wall segregates the two last bays from each other. Only a short shelf juts out like a jetty, and together the two bays make an all-purpose great room. Along one wall there is a workbench with wood and machine tools. Along another are storage shelves for assorted bulky items: the Mark III pumps and accessories, jerry cans for gas, GI surplus webbing harnesses for carrying canteens, saw supplies, whatever. There are cases of hard hats. One corner holds a chain saw bench; another, a wooden cabinet with flagging tape, headlamps, batteries, hydraulic appliances, assorted firepack necessities; a third, a ceiling-high rack for hoses; the last, a four-shelf cabinet for chain saws. The saw shop is more elaborate and self-contained—our concession to high tech—but it is far from functional. Boxes of winter-ordered parts pile around the dark workbench like mushrooms pushing through pine litter. On the bench are an electric grinder and a chain breaker and a can of oil with several seasoning chains; other chains hang in clusters from pegs like mistletoe; individual saw kits, destined for firepacks, are scattered across the bench like windfall. A surplus military field desk holds endless screws, spare parts, instruction manuals, specialty repair tools. Overhead dangles a fluorescent light, constantly bumped and swaying.
Steadily we unburden the great room of its congestion. The miscellaneous residue finds its way to shelves, or to other sheds, or to the asphalt outside until we can determine what it is and why we have it. A few bulky items are hoisted to planks crossing the joists that make a surrogate attic. A case of back-firing flares—fusees—goes to the flammables shed, a flimsy metal structure behind the warehouse that houses gas, saw mix, oil, drip torches, and flamethrowers. The outside saw bench, where we clean saws after daily use before storing them in the saw cabinet, is buried under old and new snow. We will dig it out later. The structural fire cache in another building we ignore. Kent plugs in a coffeepot, and Gilbert scrounges some spare packets of “Coffee, Instant, Type II” from the rations.
Yet there is more. A fire cache abhors a vacuum. Everything, it seems, sinks to the Lower Area and eventually finds its way, deliberately or coincidentally, to the fire cache, the great mandala of the Rim. Everything comes and goes in a grand recycling. The great room acquires quasi-permanent furnishings. Two metal lockers discarded by maintenance are eagerly scavenged and installed; a weight lifting bench appears alongside the saw cabinet; a punching bag hangs from a rafter. Some trash we haul to the Boneyard, some to the warehouse on CCC Hill. The cache is thus eclectic and plentiful; everything almost—but not quite—fits its purpose. For all its congestion it is profoundly utilitarian. A good fire cache learns everything and forgets everything. And all of it is grimy with oil and dust, coated with memory like pine pollen.
Coated, not stored. Unlike the tools and packs and fedcos, memories cannot be kept in steady state, removed like rations or restocked like shovels. The fire cache does not save the past. It reworks it, and by using the past, it continually converts past into present. But the rhythm of the cache—the cycle of fire season—is only one of several rhythms that affect us. There is also the cycle of a seasonal career, and it imposes a slightly larger rhythm upon the rhythm of annual renewal. To these I have added a third.
My longevity as a smokechaser on the North Rim was unprecedented. I even predated the existing fire cache. It is not uncommon for someone to remain somewhere in the fire community for as long as I did, but it is rare to spend those years all in the field. I experienced the annual fire cycle fifteen times, and I passed through the career cycle perhaps five times. For me, season must play against history. The opening of the cache is the opening of a Great Season.
Now, even after a day of housecleaning, the air is rank and heavy and suffused with a faint, sour odor of old woodsmoke. Memory mixes with hope. It is as though I have never left.
* * *
As 210 lifts off, we see several large thunderheads. We skirt them, yet it is apparent that they are moving in the same direction we are, that they are marching to the northeast, to Nankoweap Basin. Overhead arcs a magnificent double rainbow.
The fire is about fifty acres in size, flaring up a very steep slope in typical Canyon desert fuels. The helo delicately deposits King and me upslope from the fire, not truly landing but hovering on a small terrace under full power, perched like a raven on an outcrop, then quickly lifts off. Even as we knock down some flames at the head, it is obvious that two firefighters with handtools will not contain the fire. But this early in the season—preseason, really, with only fires in the Canyon—two are all we are. Suddenly, however, as we throw dirt along the flaming front, I realize that the onrushing storm contains a solution. The rain will not reach the Canyon bottom—it will evaporate into virga long before then—but the cascading winds will pour down the Canyon. The lower flank of the fire perimeter, now quiet, will soon become a new head.
We scramble to the bottom of the ravine and extinguish every flame. No fireline here, just a chain of linked hot-spotting, made rapid by the loose, sandy soils. The scheme works. Winds blow down the Nankoweap like a flume; the upslope flames are driven back into the burned area and expire; the lower corner is already dead cold. In fewer than two minutes, the Rainbow fire is out.
King leads as we trudge up the talus and select a campsite not far from our landing site. The fiery flush is gone, and I feel heavy sweat build up under my fireshirt. A parade of thunderheads washes through Nankoweap Basin and sweeps out across the Painted Desert. Sun and storm mingle among buttes and gorges. We search through our firepacks, extract a double meal of C rations—leftovers from last autumn—and pluck out our headlamps. The clouds transfigure the sunset into a colossal alpenglow. King fashions two fusees into a makeshift stove. Cloud and sun glide by us in grand rhythms, until the Plateau casts a deepening shadow, a false night, and evening winds slough off the Rim and pass over us—two busy ants—on their way east.
THE PIT
Kent wrestles with the lock, which is sluggish, perhaps rusted from the winter. The sky clouds, and without sun the day turns suddenly chilly. The Kid squirts some graphite into the lock, then Kent tries the key again. The door opens to a small room, part of the maintenance warehouse that stands next to (but some distance from) the fire cache. Above the door is a routed wooden sign that reads FIRE PIT.
Beyond the first doorway is a second—this one with the door removed—and beyond that is a small, narrow room, lighted from a bank of dingy windows. Here we do our paperwork, hold what pass for conferences, and congregate for dispatching. The managerial revolution demands that “managers,” even if they are fire crew foremen, have offices, and the Fire Pit is our ambivalent response. It is an imperfect weld between fire and bureaucracy. As much of the outdoors as possible has been brought inside. Its interior is a bizarre syncretism of the utilitarian and the whimsical, informed by neither logic nor history, defiantly untamable. The double entryway makes an anteroom known as the Arm Pit, while to the rear is a mouse-proofed storage room, once used to house hardware for mountain rescue operations, but now dedicated to items like fireshirts and firepants, gloves, batteries, fire maps, and compasses. Between front and rear there is barely room to walk. Crowded into the Pit are an oil heater, forcibly joined to an ancient brick chimney, which rises through the middle of the room; a metal government-issue grey desk, squatting glumly in a corner and piled with soiled fireshirts and gloves; a chair from the Lodge, its wicker unraveling; a dilapidated wooden bench, irrationally salvaged from the Boneyard; milk cans stenciled with FIRE in red letters; a giant round of pine, the only remainder of a huge ponderosa that once glowered over the flight path of the North Rim heliport but is now known fondly as the Base of a Big Yellow Pine after a favorite expression of McLaren, the Park fire officer; some scraps of carpet discards on the floor. The Kid turns on the oil heater, without effect; the drum outside is empty. Kent searches for a coffeepot.
The walls are saturated with fire paraphernalia. There are dispatching maps for the North Rim and the North Kaibab Forest, and a Federal Aviation Administration flight map of the Grand Canyon, all covered with Plexiglas. A trellis of clipboards posts biweekly tours of duty, requisition needs, helicopter schedules,
