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’ in the air
There’s somethin’ I forgot to do
And it’s causin’ me despair.
Walk around the cache
Pickin’ up the trash
There’s something I just got to do …
But fuck it.
Kent discovers the coffeepot under a soiled fireshirt and plugs it in. I step out the door and yell to Gilbert to bring some ration coffee from the cache. The air is damp and chilled, alien to fire. We find chairs or chair surrogates and accept the nostalgia of fires remembered and the more powerful nostrum of fires promised.
But already we feel the distance from the cache. “We gotta get out on the roads,” Kent says. “Yeah,” The Kid agrees. “And when the hell are we gonna get a fire?”
Three times during the past week observers on the South Rim have reported a smoke near Bright Angel Point. There are six inches of fresh snow on the ground with one to two feet of old snow in the denser woods. The reports are viewed with skepticism until a routine helicopter flight sees, then flies over, the source—a puffing, live white fir on the Uncle Jim Point trail. Our own Uncle Jimmy and E.B. begin the hike in. For more than an hour they crash through snowbanks. The sky has glossed over with filmy cirrus; it is impossible to discriminate between sky and smoke; they ask for assistance. Recon 1 guides them painfully to the smoldering snag. The tree is huge, alive, hollow, and rotten at the top. From the ground they can locate no smoke, much less flame. Convinced that the fire can only go out, they leave it alone. A week later the fire is still simmering and actually ignites some freshly exposed fuel on the ground. Uncle Jimmy and E.B. return to fell the tree.
The amount of sound wood in the interior bole is uncertain. They assess the lean of the tree, determine the preponderance of branches on each side, and check the wind, which fills the canopy like a sail. Uncle Jimmy cuts, while E.B., flapping his arms to keep warm, spots, ready to swat embers that might rain down. A few flakes of white ash settle on snowbanks. Their feet are numb with cold. Clouds of smokey snow billow upward as the tree brushes past others, then crashes to the ground. They extinguish the fire by stuffing the hollow interior with snow. The stump is composed wholly of sound heartwood—only the top is rotten. Not for another week, when they can travel across newly exposed rock and mud, do they return to the fire and officially declare it out.
Back at the Fire Pit, as they fill out their report, E.B. remarks that the coffeepot put out more heat than the Whoopie fire. “Yeah,” agrees Uncle Jimmy, searching the DI-1530 for a code small enough to enter the estimated fire acreage. “But you don’t get overtime for drinking coffee.”
176
It is a short walk—no more than a hundred feet—from the Fire Pit to Skid Row.
We amble to Building 176 for lunch. The screen door hangs up on a rock, half open and half closed. The whole cabin has sunk since it was constructed in the mid-1930s as temporary officers’ quarters for a CCC camp, and the doors cannot clear easily. Kent kicks the screen door open. The front door also sticks, this time on a bulge of ancient linoleum, which rests on a foundation stone. This door, too, can be neither closed nor opened completely.
The cabin is partitioned into three rooms. The front room combines a kitchen, a sofa, and an oil furnace into something slightly larger than a shoe box; a middle section houses a bathroom of sorts, while the hallway swells into an open bedroom; the rear room, added decades later, makes a larger bedroom. I live in the middle room, which is really a broad passageway to a shower and toilet that joins an overheated front room with a frozen rear room. When the rear room was occupied by three rookies, it was dubbed the Nursery. When the Cosmic Cowboys—Lenny, Dan, and Charlie—claimed the rear room, they converted it into a miniature Gilley’s. To compensate for the front door, which won’t close, the rear door won’t open.
Once considered prime real estate in the Area, the string of cabins of which 176 is a constituent is unable to compete with the sleek modernism of giant house trailers trucked in by the Park Service. The cabins have become known as Skid Row and assume the role of a slum, fit only for seasonals. Four fire crewmen now live in 176, and
