Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
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firepacks hang on one wall, each pack framed by a wooden nameplate; racks of shovels, pulaskis, McLeods, flanked by sledges, peaveys, picks, and axes fill up another wall; on the third are spare tool handles, wedges, a vial of linseed oil, cans of black and red spray paint, stencils, hand files, sandpaper. Sprouting from the floor are a wood box, bristling with worn tools ready for conditioning; a tool jig, with grinder, leather apron, ear protectors, vises for securing tools while they are sharpened; a black box, now cold, that emits steam like a witch’s brew when it warms a green plastic goo that coats the sharpened edges of shovels and McLeods. Above are three flail trenchers liberated from the fire cache at Yellowstone. Progress is slow. We must re-equip each firepack and individually sort the usable tools from the unusable. On the floor, dominating nearly the whole of the stall, sit two slip-on pumper units of two hundred gallons each. As soon as the trucks are available, we will hoist the slip-ons using a chain block and tackle, back a truck underneath, and lower and bolt a slip-on to each bed. With the fireroads blockaded by snowbanks and mudholes, there is no urgency. We walk around and climb over the slip-ons. The logic of opening the fire cache is the logic of fire season: handtools and firepacks precede slip-ons; crewmen come before roads; fires, before project work.
It is hard to realize that the cache has a history. Its instincts are to rework and homogenize on an annual cycle, and it thus fits well the life cycle of a seasonal firefighter for whom two, perhaps three fire seasons may constitute a lifetime. That is one of the things that made my tenure at the North Rim anomalous: I returned for fifteen seasons. I came to the Rim when I was eighteen, shortly after graduating from high school. I spent four years at Stanford, returning to the Rim each summer, and in my fourth season—the youngest member of the crew—I was made foreman. I skipped my graduation ceremony to help open the cache and the fireroads, worked late into the fall to capture some prescribed burning, then started graduate school in January 1972 at the University of Texas in Austin. The ceremonies for master’s and doctoral degrees I bypassed, too; better to open a summer than to close a winter. I took my doctoral orals with my fire boots on and my car packed outside Garrison Hall, ready—win, lose, or draw—to hurry to the Rim and begin fire season. In the spring of 1977, amid a dizzying snowstorm on the North Rim, Sonja and I married. Meanwhile, I landed a cooperative agreement, a sort of bastard grant, from the History Office of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., and set about researching a history of wildland fire in America. For the academic year 1979–1980 I went to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina on a fellowship and wrote up a draft of my fire history; there our first child, Lydia, was born. Through it all I returned each summer to fire and the Rim. But finally I just got too broken down to haul my ass, a big saw, a firepack, and assorted handtools and canteens up the ridges. If I wanted to stay in fire, I would have to write; I would have to stock the fire cache with books. During my last season, 1981, as my first fire book inched toward publication, my back was a mess. By then I had accepted an appointment with the History Department at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that would send me for a season to Antarctica. I always knew that the question was never whether I would leave but when. Now it was decided. I had stayed as long as I could; I would trade fire for ice.
Kent and The Kid move to the next bay. The cache is a rectangular building originally constructed by the CCC as a temporary warehouse for storing road equipment. The lumber is rough, the lighting poor; a corrugated tin roof reverberates during thunder and hailstorms. Small, murky windows rim three sides, and the bank of double doors frames the fourth. Only after the fire crew was assigned the structure, during a forced relocation from the indigenous cache, did the Park pour a cement floor. The interior design is our own. The north bay houses the tool stall. Here we concentrate the daily tasks, firepacks, and handtools. But the smell and noise during midsummer are too fierce not to quarantine the bay partially with a wall, and it is accessible only from the double-doored front or a doorway to the adjacent stall—the less frequently used project fire stall. We want daily access, but we also want isolation.
In the project fire stall we store matériel not destined for daily use. The bay thus acts as a buffer between the tool stall and the rest of the cache. Scores of canteens fill elevated racks. Five-gallon cubitainers climb one wall like cardboard ivy. Fedcos and project firepacks for first aid, heliport management, and saw repair festoon the other. Army pack frames crowd a corner. Old fireroad signs decorate the doorway like a collage. As we open the winter deliveries, we substitute new for old, and a pile of discards grows outside the heavy double door. Gilbert and I move some new rations and sleeping bags to an enclosed room, mouse-proofed and locked, in the back. I toss paper sleeping bags into a small attic above the room. Everything goes; we will sort the good from the bad as needed. Later that afternoon The Kid and I will visit the ancient root cellar, accessed by a trapdoor, below the bedroom of the supervisory ranger’s house, where old rations, batteries, and other perishables (including handtools, which have a tendency to disappear) are stored over the winter. Some new crew mess kits are discovered, along with gas lantern mantles, long-range patrol rations, and fire shelters. But enough. The project fire stall can be straightened out on a rainy day. Kent and The Kid move to the primary work areas.
No wall segregates the two last bays from each other. Only a short shelf juts out like a jetty, and together the two bays make an all-purpose great room. Along one wall there is a workbench with wood and machine tools. Along another are storage shelves for assorted bulky items: the Mark III pumps and accessories, jerry cans for gas, GI surplus webbing harnesses for carrying canteens, saw supplies, whatever. There are cases of hard hats. One corner holds a chain saw bench; another, a wooden cabinet with flagging tape, headlamps, batteries, hydraulic appliances, assorted firepack necessities; a third, a ceiling-high rack for hoses; the last, a four-shelf cabinet for chain saws. The saw shop is more elaborate and self-contained—our concession to high tech—but it is far from functional. Boxes of winter-ordered parts pile around the dark workbench like mushrooms pushing through pine litter. On the bench are an electric grinder and a chain breaker and a can of oil with several seasoning chains; other chains hang in clusters from pegs like mistletoe; individual saw kits, destined for firepacks, are scattered across the bench like windfall. A surplus military field desk holds endless screws, spare parts, instruction manuals, specialty repair tools. Overhead dangles a fluorescent light, constantly bumped and swaying.
Steadily we unburden the great room of its congestion. The miscellaneous residue finds its way to shelves, or to other sheds, or to the asphalt outside until we can determine what it is and why we have it. A few bulky items are hoisted to planks crossing the joists that make a surrogate attic. A case of back-firing flares—fusees—goes to the flammables shed, a flimsy metal structure behind the warehouse that houses gas, saw mix, oil, drip torches, and flamethrowers. The outside saw bench, where we clean saws after daily use before storing them in the saw cabinet, is buried under old and new snow. We will dig it out later. The structural fire cache in another building we ignore. Kent plugs in a coffeepot, and Gilbert scrounges some spare packets of “Coffee, Instant, Type II” from the rations.
Yet there is more. A fire cache abhors a vacuum. Everything, it seems, sinks to the Lower Area and eventually finds its way, deliberately or coincidentally, to the fire cache, the great mandala of the Rim. Everything comes and goes in a grand recycling. The great room acquires quasi-permanent furnishings. Two metal lockers discarded by maintenance are eagerly scavenged and installed; a weight lifting bench appears alongside the saw cabinet; a punching bag hangs from a rafter. Some trash we haul to the Boneyard, some to the warehouse on CCC Hill. The cache is thus eclectic and plentiful; everything almost—but not quite—fits its purpose. For all its congestion it is profoundly utilitarian. A good fire cache learns everything and forgets everything. And all of it is grimy with oil and dust, coated with memory like pine pollen.
Coated, not stored. Unlike the tools and packs and fedcos, memories cannot be kept in steady state, removed like rations or restocked like shovels. The fire cache does not save the past. It reworks it, and by using the past, it continually converts past into present. But the rhythm of the cache—the cycle of fire season—is only one of several rhythms that affect us. There is also the cycle of a seasonal career, and it imposes a slightly larger rhythm upon the rhythm of annual renewal. To these I have added a third.
My longevity as a smokechaser on the North Rim was unprecedented. I even predated the existing fire cache. It is not uncommon