Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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gearshift; he will shift for me if I will work the clutch. We lurch forward. The ride lasts several hours. I have not the slightest idea where we are. When we come to forks in the road, the SWFFs debate in Hopi about the proper road to take, then point and say in English, “This way.” One of the Hopis is quite old, probably sixty, and he chants in a low voice, almost in harmony with the engine whine. At last we come out to Highway 67. The remainder of the drive should be easy. It is nearly midnight when we run out of gas about a half mile from the Area.
Booby and Hugh come back the next day. Gummer drives out to pick them up, and Booby announces that it was a nice fire. There wasn’t much mop-up left, he says; they slept well, and Hugh got up early and made coffee. “That’s why,” he explains, “I wanted Hugh to stay the night.”
* * *
There are four smokechasers on the crew: The Ape, Gummer, Booby, and I. We have a foreman, Bill (“Wee Willie”), who is married and lives in a cabin. He hangs around the Area, never participates in fire crew parties, and dispatches himself immediately to every fire. We are supervised by a permanent Park Service ranger, Chuck, who reports to the unit manager. There is one patrol ranger (Weird Harold), a Park Service permanent, and one seasonal ranger. There are four or five ranger naturalists; it is hard to know exactly. The maintenance crews—Buildings and Utilities (B&U) and Roads and Trails (R&T) both—have fewer than ten people. The B&U group calls itself the Rare Breed. There are no fee collectors; there is no visitor center. The ranger station is a slightly refurbished mess hall constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in the 1930s. Almost everyone who is single eats at the North Rim Inn. The fire crew and the SWFFs always go as a group.
What makes the fire crew the largest collective entity on the North Rim are the SWFFs. Each summer a squad of six is requested out of the Southwest Forest Firefighter program for a tour of duty that lasts most of the summer. Our group consists of Hopis. The SWFFs live in the east bunk room of the Sheep Shed, the fire crew in the west. Separating (or binding) the two bunk rooms are a common shower and a toilet. The fire crew used to reside in a cabin, another relic of CCC days, and wishes to return. There are rumors of trouble among the SWFFs.
We are returning from the Grand Lodge when we notice flashing lights outside the Sheep Shed. The rangers are present and there is yelling. I am told to watch our bunk room. There is more screaming and the sound of tires on gravel. After a while Booby comes in. “Butch has been drinking,” he says. He assaulted Albert and nearly kicked his ear off with the pointed toe of his cowboy boot. Albert is on his way to the Kanab clinic in the back of the ranger station wagon, but the SWFF crew refuses to bed down in the Sheep Shed until Butch sobers up. Booby says that I am to stay in the Sheep Shed and watch Butch. I can hear Butch stalking across the floor and chanting on the other side of the shower stall. “I have to go now,” says Booby. “And, yeah, Butch may have a knife.”
I dress in my fire gear and drag my blankets outside. The moon is nearly full. Forest and Rim are bathed in silver light, and the Canyon is a black abyss. There are large ponderosa outside the Sheep Shed and some aspen. I stumble over to the aspen. Light streams out of the Sheep Shed, but there are no screams. I hear only the wind, and under the trees I cannot feel it.
Two days later we move to a cabin.
The lightning storm comes late in the day. Early the next morning Chuck sends me to Kanabownits tower with three SWFFs. We man Kanabownits only on special occasions. Chuck says he is sending Hugh with me because Hugh has a lot of fire experience; I should seek his advice. If there is a smoke in the western portion of the North Rim, we will be dispatched. He hands me a pair of binoculars from the ranger station safe.
Hugh struggles up the steps to the tower. He is breathing irregularly, his eyes are bloodshot, and his speech is a little slurred. He is unusually talkative and eager to please; after the episode with Butch, he fears that the whole crew will be sent home. I scan the horizon with the binoculars, trying to see more of the landscape with them than without. I can see the Rim and Canyon clearly. Powell Plateau stands out in bold relief. There are bluish mountains to the south, southwest, and west. I can’t name any of them.
Hugh and I sit down in the lookout booth and open the windows; the other two SWFFs stay with the truck. I begin to read a book and plan to survey the scene every half hour or so. Hugh chatters away. He tells me about the biggest fires he has worked, how long he has been with the SWFF program. He asks for the binoculars. I return to my book.
After a while Hugh points to a bluish haze hanging around a point on the Rim and declares that it is a fire. “I can’t tell,” I say. I have seen only one forest fire in my life. It is still early morning, Hugh explains, and the fire is only smoldering; now is the time to attack it. I take a bearing with the firefinder and watch the smoke some more with the binoculars. The haze is unquestionably dense, like the air in a campground during the early morning. On the other side of the point the bands of the Canyon are visible. The fire must be right on the Rim. I radio the information to Chuck. “The fire is at Rose Point, on Rainbow Plateau.” “Good,” he says. “Start to it and we’ll send up Recon 1 to guide you.”
With Hugh’s help I stop the powerwagon just north of Rainbow. There are no roads or trails, and Rose Point is more than a mile away. We load up with firepacks, chain saw, fedcos, handtools, and extra canteens. I flag our route by tearing off pieces of plastic surveying tape from a roll and tying them to tree branches. The drive takes an hour, and we walk for more than another hour before we hear that 211 has departed from the South Rim airport. We have found nothing, though several times I am sure that I can smell the odor of something burning. Hugh is enthusiastic. I want to traverse along the Rim, but Hugh points out that if we do that, we must cross several steep ravines. Better to follow deer paths, he cautions. So we do. We can always retrace our flagging back to the truck.
We hear the plane but we cannot see it, so we work our way to the Rim. The plane is circling far to our north. I get on the radio and ask the observer if he can help us reach the fire at Rose Point. He says that he is at Rose Point. “No,” I reply, “you are much too far north.” No, he replies, he is at Rose Point, and we must be somewhere else. After some maneuvering he locates us at Violet Point, the southern extremity of Rainbow Plateau and maybe an air mile from Rose Point. He cannot see any smoke. Are we sure there is a fire? “I guess not,” I reply, wondering if my nose has led me to anything more than the memory of a morning breakfast of bacon and burned toast. After Recon 1 surveys the rest of the North Rim, he heads for the airport.
The day is late, so we stagger back to the powerwagon by the most direct route we can imagine. The fedcos and extra canteens, useless, are drained to lighten the load. The next day we return and pick up our flagging.
It is a slow season for fires.
So it is, but there is still much to do. There are fireroads to open: the SWFFs clear brush, while we cut and move logs with chain saws and winches. We work with the R&T crew in rebuilding the Sublime Road. Two days a week we cut wood for the campground. We cut down snags—hazardous trees—along the main road, and buck and split the wood for the campground bins. We work in the fire cache: there are tools to sharpen, paint, rehandle; there are signs to rout and paint. If there is nothing else to do, we go to the Fence. The north boundary fence is a great sink for labor; usually one smokechaser will take the entire SWFF crew to the Fence for the day. If you drive slowly, this means only five and a half hours of real repair work. And we overhaul the network of tree towers.
When the CCC was in force, they moved North Rim tower to its present location, built Kanabownits tower to provide additional coverage, and constructed a dozen tree towers by attaching metal ladders to the trunks of prominent trees around the North Rim. The idea was that smokechasers could climb a nearby tree tower to get a better fix on a fire. The ladders were secured by lag bolts and joined by a heavy copper wire to conduct lightning to ground. The best tree tower (TT-1) scales a giant white fir behind the ranger station and ends in a small crow’s nest. The tree is topped, there is a small platform on which to stand, and a metal pipe encircles the affair in imitation of a handrail. The other towers end in branches, which have to be climbed to acquire a view. Over the course of thirty years, the system