virtue of 176 is that it is a stone’s throw from the cache. In 176 we eat and sleep and do little else.
No one assumes the least responsibility for upkeep. The sink spills out dishes; it bubbles bad odors, grease, and cups like a mud geyser; our sink, a friendly visitor observes in midsummer, is getting “very ripe.” Our bathroom, another notes, smells as if Ralph’s pickup truck took a shower in it. The back bedroom begins to resemble the kitchen. From time to time we clean up. We will not allow the situation to deteriorate to the state that 155 reached one summer, when it was necessary at the end of the season to clean it out with road brooms and shovels.
Dominating the kitchen, which dominates the cabin, is its wooden table, three feet by two feet in size. Inevitably there is a problem with doors. On one side the front door opens into the table, and on the other, the refrigerator door does. The refrigerator, moreover, has a reverse handle so that it opens first along the wall, then into the table; this means that it can be opened fully only with effort and never when the table is occupied. The table is equally obstructive to both doors, but there is nowhere else to put it, and we cannot do without it. The table itself is constantly, indifferently littered with debris. A random inventory discovers a hammer, a pipe wrench, a can of shaving cream, crumpled aluminum foil, salt and pepper shakers liberated from the Inn, a bottle of Louisiana hot sauce, a pocketknife, a gas cap, a harmonica, a measuring cup, an apple, dirty dishes, granola, cartons of instant milk, a three-year-old copy of Life magazine, a box of Kleenex, Scientific American, napkins, dirty silverware, a potholder, an onion, a mostly empty pitcher of Kool-Aid, crackers, a can of beans, paper plates, homemade bread, and an indeterminate patch of sticky goo (probably honey and maple syrup). With appropriate shufflings, we eat on the table, play cards on it, and rebuild carburetors. On it I write the last two chapters of my doctoral dissertation.
The truth is that 176 is a bivouac, not a home. It is another place we move into and out of. Built on one pattern, then modified with ad hoc amendments; designed for one purpose, then applied for another; used, not lived in; and moved through, not truly inhabited—176 is the perfect residence for a fire crew. We don’t work on the North Rim because we live here; we live here because there is work to do, and the nature of that work, firefighting, dictates every part of our existence. Our cabin is little more than a detached annex to the fire cache, and we could sooner do without it than without the cache. Even on lieu days a crewman is more likely, after sleeping in (if he can), to hang around the cache than the cabin. That is the way we want it, and we treasure 176 as much for what it is not—which would divert us from what really matters—as for what it is.
What improvements there are take place outdoors. Outside the front door stands a concrete and rebar fireplace extracted from the Boneyard. Beyond the back door a brick-lined pit designed to accommodate a Dutch oven, in which Lenny makes his exquisite peach cobbler, points to the Rim. A wooden picnic table oscillates between the front and rear of the cabin. With a chain saw Dan carves two five-foot trunks of ponderosa into mock thrones. Cars park on both sides of the cabin. The Rim of Transept Canyon breaks open no more than thirty yards behind us, and the sun sets routinely across the Canyon, our backyard. It is a point of honor—a moral imperative—that we have a campfire in the evening.
When Hopi tower reports the smoke, it is no more than a pencil-thin column that scatters above the tree canopy into a diffuse plume. Booby and Vic hurriedly outfit a pumper, grab some packs, and drive north. No fireroads have been opened within the Park, so they plot an elaborate detour through the Forest. They are the only regular fire personnel available so early on the Rim—Booby as a seasonal firefighter and Vic as the new ranger supervisor. It is the first fire of the season, and they can almost taste the adrenaline.
The smoke thickens, builds, and rises. As Park fire officer, Clyde struggles to organize a recon. Booby and Vic drive steadily onward. They veer around some logs, cut others, pause at signs stripped by the winter. They are still deep in the Forest. The fire is an acre in size. Everything is unusually dry; and Rainbow Plateau—a peninsula surrounded on three sides by canyon—is exceptionally dry. It is a fire to kill for. The fire torches some trees. Clyde requests the Park dispatcher to ask the Forest dispatcher for the location of the nearest air tanker. It is only noon, and the fire continues to escalate. Black smoke erupts like a gushing well as flame enters the oily crowns of ponderosa; surface fires flash through scrub oaks and heavy litter like surf striking a rocky shore. Clyde orders a retardant drop from an air tanker stationed at Prescott, while Booby and Vic, temporarily mired in a mud puddle on a stretch of Forest road just outside the Park boundary, stare with longing and frustration at the Shinumo Gate. They extricate themselves with a winch.
The fire is now about ten acres; with a long burning period ahead of it, the fire will probably proceed to the Rim and up the peninsula. Clyde requests a helicopter; Booby and Vic struggle with the rusted lock at the Shinumo, finally break the chain, and enter the Park. They continue to dodge trees where possible and cut them where they must. The helicopter locates a landing site not too far from the fire, but there is a much better helispot possible along the Rim if a few trees are dropped—a chore quickly done. Within an hour it is possible to begin ferrying firefighters from either North or South Rim to the fire. Booby and Vic stop the pumper near Swamp Lake. Rainbow Plateau is due south. They study their fire map, realize that the plateau tilts downward from east to west, and wisely elect to hike along the eastern Rim; even so, there are three substantial ravines to cross. They seize packs, tools, and canteens and begin to flag a route south. The fresh personnel landed by the helo work a flank of the fire. The air tanker, a B-17, arrives, drops its load along the most active perimeter, then departs for the retardant base at Grand Canyon airport for another tank of slurry. Many more people will be needed. The fire is twenty acres and growing as it wishes. The smoke column is visible to all the regional lookouts. Clyde orders three SWFF crews. The fire flashes over Emerald Point and expires in midair as it sweeps into the void of the Canyon. Booby and Vic thrash through vicious meadows of locust. Not yet acclimated to the high elevation of the Rim, panting from both exhaustion and anxiety, they listen helplessly to their radio, a constant buzz of voices, a flaming rush of shouts, chain saws, aircraft. Hopi tower reports another fire farther west.
Clyde makes a pointless recon, for it is discovered later that Hopi tower, manned for the summer by the music teacher from Grand Canyon High School, has reported the sunset over Mount Trumbull as a fire. Meanwhile, Booby and Vic catch whiffs of smoke. They can hear the helicopter, then chain saws, then voices, shouts. They tie their last flag at the helispot, now piled high with matériel. Within a couple of hours the SWFF crews—Hispanics from New Mexico, tough and regimented—will trample over their flagged route to the helispot at Violet Point. The route will become a trail. When the SWFFs arrive, the local crews will be released.
Booby and Vic grab canteens and shovels and wander in the direction of the noise. They want to find someone to report to before they are released. They would like to see the Emerald fire, and darkness is coming fast.
“IF YOU DON’T GET OUTTA HERE …”
Our sense of geography enlarges slowly and empirically. It begins with a nuclear core of work stations and gradually expands, like a tree branching outward, to encompass the Rim. Skid Row, the maintenance shops, the gas pumps, the mule barn, the galleria of mid-scale managerial shops are added to the Greater Cache to form the Lower Area. The ranger station (a.k.a. “the Office”) and a cluster of upscale housing constitute the Upper Area. Here the administrators of the Rim congregate, and here there are frequent contacts with Park visitors.
The entrance road passes near the Office on its way to a terminus at Grand Lodge, somewhat over a mile distant. Between the Park Service Area and the Lodge are side roads that lead to the North Rim Inn, the campground, the garage, the wranglers’ quarters and mule barn, the ball park. We know the fire cache well and the Area somewhat less well. We know the Rim only as we encounter it during the course of our work—which is to say, where fireroads and fires take us. We know the Canyon from scattered fires that occur within it. Our interest varies by a kind of inverse-proportion
