fir, aspen. The smoke hangs there, and the light from the headlamp scatters. It’s nearly worthless. No moon. And it’s wet. The damn inversion is forming. My headlamp gives out. Everything seems familiar and nothing seems familiar. Every place looks like every other place. We reach the road around midnight. So where’s the pumper? Any pumper?
“We split up. Tim and I go north, and the two bozos go south. Sooner or later one of us will come to a vehicle. Whoever finds a pumper will drive back to pick up the other guys and look for the second pumper. We don’t get back in the Area until 3:00 A.M. Holden and the BI parked their pumper somewhere; I don’t know where, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Maybe their map was bad. We were lucky to find them. Now that I think about it maybe we were unlucky.
“So Tim and I hike in the next day—our basic compass bearing—and we mop up and carry everything out. I’ll be damned if I’m going back in twenty-four hours to check for smokes. It’s out. If it isn’t out, I’ll wait until it comes to find me. Anyway, the BI says his time is too valuable to waste on any more snag fires.
“Now how the hell do you put this in a report? Just where do you find all this stuff in the manual? Where are the codes for running up and down a ridge with a chain saw and flagging tape? I’m not even sure I could draw a map. Where are the codes for wandering around the goddamn woods all night? What the hell does it matter what fuel model burned? ‘Elapsed time,’ my ass! You write the report. Find it in the book. Try it. I’ll give you a bearing.
“OK, OK, I’ll fill out the forms. But you know what I think? I think we need a new book. Our own book. A North Rim book.”
TASTE OF ASHES
There is something wrong in the Pit.
We sense it as soon as we pry the winter lock open. There is something missing; no, not just some thing but a feeling. Wil points to a space where the Base of a Big Yellow Pine used to be. The bench and milk cans are gone. The Musuem is gutted. Most of our photos are stripped from the walls. The BI has cleaned out the Pit. Now that the resource management office is complete—now that he has a proper office with electric heaters, venetian blinds, fake paneling, carpeting, a ritzy location within the new galleria of mid-level managers—the Fire Pit will be decommissioned. It is an act of bureaucratic vandalism.
For years our position within the Park has deteriorated, and the winter gutting of the Pit is a culmination, not a novelty. When the original fire cache was inaugurated in 1936, its double stalls—one for forest fire and one for structural fire—opened onto the major crossroads of the Area. Until the late 1960s, the fire crew remained the largest in size, and its mission—with the exception of actual lifesaving—the most vital to the Park. But that mission has been abandoned, without establishing an adequate surrogate; the fire crew diminishes in size, and other divisions increase dramatically in numbers; fire management is transferred from agency core to periphery. The fire cache is relocated to its present site between the warehouse and the mule barn. The old forest fire stall is reconditioned for an ambulance and mountain rescue apparatus—ranger operations. And rangers—the quintessential people managers—assume control over the Rim. Rangers turn the fire cache into a logistical slush fund and oversee a steady hemorrhage of tools, canteens, headlamps, hiking equipment.
What is fantastic is that this final act of vandalism has come from the top, not from the bottom. The brutality and cowardice and pettiness by which it has been perpetrated leave us speechless, then angry, then resigned, and finally indifferent. For us, fires are indispensable; the Pit is not. We need a future more than we need a past.
“OK, OK,” Joe laughs, magnanimously, cunningly. “Forget it. They can’t stop the fires from coming.”
The storm rises in the South and begins depositing lightning everywhere. We watch, disgusted and unbelieving, as a smoke curls up from the South Rim. A recon is mounted. There is a fire on Powell, near Dutton Point. Kent and Tyson race off, oblivious to the knowledge that they face a long drive and a longer walk. A second smoke is sighted deep in the Iron Triangle, near the abandoned E-1 fireroad; Randy, eager for overtime, takes a rookie; the fire, he calculates, will be simple. A third smoke, faint and remote, rises out of the Poltergeist Forest south of the Sublime Road. Alston takes Johnny Begaye and Howard Tsotsie, two SWFFs.
Recon 1 circles lazily over the remainder of the Rim, dodging thunderheads, biding time and watching for smokes. Alston enters the Sublime Road. Recon 1 powers back to give him a bearing—187 degrees magnetic, 202 degrees corrected—before departing for the South Rim.
Loaded for bear, Randy hikes up E-1. “The fire is to the north, left, at the third large log across the old road. Just up a little hill from there,” he remembers Recon saying.
Alston climbs into his firepack, while the SWFFs take a pack, a saw, and a fedco. Methodically, Alston adjusts his compass, smokes a cigarette, and begins to flag a route in. Two ridges. The compass hangs from a button on his fireshirt. Every twenty yards or so he takes a new reading, walks to an object in his line of sight, backsites his old flagging, and adds a new flag.
Kent and Tyson, another SWFF, reach Swamp Point. They see no smokes in the vicinity of Dutton Point. Since there are tools cached at the Powell helispot, they elect to take only firepacks and canteens across Muav Saddle. They check their map. The surface relief of Powell Plateau dips sharply from east to west; if they stay on the eastern Rim, they will cross the fewest ravines. There is no need to bring sleeping bags. They will work all day, all night if necessary.
Randy has reached the third log. The ridge is at least one hundred fifty feet above him, but he cannot see it through the dense forest. His crew hop and climb like enormous beetles over downed spruce, over branches, trunks, windfall; they move in slow motion, as though they have entered another planet whose gravity is twice, three times that of the earth. Branches tear their carefully balanced packs. Still, they climb on, blindly and always uphill.
The SWFFs follow Alston wordlessly. He halts, backsites, pulls out another cigarette. They have walked for more than a mile and a half, he estimates. Early in the season the large fuels are still wet. Plenty of time for a cigarette. May is a season for patience.
Kent and Tyson plunge down into Dutton Canyon, the great drainage, overgrown with scrub oak and locust, that segregates Dutton Point from the rest of Powell Plateau. There is no other route across the towering mesa. Overhead the midday sun glares tauntingly. Soon they will arrive at the fire; the narrowing geography of the Point will draw them irresistibly to any fire. There is no way the fire can escape them.
Randy concludes that they have reached the ridgetop. But there is no fire and no smoke; there is only an opaque forest of Engelmann spruce and white fir. Randy slumps down, crouching against a log to hold up his pack; he scans his map; he flips a coin. “Heads we go north,” he announces to the uncomprehending forest. “Tails, south.” The squad flounders north; after about fifty yards they see the fire—a flaming snag, half a dozen burning large logs, smoldering duff a foot thick, everything arranged to resemble the aftermath of a tornado. Maniacally, panicky, Randy scrambles around the site. Where, where, he screams, is the goddamn dirt?
So intent is Alston on his bearing that he hardly hears the SWFFs. “Kq’! Kq’! The fire!” He looks up from the compass. There, a mere ten yards away, is a pool of smoke. Cautiously he abandons his bearing and moves to the smoke. A dead aspen log—not more than eight inches in diameter and leaning against a white fir—is puffing furiously. There is virtually no ground fire; in fact, water oozes out of the duff as they tread. They trace the line of lightning down the furrowed trunk of the fir, untouched by fire, to the aspen. Alston sits down on a log, stuffs his compass into his pocket, and smokes another cigarette while he contemplates
