each jumper on the left calf as the signal to step into the sky over Mann Gulch.

  The chief psychological roadblock holding up the acceptance of parachute jumping by the government and the public itself was the belief that most parachute jumpers were at least a little bit nuts and the high probability that a few of them were. In 1935, Evan Kelley, of the Forest Service’s Region One (with headquarters in Missoula, Montana, where in a few years one of the biggest Smokejumper bases was to be established), rejected the possibility of dropping men on fires from parachutes by saying: “The best information I can get from experienced fliers is that all parachute jumpers are more or less crazy—just a little bit unbalanced, otherwise they wouldn’t be engaged in such a hazardous undertaking.” There is no doubt that among those most visibly touched with the Icarus complex were jumpers off wings of planes at county fairs or stunt-men doing the same kind of work for movies. Only a year before Kelley had made his psychological analysis of parachute jumpers, Frank Derry, a stuntman in California and short of cash, got the idea of jumping from a plane in a parachute, dressed as Santa Claus. He made a perfect landing, pleased the local Los Angeles merchants, quit factory work for good, joined a flying circus barnstorming the West, and became one of the nine original Forest Service Smokejumpers, one of the Forest Service’s finest jump instructors, and one of its best riggers, making important improvements in both the parachute and the jump suit.

  Most people have a touch of the Icarus complex and, like Smokejumpers, wish to appear on earth from the sky. In my home town of Missoula, Montana, older brothers all over town trained their younger brothers to jump from garage roofs, using gunnysacks for parachutes. The older brothers argued that the younger brothers should do the jumping because, being smaller, they would take longer to reach the ground and so give their gunnysacks more time to open and soften the landing. From the start, Smokejumpers had to have a lot of what we have a little of, and one way all men are born equal is in being born at least a little bit crazy, some being more equal than others. A number of these latter were needed to get the Smokejumpers started, and a certain number more have always been needed to keep it going.

  Fortunately, many of those powered by the Icarus complex, unlike Icarus, are gifted mechanically in odd ways and have long worked on problems connected with landing safely. Even the most sublime of oddballs, Leonardo da Vinci, had studied the problem of safely landing men on earth from the sky. But it wasn’t until 1783 that the French physicist Louis-Sebastien Lenormand made the first successful parachute jump from a tower, and even in 1930 the parachute had many shortcomings as a means of aerial transport, some of which were eliminated or reduced by none other than Frank Derry, the Santa Claus parachute jumper who was also gifted mechanically. One of the parachute’s greatest shortcomings as aerial transport had been that, being a parabolic object, it drops with a bell-like motion. As it descends, air is forced up into it and, since there are no openings in the parachute through which the air can escape, it rocks up on one side until the surplus air is released, then swings to the other side until it tips out the excess air it has accumulated on its return trip. As a result, before the parachute could be a reasonably safe means of getting from the sky to the earth, the rocking had to be taken out of its flight and some means of steering it had to be devised so Smokejumpers and their supplies could be dropped on a designated spot near a fire instead of scattered all over the nearby mountains.

  The parachute developed by Frank Derry became the standard Smokejumpers’ parachute for many years and is the parachute used by the crew that dropped on the Mann Gulch fire. The rocking motion had been reduced by three openings through which air could be released—an opening in the top and two slots on opposite sides. On the outside of the chute attached to the slots were “tails,” pieces of nylon that acted as rudders to guide the flow of air coming through the slots, and to them guide lines were attached so that the direction of the flight was ultimately determined by the jumper. Not a highly safe and sensitive piece of machinery, but better than Icarus had. It had a speed of seven or eight knots, and, as soon as a jumper could, he turned his face to the wind and looked over his shoulder to see, among other things, that he didn’t smash into a cliff.

  Frank Derry, his two brothers, and others of the early Smokejumpers not only greatly improved the parachute but soon were developing a safer jump suit, one designed especially for jumping in mountainous timber country—football helmet with heavy wire-mesh face mask, felt-lined suit, and “shock absorbers” such as ankle braces, athletic supporters, back and abdominal braces, and heavy logger boots (the White logger boots from Spokane, Washington, the best). Frank Derry’s two brothers were helpful, but staying put was not part of their calling and they weren’t long with the Smokejumpers. Frank, however, lasted much longer, then bought a bar nearby and became his own best customer.

  So far it has all been the jump in smokejumping and nothing about the smoke or fire at the end. In 1949 a fair number of old-timers in the Forest Service still believed that God means there to be only one honest way to get to a forest fire and that is to walk your guts out. To these old-timers the Smokejumpers were from a circus sideshow, although in fact they were already on their way to becoming the best firefighting outfit in the Forest Service.

  Basic movements in the history of the Forest Service had helped put the Smokejumpers by 1949 on their way to being the best. The United States Forest Service was officially established in 1905 by President Theodore Roosevelt and Governor Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, eastern outdoorsmen who knew and loved the earth in its wondrous ways when left to itself and given a chance. Their policy of acquiring and protecting some of the earth’s most beautiful remaining parts became the Forest Service’s primary purpose. Then came 1910, the most disastrous fire year on record. In western Montana and Idaho 3 million acres were left behind as charred trees and ashes that rose when you walked by, then blew away when you passed. This transformation occurred largely in two days, August 20 and 21, when thousands of peo
ple thought the world was coming to an end, and for eighty-seven people it did.

  I remember these two days very well. My family was on summer vacation, camped in tents on an island between forks of the Bitterroot River. The elders in my father’s church had become alarmed and had come in a wagon to rescue us. A team of the elders waded out to our island, crossed hands, and in this cradle carried my mother back to the wagon. My father and I followed, my father holding me with one hand and his fishing rod with the other and I also holding my fishing rod with my other hand. It was frightening, as what seemed to be great flakes of white snow were swirling to the ground in the heat and darkness of high noon. I was seven years old and might have cried for our tent, which we had to leave behind, except I thought my mother and our two rods would make it to the wagon.

  Since 1910, much of the history of the Forest Service can be translated into a succession of efforts to get firefighters on fires as soon as possible—the sooner, the smaller the fire. If a campfire left burning can be caught soon enough, a man with a shovel can bury it. If the fire is a lightning fire burning in a dead tree, a man will need an ax to drop the burning tree and will still need the shovel to dig the shallow trench into which he is going to drop and bury it. If two Smokejumpers had reached the Mann Gulch fire the afternoon it started, they would at least have kept it under control until a larger crew arrived. Before the Mann Gulch fire was finally put under control five days later, there were 450 men on it and they didn’t have as much to do with stopping it as did cliffs and rock slides.