Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
Harry—much older—is outfitted with a cowboy shirt, a cowboy hat, and boots. Lou declines to fly back to the South Rim. He will wait out the storm.
We drive to a paved highway, U.S. 67, and turn south toward the North Rim. The road runs along a vast grassy plain, green and yellow, grey and brown. Around the edge of the swollen meadows there is an impenetrable forest. Some patches of snow collect along the perimeter. Under the darkening sky white clouds scud across the meadow, and fog streams through the woods. Occasionally there are bursts of hail. After a few miles the meadow narrows, pinched off by a portal of trees. A wooden sign, heavy as a boulder, announces GRAND CANYON NATIONAL PARK. Beyond is a small log cabin that serves as an entrance station. It is vacant, dreary with winter. We drive through another large meadow. The clouds break momentarily, sunlight streaks to the road, and steam rises from the pavement.
Harry, half deaf, shouts, “How do you like this country?” “It’s all new,” I reply. Stan nods. Stan, Harry, and Lou talk about the road. It is narrow and full of potholes, “disgraceful,” “unsafe.” Replacement of the entrance road, they agree, should be the Park’s highest priority. I stare out the window at the fog and trees. “Those aren’t smokes,” Harry yells, laughing. “If you’re going to be a smokechaser, you’ll have to tell the real smokes from the waterdogs”—he points out the window—“like them. That’s only fog. Remember Smokey’s First Rule of Firefighting: You can’t fight a fire you can’t find.”
When we reach the ranger station, I hand over my papers, and they send me to my quarters with the rest of the fire crew in the Sheep Shed. The crew is out now, I am told. When they return I can get a bunk, clothes, and firepack. I am to report for work in the morning at 0800 hours.
No one says much to me when the crew returns. Bill, the foreman, gives me a hard hat and a firepack from the fire cache. The Sheep Shed is a dilapidated wooden bunkhouse, and I take the only unclaimed bunk. It has about six inches of clearance from the ceiling. Someone motions me to join them for dinner. We walk through the woods to a cafeteria called the North Rim Inn. The next morning, having mis-set my alarm clock, I am dressed and ready at 6:00 A.M. A few groggy eyes blink incredulously. I don’t know what to do. I sit in a chair, fully dressed with a Levi’s jacket and hard hat, and read for two hours, while the rest of the crew, several of them hung over, rouse themselves about fifteen minutes before work. No one more than glances my way. No one needs to.
Pete is driving a red Dodge powerwagon outfitted with a slip-on unit, tools, saws, and firepacks. We turn off the paved road for two muddy ruts (“E-1,” he calls it) across a short meadow, then enter a dark woods. Pete insists on being called by his nickname, The Ape, which he earned by virtue of a huge barrel chest and a passion for climbing trees. His car is known as the Apemobile; his bed is the Ape’s Nest. He wears a Levi’s jacket over an orange fireshirt. An orange metal hard hat, slightly too small, sits incongruously on his head. His facility with language is astonishing. He can make even four-syllable words sound like four-letter words.
We roll from one rut to another. A fallen aspen blocks the road. I climb out and look for an ax. “Break it,” The Ape grunts. I stare blankly. Disgusted, he leaves the vehicle, picks up the short end of the aspen, swings it against some trees, and pushes until the log snaps. We drive to where a large tree bristling with branches has fallen lengthwise down the road. The branches spin across the road like a spider web. The Ape selects an enormous black and yellow chain saw and begins cutting. I pull branches away. Together we roll the large chunks out of the road, sometimes using a long pole with a floppy hook, a peavey. The rain starts, followed by hail and fog. We slide along portions of the road; in places the truck splashes sheets of mud past the window. When the road bends and The Ape slows, the powerwagon sticks in a mud puddle the consistency of brown tar. The Ape runs a winch cable out to a tree. The cable tightens, then springs loose. “Fuckin’ goddamn clutch popped,” mutters Ape. We gather some wood and surround the left-side tires. Still no luck. Ape dumps the water out of the tank, all one hundred fifty gallons, and with winch and engine operating together, we lumber out of the puddle. We drive for what seems like hours. More trees, more mud, more hail. Then the forest abruptly opens; our keys undo the lock at the gate, and The Ape drives onto a logging road.
The clouds are still too thick to see much. Dense pockets of fog sweep across the road like gentle brooms. When the scene lightens, it is filled with charred black stalks and dense brush. Alongside the road are rotting piles of roots and logs. The ground is rocky and grassy. “The Saddle Mountain fire,” The Ape explains. “Started in 1960, on Park lands. Fuckin’ Reusch sent out two smokechasers to find it. They couldn’t locate fuckin’ anything—too dark and no goddamn roads. They came back to the Area and agreed to return the next day. Jesus H. Christ, it happens all the time. But this fuckin’ fire burned through the night, forty acres in the Park, then wiped out nine thousand fuckin’ acres in the Forest. The fire crew made buckets of overtime just on patrol. Lucky bastards. The ranger station has a photo of the crew that the Park sent to the fire. The Forest Service built this road to log off what they could of the burn. If you ever want to get them fuckin’ mad, just say ‘Saddle Mountain.’”
Another truck is at the end of the road, with another smokechaser. The Ape goes to the other truck and talks. I stare at my fire map. I unfold and refold it. The Ape returns and we eat lunch in the powerwagon. The Ape warms up a small can on the truck manifold. The steam in the cab is so thick he turns on the defroster. I now see a group of Indians huddled under a small tarp off under some trees. When the rain and hail let up, The Ape says, we will begin work on the boundary fence.
Booby jogs toward me as best he can while stepping over the heavy windfall and balancing a chain saw. “A smoke on Powell Plateau!” he yells. “Meet me at the truck.”
Booby, one of the Indians, and I ride in the cab. The other Indians—“SWFFs,” Booby calls them, short for “Southwest Forest Firefighters”—climb onto the back of the slip-on. “How do we find the smoke?” I ask. Booby replies that we have a good location for this fire, that we usually smell a fire before we actually see it. I have no idea where Powell Plateau is, and every ten minutes or so I stick my nose out the window to sniff for smoke. The drive lasts nearly an hour and a half. When it ends, at Swamp Point, we are at the rim of the Canyon. On a mesa across from the Point there is a column of smoke.
Booby hands me two canteens, which he drapes around my firepack, and some tools and tells me to take off. There is a trail of sorts across to Powell. “Just follow it.” A couple of SWFFs are outfitted in the same way. From the slip-on he fills up fedcos—rubber bladder bags that hold five gallons each and can be carried like backpacks—and hands them to the remaining SWFFs. The trail is easy going down; we descend for maybe a thousand feet. The trip up staggers us, however, and I pass one reeling SWFF, then a second. We are strung out over maybe a quarter mile. The sun blasts off exposed rocks as though Muav Saddle were a reflector oven. Near the top I realize that there is no trail to the fire. I wander around for a few minutes, trying to orient myself, then slump down a little ways from the trail and wait. Eventually one of the SWFFs appears, then another. They talk in gasping, hushed Hopi, and finally leave the trail to bushwhack cross-country. I follow. We come to the fire—the smoldering stump of a tree and a burning log. There are now three SWFFs and myself on the scene. I am a seasonal employee, they are temporaries; I have a government driver’s license, they do not; I am a fire control aid, an FCA, they are SWFFs. I am the fire boss. They wait for me to say something. I fumble with my pack and canteens, buying time. “All right,” I say. “You guys know what to do. Get to work.” They nod and pick up tools. One grabs a shovel and begins to throw dirt on the log. I copy his every gesture. By the time Booby arrives we have most of the log covered.
We cut and dig some more before Booby decides that he will spend the night on the fire with Hugh, crew boss of the SWFFs. Booby and Hugh have each brought a sleeping bag. I am to return to the Area with the rest of the SWFFs. If we leave shortly, we should reach Swamp Point before sunset. The SWFFs who carried fedcos go back empty-handed; I have to carry my firepack across the Saddle again. I am exhausted when we get to the powerwagon, and it is apparent that it will soon rain and that we all must ride in the cab.
I am the only one with a license, but I have never driven a standard