fire might have expired. The SWFFs want to extinguish the fire instantly, but Alston dampens their enthusiasm. He is sure there must be subtle complications in the scene. He is confident that he can extort at least an hour of overtime from the fire.
At Dutton Point the view of the inner gorge is spectacular. Kent climbs a tree, searches avidly for the smoke, and sees nothing. There is only one response possible. He requests another recon. Clyde obliges, and almost as soon as the plane leaves the airport, Clyde recognizes his error. “It looks like I gave you a bum steer,” he admits to Kent and Tyson. “I meant to say Ives Point, not Dutton Point. When you get to Ives, you’ll see the fire. There is nothing else around.” He does not say—does not need to say—that Ives Point is the farthest possible extremity of Powell Plateau, that Kent and Tyson will have to recross Dutton Canyon, hike back almost to the helispot, then trace out the declining backbone of the plateau. They arrive well past sunset. The Bumsteer fire—a flaming pinyon—acts like a beacon. They slump beside an adjacent tree, packs still on, and stare at the fire for perhaps two hours. Occasionally they drink from a canteen. At some point they fall asleep. In the morning they mop up the quietly flaming stump and start the trek back. When they reach the truck at Swamp Point, they open the doors of the cab and, reaching across the seat, pull each other in.
Randy calls for reinforcements—for water, rations, saws, firefighters. Three of us trudge in. No one has found any dirt. It will be a difficult mop-up. Sitting despondently on a sawn log that evening, Randy names it the Rekup fire. “‘Rekup,’” he explains, “is ‘puker’ spelled backward.”
Alston returns to the cache shortly after 1700 hours redolent of satisfaction. He has worked through his lunch hour; the Smoker fire was uncontrolled when he arrived; his crew will receive hazard duty pay.
CHAPTER TWO
Tipover
THE FIRE CACHE and the fireroads are symbiotic. The cache opens to the roads, and the roads take us to the Rim. Without the fireroads we are condemned to the Area. With them we can recapitulate the ritual of renewal on a grand scale. The roads take us to fires.
It is good, tough work. We exploit every tool, test every vehicle, initiate every crewman. Trees must be cut and hauled off, branches and brush trimmed back, eroded sites repaired, new signs installed. Milk Creek must be spanned with another corduroy bridge. Old roads, abandoned and retained as foot trails, must be reflagged. Every road and trail must be revisited and reopened. Hands toughen, and muscles harden to the texture of Gambel oak. Mind concentrates—a chisel rather than a probe.
From the fireroads we learn (and relearn) the geography of the North Rim. There are two geomorphic terranes: the Canyon and the Plateau. They are incommensurable; they operate according to two sets of geologic processes and represent two epochs of geologic activity. The Plateau is a landscape without vantage points. There are no peaks to which you can orient and from which you can look out. Hydrology is no better guide, for the Plateau is karstified, its drainage subterranean and deranged. Where Canyon and Plateau meet, along the Rim, their conjunction is startling, arbitrary, relic, violent. Yet only there can you determine your location with any precision.
Gradually the days lengthen, the landscape sheds its winter snowbanks and dries, and the sky clears. Forest and meadow slough off their dormancy but have yet to flower. The storm tracks have moved too far north for weather systems to pass through routinely, yet the summer rainy season has not arrived. There is neither fire nor water, only the recession of the latter and a promise of the former.
On both time and place the fireroads impose a kind of order. They instill a functional integration on a topography that is otherwise at odds with itself. They establish reference points, and they give access. The only way to move from rim point to rim point along the surface is through the Plateau, and that makes the roads mandatory. Opening the roads likewise imposes a complementary temporal order. Clearing the roads marks a tumultuous, subtle change in season, between spring melt and summer rains, when the Kaibab exchanges mud for dust, when the sun streams through the dappled woods and the air is full and warm. It is a critical moment in the annual cycle of natural history at the North Rim—and in the life cycle of a seasonal fire crew.
Whatever the season holds, the fireroads open it to us.
The fire is reported along fireroad W-1, on the last ridge before The Basin. “Yes,” Recon 1 reports, “right along the road.” Kent is restless. Others have been sent to fires reported earlier in the day, yet he and two SWFFs have remained in the cache. It has not been an easy fire bust. Recon 1 has been flying unceasingly since late morning. There have been long, indecisive walks. No more than a fraction of the roads are open. The snowpack prevents access to Sublime and W-1; only the Walhalla fireroads are passable. None of the crews can see fire from their vehicles. Kent takes the white powerwagon and proceeds down W-1, about a twenty-minute drive from the fire cache.
Recon 1—with reliable, soft-voiced McLaren calling the shots—is right. The fire is adjacent to the road. The snag has been shattered by lightning into a thousand splinters; a gouged trunk flames on the ground like a candelabra. Kent fires up the pump on the slip-on. While he adjusts the throttle, the SWFFs pull out the hardline hose and drag it toward the fire. In two minutes the fire is out. Incredulous, they buck up the log, roll it over, search through the duff for smoldering cinders. They find nothing. The log steams and hisses. The slip-on chugs happily. They empty the rest of the tank on the log, roll up the hardline, abandon the Scorcher fire, and return to the cache.
The Kid has just cleared the Shinumo Gate, after a long detour through the Forest. His crew faces another forty-five-minute drive before they come to TT-2. From there they will have to compass at least a mile south cross-country. Kieffer’s crew, meanwhile, has yet to locate their fire. They have hiked nearly two miles down W-1G, then bushwhacked into the woods on a compass bearing. Kieffer is gasping out his presumed location over the radio to Recon 1. His crew is trying to signal McLaren with compass mirrors. They can hear the plane but they cannot see it.
HOW THE FIREROADS ARE OPENED—AND CLOSED
Aspen are easy. Ralph kicks most of the branches off the road. If the trunk is dry, he breaks it by snapping it like a whip or by wedging it against other trees and pushing. Bone sits in the truck and shouts friendly obscenities. There are so many branches and logs across the road that you can wear yourself out just getting in and out of the pumper. Ralph drags an aspen log across the road, then hefts another and throws it like a spear. A large bole remains, green and sweating. He motions for a chain saw. Two saws—Big Mac and a Stihl 045—are mounted for easy access onto the slip-on. Bone mocks disgust. “Use an ax,” he shouts. Ralph chops where the trunk narrows; huge chips spray into the woods. Bone cinches his chaps, inserts plugs into his ears, and fires up the Stihl. He lops off the branches, then bucks the bole into sections while Ralph hauls the residue over the road berm. Another tree is visible about forty yards ahead. Bone hesitates before plodding forward, the saw perched on his shoulder. Ralph climbs into the cab and drives to meet him.
Spruce are dreaded. Some perverse instinct guides them, in their fall, down the center of the road. They descend in clumps; not one tree but several crash at any site. Although the trunks are not large, the branches are prickly; limbing them is like trimming a porcupine. The work goes steadily, but a clump may take half a day to clear. Worse than mop-up. Ralph spots a spruce cluster just beyond the next bend. Only an hour remains until noon; they will work through the maze, then eat. A warm sun streams down on the fireroad—powdery silt, scattered mudholes, and cobbles of buff limestone and hard, spangled chert.
It is worse than they anticipated. A white fir has crashed across the road and taken several smaller spruce down with it. The bole of the fir is enormous; the branches are large and messy; the tree is heavy with water. Limbing proceeds cautiously.
