Mutiny in the North Woods

A fire assignment in Canada flies off the rails

Photo by Issy Bailey on Unsplash

By the time you read this I’ll hopefully be on a flight to Montana with my kids. I’ve been thinking of home all spring, but the smoke drifting down from Canada into central Pennsylvania, where we now live, has brought back other memories from my youth. I used to be one of those college kids digging fireline around lightning strikes and patrolling large fires after they had been contained. So, as unpleasant as the smoke has been for us, my thoughts have been with the crews up north, who are assuredly blowing black ash into their Kleenexes every night.

Today I’m sharing a firefighting essay that first appeared in The Kenyon Review and that I reworked as part of my memoir Down from the Mountaintop: From Belief to Belonging. I’m grateful to the poet G. C. Waldrep for plucking this piece from the slush pile during his time at Kenyon College. Hope it holds up for you.

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Mutiny in the North Woods

It was a cloudy day in June, our first day back on the job in Troy, Montana, when we got the call from northern Alberta. We were crowded round the chain link equipment locker in the fire shop, jostling as close to the front of the line as we could in hopes of getting a good pair of Nomex pants and one of the vintage smokejumper packs, when our supervisor stepped into the hallway and shouted, “Jones, Tozzi, Doležal, Jacobson — my office.” Lonna Huff had fought her way to Assistant Fire Management Officer through the old boy Forest Service. She raised Greyhounds and looked a little like one, too. Only rarely did she raise her voice.

I had just gathered my gear and hurriedly signed off with Maddox, who stood with his clipboard near the piles of red packs and green and gold fire clothes. Tozzi and Jacobson gave up their places in line, to much hooting and elbow jabbing from the others, and we followed Jones down the hallway to Lonna’s office, a tiny paper-strewn space shared by three other supervisors. The bookshelves were jammed with three-ring binders, maps, training workbooks, and odd novels, Catch-22 and Vineland nestled among the thrillers. A tattered poster taped to the door showed a photo of a mime troupe with the caption, “Occupants are lifers with nothing to lose.”

Lonna motioned for us to sit. Jones and Tozzi took the open chairs as Jacobson and I leaned against the door jamb.

“How’d you like to go to northern Alberta?” she grinned. “I just got the call, and we’re trying to put together a crew. Libby will send a squad, we’ll get one each from Eureka, Rexford, and the Cabinet district, and I thought we could send you four. Jones, you’d be our squad boss. They’ll be sending Claude Shanley from the Cabinet to run the crew.”

Jones sniffed. “What the hell do they want us in Alberta for?”

“Big muskeg fires, they say. It’s a ground moss, grows up to five feet deep. Anytime those swampy areas dry out a little bit, like down in the Everglades, you get some bad fires. Once the heat starts skunking around in that moss, it’s almost impossible to stop. Anyway, you guys interested?”

“Hell, yes,” Tozzi said. We all agreed. Nobody ever turned down an off-forest assignment. With twenty-one straight days on the clock, twelve to fourteen hours a day, the overtime was reason enough. We were all cash-craving college kids except for Jacobson, one of the Troy boys still determined to make a life for himself in our hometown.  Jones and Tozzi stood to go, but Lonna waved them back.

“There’s something I want you all to know, just to be on the safe side. Claude is a nice guy, but he’s not all there. Just two years ago he was crew boss with a hotshot outfit, and one of his guys died on the fireline — tree felling accident or something. Whatever it was, it got Claude demoted. If it was me, I’d never send him out again, but it’s not my call.” Lonna leaned forward in her chair. “You guys don’t hesitate to call home if you think things aren’t safe up there, OK? No heroics. I need you to pay attention and speak up if your gut tells you to. Alright?”

She looked at Jones to be sure. He nodded and pulled his cap down over his eyes.

We made a quick business of packing our things and drove a green club cab to the Kalispell airport, where we would catch our flight to Edmonton. Clouds had gathered quickly throughout the day, and rain began to fall as we climbed Whiskey Hill on the outskirts of Libby. Jones drove with one hand on the wheel, the other clutching an empty Mountain Dew bottle against his red wool shirt. His lower lip bulged with a wad of Kodiak snuff. Jones stood over six feet and weighed at least 250 pounds, much of that in his hips. It was hard to read his thoughts. When he saw a woman in tight pants, he was apt to say, “I’d eat a mile of her shit just to see where it came from.” But then he might fall into a brooding silence as he did on this drive, the pale daylight gleaming on his glasses, wheel rocking beneath his wrist. Jacobson rode shotgun, listening to country radio. The steady hiss of the tires and the thump of a broken windshield wiper lulled Tozzi and me to sleep in the back seat.

We woke to doors slamming and found ourselves on the tarmac in a desolate part of the Kalispell airport reserved for charter flights. It was scarcely noon, but thunderheads had walled off the sun and the Flathead Mountains, so we could see only the glistening asphalt and the dim outline of the terminals. Jones had his red and orange packs slung over each shoulder and was walking quickly toward the concrete warehouse where we were to wait for the rest of the crew to join us. We followed, heads bowed against the rain.

“Jesus and Mary,” said Tozzi, once we were inside. “How the hell are we going to fly in this?” Jones shrugged and tossed his gear in the pile that had formed just inside the door. The place reeked of wet boot leather and snuff.

Libby’s squad leader, Pat Caspe, rose to greet us. Pat wore a camouflage Mack Truck cap with nylon netting in the back. She was stout and looked like a man from the rear, her blonde curls bulging beneath her cap. Pat had gone to work in a silver mine after high school. When the mine closed she signed on with a logging company, and now that the timber industry was on the wane, she had fallen back on seasonal work with the Forest Service. She was clear-headed and kind, even though she put up a tough front. I was glad to see her on this crew.

“What’s the word, Pat?” Tozzi cupped his hand to his ear.

“Word is, you sleep when you can, eat when you can, and mind your own ass,” she said.

A few hours passed, it seemed, before the others arrived, but once the Eureka and Rexford squads rolled in, the Cabinet folks were close behind, and then we got our first look at Claude Shanley. He was a short, pot-bellied man. His round spectacles had slid halfway down his face in the rain, and his mouth gaped as he tried to hold them up by wrinkling his nose. Pat Caspe and Jones stood to introduce themselves. Soon the other squad leaders followed, forming a knot around Claude. He had a habit of touching his face as he spoke, and he stood with one leg relaxed, his hips in a rakish tilt. I could tell this aggravated Jones, who formed impressions quickly and harbored grudges longer than anyone I knew. He must have been recalling Lonna’s warning. Listen to your gut. Speak up if you have to.

As the squad leaders broke away, word trickled back that we were going to fly regardless of the storm. The room began to buzz as we crowded to the windows for another look at the sky. Rain was falling in sheets, puddles rippling around the tires of the plane. Lightning glittered on the tarmac. The thunder broke immediately.

Whether it be instinct or bravado or plain stupidity, it is hard not to board a plane when your crewmates are dashing through the rain to toss their packs into the cargo bin. No matter how bald-headed and knock-kneed the crew boss, no matter how uncertain he might seem of his own demands, it is hard to look him in the eye and refuse to follow orders. It is easier to keep your place in line, kvetching all the while, mount the stairs to the plane, and buckle in.

Our fire training stressed safety above all else, steeping us in cautionary tales of crews who overlooked obvious watch-out situations and ended up dead. It was an easy calculus in hindsight. But we never had a class on the unwritten rules of the field, where danger is not always dire. Where does flying into a thunderstorm rank on the scale of acceptable risk? I had some doubts about whether the propellers would be turning now if this were a commercial flight, whether the attendant would be sealing the cockpit door as the engines whined and the plane lurched forward. But there was no bucking it now, so I gripped the armrests and sank into the seat as the ship lifted off, swaying and dipping against the black sky. Gusts shuddered the cabin as we climbed through the storm, air pockets sucking the plane down fifty feet before updrafts shot us skyward again. I watched lightning flash beyond the tip of the wing and tried to swallow my fear.

❖

The next morning, after staying over in Edmonton, we boarded a yellow school bus and headed north toward Slave Lake. Once we left the hayfields in Fawcett and Flatbush, the roadside turned to scraggly pines and firs and the occasional aspen grove. The horizon was a brown ribbon of earth. Tozzi quickly succumbed to the hum of the tires and the mesmeric drift of landscape, his head bouncing on my shoulder. I stayed awake, struck by the sensation of moving north, off my personal map. Troy was scarcely an hour from the border, and though I had crossed many times into British Columbia and Alberta, I had no more notion of the northern reaches of the provinces than a Vancouver dweller might have of Nome.

There was little traffic on the highway, just endless patchy trees. The land was so flat it offered blankness as perspective. When the trees opened up enough for me to see some distance, it was like a glimpse into nothing, and when the fir thickets blocked the view again, I felt dizzy, the way a fisherman might feel walking over a frozen lake after knocking a hole in the ice to discover the water twenty feet below.

We passed a few desolate homes, mostly trailer houses, many abandoned. This prompted some heckling from Bauer, a loudmouth on the Libby squad, who had spontaneously nicknamed Jacobson “Dirt Chicken” and was now intent on making that name stick. It was like the game Slug Bug, which I used to play with my sister on long drives, each of us scanning the oncoming traffic for a Volkswagen Beetle and pummeling the other’s arm if we saw one first. Now the game was to spot a trailer and shout “Dirt Chicken!” at Jacobson. “Looks like home, eh?” Bauer would say, and the game would go on.

Jacobson was nearly as tall as Jones, but not as stout. He was fond of denim cowboy shirts with brass snaps and always wore a Husqvarna cap over his greasy mullet. At a distance he might have seemed formidable, but in person he was shy and invited abuse the way an old dog draws mange. I liked Jacobson and thought he got short shrift most of the time, but I was all too glad to forget the dead landscape outside, so I joined in the fun.

We were a sorry crew, truth be told, mostly kids with a season or two of experience. The crew boss trainee from Rexford, who scarcely cleared five feet and maybe weighed a buck thirty, answered to Tadpole. There was Claude, who wore a perpetual grin under his gleaming spectacles and walked like he had to piss. Five women had joined the crew, including Pat Caspe, and they were all solid but for a histrionic blonde from Libby. We thought our Troy squad was tough enough, and Craig, the helicopter specialist, knew what he was doing. Still, there was an alchemy from the start that brought out the worst in some of us. Tozzi and I — usually amiable sorts — laughed along with the others when the bus passed another trailer and Bauer led the dirt chicken chorus while Jacobson turned a deeper shade of red.

The bus sped northward, deeper into the muskeg country between the Greater and Lesser Slave Lakes. The dirt roads made for slower driving, so it could have been forty or fifty miles before we arrived at the fire camp, which covered one end of an airstrip cut from fir and aspen groves. Yellow canvas tents sat in rows among the gopher holes, each tent supported by peeled poles lashed together in an A-frame.  Two sanitation trailers and two portable shower houses stood behind the mess hall, a circle tent of white canvas. There was a medic tent and a trailer set up for the Division Supervisor and a row of yellow school buses like ours. As we pulled to a stop in the makeshift parking lot, a Jeep rumbled out to meet us. A small, balding man who looked a lot like Claude jumped out and broke open two boxes in the back of the Jeep, which we soon saw held rubber boots and bottles of mosquito spray. Claude stepped from the bus to help, and the two portly men stood on either side of the bus door to dispense the gear as we filed out.

“Looks like we’ll be fighting more skeeters than fire,” said Bauer. He looked around at the tents. “Damn, Jacobson, you’ve got your own dirt chicken village. It’s a redneck fiefdom out here, and you’re the king.” Bauer made a mock bow, and we all laughed as we stood clutching our boots and repellant. We waited for Claude to give directions about our bunking arrangements, but he climbed into the Jeep and bounced away with the camp administrator, so we carried our packs through the camp, peering under the flaps to see which tents were occupied. Jones and I claimed a vacant tent and began unrolling our sleeping pads. The canvas canopy stank of camphor and mold. Black ants scurried over the dirt floor. As the sun died out on the western horizon and night fell on the camp, we went about arranging a home for ourselves in the dust.

❖

We woke to a tumult of helicopters landing on the airstrip, the thock-thock-thock of their blades like a hundred axes driven into wood. They were Type I logging ships with enough space for ten to twelve passengers, and we could feel their power through the ground as we lay in our mummy bags. After the usual briefings, when we heard again that our fire shelters would make no difference in a muskeg fire, owing to the deep ground moss, we lined up on the airstrip with the other crews to await our turn for a chopper ride.

Regulations in the U.S. demand that crews manifest their loads, which means calculating the weight of everyone and everything on board, but the Canadian rules were more lax. Their pilots encouraged us to pile in, and if the load proved too heavy, they’d just kick someone off. Claude stood on the landing strip with his arms crossed and did nothing to suggest otherwise, which raised some uneasiness among our crew. This was a clear watch-out situation, the kind that flew in the face of the training manuals we all knew, and I could see Jones chewing on his lip as he mulled it over. Claude had a way of standing apart from the group that might have made him seem tough if he had been six inches taller and thicker in the shoulders rather than the paunch. As it was, he looked distracted, even senile. The other crew bosses shepherded their squads into the choppers, leaning in through the doors to make sure everyone was buckled in, but when it was our turn to board, Claude drifted to the back of the line and let us fend for ourselves. Craig, our helicopter specialist, did the best he could to make sure our loads were reasonable, and we all arrived safely at the drop point.

Boarding and dismounting from a large helicopter is breathtaking, the great wash of air like no wind I have ever felt, more like the surge of a river than any breeze. We approached and departed with our heads bowed, as if we were playing parts in a war film, and then we stood back in the trees as we watched the ships lift off, their noses lowered as they whizzed off over the forest. During training sessions we had been taught to hit the ground if a chopper crashed nearby, since the broken blade would hurtle like grapeshot in all directions. Each morning I stood with my legs tensed at takeoff and after landing, imagining the great blade spinning free of its axis and slicing me in two. It was the most exhilarating part of the day.

The rest of the time we passed mopping up, a dull business that drags out for weeks after a big fire has spent itself. We began as a crew, all twenty of us walking straight through the forest in a grid, no more than an arm’s length from our nearest neighbor, watching for smoldering hot spots. If we found a pocket of heat, we would call out “Smoke!” and the rest would wait for us to potato patch the spot, hacking down to mineral soil with the hoe end of our Pulaskis, turning the embers under.

Mopping up is a dismal job because it most often occurs in a moonscape of a forest, where the ground is one expanse of ash and the trees look like they have been blasted by the fifth trumpet of the Apocalypse. This fire was different, because the charred areas were swampy, and half the time we swatted at mosquitos and gnats while sloshing through the muskeg. Still, we got plenty dirty digging in the char. Ash after a large-scale blaze has a certain energy, flying up your pant legs and coating your teeth, gathering in your hair and clumping like tar at the corners of your eyes.

The hazards of mopping up are small but real. Roots burn up to the bases of trees, leaving little tunnels that let the earth collapse underfoot, sometimes enough to sprain an ankle or slam a knee back into the joint. Many trees teeter on a rootless trunk after a hot ground fire and can topple silently at any time. Cold-trailing is part of the job, running a bare hand along the underside of a log to feel for heat, and even when there is no fire in sight, you can still get badly burned by grabbing a branch with live embers or thrusting a hand into a white-hot pocket of ash.

But boredom is a greater hazard, nearly as perilous to a firefighter as pride. Lonna’s warning had given us too much pride by entitling us to question the chain of command, and so that was what our thoughts went back to when mopping up grew dull, which made a deadly stew. It was never a question so much of whether we were in danger as whether we could get Claude in trouble for leading us into it. And the more we kicked at the ash and spit it out and ran our sooty hands across our faces, the more we blamed our discontent on him.

The fire had mostly spent itself, so we took long breaks that first week, digging easy chairs for ourselves in the muskeg and dipping snuff. But once the dreariness of the work stole back over us, Claude was much on our thoughts. After the first week we gave up gridding as a crew and wandered about in squads, chopping out a few smoldering stump holes and leaning on our Pulaski handles for many minutes afterward until the mosquitoes drove us back to walking. Jones carried a radio on a yellow chest holster, but the traffic was slow, and we often lost track of where the other squads were until the end of the day, when we tried to find our way back to where the choppers had dropped us that morning. The flat aspen groves made orienteering difficult. Here was a swampy clearing, there was a little clutch of trees, and beyond were other clearings and oily marshes and little stands of fir. During one of our many breaks, I closed my eyes and tried to remember which way was north, and the more I struggled to decide, the more it felt as if the darkness behind my eyes were empty space, as if I were hurtling through the cosmos. Lazy moments like these multiplied as we logged more twelve-hour shifts, rising at dawn to file through the mess line, waiting for the morning briefing, lining up for our chopper ride, then drifting about in the field for ten hours before catching our return flight. The numbing shuffle felt like hunting with no hope of seeing game.

So it was really no surprise when Tozzi stepped behind a tree one day to piss and came tiptoeing back, motioning for us to follow. We crept up a knoll, and there in a little hollow we saw Claude fast asleep, hands folded on his potbelly, cap pulled down over his eyes. Jones smiled the way he used to on the football field, when he planned to dive under the center off the snap and grab at the opposing quarterback’s shoelaces. “Damn, I wish I had a camera,” he whispered, and we crouched there for a moment deciding what to do. Then Claude stirred in his sleep, and we stole away to ponder what this meant.

“That guy’s as crazy as a rat in tin shithouse,” Jones said. “He doesn’t have any more sense than Jacobson does.” Jacobson mumbled a retort and began chewing on a stem of grass. Tozzi and I agreed. Something had to be done about Claude.

One week turned into two. Then one day we were gridding, sloshing through the muskeg, when we saw thunderheads building in a big cloud bank with a purple belly. By lunchtime the storm had blown overhead, and the temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees. Jones called the other squad leaders and got us all together. Claude heard the radio traffic and joined us. As the sky grew dark, we pulled out our rain shells and ponchos and began hunkering down among a few fir trees that had survived the burn. The air smelled electric, like ozone. Hail began drumming on our hard hats. Lightning flashed in the distance. In that flat country the trees were virtually all the same height, and it seemed that a strike might touch down anywhere.

We waited, peering from beneath the drawn hoods of our ponchos, the wet ground soaking our asses. Our feet grew cold in our rubber boots. Then Claude got anxious and started calling the chopper pilots on his handheld radio. I could not make out what he said, but he must have been pleading for an emergency rescue, because hail can be deadly to helicopters, sometimes breaking windows, doors, or the external pitot tubes that measure airspeed. If hail is large enough, it can bring a ship down, so it surely would have been safer for us to wait out the storm. But Claude got us all to stand and start moving toward an opening a few hundred yards away that turned out to be a power line. We could see the pea-sized hail bouncing from the wires. The right-of-way cut a corridor through the trees, and our ponchos billowed as powerful gusts surged down the line. Lightning snapped once more, the rumble a few seconds behind. Claude’s radio squawked and stammered while we waited at the edge of the trees. Jones stood nearby with his arms crossed and his lower lip, full of snuff, bulging from beneath his hood.

Then the broken drone of the choppers drifted toward us, and we strained to see them, our eyes streaming from the wind, noses running from the cold. The two ships came out of the clouds a long way off, like black wasps made sluggish by frost. They landed near the treeline, close enough to the power poles that the wires tossed in the rotor wash, and we boarded in twos, heads bent, breath caught in our throats as the downdrafts pounded our faces. There was a lot of hand rubbing and nose wiping after we had buckled in, and everyone turned to look through the open doors as we sailed back through the storm to our muddy camp. The forest stretched out below in a carpet of trees, the blackened patches, evergreens, and orange beetle-kill like a vast calico.

❖

The storm turned to rain and killed what was left of the fire. We patrolled a few more times and found nothing, so the Division Supervisor placed us on standby, and we spent a week in camp with idle hands. Firefighters sign on to have fun and make money, so drawing eight hours a day — what we called straight eights — for playing cribbage or napping in a moldy tent tends to amplify any festering discontent in a crew, and we already had more than our share. If we’d continued to draw overtime for field work, with daily helicopter rides, Jones would have swallowed his disgust for Claude, the rest of us would have kept mostly quiet, and we would have grumbled our way safely back home. But once we went on standby, our thrill seeking turned toward mutiny.

It is likely that the storms I have described were not as severe as they seem now in retrospect, because that week of standby acted as a powerful warp on our memory, aided by our need for all of those memories to point toward Claude’s ineptitude. Jones was determined by now to call Lonna on one of the camp’s remote phones, which we all knew would be a serious subversion of the chain of command. This was a moment of truth, a political moment, when crew members had to choose where they stood, like the moment in summer camp when you must decide whether you are in on pranking the weird kid in the corner bunk and, if not, how to avoid becoming a target yourself. I was on Jones’ squad, and I had been there when Lonna gave us her warning, so loyalty kept me from washing my hands of the plan to skewer Claude, though a certain schadenfreude also had me egging Jones on.

What was the case against Claude? The stories flourished over games of cribbage in the mess tent, where we spent most of our days on metal folding chairs whose legs sunk into the soggy ground. Between hands we spit snoose into our paper coffee cups and recovered our memories, starting with the hailstorm and working backward. Flying a helicopter through hail is enough to get a pilot fired in the U.S., and even if this decision owed something to the machismo of Canadian pilots, we were sure Claude had violated our safety policy by calling in the order. It must have been during this time that someone claimed to have witnessed a hotshot crew loading too much weight into one of the helicopters, so that when the ship tried to lift out of ground effect — the ballast gained from the rotor wash bouncing from the earth back up into the blades — it began to nosedive over the trees, banking so hard to get back to the landing strip in its free fall that it touched down off-center and bent one of its skids. Then the pilot just kicked one of the big guys out and lifted off again, as if such things were routine. This story gained so much traction among us that it now seems just as vivid and real to me as our flight out of Kalispell. It is only with discipline that I do not now tell the story as true, though all memory is a little like this, inextricable from the story one is telling about the present, and as true as that self needs it to be.

Jones got on the phone once we had our story straight and had a talk with Lonna, and then we quieted down for a few days, until some buzz started about an investigation. At that point Bill Gossage, the Division Supervisor, got involved. We had seen Bill around camp and should have gone to him first, which we surely would have done if our claims had been legitimate. Bill was a bearded old firefighter who seemed almost as lost as Claude. He mostly kept to himself in camp and ate alone in the mess hall, shoveling down huge platefuls of mashed potatoes and gravy. Like Claude, he had a hard time looking people in the eye, and so it was especially awkward when he started calling us one by one to his trailer office and asking us to verify the charges.

I went to see Bill on a pleasant afternoon, sunny and clear, near seventy degrees. He suggested that we meet outside, and so we sat beneath a pine tree behind his trailer. Bill leaned back on one elbow and fiddled with the pine needles, breaking them into little bits as he ran through his questions.

“I’ve got word from the Forest Supervisor back home that you all have some doubts about Claude,” he said. “That’s why I’m here, so I wish you’d all come to me from now on if you have concerns. But I do have to ask if Claude has done anything on this trip to make you feel unsafe.” I ran through the stories we’d all been telling over cards, and Bill nodded. He’d heard it before. His face was sunken, as if he weren’t sleeping well, and his eyes were bloodshot.

“OK, son,” he said finally. “Thanks for your thoughts. You can go now.” All twenty crew members went to Bill, and most of us had the same impression that he was just following orders, waiting out the last stretch of our three-week tour. We’d heard that our flight home would leave from Fort McMurray in a couple of days, so our bloodlust had worn off and we were mostly anxious to pile into the bus and leave the dirty camp. Tozzi made a softball by wrapping a small rock with several layers of duct tape, Jacobson whittled a bat from a green sapling, and we played a few pickup games barehanded, stopping the hot grounders with our boots, dodging the gopher holes.

The day before we were to leave, Claude appeared near our row of tents and offered us a trip to Lac la Biche, which was at least forty miles away. He stood cockeyed, as usual, sighting down his lowered shoulder as he said there wouldn’t be any more firefighting on this trip, so we may as well have a little fun.

“I don’t mind if you have a beer or two,” he said, “but just don’t get out of hand.”

The fact that Claude stayed behind should have struck us as odd, but we were so glad to get shut of that camp, even for an afternoon, we didn’t stop to wonder. The bus groaned into gear, and then we were bumping through the hardened ruts, listening to Bauer heckle Jacobson with mock sorrow for leaving our little village. There was a steady murmur on the bus all the way to Lac la Biche like the happy rumble of talk at a church potluck, and when we pulled up to the Cheetahs Bar and Grill, everyone stood before the driver had stopped and ended up falling into the next seat when he hit the brakes. It was a mad scramble. Then we were wolfing down burgers and fries and draining pitchers of Molson as fast as the bartender could draw them.

A few of our party passed on Cheetahs and wandered down to the lake shore. They might have seen the plaster and brick mosque that I later learned was one of the most famous landmarks in Lac la Biche. They would have seen loons on the lake and a few osprey, maybe a lone heron. They might also have seen that Claude had a purpose for sending us to town that they wanted to avoid. As inept a boss as he might have been, he was a schemer, and he surely knew that no crew of college kids who had been playing gopher ball and cards all week would be able to avoid growing unruly if they had a chance at beer.

He was right. It was a bleak trip back to camp. There were boozy skirmishes in the back seats, overturned spit bottles, and lots of pissing out the windows, a messy business on a bumpy dirt road. Claude was waiting for us when we returned, the bus headlights flashing against his glasses. He stood with his arms crossed while we filed out, and he might have been smiling as he surveyed the damage. We made our way to the tents in the chilly night, fell asleep in the dirt, and woke the next morning coated in grime.

❖

Mutinous sailors either throw the captain overboard or hang for their crimes, but such fates are rare in the Forest Service. Lonna and the brass at the district office took a deposition from Claude after our return, where he presented time reports showing us on the clock during our binge in Lac la Biche. He claimed to have told us to lay off the booze, since we were on standby and could have been deployed to another fire at any time, even if our three-week tour was nearly up. His counterattack discredited us enough to kill the investigation into his safety violations. No one wanted to hear about our assumption that Claude had clocked us off for that afternoon, and while I felt outraged at the time, I don’t blame them now.

Soon after Claude’s deposition, Lonna tracked the four of us down, and Jones, Tozzi, Jacobson, and I went to see our Fire Management Officer. Howard was a craggy man in his late fifties, half deaf from running a chainsaw for too many years without earplugs. He had lost part of one lung, and his shortness of breath made him impatient with bullshit. When we protested that we weren’t stupid enough to drink on the clock, he waved his hand.

“I don’t give a good goddamn whether you were on the clock or not,” he said. “You’re supposed to be firefighters, for Christ’s sake. That means being problem solvers, not troublemakers. We have enough clusterfucks without shit like this.” Howard paused to cough, eyeing us from beneath his bushy eyebrows while he hacked into his hand. When he caught his breath, he licked his lips, glaring.

“Now, I’ve known you boys your whole lives. If I hadn’t, I’d barbecue your asses right now. Even so, I should put a letter in your file. That’s what the Division Supervisor wants me to do. But I know you’re better than this, and I know you’ll never do anything so goddamned stupid again, so I promised them this is the last horseshit they’ll ever see from you. So, go on — get the hell out of here. Get back to work.” We murmured our thanks as he waved us toward the door. Howard’s tongue-lashing was a kind of pardon. We were punks, but he forgave us. This instilled in me a great admiration for Howard, and aside from the shame I carried around for the rest of the summer, that was the end of it.

❖

Fifteen years have passed. I have spun the Alberta tale over pints of Guinness, black coffee, and cold stream water. The story rises in my memory like smoke swirling above the original fire of that place and time. It is as if I am stumbling through the charred forest of my past, coated in ash as I search among the stump holes for a few embers to blow back into flame. Each time the coal bed ignites and the smoke pours forth, I kneel in the dust and watch the shape-changing faces unfold. I have remembered the trip to Alberta as a drama of near death by helicopter, a comedy of errors in the Forest Circus, and a lesson in staying uphill of one’s own shit. Now, kneeling at the stump of this tale and fanning it alive again, I see a new story in the smoke.

The day after our lark in Lac la Biche, we all got drunk again, this time with Claude and Bill. We were staying at a hotel in Fort McMurray, planning to catch a flight back to Montana the next morning. That night we gathered in the cocktail lounge, a roomy space with a hardwood stage, a big-screen television, and at least a half dozen pink felt pool tables.

Like most beery memories, this one is hazy. But moments of clarity still surface in that state, when something seems so strange even drunk logic can’t explain it, and for me such a moment came when Claude and Bill appeared at the bar.

For an hour or so we kept our distance, downing our pitchers at the pool tables, but soon Bauer was laughing with Claude while ordering another round, and then Pat Caspe was buying Bill a whiskey sour, and before long one of them convinced the bartender to power up the karaoke machine.

We each took a turn as the fool, following the bouncing ball while the others cheered, then we mobbed the stage and sang a string of traveling tunes — “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” “Jet Airliner,” “Against the Wind.” At two or three in the morning, after several last calls for booze, we badgered the bartender into one more song. Bill took the microphone for this one, and we all swayed like a choir behind him as he belted out “You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’.” I remember standing behind Bill as he crouched in anticipation of the chorus and swung his arm toward Claude, who was leaning against the bar, his spectacles like bright saucers of light above his gleaming cheeks, his hands clasped as if in triumph.

That is how I have always remembered Claude. But I had one arm around Tozzi, the other around Jacobson, and the fog of youth in my head. I had no notion of how it might have felt to be clutching my own hand for solace, wishing to God I were home.