Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne

      PREFACE TO THE 1995 EDITION

      Reburn

      FIRE ON THE RIM was a book I wanted to write for a long time but didn’t know how and to some extent didn’t know why. There were really three problems, related of course, but also autonomous.

      The first was technical. How do you make a profoundly seasonal experience into a coherent narrative? Fire season has a beginning, middle, and end, and so do fire careers, but how to reconcile an annual cycle with a secular one baffled me for many years. The typical solution is to imitate a diary and highlight the bigger events of the chronology or to collapse the whole into a single, composite year. Neither, I decided, was good enough, but in pursuit of an alternative I chased a lot of waterdogs. Eventually I hammered out a format around the idea of a “great season,” framed by initiating and valedictory years, that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. That decision led to the use of the historical present, the creation of composite events, and inevitable distortions as to who did what when. Not least it committed me to a narrative persona more or less fixed at a particular, and timeless, stage in his career. Accordingly I even found it necessary to invent one character to convey certain of my experiences without forcing the narrator to claim them. Still, all this gave coherence to the prose.

      The second, more daunting problem was a coherence of purpose. Was this a collection of beer-fogged anecdotes, or did the experience, and through it, fire, acquire a larger significance? If so then the story needed the discipline of literature (with a small “1”). It needed, at its core, some moral drama.

      As I read it, the literature of fire falls into three genres, a kind of conceptual fire triangle. One exploits fire as a narrative driver. The chronicle of a fire carries the other plots along with it, and fire illuminates, literally and symbolically, that larger narrative. Probably the classic expression is George Stewart’s novel, Fire. That book captured most of the possibilities of fire as narrative, which is why, despite its technological anachronisms, the book continues to find an audience. The second genre hovers over the central existential drama of firefighting, the tragedy of the burned-over crew. Here is the trying fire, the fire of judgment, the fire that sorts out the living from the dead. It is the prospect of death by fire that, in practice, moves the experience of firefighting beyond the domain of outdoor recreation and that, in principle, elevates its literature beyond juvenile sports stories. But until Norman Maclean wrote Young Men and Fire the genre had few serious practitioners. Possibly Maclean has exhausted the literary prospects. It is difficult to imagine anyone revisting the subject without quoting his vision if not his words.

      That leaves the third genre, firefighting as a rite of passage, fire season as a coming-of-age story. This is, by far, the most common experience of wildland firefighting, linked as it is to the seasonal employment of young people. Fire season becomes a time in one’s life, the passage from adolescence to adulthood. What added rebars to the narrative concrete, however, is the fact that the year after I began at the North Rim the National Park Service changed