Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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worked the fire crews, invited them to his house for drinking and general hell-raising. After the Saddle Mountain fire, Reusch made it a policy not to pay for overtime unless his crews found a fire. In disgust, Tim and Shane located a snag with a catface, started a fire in the basal cavity, and extinguished it. We found a fire and we put it out, they solemnly swore.
Now, of course, the new regime is less colorful and less sensitive to fire crew needs. The cautious Chuck has replaced the reckless Reusch, and I have replaced Tim. Chuck’s manifold fire credentials are dismissed. The crewmembers blink with incredulity when they learn that Tim and I attended the same high school in Phoenix.
They are determined to corrupt me. There is hope. I carry a pipe, though I have yet to smoke it. I drink a beer from time to time. I have learned to use simple swear words, not in fluent fire crew idiom but as a halting, second language. But I do not party. Gummer finally proposes that we organize a “book party.” The Ape reluctantly agrees. We each find a book and go to the Lodge. For half an hour or so we variously read or, more commonly, prowl restlessly around the Lodge. The book party is a failure. Books will not substitute for girls. My initiation becomes a matter of some importance. It will not be easily solved, but there have been stubborn rookies before: Gummer got his nickname because Tim thought he acted like a bubble-gummer. There is hope; there will be fires.
The crew is cutting and splitting wood on Lindbergh Hill when the smoke report comes in. North Rim tower sites the fire just south of the Sublime Road “in a grove of aspen.” The Ape and I depart immediately. We exit the Sublime Road at W-2 and, with pack and tools, begin walking. We walk for an hour. No smoke. Ape radios the tower and asks if he still sees smoke. “Yes,” Rick replies. “It is in a small grove of aspen.” “Christ!” mutters Ape. “Does he know how many fuckin’ groves of fuckin’ aspen there are on the North Rim?” We walk for another hour. It rained last night, and the sky remains largely overcast. It is difficult to spot smoke against that kind of backdrop. We climb another hill. The spruce branches are still wet; we brush against them as we trudge, loaded like pack mules, through the woods, and we both are soaked. At last we stop. Something bounces off Ape’s hard hat. He picks up a piece of charcoal. Some more charcoal falls nearby. We stare at each other and look up. Immediately there is a thunderous crack; awkward in our firepacks, we stagger as fast as we can away from the noise, while the top of a large fir crashes to the ground. It is the lost smoke.
The Ape grins. The tree has broken far below where it has been burning. The entire burning section is now on the ground. Ape tells me to dig a fireline. He hacks off branches with a pulaski, then stacks the green branches on the quiescent flames. The smoke thickens. He radios North Rim tower that we have arrived at the fire. I complete the line, and Ape continues to pile on more branches. The fire, which was nearly out, now flares and smokes heavily. North Rim tower calls to ask if there is a problem. The Park fire officer, Clyde, asks if we need an air tanker, some slurry, some advice. “No,” says The Ape. “We’re holding our own.” The fire rushes through the branches in sudden, gulping flames and sends up dense pockets of black-and-white smoke. The Ape lights his pipe. “Good fuckin’ work,” he says to me. Clyde has personally gone to Hopi tower to observe the smoke column puffing malignantly from the North Rim. He can have an air tanker up in minutes, he reminds us. It is now after 1700 hours, the start of overtime.
The Ape decides we should eat. In digging for my C rations, I unearth a bag of marshmallows. The Ape sees it and goes bananas. “It’s just a gag,” I explain. He insists that we cut some sticks. He squeezes a marshmallow down the point, locates a bed of red coals, and turns his hard hat around. We are just browning up the first batch when we hear a voice.
Rick trudges past our last flag. He is carrying a coffeepot, has carried it all the way from North Rim tower along our flagging. “After that fire flared up, I thought you boys could use some help,” he explains. “Thanks,” we say. “We’re doing just fine. Would you like a marshmallow?” Blankly, alternately staring at the smoking log and the pot, Rick shakes his head no. The fire has nearly expired; the large wood is much too wet to sustain combustion; only the oily branches, carefully prepared, could torch. We begin serious mop-up. It does not take long. Before he leaves we ask Rick to take a picture of our marshmallow toast. Trying to juggle coffeepot and camera, he quietly obliges.
When I return in early June the next summer, Ape asks me how the winter went.
I am driving the red powerwagon to the Inn. School had gone OK, but for months all I had thought about was the North Rim. For an instant I am caught between polysyllables and swearing and can’t say anything. “At least you learned to drive,” The Ape shouts. “Christ, you were fuckin’ awful.” “Yeah,” I say lamely, glancing out the open window. “It’s great to be back.”
But it doesn’t matter what I say or how I say it. The wind gusts, and my words vanish in its thundering rush through the pines.
Part Two
TOURS OF DUTY
CHAPTER ONE
The Area
COME EARLY.
When you stand at Little Park, it does not matter how far, or for how long, or for what reasons you have been away. Everything outside the North Rim vanishes instantly. The cold air shakes you awake; your skin feels as if it has plunged into a mountain stream; lungs ache for breath at the high elevation; trees in the crystal air look as if they have been etched on glass. The scene shocks with recognition. The great, many-boled ponderosa, dead for centuries, still guards the Sublime Road. Every sinkhole in the swelling meadow has a story. Every cavity in the old road revives an instinct. Eight months seem like a weekend. The sense of freshness and familiarity is overpowering. There is only the North Rim.
And fire. Scan the snowpack at Little Park. If it is deep and furrowed, there will be no spring fire season, and fires will be coincidental, spasmodic, ignited peripherally around the points that outline the Canyon. But if, by mid-May, the snowpack is broken into floes and the meadow is braided with briskly running streams, the fires may come early, and they can enter into the interior. They will go to the heart. This year the ground is raw with dead grass, mud, and duff. There will be fires.
So come early. There is no feeling like it. There are ample jobs; there is a promise—a wild hope—that can leap chasms; there is an animal thrill as the crew builds and the fire danger escalates. The Rim erases the outside world. Snow gives way to smoke. Nothing else matters.
* * *
The fire is at Deer Creek, and there is not much that can be done. Jim and I greet 210—the Park helicopter—with a firepack, some handtools, canteens, sleeping bags, and a Mark III pump with accessories, all ransacked from the fire cache. It’s the best we can manage on short notice. The cache is in disarray. Unopened boxes, heaped late in the fall, collect like snowdrifts in corners; slip-on units hang from the ceiling like monstrous beeves; packs are scattered, rifled, and incomplete from winter pilfering; saws are unassembled and pulaskis unsharpened. Jim hastily tests the Mark III while the 210 is a distant speck over Oza Butte. We barely complete our enter-on-duty (EOD) papers before climbing into the helo. The fire will probably expire before we reach it. If not, the pump should give us an edge, and there are few occasions to use it properly on the waterless Rim. At least we have a fire.
We fly over Tiyo, The Dragon, Sublime, Rainbow Plateau, Powell Plateau, a topographic fugue of Rim peninsulas and Canyon gorges. Then we cross beyond the edge of our fire maps. Deer Creek is a narrow gorge, like an opened coffin, with springs gushing out of limestone and a creek that debouches into the Colorado River itself. The fire is below the springs in a floodplain of grass, rushes, mesquite, and cottonwoods—ignited by yet another river party, conscientiously burning its toilet paper. We land at a small knoll, an Indian ruin overlooking the creek, and agree to a pickup the next morning at 1000 hours. A handful of cottonwoods, probably hollow, puffs with sad smokes. The hot air of the Canyon cloys and suffocates.
The Mark III, lugged painfully to the creek, proves worthless, full of sinister, hopeless sputters. Methodically we attack the cottonwoods with pulaskis