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 is a grove of aspen. At the aspen we are supposed to follow a bearing of 162 degrees. This should get us to a small clearing on the ridge. Then he wants us to climb up the ridgetop for another quarter mile. ‘The fire is burning at the base of a big yellow pine.’ We can’t miss it.
“You can see this coming. It’s dark by the time we reach the second bend. Or maybe it’s the third. Or the fourth. The whole drainage is a tangle of bends and oxbows. There are logs in all of them. The whole south slope is covered with aspen. So I figure, ‘Fuck it. The fire’s somewhere on the ridge. We just hike up the slope and follow the ridgeline until we come to the smoke.’ Besides, it’s getting dark. We get out our headlamps. I’m hungry as hell, but I figure we can eat when we get to the fire. I’m tired. I haven’t been up on the Rim but three days, and I got a bad case of Kaibab emphysema.
“So we climb up. Tim’s heaving for air. We use our shovels as walking sticks. The canteens hang below our chests and clang like cowbells. What a comedy. We get to the ridge, and we walk up it. We walk all the damn way to the summit. We don’t see anything. It’s pitch-black. We’re sweating like hogs. So we drop the gear, sit down on a log, and eat rations. Haven’t a clue where the fire is. But I reason we can walk back down the ridge to W-4. If the fire is on the ridge, we have to find it. Right?
“Forget it. It’s about eleven when we reach the pumper. We drive back to the Area. I still have my wash sitting in the laundromat, so I dump the wet clothes in the dryer and eat, and in the morning we set off at seven. This time we get a compass bearing, and we walk to the fire. Ridgetop, my ass. Well, I knew—just knew—we’d be sent traipsing around the countryside again, so we didn’t flag. The fire was a mess. The snag had pretty much burned through, but there was quite a patch of surface fire and a lot of mop-up. We could be there for maybe a couple of days. You and Charlie were on the Preamble fire, but there was nothing else going on, so I asked for some help with mopping. Big Bob, the BI himself, and Holden, that new seasonal ranger, came out.
“But how we gonna get them in to the fire? Neither one of them can compass worth a damn. So I send them up a drainage just below the fire; the ravine goes all the way to W-4. Or it seems to if I got the fire located right. We had a lot of logs to buck up and figured to run the saw pretty much continuously. Let ’em hike up the draw. If they don’t see the smoke from the morning inversion, they’ll hear the saw. Well, they don’t see anything or hear anything. I think they took the wrong draw. They get on the radio and ask us if the saw is running. Of course it’s running, which means we can’t hear the radio. Well, eventually we hear them, and they want us to run the saw. So I send Tim up and down the ridge with the saw running—a complete waste of time. These guys are lost. I mean, they’re out in the Twilight Zone. So I keep Tim revving up the Big Mac, and I run some flagging tape—a continuous roll—across the ravine. There’s no way they can miss it. The place is looking like a goddamn carnival. I run another set of flags over the ridgetop and down the ravine on the other side. Then I just sort of wander around. It’s like a Brownian movement. Eventually we run into one another and collect at the fire. Big Bob nearly passes out under a tree. Holden is willing; he used to be a logger and got on some fires in the Sierras. Holden, Tim, and I mop up like mad the rest of the afternoon. We won’t get it done, but it’ll be good enough to leave at night. And it is night when we get ready to pack up. We leave the full canteens and a fedco and some handtools. Holden and the BI of course didn’t bring any headlamps, and the batteries in mine are weak. Then the great debate. How we gonna get back?
“I want to compass back to our pumper. But Tim doesn’t trust the compass, and Holden and the BI want to go to their vehicle, not ours. We decide to follow a ravine out. We take the flagging to the south ravine. We can’t see a fucking thing. I walk a little ahead of Tim, and
