Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
requests the Park dispatcher to ask the Forest dispatcher for the location of the nearest air tanker. It is only noon, and the fire continues to escalate. Black smoke erupts like a gushing well as flame enters the oily crowns of ponderosa; surface fires flash through scrub oaks and heavy litter like surf striking a rocky shore. Clyde orders a retardant drop from an air tanker stationed at Prescott, while Booby and Vic, temporarily mired in a mud puddle on a stretch of Forest road just outside the Park boundary, stare with longing and frustration at the Shinumo Gate. They extricate themselves with a winch.
The fire is now about ten acres; with a long burning period ahead of it, the fire will probably proceed to the Rim and up the peninsula. Clyde requests a helicopter; Booby and Vic struggle with the rusted lock at the Shinumo, finally break the chain, and enter the Park. They continue to dodge trees where possible and cut them where they must. The helicopter locates a landing site not too far from the fire, but there is a much better helispot possible along the Rim if a few trees are dropped—a chore quickly done. Within an hour it is possible to begin ferrying firefighters from either North or South Rim to the fire. Booby and Vic stop the pumper near Swamp Lake. Rainbow Plateau is due south. They study their fire map, realize that the plateau tilts downward from east to west, and wisely elect to hike along the eastern Rim; even so, there are three substantial ravines to cross. They seize packs, tools, and canteens and begin to flag a route south. The fresh personnel landed by the helo work a flank of the fire. The air tanker, a B-17, arrives, drops its load along the most active perimeter, then departs for the retardant base at Grand Canyon airport for another tank of slurry. Many more people will be needed. The fire is twenty acres and growing as it wishes. The smoke column is visible to all the regional lookouts. Clyde orders three SWFF crews. The fire flashes over Emerald Point and expires in midair as it sweeps into the void of the Canyon. Booby and Vic thrash through vicious meadows of locust. Not yet acclimated to the high elevation of the Rim, panting from both exhaustion and anxiety, they listen helplessly to their radio, a constant buzz of voices, a flaming rush of shouts, chain saws, aircraft. Hopi tower reports another fire farther west.
Clyde makes a pointless recon, for it is discovered later that Hopi tower, manned for the summer by the music teacher from Grand Canyon High School, has reported the sunset over Mount Trumbull as a fire. Meanwhile, Booby and Vic catch whiffs of smoke. They can hear the helicopter, then chain saws, then voices, shouts. They tie their last flag at the helispot, now piled high with matériel. Within a couple of hours the SWFF crews—Hispanics from New Mexico, tough and regimented—will trample over their flagged route to the helispot at Violet Point. The route will become a trail. When the SWFFs arrive, the local crews will be released.
Booby and Vic grab canteens and shovels and wander in the direction of the noise. They want to find someone to report to before they are released. They would like to see the Emerald fire, and darkness is coming fast.
“IF YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE …”
Our sense of geography enlarges slowly and empirically. It begins with a nuclear core of work stations and gradually expands, like a tree branching outward, to encompass the Rim. Skid Row, the maintenance shops, the gas pumps, the mule barn, the galleria of mid-scale managerial shops are added to the Greater Cache to form the Lower Area. The ranger station (a.k.a. “the Office”) and a cluster of upscale housing constitute the Upper Area. Here the administrators of the Rim congregate, and here there are frequent contacts with Park visitors.
The entrance road passes near the Office on its way to a terminus at Grand Lodge, somewhat over a mile distant. Between the Park Service Area and the Lodge are side roads that lead to the North Rim Inn, the campground, the garage, the wranglers’ quarters and mule barn, the ball park. We know the fire cache well and the Area somewhat less well. We know the Rim only as we encounter it during the course of our work—which is to say, where fireroads and fires take us. We know the Canyon from scattered fires that occur within it. Our interest varies by a kind of inverse-proportion square law. The Lodge can be reconstructed—is reconstructed—and the Inn can be rededicated as a store, and the changes affect us hardly at all. But when Horace Wilson bulldozes the heliport into dust, when the fire cache is relocated, when the storage sheds where we used to park the pumpers are converted to a galleria of clapboard offices, we are outraged. This is sacred space. It is our connection to fire.
In the great room of the cache there is a routed sign that reads IF YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE, YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE. After a few weeks even rookies no longer have to ask what it means. At best the cache is a portal; at worst, a sink. “The Area” becomes an expression of opprobrium. Rangers work in the Area. Offices, not fires, populate the Area. The Area exists because there is a source of water (Roaring Springs) to exploit, not because there are fires. The Area is staffed to serve the visitor.
This is the dichotomy that divides the North Rim into two realms: you work either in the Area or out of the Area. Every job apart from ours relates directly or indirectly to the Park visitor, and that compels everyone else to stay in the Area because this is where the visitors cluster. If there were no visitors, there would be no Office, no Lodge, no Inn, no campground, no paved highway or overlooks, no saloon, no sewage treatment plant; there would be no park rangers, no ranger naturalists, maintenance laborers, carpenters, plumbers, road workers, no supervisors. But we could pass an entire summer and never contact a visitor in an official capacity. We could be stationed anywhere on the Rim. We are informed by fire—by fires that originate from lightning, not from people; by work that puts us in contact with the forest and the rolling ravines of the North Rim, not with visitors or with the Canyon to which they come to gaze; by events that cannot be forecast with managerial precision prior to their occurrence, that can only frustrate career tracks and budgets. Fire is eclectic, ineradicable, invasive, stochastic, opportunistic, fun—and its attributes become ours.
Our status within the Park Service, and our place within the Park, are extraordinary. No one knows exactly where to position us within the organizational geography of the Park, or where to place the cache and the Pit within the functional geography of the Area. No one knows what to call us, what kind of uniform (if any) we ought to wear, what we should do and how we ought to do it. We are creatures of the Rim at a time when the River, not the Rim, defines the political geography of the Park. We manage by opportunity, not by objective. We are at once irrelevant and irrefutable, the fire weeds of the Park Service, thorny locusts in an otherwise open glade of ponderosa. We fit nowhere, and if we stay in the Area, we cannot survive as a fire crew. If you don’t get outta here, you don’t survive.
* * *
“I can’t write the report,” says Mac.
“It’s easy.” I shrug. “You just look up the codes in the manual, fill in the blanks, and sign it. No report, no fire. No fire, no pay. That’s just the way it is.” Mac shakes his head. “The manual won’t help. What happened isn’t in the manual. I’ll tell you what happened.
“The original smoke report came from the Forest Service. Their fire recon guy—Observer 1, they call him—well, he wasn’t even close. He might as well have flown over the Dixie as the Kaibab. They don’t know the Park. He mistakes Big Springs Canyon for Kanabownits Canyon. So Tim and I drive down W-4, which has not yet been opened, and we have to clear it as we go. Just enough to get through.
“The Forest Service guy says to go half a mile beyond W-6, then take a compass bearing of 97 degrees. I don’t think he corrected for declination. I don’t know. We walked for over an hour, all of it across ridges and ravines. There is nothing there to sight on. There’s nothing—no placenames, no landmarks, no roads; maybe no fire. Nothing works. Typical early-season fire. Call it the Shakedown fire.
“So I request Recon 1, and we walk back and pull our flagging and wait at the pumper. Well, it’s getting dark. Recon finally arrives and circles for what seems like hours and then gives us a mixed set of directions. Waste of time. You can’t mix geography and mathematics. You follow a ravine or you take a bearing, but you don’t do both. Anyway, you forget after a winter. So recon has us park the pumper at this drainage and then tells us to follow it east. OK. We are supposed to come to a bend, then another bend. At this second bend we are supposed to find a fallen log in a small meadow, and on the south slope there