Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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up the ridgetop for another quarter mile. ‘The fire is burning at the base of a big yellow pine.’ We can’t miss it.
“You can see this coming. It’s dark by the time we reach the second bend. Or maybe it’s the third. Or the fourth. The whole drainage is a tangle of bends and oxbows. There are logs in all of them. The whole south slope is covered with aspen. So I figure, ‘Fuck it. The fire’s somewhere on the ridge. We just hike up the slope and follow the ridgeline until we come to the smoke.’ Besides, it’s getting dark. We get out our headlamps. I’m hungry as hell, but I figure we can eat when we get to the fire. I’m tired. I haven’t been up on the Rim but three days, and I got a bad case of Kaibab emphysema.
“So we climb up. Tim’s heaving for air. We use our shovels as walking sticks. The canteens hang below our chests and clang like cowbells. What a comedy. We get to the ridge, and we walk up it. We walk all the damn way to the summit. We don’t see anything. It’s pitch-black. We’re sweating like hogs. So we drop the gear, sit down on a log, and eat rations. Haven’t a clue where the fire is. But I reason we can walk back down the ridge to W-4. If the fire is on the ridge, we have to find it. Right?
“Forget it. It’s about eleven when we reach the pumper. We drive back to the Area. I still have my wash sitting in the laundromat, so I dump the wet clothes in the dryer and eat, and in the morning we set off at seven. This time we get a compass bearing, and we walk to the fire. Ridgetop, my ass. Well, I knew—just knew—we’d be sent traipsing around the countryside again, so we didn’t flag. The fire was a mess. The snag had pretty much burned through, but there was quite a patch of surface fire and a lot of mop-up. We could be there for maybe a couple of days. You and Charlie were on the Preamble fire, but there was nothing else going on, so I asked for some help with mopping. Big Bob, the BI himself, and Holden, that new seasonal ranger, came out.
“But how we gonna get them in to the fire? Neither one of them can compass worth a damn. So I send them up a drainage just below the fire; the ravine goes all the way to W-4. Or it seems to if I got the fire located right. We had a lot of logs to buck up and figured to run the saw pretty much continuously. Let ’em hike up the draw. If they don’t see the smoke from the morning inversion, they’ll hear the saw. Well, they don’t see anything or hear anything. I think they took the wrong draw. They get on the radio and ask us if the saw is running. Of course it’s running, which means we can’t hear the radio. Well, eventually we hear them, and they want us to run the saw. So I send Tim up and down the ridge with the saw running—a complete waste of time. These guys are lost. I mean, they’re out in the Twilight Zone. So I keep Tim revving up the Big Mac, and I run some flagging tape—a continuous roll—across the ravine. There’s no way they can miss it. The place is looking like a goddamn carnival. I run another set of flags over the ridgetop and down the ravine on the other side. Then I just sort of wander around. It’s like a Brownian movement. Eventually we run into one another and collect at the fire. Big Bob nearly passes out under a tree. Holden is willing; he used to be a logger and got on some fires in the Sierras. Holden, Tim, and I mop up like mad the rest of the afternoon. We won’t get it done, but it’ll be good enough to leave at night. And it is night when we get ready to pack up. We leave the full canteens and a fedco and some handtools. Holden and the BI of course didn’t bring any headlamps, and the batteries in mine are weak. Then the great debate. How we gonna get back?
“I want to compass back to our pumper. But Tim doesn’t trust the compass, and Holden and the BI want to go to their vehicle, not ours. We decide to follow a ravine out. We take the flagging to the south ravine. We can’t see a fucking thing. I walk a little ahead of Tim, and Holden and the BI walk one to each side. The bottoms of the meadows are a mess, totally trashed—spruce, fir, aspen. The smoke hangs there, and the light from the headlamp scatters. It’s nearly worthless. No moon. And it’s wet. The damn inversion is forming. My headlamp gives out. Everything seems familiar and nothing seems familiar. Every place looks like every other place. We reach the road around midnight. So where’s the pumper? Any pumper?
“We split up. Tim and I go north, and the two bozos go south. Sooner or later one of us will come to a vehicle. Whoever finds a pumper will drive back to pick up the other guys and look for the second pumper. We don’t get back in the Area until 3:00 A.M. Holden and the BI parked their pumper somewhere; I don’t know where, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Maybe their map was bad. We were lucky to find them. Now that I think about it maybe we were unlucky.
“So Tim and I hike in the next day—our basic compass bearing—and we mop up and carry everything out. I’ll be damned if I’m going back in twenty-four hours to check for smokes. It’s out. If it isn’t out, I’ll wait until it comes to find me. Anyway, the BI says his time is too valuable to waste on any more snag fires.
“Now how the hell do you put this in a report? Just where do you find all this stuff in the manual? Where are the codes for running up and down a ridge with a chain saw and flagging tape? I’m not even sure I could draw a map. Where are the codes for wandering around the goddamn woods all night? What the hell does it matter what fuel model burned? ‘Elapsed time,’ my ass! You write the report. Find it in the book. Try it. I’ll give you a bearing.
“OK, OK, I’ll fill out the forms. But you know what I think? I think we need a new book. Our own book. A North Rim book.”
TASTE OF ASHES
There is something wrong in the Pit.
We sense it as soon as we pry the winter lock open. There is something missing; no, not just some thing but a feeling. Wil points to a space where the Base of a Big Yellow Pine used to be. The bench and milk cans are gone. The Musuem is gutted. Most of our photos are stripped from the walls. The BI has cleaned out the Pit. Now that the resource management office is complete—now that he has a proper office with electric heaters, venetian blinds, fake paneling, carpeting, a ritzy location within the new galleria of mid-level managers—the Fire Pit will be decommissioned. It is an act of bureaucratic vandalism.
For years our position within the Park has deteriorated, and the winter gutting of the Pit is a culmination, not a novelty. When the original fire cache was inaugurated in 1936, its double stalls—one for forest fire and one for structural fire—opened onto the major crossroads of the Area. Until the late 1960s, the fire crew remained the largest in size, and its mission—with the exception of actual lifesaving—the most vital to the Park. But that mission has been abandoned, without establishing an adequate surrogate; the fire crew diminishes in size, and other divisions increase dramatically in numbers; fire management is transferred from agency core to periphery. The fire cache is relocated to its present site between the warehouse and the mule barn. The old forest fire stall is reconditioned for an ambulance and mountain rescue apparatus—ranger operations. And rangers—the quintessential people managers—assume control over the Rim. Rangers turn the fire cache into a logistical slush fund and oversee a steady hemorrhage of tools, canteens, headlamps, hiking equipment.
What is fantastic is that this final act of vandalism has come from the top, not from the bottom. The brutality and cowardice and pettiness by which it has been perpetrated leave us speechless, then angry, then resigned, and finally indifferent. For us, fires are indispensable; the Pit is not. We need a future more than we need a past.
“OK, OK,” Joe laughs, magnanimously, cunningly. “Forget it. They can’t stop the fires from coming.”
The storm rises in the South and begins depositing lightning everywhere. We watch, disgusted and unbelieving, as a smoke curls up from the South Rim. A recon is mounted. There is a fire on Powell, near Dutton Point. Kent and Tyson race off, oblivious to the knowledge that they face a long drive and a longer walk. A second smoke is sighted deep in the Iron Triangle, near the abandoned E-1 fireroad; Randy, eager for overtime, takes a rookie; the fire, he calculates, will be simple. A third smoke, faint and remote, rises out of the Poltergeist Forest south of the Sublime Road. Alston takes Johnny Begaye and Howard Tsotsie, two SWFFs.
Recon 1 circles lazily over the remainder of the Rim, dodging thunderheads, biding time and watching for smokes. Alston enters the Sublime Road. Recon 1