Lay. Smokechaser. 1955.” The Tipover Tank is the Inscription Rock of the North Rim. New crewmen pencil in their names and dates, and veterans update their list of seasons. To formal names are added, willed or otherwise, occupational nicknames: Pinyonfoot, John-Boy, Greenback, The Dancing Pole. When Swift transfers to the rangers, “Rim Roach” is scrawled over “Smokechaser.” When Stiegelmeyer decides to dedicate the Tank to himself in bold letters as the Stiegelmeyer Memorial Tank, an “S” is inserted before “Tank.”
And not without reason. The Tank reeks. In its original design the Tank was apparently fed by a pipe from a spring located uphill, but the system fell into disrepair, and for most of its existence the Tank has been filled only by direct precipitation. The top is screened off by a two-by-four frame covered with chicken wire. It is only partially effective. Conifer needles collect in slumps. Dead birds float on the surface. The tank is filled with a vile green brew. In dry years a rookie is sometimes condemned to scour out the inside in the hopes that the plumbing can be activated. It never is. Still, there is a revival of sorts one season, and an ingenious construction project again brings water from the spring to the Tank along what is labeled the BOT Memorial Aqueduct, named for its builders, Brueck, Owen, and Tally. But this misses the point.
The Tank is not an effective reservoir of water. It taps a deeper watershed. It exists to record names, seasons, experiences. Signing the Tipover Tank is the final gesture in the opening of the fireroads. It is the mark of good planning that the fireroads can be opened with sufficient synchronization that all the crews converge at Tipover late one afternoon. Away from the Rim, the Tank is our one true reference point.
The fire is somewhere along the Park boundary, and Duane—laid-back Duane with the stringy, long black hair—is determined to reach it before the Forest Service. The smoke lies within the mutual aid zone: it belongs to the vehicle that can reach it first. The odds are that we won’t be able to get the pumper to the fire anyway, but Duane insists that we stop by the Tipover Tank while en route and try to fill our empty tank. The Tank is a fetid swamp of organic debris. It is full, however, and we draft water from its middle. Duane is galvanized by the thought that the Forest Service might beat us. “It’s our fuckin’ fire,” he insists.
The area beyond the Shinumo Gate was logged late last autumn. Everything to the north of the boundary is a surreal jumble of torn earth and half-burnt slash; the roads are, if anything, confusingly abundant. Park fire maps show an old road, W-4C, that once reached out from the CCC camp at Shinumo, paralleled the boundary, and in a few places moved in and out of an otherwise impermeable aspen worm fence. The derelict road cannot be found. Instead, there are new logging roads, not yet numbered, and a tangle of skid trails. We pick our way as best we can among the wreckage. Duane steers by dead reckoning. There is no sense to the land: it is possible to drive everywhere and go nowhere. Yet we are at least driving, and we hope to maneuver as closely as possible before abandoning the truck, climbing the aspen fence, and walking into the fire. The ponderosa forest is open. Duane figures one of us can take a saw and a fedco, and the other, two fedcos. “And a couple of shovels, of course. And pulaskis.”
But Recon 1 has become bored with our laborious maneuverings and has departed on a general survey of the Park. It will return only when we request it. We work our way to what we take as our best guess and call blindly into a dead radio for the plane to return. Duane is wild with apprehension. “Christ,” he says through clenched teeth. “Let’s drive.” We traverse the boundary another quarter mile, bouncing over roots, stumps, rocks, then catch sight of some smoke drifting on southwesterly winds through the woods. Duane powers the truck to where the smoke intersects the fence. There in front of us—in all its wild improbability—is a gate, surely a relict of the old W-4C fireroad. We swing it open and drive forty yards through the open forest to the fire. We drop the snag, buck up the larger burning logs, douse them with water; the fire will be mopped up by evening.
A Forest Service engine crew, carefully following our tracks, appears near the old gate. Do we need help? they ask plaintively. “No,” crows Duane. “We have a pumper on the fire.” And yes, we have ample supplies of water. The gate, the skid roads, the Tank—it is like something out of a movie, and Duane names it the Hollywood fire. The drive back ensures that we will even pick up a few hours of overtime.
When asked later about its location, Duane replies evasively, “East of Swamp and west of the Twilight Zone. You know, the Tipover area.”
KENNY SIGNS ON
When we arrive at the Tank, there is more graffiti, this time in bright red ink. Steadily, like a malevolent mistletoe, the names of people other than fire crew members have spread across the Tank. Rangers with no fire experience. Fee collectors. Interpreters. Vandals all. Even the road to Tipover is formally eliminated because it passes through a meadow. Official vandalism.
Closed or not, the walk from W-4 to the Tank is easy, and we make it often. During springtime the site is rank with greenery. In the autumn the deep hillsides of Tipover Canyon sway with the yellow and orange of aspen. Lunch at the Tank has a serene, bittersweet glow. The site is too remote from the Rim for there to be many fires—a fact for which we are grateful. Surrounding ravines are unusually steep, and the forest is satanically dense. One fire southeast of Tipover forced a party of smokechasers to cross three ridges, each steeper than the last. As they marched back and forth with fedcos, they named the ridges—Devastation, Desolation, Destruction. This is not a scene for fires, but it is an ineradicable part of the geography of fire. We travel here not for fires but for the Tank.
The Tank’s status remains ambivalent. It will not be forcibly removed, yet it will never be integrated with the managed geography of the North Rim. Lenny and I add another year below our names. Dash tries, without success, to erase the name of a particularly obnoxious fee collector. The galvanized metal holds the ink like a brand. Kenny, a rookie, searches for an empty space on which to write. “Hey, what should I call myself?” he asks, almost shouting as the rest of us leave the Tank for lunch under the aspen. Smokechaser, FCA, fire guard, fireaid, fire management specialist—all have fallen into disuse. “Longshot,” Donnie tells him. “We’re Longshots now.”
Dash marvels that the wonderful Tank has not yet toppled down.
CHAPTER THREE
Powell Plateau
THE DAYS LENGTHEN and dry under a crystal blue sky. Storms are infrequent, and lightning fires scarce. The mud recedes into a few stubborn holes. Snow vanishes from all but the darkest forest. The cache is fully operational; the fireroads are passable; the crews, the new and the old, are on board. For the veterans there is much to do, and for rookies, much to learn. Steadily we move out of the Area and even beyond the dendritic grid of fireroads. Through trails and helispots, through projects like the Fence, and through fires, we explore the boundaries of the North Rim.
The Rim—the Park—forms a ragged triangle shaped equally by geography and bureaucracy. The Colorado River makes a colossal, puzzling bend around and through the Kaibab. The River first proceeds southward along the east flank of the Kaibab Plateau; then it breaches the Plateau—the Grand Canyon proper—before returning northward along an old fault line that defines the western flank of the Kaibab. As the Canyon matured and expanded outward, the great bulge of Plateau caught in the looping triangle broke up into long peninsulas. On the South Rim it was reasonable to confine the Park proper to a roadway—a string of overlooks—along the Rim itself. But this was not possible on the North Rim, and a nearly straight boundary line was drawn across the Plateau with the result that large chunks of the interior were incorporated into the Park and an interagency DMZ was established between the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service. The larger result is that three points roughly demarcate the North Rim—Saddle Mountain, Powell Plateau, and The Dragon. Together they define the metageography of Rim and fire. Call them our fire triangle.
