Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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somewhere, somehow—has crossed the stream. The scene explodes. Within minutes the fire races through reeds, shrubs, cacti, cottonwoods and across the narrow floodplain and up the rocky slopes. The rush and crackle of flame echo off the cliffs. The box canyon concentrates a convective column black with roiling smoke; fire lookouts from Flagstaff to the Arizona Strip report the towering column, rising angrily like a thunderhead; Dick Johnston, fire officer for the North Kaibab National Forest, sights the smoke while taking out the trash at his Fredonia home; two hikers, who just minutes previously painfully staggered down from Surprise Valley, scramble back up the trail with the agility of bighorn sheep. Then it ends. Within thirty minutes the fire has run its course. The head dies out amid the Tapeats sandstone, and there is nothing left but flaming trees and smoldering pack rat middens stuffed under boulders. A group of river rafters appears, also drawn by the awesome smoke, and wonders if the Park Service knows about the fire. “We are the Park Service,” Jim informs them.
Nightfall creeps over the gorge, and we retire to our camp at the ruins for a fitful sleep. The evening is oppressively hot, filled with the obnoxious odors of tamarisk and sour woodsmoke, and when we rise at dawn, haze hangs in the gorge like a prehistoric smog. We mop up scattered pockets of flame and smoke, more to keep ourselves busy than to control another outbreak. Jim surreptitiously tries, without the least success, to start the Mark III.
At 1000 hours, the helo has failed to show; at noon we eat the last of our rations; at 1400 hours, we slink off the knoll for the timid shade of a mesquite. Deep within Canyon gorges our radio is worthless. We are dead to the Park. Not until 1600 hours does 210 appear, delayed, the pilot explains, by assorted “river emergencies.” The helo rises, like a fluttering raven, out of the Canyon. The snowbanks under spruce and fir shock us back to life.
At the cache I grab some C rations for dinner, while Jim, readying the Mark III for storage, tries the starter rope once more. The pump coughs, rocks the cache with noise, and roars with a cacophony that could fill Transept Canyon. “Dammit,” he mutters. “Nothing at this place works except at this place.”
The smoke column rises from southeast of Cape Royal, near Lava Canyon, where the Colorado River makes its great bend to the west. Flames move briskly through desert grasses, shrubs, and scattered pinyons. The fire burns in a narrow canyon but will soon crest onto a broad terrace. If it continues it may spread through one of several brush-covered debris cones that span the vertical cliffs of the Redwall limestone; it could, conceivably, continue all the way to the Rim. Winds gust upslope in slow coughs.
Park fire officer McLaren orders fire retardant and requests a small crew from the North Rim. The “crew” will be an ad hoc group—a handful of recent regular fire crew arrivals, but mostly reserves, curious and untrained, who have been impressed into service from duties as garbage and fee collectors, a carpenter and plumber, even a ranger. The reserves are unenthused, and everyone is unacclimated. Even the regulars have only just arrived, and they have not yet unpacked their gear, which clusters on bunks like lichen-backed stones.
We begin arriving by helicopter around 0900 hours, store our firepacks amid a large rock outcrop, and throw dirt along the advancing flaming front. The grasses have the kindling temperature of Kleenex; even the prickly pears burn hot. No fireline needed here, only a vigorous perimeter of hot-spotting and cold-trailing—knocking down flames and using burned-out patches as a surrogate fireline. But the fire moves upslope through the rugged terrain much faster than we do. We will be saved only by the slurry. For nearly an hour a B-26 and a PB-4Y2 drop retardant, operating out of the retardant base at the South Rim airport. McLaren directs the drops from the Park helicopter. We follow behind the slimy trail of slurry, extinguishing flames that escape it or that burn under its pink patina. The helo brings in more firefighters and removes one, overcome by heat, back to the North Rim. When the B-26 shortens its return time and suddenly appears on a drop run directly over us, Wil and Dave take refuge behind some large sandstone boulders; the retardant cloud, in a slow, graceful vortex, swirls around the boulder and paints them pink. When finally contained, the fire totals 350 acres—a quarter mile wide and a mile and a half long.
Dave and Wil establish a small helispot, where 210 can land, then we fly the perimeter. At areas that need mop-up we drop off two-man teams, each with at least one regular fire crewman, along with shovels, saws, and fedcos. The chief problems are pack rat middens tucked around giant boulders and hollow-trunked junipers that can smolder for days and in a high wind throw sparks outside the old burn. While the scenery is spectacular—great fault blocks, bands of ancient lava, a topography of terrace and ravine, an unblinking desert sun—the heat is oppressive. Then 210 is called away to other Park duties, and, fully equipped, we climb on foot through the colossal silence. Mop-up slows. The reserves tire quickly; they have long since sweated away the flush of excitement; they want to go home. Around 1700 hours we fly them off the line and reposition a handful of fire crew regulars at another trouble spot. Two hours later the only smokes are safely within the deep interior of the burn. As the last crew departs, the Chuar fire—in the lee of a Canyon sunset—is engulfed by deep, cool shadows from the Rim.
Building 176 echoes with emptiness. Its screen door flaps in the evening winds. One by one we shower, open cans of beans, peaches, and beer, and throw sleeping bags on bunks. Dave searches for a fresh shirt and socks. I clean and oil my boots; the heat has baked them as stiff as sheet metal; ash, once wet, then fired, congeals like concrete. My left foot is blistered. Wil moves with studied deliberateness, his muscles as stiff as two-by-fours. Ralph and Joe should EOD tomorrow. We can unpack our gear tomorrow. Outside, winds from Rim and Canyon mix in black, noisy gusts.
Tomorrow we will open the fire cache.
THE CACHE
The great double doors draw open. Chilled morning air seeps through all four stalls. A winter’s mustiness rises, like an invisible steam, out of the cache.
The grime looks wonderful. I have come home. We all have. We are what we do, and the fire cache is where we do it—or where we start to do it. Fire season ends when, in the late fall, the cache is stuffed with the residue of one summer and the ordered goods for another, and fire season begins when, the next spring, the cache is again exhumed and revived. As often as not, we are dispatched to fires from within the cache or its annex, the Fire Pit. All backcountry roads (and all the roads of winter) lead to the cache. After fires are out, we clean up our gear in the cache. We begin workdays in the cache, and as often as not we go to the cache on our days off as well. We can live without a ranger station, without a resource management office, without Building 176, without a Grand Lodge, a North Rim Inn, a saloon; but we cannot survive without the cache.
There is a rough logic to excavating the fire cache. We take the bulk items first: oversize cartons of paper sleeping bags, cases of canteens, cotton hoses, twelve-packs of shovels and pulaskis, a small warehouse of postseason fire orders. Kent, The Kid, Gilbert, and I dump them willy-nilly on the asphalt outside the cache. The fitness trail paraphernalia goes next. We carry the stations—like miniature dinosaurs constructed of two-by-fours—behind the road shed until they can be set up in proper sequence. Next to them, under a white fir and a looming ponderosa, we stash the slatted sections of the hose drying rack; it will not be assembled until the snows melt. Right now our need is access to the cache; it has to be opened, emptied, and refilled.
So, after a winter away, do we. The cache is an exchange as much as a warehouse. Step across its threshold, and its crowded exhilaration will overwhelm whatever else you bring to it. The cache is inexhaustible and infinitely renewable. This is ritual as much as logic, and to make the renewal work, every item has to be touched, pondered, moved, reshelved, and allowed to crowd out a winter of remote experiences, distant thoughts, and abstract emotions. Rookie or returning veteran—the effect is the same. Already, as the day progresses, I begin to slough off one existence and take on another. Shovels replace pencils; firepacks displace books; chain saws and fedcos suppress lectures, television, magazines, malls, libraries. The fire cache is made for access: its bank of doors opens half the building at once. Through them we pass into the North Rim.
After the bulk items have been removed, we start on the smaller boxes. Each goes to one of the four stalls or bays that make up the cache. The tool stall