BY KATHERINE PIOLI
Copyright is held by the author.
I DIDN’T know a “good” fire from a “bad” one, but it was pretty clear from the start that Amy Harvey, my squad boss, thought this was a bad one. The prospect of 14 days working on the slow-burning Jim Creek Fire was making her irritable and she wasn’t trying to hide it.
Cussing out loud with the effort of her job, Harvey, never the less, persisted, slashing through the underbrush, hefting the thirty-pound 460 Stihl powerhead saw with its twenty-inch blade. The machine looked big enough to topple her, but Harvey worked fast. I could tell I was expected to keep up.
Sweating and stumbling through the forest I followed behind. The line gear pack on my back kept throwing me off balance. One minute I was crawling across ditches and over fallen trees, the next I was pulling branches, pitching everything she touched into a pile towards the road. The same motions over and over and over. All the while, trying to stay out of reach of the saw’s spinning teeth.
Earlier that day, just before dawn, I had left my trailer park home driving a borrowed Forest Service truck. In the quiet, cold morning the truck’s tires had crunched loudly at first over the gravel road, then quieted as I pulled out onto the smooth asphalt of the highway, headed north. One hundred and sixty-one miles north. Past the endless hills of Wyoming sage, tawny and sepia coloured in the growing light, to the Forest Service Supervisor’s Office in Jackson, Wyoming where a gathering crew of firefighters awaited me.
In the passenger seat next to me slumped an over-sized red duffle bag with handles that doubled as shoulder straps. I had packed the bag the night before without thinking much about where I was going or what I would do, but I had performed this small preparation with the eagerness of a child readying for a sleepover with a new friend. Inside the bag were some underwear, socks, a toothbrush, two rolled pairs of green Nomex fire-resistant pants, a yellow Nomex fire-resistant shirt, a synthetic-fill, government-issue sleeping bag, a sleeping pad and a bulky two-man tent. I also had a pack of batteries and a portable two-way radio that I had no idea how to operate. I had never been to a fire before. But these few items were what I was told I would need for my two-week assignment.
I’d spent the previous months of that summer working on a small trail crew, my first job out of college. Like most seasonal workers I’d spent a week at guard school training and earned my basic firefighter qualifications, only to return to clearing trails, hoping and praying every day to get out on a fire. The weeks passed. It seemed my prayers would go unanswered. Then, suddenly, three weeks before the end of my work season, I got the call.
By mid-afternoon, just hours after meeting my new crew, we were cutting a contingency line up Jim Creek, corralling a burn that was about as active as a half-dead campfire. There wasn’t a whiff of smoke. This wasn’t the kind of fire that made headlines, not even in the little local weekly papers. More a nuisance than anything, the Forest Service had decided to continue allowing the public to access the roads and trails around Jim Creek while we worked a containment line that seemed more like a tree thinning project.
A few cars came and went down the road. Our chainsaws whined. The only sign of fire activity came from the Forest’s public information sign, a piece of ply-board stapled with a laminated topography map. On the map an amoeba-like red line, cutting across the green topography lines, showed the outline of the fire. According to the incident map the fire’s frontline was about a mile away.
Harvey had split our squad of five fire fighters into two smaller groups and claimed me as her saw partner – a gesture of solidarity, I felt, between two women. While she took the job of sawyer, I became her permanent swamper in charge of moving aside the sticks, branches and logs that she touched her blade to. Within half an hour I was exhausted and relieved when we finally stopped to refill the gas tank, completely unaware of how much heavy lifting Harvey was also doing.
Even before I knew she was my squad boss, and direct supervisor, I’d quickly picked Harvey out of the circle of fire fighters. She was a small woman and strikingly beautiful. Her straight sandy blond hair reached just below her chin. Her eyes were ice blue. Up close her face was a rugged map of a hard outdoor-living. Creases formed easily on her sun-browned skin. Crow’s feet angled around her eyes. Lines pulled from the corners of her mouth where, I soon learned, she often pinched her lips together in a slight frown. It was the kind of face that, at twenty-two years old, I knew I wanted some day, a face that showed character and grit.
At the time we met, Harvey was already thirty-five-years-old and an experienced wildland firefighter with eight seasons under her belt. I could sense, even before hearing the stories, that she had seen plenty of “good” fires over the years. Fast, intense fires, the exciting ones that ate up everything in their path and kept a crew half wondering if they might get eaten up, too.
I later learned that Amy Harvey had been 28 years-old, with college long behind her, when she walked into a Forest Service office in Sheridan, Wyoming to inquire about seasonal work with the Forest biologist. She had walked out that day, instead, with a job on a fire hand crew. When she started, she was probably a decade older than most of the guys she worked with, but her age didn’t hold her back. She dug and hiked as hard and as fast as any young person and she had life experience on her side. Her wisdom, combined with her built-in toughness, got Harvey an express ticket into the elite ranks of firefighters. Before the end of her second season she landed a spot with the Wyoming hotshots. With the “shots” all of Harvey’s fires, dozens and dozens each season, were “good” ones. Initial attack. Night operations. This was up-close, can’t-ever-rest firefighting. Two seasons with the Wyoming hotshots led to a senior position with Teton Helitack. Her promotions came in quick succession and when some of the men around her grumbled about it Harvey didn’t give it any attention. She knew she was where she was supposed to be.
After we had both sucked down some water, and Harvey had refilled the saw’s gas tank and oil, we regained our feet and got back to work. Harvey clenched her jaw and yanked on the start cord. I checked my watch and pulled on my gloves. It was finally starting to sink in just how long and tedious this assignment might be. Harvey went right back to cussing and cutting shit into pieces, and the more she cussed and stomped and scowled the more I liked her. I was sure she was the toughest woman I’d ever met.
Afternoons in Wyoming play out a fierce drama across the sky. What looks blue and pacific in the mornings, by two o’clock turns grey and electric. Summer storms hit fierce and quick, almost while the sun still shines overhead. The first sign is a sudden cooling of air.
The storm that rolled over Jim Creek that afternoon, August 23, 2006, the storm that, for me, started it all, began with a faint rumbling of thunder barely audible over the whine of our crew’s chainsaws. Rain soon pelted from the sky and a few close lighting strikes sent our twenty-person crew running from the tall timber and scattering out into the nearby road. Being on open ground made me feel more exposed, but I knew that each tree was a lightning rod. We threw our metal tools to the ground and crouched low in the road ditch. Radios switched off. Rain drenched my clothes. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was over.
Harvey’s whole attitude changed after that storm. As the thunderheads retreated to the east, grumbling and rolling, electricity seemed to linger around her. The crew boss, moving from group to scattered group, pulled Harvey and the other squaddies aside. I remained where I had taken shelter in the road and was taking stock of my wet clothes, wondering if I could remove my yellow long-sleeve, when the call came to load up into the trucks. A thought raced across my mind. I was not going back to swamping. In that moment, where we were going didn’t seem to matter at all. Sinking into the cushioned truck seat all I cared about was rest.
With Guns n’ Roses crashing out of the speakers we took off flying over rutted out roads and through mud holes. Harvey and her navigator, Joe, talked excitedly in the front seats. Between them the black box of the communications radio, fixed low near the gearshift, chattered and buzzed but I couldn’t hear the voices over the sound of wailing guitars. After twenty minutes of bouncing through rolls of sage brush we rounded a bend. My confusion about our destination came to an abrupt end.
From the back seat of a white Forest Service pick-up truck I looked out the window and saw a thick black rope of smoke twisting above the evergreen canopy. The lightning strike was less than an hour old and already, somewhere beneath the tops of lodgepole pine, subalpine and Douglas fir, a fire burned. At its back lay an expanse of green that rose up all around, over peaks that I knew hid more mountains behind them, hundreds of miles of continuous Wyoming timber. There I was, at the edge of the Gros Ventre Wilderness, watching a wildfire begin.
I could see the contortion of embers pull upwards on currents of hot air. Bits of cooling ash fell from the convection column like shreds of black tissue paper. All around us, in the sagebrush meadows that bordered the timber, on the powder-fine dust in the road, the embers came to rest.
Staring out through the windshield on that mid-August day, I could not fully understand the immensity of the thing I watched. I was close enough to see it, the red-orange crawling tree by tree up the trunks of hundred-foot tall subalpine fir. I was close enough to smell it, that faint sweetness that seeped in even through the rolled up windows, that lingered in clothing and car seat upholstery days afterward, that I learn to call “money” because to a firefighter it meant work. There I was – watching, smelling, seeing – and yet not really comprehending the destructive potential, the unpredictability, of that thing that had brought me there.
From within the deep rumble of fire I could make out the pop of exploding sap and the tear of falling limbs. Overhead the thwack of helicopter blades from the circling reconnaissance ship sliced periodically through the roar. The chatter continued from truck’s two-way radio. Now I could hear a woman’s voice, dispatch, full of questions. What was the fire cause? It’s size? Was there potential to spread quickly? The voice of our crew boss, sitting two trucks ahead of us in the caravan line, sounded with answers, calmly, as though he were talking about the weather on a lazy summer day.
Their talk was all background noise to me — meaningless squawking. The only thing I knew, the only thing I cared about in that moment, was that Amy Harvey, my squad boss and the one I looked to for directions, assignments and orders, was still in her seat behind the wheel. I didn’t do anything without her telling me to do it first. So I sat and watched the fire grow. Though my heart beat very fast, I knew that I was not afraid.
Helitack had already flown their helicopter over the blaze and called it in to dispatch at ten acres. Working through the official channels – dispatch to fire management officer to dispatch to us – we were officially released from the Jim Creek Fire and reassigned to the Battle Mountain Fire.
This was it, the real thing. No more guard school training scenarios, textbooks, VHS videos, red flagging in the trees, cutting line through a healthy, green forest. No more cutting sticks and throwing into piles along a road. Now shit was on fire. It was all red and orange tendrils and rumbling, grinding sounds like the echo of a steel train coming through a granite tunnel.
I knew that we were at the heel of the fire, the sight of the igniting lightning strike. I knew that the books all said to start here. We would “anchor” into the road and start our digging line from a point that could not burn — dirt, rock or, in this case, a road. We would work a two-foot wide scratch line along the flank, or side, of the fire and move up it trying to pinch out the top. But looking at what lay in front of us all of this suddenly seemed crazy. Impossible. One little line scratched in the dirt? That’s all we had to work with against this monstrous force?
That, indeed, was the plan. Our crew boss, before lining us out, knelt in the road. Our crew gathered around in a tight circle. In the fine dirt he drew a rough map with his index finger. It started with an “x” for the fire heel and a line for the road we were parked on. A second line intersecting with the “road” showed us the route we would dig. Slowly we would draw a literal line in the sand.
Fifty feet from the edge of the burning timber, with heads down, eyes on the ground, we began. Swing, hit, pull, step, swing, hit, pull, step. With each pull we ripped roots, whole plants, decaying leaf matter, towards our feet and away from the flames. The Wyoming ground gave easily to our sharpened metal. Whole whorls of sage swept aside with a few strokes of a pulaski axe. With a few more swipes the combi tools cleaned the rest. I hunched over my work, my steps keeping rhythm with the people ahead of me. The work distracted me from the fire, except for when I unfurled momentarily to shift the weight on my back and straighten my stiffening spine. Then I could see that we were steadily walking closer to where the sage field met the fire. I could see individual trees and fallen logs lapped by flame. I felt compelled to watch the flickering, as captivating as a television screen, but my cheeks soon burned and even with sunglasses over my eyes I could not stand the dry blasts of air. Lowering my chin I used the brim of my plastic helmet to deflect the intense heat and bent back to work.
***
By the time we were told to take a break the sun was nearly set. I’d barely had time to drink water since we’d left the trucks, let alone get any food, and I was grateful when Harvey told to me pull out my MRE dinner. Almost before I finished we were back on our feet.
The fire, since our arrival, had continued to grow at an extraordinary pace and it was clear, at least to our crew boss, that scratching a containment line would never be fast enough, with one twenty-person crew, to succeed in cutting off the blaze’s march into the wilderness. We needed a faster method. We needed to fight fire with fire.
The crew divided into two groups. Most joined the holding crew, spread out into the sage meadow following the timberline. There, in the sage sea, they would wait to catch and extinguish any embers that might fall across our line.
I stood with the burn crew just inside the line of trees. There were five of us. Our job was to walk at a brisk pace, but not run, and ignite everything around us. We would create a burn line, grass and bushes and trees all turned to black ash under our hands. A sixty-foot wide swath of black which the wildfire could not cross. A line which might grow fast enough to flank the fire, wrap the head where the blaze pushed hungrily on, pinching it out for good.
The only rookie chosen for the small burn crew, I was not at all sure of what to do after being pulled aside from the rest of my squad. Preparations had begun all around me and I felt lost at the center of them. So I stood, waiting. Next to me a young subalpine fir kept me company. It grew barely fifteen feet tall and stood a little apart from the more dense mature growth, a vanguard pushing out into the open land. It would not remain alive for long.
Harvey soon came to my rescue. She dropped at my feet two empty metal cylinders. They were as tall as my knee and six inches in diameter. I had never seen a drip torch before. She knelt over each can and unscrewed their tops. Together we filled the one-gallon cylinders with a highly flammable mix of diesel and gasoline. Then she showed me how to invert and secure the top so that the long metal spout, which had previously been inside the canister, now reached upward. She looked at the torch unsatisfied. Loosening the lid she swiveled the top until the spout’s curl, the “pig tail,” faced away from the can’s handle. The pig tail, she explained, would slow and regulate the stream of liquid fire starter as I poured from the long appendage. She twisted open the air vent. Then, she lit a lighter.
“Tip your torch until some fuel falls on the ground,” she instructed. I shook a few streams from the spout. The tip glistened black and wet. Harvey held out her flame. When they met a ball of blue fire lapped around the metal wick and then settled into place no more dangerous looking than a garden party tiki torch.
After helping to secure the second drip torch to my line gear Harvey pointed me towards a man in a blue hardhat. He would be leading the burn crew, she said. Then, she walked back out into the field and disappeared into the dark.
In the time it took to prepare the drip torches the holding crew had found their spacing. With thirty feet between each person their line stretched two-hundred feet down the timbered edge. Our burn crew, ready with our torches, moved into formation perpendicular to the holding crew. I stood on one end of our line keeping us on the border between trees and sage. I felt good about my placement on the edge of the timber. From my position I could always keep one eye on my escape route out into the wet meadow.
The burn boss took the deepest position sixty or seventy feet inside the timber. The trees, standing and fallen, were so dense that I could only reliably keep a visual on the person immediately to my right, fifteen feet away. By now the sun had completely set. The fire, and our headlamps, partially illuminated the night. But the trees and the smoke and the confusion of something so new made me feel half blind. I had to trust. I had to follow.
At the signal called out from the burn boss, “moving”, our five-person burn squad tipped the spouts of our torches to the ground and walked forward. Harvey, who continued to move between me and the holding line, reappeared. She took the torch momentarily. Circling the base of the young subalpine fir next to which I had been standing, she let fall along its lower branches a stream of fire and fuel. Then, without waiting to see what would happen, she pushed the torch back into my hands and told me to keep moving. By the time I’d finished pouring fuel at the base of an adjacent tree I felt warmth creep across the back of my neck. Turning I found the little subalpine engulfed in flame.
Deep inside the forest the darkness began to waver. Sudden flares of orange revealed where others had tipped their torches. We walked and burned for hours that night – well into the morning.
***
Many years later, Harvey and I spoke about our time together on the Battle Mountain Fire. For her, there is little to no memory of those weeks. Getting assigned to the Teton hand crew in the middle of August, jumping into an initial attack assignment, it was all just another day leading a new squad of people across a sublime slice of Wyoming soil. But for me, the experience of that first fire dug deep into my memory. The twist of black smoke. The intoxicating adrenaline rush. The way we dug, behaving like an army of ants working away strangely, methodically, mechanically, towards the same herculean goal. The powerful feeling that, if we could only dig fast enough, our little human chain might stop this incredible force of nature.
Of course, we couldn’t stop the fire, and we didn’t. It burned on for weeks, and smolder for weeks more, until the snows came in late September. But our failure to stop the fire never mattered to me as much as my memories of the sights and sounds of that first night and the incredible bond I felt with Harvey and the other firefighters. With each step I took into that fiery darkness its magic wove a spell on me and I knew that this would only be the beginning. That, for me, there would be many more fires to come.
***
That first night on Battle Mountain I wove in and out of the forest, drip torch pouring liquid fire, watching it grow. With whoops and yelps we kept track of each other’s location through the burning timber. I entered into a rhythm and a focus that I had never felt before.
When Amy Harvey called me back out to the field I had no idea how long we had been moving or how far we’d gone. Harvey showed me how to smother my torch. A leather-gloved hand cupped over the metal wick. Together we walked out into the field. I stopped when she did and I turned back to watch the last lighters, the more experienced ones who had worked deeper in the timber, walk purposefully out of the burning forest. The hot gasses made their exiting figures look like walking mirages. Two hundred feet overhead the fire curled. No one ran. Everything felt calculated and controlled. Harvey stood silently by my side. I looked to her face and knew that the fire would not reach us, could not hurt us, not tonight.
Standing out in the sage meadow, in the darkness lit with wavering light, we watched something greater than us, moving. It was beautiful. Sparks of hot ash, brighter than the stars, rose into the night. The hot air carried them up and up. They drown out the stars and replaced them. Then, swirling, blinking, they fell back to earth hanging in the branches of the unburned trees like garlands of bright white Christmas lights.
***
In her previous life, Katherine Pioli was a wildland firefighter and a journalist. She now teaches middle school, is the mother of two young boys and, in moments of quite late at night, tries her best to write stories. This is her first published piece of narrative nonfiction.
