throw sleeping bags on bunks. Dave searches for a fresh shirt and socks. I clean and oil my boots; the heat has baked them as stiff as sheet metal; ash, once wet, then fired, congeals like concrete. My left foot is blistered. Wil moves with studied deliberateness, his muscles as stiff as two-by-fours. Ralph and Joe should EOD tomorrow. We can unpack our gear tomorrow. Outside, winds from Rim and Canyon mix in black, noisy gusts.
Tomorrow we will open the fire cache.
THE CACHE
The great double doors draw open. Chilled morning air seeps through all four stalls. A winter’s mustiness rises, like an invisible steam, out of the cache.
The grime looks wonderful. I have come home. We all have. We are what we do, and the fire cache is where we do it—or where we start to do it. Fire season ends when, in the late fall, the cache is stuffed with the residue of one summer and the ordered goods for another, and fire season begins when, the next spring, the cache is again exhumed and revived. As often as not, we are dispatched to fires from within the cache or its annex, the Fire Pit. All backcountry roads (and all the roads of winter) lead to the cache. After fires are out, we clean up our gear in the cache. We begin workdays in the cache, and as often as not we go to the cache on our days off as well. We can live without a ranger station, without a resource management office, without Building 176, without a Grand Lodge, a North Rim Inn, a saloon; but we cannot survive without the cache.
There is a rough logic to excavating the fire cache. We take the bulk items first: oversize cartons of paper sleeping bags, cases of canteens, cotton hoses, twelve-packs of shovels and pulaskis, a small warehouse of postseason fire orders. Kent, The Kid, Gilbert, and I dump them willy-nilly on the asphalt outside the cache. The fitness trail paraphernalia goes next. We carry the stations—like miniature dinosaurs constructed of two-by-fours—behind the road shed until they can be set up in proper sequence. Next to them, under a white fir and a looming ponderosa, we stash the slatted sections of the hose drying rack; it will not be assembled until the snows melt. Right now our need is access to the cache; it has to be opened, emptied, and refilled.
So, after a winter away, do we. The cache is an exchange as much as a warehouse. Step across its threshold, and its crowded exhilaration will overwhelm whatever else you bring to it. The cache is inexhaustible and infinitely renewable. This is ritual as much as logic, and to make the renewal work, every item has to be touched, pondered, moved, reshelved, and allowed to crowd out a winter of remote experiences, distant thoughts, and abstract emotions. Rookie or returning veteran—the effect is the same. Already, as the day progresses, I begin to slough off one existence and take on another. Shovels replace pencils; firepacks displace books; chain saws and fedcos suppress lectures, television, magazines, malls, libraries. The fire cache is made for access: its bank of doors opens half the building at once. Through them we pass into the North Rim.
After the bulk items have been removed, we start on the smaller boxes. Each goes to one of the four stalls or bays that make up the cache. The tool stall on the north end is reworked first. Our firepacks hang on one wall, each pack framed by a wooden nameplate; racks of shovels, pulaskis, McLeods, flanked by sledges, peaveys, picks, and axes fill up another wall; on the third are spare tool handles, wedges, a vial of linseed oil, cans of black and red spray paint, stencils, hand files, sandpaper. Sprouting from the floor are a wood box, bristling with worn tools ready for conditioning; a tool jig, with grinder, leather apron, ear protectors, vises for securing tools while they are sharpened; a black box, now cold, that emits steam like a witch’s brew when it warms a green plastic goo that coats the sharpened edges of shovels and McLeods. Above are three flail trenchers liberated from the fire cache at Yellowstone. Progress is slow. We must re-equip each firepack and individually sort the usable tools from the unusable. On the floor, dominating nearly the whole of the stall, sit two slip-on pumper units of two hundred gallons each. As soon as the trucks are available, we will hoist the slip-ons using a chain block and tackle, back a truck underneath, and lower and bolt a slip-on to each bed. With the fireroads blockaded by snowbanks and mudholes, there is no urgency. We walk around and climb over the slip-ons. The logic of opening the fire cache is the logic of fire season: handtools and firepacks precede slip-ons; crewmen come before roads; fires, before project work.
It is hard to realize that the cache has a history. Its instincts are to rework and homogenize on an annual cycle, and it thus fits well the life cycle of a seasonal firefighter for whom two, perhaps three fire seasons may constitute a lifetime. That is one of the things that made my tenure at the North Rim anomalous: I returned for fifteen seasons. I came to the Rim when I was eighteen, shortly after graduating from high school. I spent four years at Stanford, returning to the Rim each summer, and in my fourth season—the youngest member of the crew—I was made foreman. I skipped my graduation ceremony to help open the cache and the fireroads, worked late into the fall to capture some prescribed burning, then started graduate school in January 1972 at the University of Texas in Austin. The ceremonies for master’s and doctoral degrees I bypassed, too; better to open a summer than to close a winter. I took my doctoral orals with my fire boots on and my car packed outside Garrison Hall, ready—win, lose, or draw—to hurry to the Rim and begin fire season. In the spring of 1977, amid a dizzying snowstorm on the North Rim, Sonja and I married. Meanwhile, I landed a cooperative agreement, a sort of bastard grant, from the History Office of the Forest Service in Washington, D.C., and set about researching a history of wildland fire in America. For the academic year 1979–1980 I went to the National Humanities Center in North Carolina on a fellowship and wrote up a draft of my fire history; there our first child, Lydia, was born. Through it all I returned each summer to fire and the Rim. But finally I just got too broken down to haul my ass, a big saw, a firepack, and assorted handtools and canteens up the ridges. If I wanted to stay in fire, I would have to write; I would have to stock the fire cache with books. During my last season, 1981, as my first fire book inched toward publication, my back was a mess. By then I had accepted an appointment with the History Department at the University of Iowa and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities that would send me for a season to Antarctica. I always knew that the question was never whether I would leave but when. Now it was decided. I had stayed as long as I could; I would trade fire for ice.
Kent and The Kid move to the next bay. The cache is a rectangular building originally constructed by the CCC as a temporary warehouse for storing road equipment. The lumber is rough, the lighting poor; a corrugated tin roof reverberates during thunder and hailstorms. Small, murky windows rim three sides, and the bank of double doors frames the fourth. Only after the fire crew was assigned the structure, during a forced relocation from the indigenous cache, did the Park pour a cement floor. The interior design is our own. The north bay houses the tool stall. Here we concentrate the daily tasks, firepacks, and handtools. But the smell and noise during midsummer are too fierce not to quarantine the bay partially with a wall, and it is accessible only from the double-doored front or a doorway to the adjacent stall—the less frequently used project fire stall. We want daily access, but we also want isolation.
In the project fire stall we store matériel not destined for daily use. The bay thus acts as a buffer between the tool stall and the rest of the cache. Scores of canteens fill elevated racks. Five-gallon cubitainers climb one wall like cardboard ivy. Fedcos and project firepacks for first aid, heliport management, and saw repair festoon the other. Army pack frames crowd a corner. Old fireroad signs decorate the doorway like a collage. As we open the winter deliveries, we substitute new for old, and a pile of discards grows outside the heavy double door. Gilbert and I move some new rations and sleeping bags to an enclosed room, mouse-proofed and locked, in the back. I toss paper sleeping bags into a small attic above the room. Everything goes; we will sort the good from the bad as needed. Later that afternoon The Kid and I will visit the ancient root cellar, accessed by a trapdoor, below the bedroom of the supervisory ranger’s house, where old rations, batteries, and other perishables (including handtools, which have a tendency to disappear) are stored over the winter. Some new crew mess kits are discovered, along with gas lantern mantles, long-range patrol rations, and fire shelters. But enough. The project fire stall can be straightened out on a rainy day. Kent and The Kid move to the
