is a story of that place, those times, and the fires—those marvelous fires—that made it all possible.
… and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
—HUCKLEBERRY FINN, ON MARK TWAIN
… and after the fire a still small voice.
—1 KINGS 19:12
Part One
EOD
WHEN THE CLOUDS PART, there are disjointed colors and shadows and fragments of more cloud. Lou’s eyes bulge and dart like a chameleon’s. Clouds close and strike the Rim like surf. The storm seals off the Canyon in slow swirls of black and white. To the west there is lightning; clouds billow like wet smoke.
Lou flies the Cessna northward. We circle and wait for the clouds to break. They lift, suddenly lightening, and reveal a great bowl of a meadow; Lou plunges the plane through the cloud deck. Across the meadow runs a plowed brown scar. An orange wind sock identifies the site as a landing strip, and we are soon bouncing over mud and cobbles on the ground. Two men and a green Park Service station wagon are waiting for us. Stan wears a ranger uniform, complete with Stetson. 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
