Fire on the Rim. Stephen J. Pyne
as I did, but it is rare to spend those years all in the field. I experienced the annual fire cycle fifteen times, and I passed through the career cycle perhaps five times. For me, season must play against history. The opening of the cache is the opening of a Great Season.
Now, even after a day of housecleaning, the air is rank and heavy and suffused with a faint, sour odor of old woodsmoke. Memory mixes with hope. It is as though I have never left.
* * *
As 210 lifts off, we see several large thunderheads. We skirt them, yet it is apparent that they are moving in the same direction we are, that they are marching to the northeast, to Nankoweap Basin. Overhead arcs a magnificent double rainbow.
The fire is about fifty acres in size, flaring up a very steep slope in typical Canyon desert fuels. The helo delicately deposits King and me upslope from the fire, not truly landing but hovering on a small terrace under full power, perched like a raven on an outcrop, then quickly lifts off. Even as we knock down some flames at the head, it is obvious that two firefighters with handtools will not contain the fire. But this early in the season—preseason, really, with only fires in the Canyon—two are all we are. Suddenly, however, as we throw dirt along the flaming front, I realize that the onrushing storm contains a solution. The rain will not reach the Canyon bottom—it will evaporate into virga long before then—but the cascading winds will pour down the Canyon. The lower flank of the fire perimeter, now quiet, will soon become a new head.
We scramble to the bottom of the ravine and extinguish every flame. No fireline here, just a chain of linked hot-spotting, made rapid by the loose, sandy soils. The scheme works. Winds blow down the Nankoweap like a flume; the upslope flames are driven back into the burned area and expire; the lower corner is already dead cold. In fewer than two minutes, the Rainbow fire is out.
King leads as we trudge up the talus and select a campsite not far from our landing site. The fiery flush is gone, and I feel heavy sweat build up under my fireshirt. A parade of thunderheads washes through Nankoweap Basin and sweeps out across the Painted Desert. Sun and storm mingle among buttes and gorges. We search through our firepacks, extract a double meal of C rations—leftovers from last autumn—and pluck out our headlamps. The clouds transfigure the sunset into a colossal alpenglow. King fashions two fusees into a makeshift stove. Cloud and sun glide by us in grand rhythms, until the Plateau casts a deepening shadow, a false night, and evening winds slough off the Rim and pass over us—two busy ants—on their way east.
THE PIT
Kent wrestles with the lock, which is sluggish, perhaps rusted from the winter. The sky clouds, and without sun the day turns suddenly chilly. The Kid squirts some graphite into the lock, then Kent tries the key again. The door opens to a small room, part of the maintenance warehouse that stands next to (but some distance from) the fire cache. Above the door is a routed wooden sign that reads FIRE PIT.
Beyond the first doorway is a second—this one with the door removed—and beyond that is a small, narrow room, lighted from a bank of dingy windows. Here we do our paperwork, hold what pass for conferences, and congregate for dispatching. The managerial revolution demands that “managers,” even if they are fire crew foremen, have offices, and the Fire Pit is our ambivalent response. It is an imperfect weld between fire and bureaucracy. As much of the outdoors as possible has been brought inside. Its interior is a bizarre syncretism of the utilitarian and the whimsical, informed by neither logic nor history, defiantly untamable. The double entryway makes an anteroom known as the Arm Pit, while to the rear is a mouse-proofed storage room, once used to house hardware for mountain rescue operations, but now dedicated to items like fireshirts and firepants, gloves, batteries, fire maps, and compasses. Between front and rear there is barely room to walk. Crowded into the Pit are an oil heater, forcibly joined to an ancient brick chimney, which rises through the middle of the room; a metal government-issue grey desk, squatting glumly in a corner and piled with soiled fireshirts and gloves; a chair from the Lodge, its wicker unraveling; a dilapidated wooden bench, irrationally salvaged from the Boneyard; milk cans stenciled with FIRE in red letters; a giant round of pine, the only remainder of a huge ponderosa that once glowered over the flight path of the North Rim heliport but is now known fondly as the Base of a Big Yellow Pine after a favorite expression of McLaren, the Park fire officer; some scraps of carpet discards on the floor. The Kid turns on the oil heater, without effect; the drum outside is empty. Kent searches for a coffeepot.
The walls are saturated with fire paraphernalia. There are dispatching maps for the North Rim and the North Kaibab Forest, and a Federal Aviation Administration flight map of the Grand Canyon, all covered with Plexiglas. A trellis of clipboards posts biweekly tours of duty, requisition needs, helicopter schedules, work projects. There are posters of Smokey Bear, lightning, a pinup advertising Husqvarna chain saws; there are photos of former crews, our Hall of Flame; a slab of aspen, sheared longitudinally and routed with red letters that read NEVER GIVE A INCH. Above the desk hangs a square sign constructed from scrap plywood, with a metal button (scavenged from a government-issue brown metal cabinet); a large arrow that points to the button has been routed out with the caption “Lightning Button. Press for Fire.” Elsewhere, mounted on wood, are a pair of photos, one from 1936 when the fire cache was opened, and another, forty years later, with FCAs taking the place of CCC enrollees but with the vehicles and arrangements otherwise identical.
The Kid opens the windows, but the only effective fumigation is smoke. From the floor Kent picks up a ball of flagging tape—the “Dragon Flaggin’,” recovered from the great Dragon fire—and places it on a shelf labeled FCA Musuem. There are other trophies: a pulaski coated with slurry on one side and charred on the other that Alston recovered from the Sublime fire; the lucky turkey feather that guided Rethlake across Powell Plateau; a memorial plaque, signed by Park and Forest crews after the Circus fire; a two-foot bronze nozzle, discovered in a dark corner of the structural fire cache, now the John Smokechaser Award; a metal Log Cabin syrup can; a Mickey Mouse hard hat; a motorcycle helmet with drip torch nozzle and fusees bristling out of it; and the wooden sign itself, FIRE MUSUEM, whose misspelling instantly qualified it for inclusion. Mementos flood the wall. For a seasonal crew—for a migrant folk society like ours whose collective memory is brutally short—this omnium-gatherum of artifacts is our surest record of the past. If the cache tells us who we are, the Pit tells us who we have been. Outside the window stands our fire totem, a fire-sculptured snag brought back from Walhalla and planted as a sentinel.
In a perfect world the Pit would be located in the cache, but the Pit has two items that the cache lacks—a base station radio and a telephone—and the need to connect with an audience other than the fire crew. Distance from the fire cache is part of the price we pay for communication with the outside world. The Pit must syncopate the rhythms of bureaucracy and fire, Rim and Park. Alienation from the cache is more annoying than dysfunctional. We can shout from the door of the Pit to the doors of the cache, but we can speak to the Park only through radios, phones, and official forms.
Its real distance from the cache lies in its bureaucratic role. With its great battery of double doors, it is the character of the cache to open, to let mounds of matériel and throngs of firefighters pass through, in and out, day and night, season after season. Not so with the Pit. Its double entryway emphasizes that this is a place where things stay in or stay out, that it exists outside the mainstream of real firefighting. If the cache is a portal to the Rim, the Pit is a portal to the Park.
The Pit is less an office than a way station. It is too transient, too empirical, too filled with the minutiae and trophies of life in the woods; it tries to build from the bottom up rather than from the top down. It expresses how a fire crew would connect to a parent bureaucracy, not how a bureaucracy would choose to connect to its fire crew. Supervisory rangers don’t like to enter it. The Pit is cold, rudely fashioned, less comfortable than the woods; and that is how we like it. The Kid reads aloud a poem scrawled in longhand and posted over the desk.
Sittin’ in the Pit
Feelin’ like shit
There’s somethin’ I’m supposed to do
But I can’t think of it.
Sittin’ in this chair
Breathin’