Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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I forgot to do
And it’s causin’ me despair.
Walk around the cache
Pickin’ up the trash
There’s something I just got to do …
But fuck it.
Kent discovers the coffeepot under a soiled fireshirt and plugs it in. I step out the door and yell to Gilbert to bring some ration coffee from the cache. The air is damp and chilled, alien to fire. We find chairs or chair surrogates and accept the nostalgia of fires remembered and the more powerful nostrum of fires promised.
But already we feel the distance from the cache. “We gotta get out on the roads,” Kent says. “Yeah,” The Kid agrees. “And when the hell are we gonna get a fire?”
Three times during the past week observers on the South Rim have reported a smoke near Bright Angel Point. There are six inches of fresh snow on the ground with one to two feet of old snow in the denser woods. The reports are viewed with skepticism until a routine helicopter flight sees, then flies over, the source—a puffing, live white fir on the Uncle Jim Point trail. Our own Uncle Jimmy and E.B. begin the hike in. For more than an hour they crash through snowbanks. The sky has glossed over with filmy cirrus; it is impossible to discriminate between sky and smoke; they ask for assistance. Recon 1 guides them painfully to the smoldering snag. The tree is huge, alive, hollow, and rotten at the top. From the ground they can locate no smoke, much less flame. Convinced that the fire can only go out, they leave it alone. A week later the fire is still simmering and actually ignites some freshly exposed fuel on the ground. Uncle Jimmy and E.B. return to fell the tree.
The amount of sound wood in the interior bole is uncertain. They assess the lean of the tree, determine the preponderance of branches on each side, and check the wind, which fills the canopy like a sail. Uncle Jimmy cuts, while E.B., flapping his arms to keep warm, spots, ready to swat embers that might rain down. A few flakes of white ash settle on snowbanks. Their feet are numb with cold. Clouds of smokey snow billow upward as the tree brushes past others, then crashes to the ground. They extinguish the fire by stuffing the hollow interior with snow. The stump is composed wholly of sound heartwood—only the top is rotten. Not for another week, when they can travel across newly exposed rock and mud, do they return to the fire and officially declare it out.
Back at the Fire Pit, as they fill out their report, E.B. remarks that the coffeepot put out more heat than the Whoopie fire. “Yeah,” agrees Uncle Jimmy, searching the DI-1530 for a code small enough to enter the estimated fire acreage. “But you don’t get overtime for drinking coffee.”
176
It is a short walk—no more than a hundred feet—from the Fire Pit to Skid Row.
We amble to Building 176 for lunch. The screen door hangs up on a rock, half open and half closed. The whole cabin has sunk since it was constructed in the mid-1930s as temporary officers’ quarters for a CCC camp, and the doors cannot clear easily. Kent kicks the screen door open. The front door also sticks, this time on a bulge of ancient linoleum, which rests on a foundation stone. This door, too, can be neither closed nor opened completely.
The cabin is partitioned into three rooms. The front room combines a kitchen, a sofa, and an oil furnace into something slightly larger than a shoe box; a middle section houses a bathroom of sorts, while the hallway swells into an open bedroom; the rear room, added decades later, makes a larger bedroom. I live in the middle room, which is really a broad passageway to a shower and toilet that joins an overheated front room with a frozen rear room. When the rear room was occupied by three rookies, it was dubbed the Nursery. When the Cosmic Cowboys—Lenny, Dan, and Charlie—claimed the rear room, they converted it into a miniature Gilley’s. To compensate for the front door, which won’t close, the rear door won’t open.
Once considered prime real estate in the Area, the string of cabins of which 176 is a constituent is unable to compete with the sleek modernism of giant house trailers trucked in by the Park Service. The cabins have become known as Skid Row and assume the role of a slum, fit only for seasonals. Four fire crewmen now live in 176, and another crewman resides next door in 175. The great virtue of 176 is that it is a stone’s throw from the cache. In 176 we eat and sleep and do little else.
No one assumes the least responsibility for upkeep. The sink spills out dishes; it bubbles bad odors, grease, and cups like a mud geyser; our sink, a friendly visitor observes in midsummer, is getting “very ripe.” Our bathroom, another notes, smells as if Ralph’s pickup truck took a shower in it. The back bedroom begins to resemble the kitchen. From time to time we clean up. We will not allow the situation to deteriorate to the state that 155 reached one summer, when it was necessary at the end of the season to clean it out with road brooms and shovels.
Dominating the kitchen, which dominates the cabin, is its wooden table, three feet by two feet in size. Inevitably there is a problem with doors. On one side the front door opens into the table, and on the other, the refrigerator door does. The refrigerator, moreover, has a reverse handle so that it opens first along the wall, then into the table; this means that it can be opened fully only with effort and never when the table is occupied. The table is equally obstructive to both doors, but there is nowhere else to put it, and we cannot do without it. The table itself is constantly, indifferently littered with debris. A random inventory discovers a hammer, a pipe wrench, a can of shaving cream, crumpled aluminum foil, salt and pepper shakers liberated from the Inn, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce, a pocketknife, a gas cap, a harmonica, a measuring cup, an apple, dirty dishes, granola, cartons of instant milk, a three-year-old copy of Life magazine, a box of Kleenex, Scientific American, napkins, dirty silverware, a potholder, an onion, a mostly empty pitcher of Kool-Aid, crackers, a can of beans, paper plates, homemade bread, and an indeterminate patch of sticky goo (probably honey and maple syrup). With appropriate shufflings, we eat on the table, play cards on it, and rebuild carburetors. On it I write the last two chapters of my doctoral dissertation.
The truth is that 176 is a bivouac, not a home. It is another place we move into and out of. Built on one pattern, then modified with ad hoc amendments; designed for one purpose, then applied for another; used, not lived in; and moved through, not truly inhabited—176 is the perfect residence for a fire crew. We don’t work on the North Rim because we live here; we live here because there is work to do, and the nature of that work, firefighting, dictates every part of our existence. Our cabin is little more than a detached annex to the fire cache, and we could sooner do without it than without the cache. Even on lieu days a crewman is more likely, after sleeping in (if he can), to hang around the cache than the cabin. That is the way we want it, and we treasure 176 as much for what it is not—which would divert us from what really matters—as for what it is.
What improvements there are take place outdoors. Outside the front door stands a concrete and rebar fireplace extracted from the Boneyard. Beyond the back door a brick-lined pit designed to accommodate a Dutch oven, in which Lenny makes his exquisite peach cobbler, points to the Rim. A wooden picnic table oscillates between the front and rear of the cabin. With a chain saw Dan carves two five-foot trunks of ponderosa into mock thrones. Cars park on both sides of the cabin. The Rim of Transept Canyon breaks open no more than thirty yards behind us, and the sun sets routinely across the Canyon, our backyard. It is a point of honor—a moral imperative—that we have a campfire in the evening.
When Hopi tower reports the smoke, it is no more than a pencil-thin column that scatters above the tree canopy into a diffuse plume. Booby and Vic hurriedly outfit a pumper, grab some packs, and drive north. No fireroads have been opened within the Park, so they plot an elaborate detour through the Forest. They are the only regular fire personnel available so early on the Rim—Booby as a seasonal firefighter and Vic as the new ranger supervisor. It is the first fire of the season, and they can almost taste the adrenaline.
The smoke thickens, builds, and rises. As Park fire officer, Clyde struggles to organize a recon. Booby and Vic drive steadily onward. They veer around some logs, cut others, pause at signs stripped by the winter. They are still deep in the Forest. The fire is an acre in size. Everything is unusually dry; and Rainbow Plateau—a peninsula surrounded on three