The education of a firefighter

Notes from my rookie season

My son tested positive for COVID last week. He’s totally fine, thankfully, and we’ll be enjoying more “boy time” this coming week until he’s cleared to return to daycare. Since I won’t be at my desk very much, I’m digging into the archives. This essay didn’t make the cut for my first book, but I think it holds together well enough. I also learned yesterday that my father passed the fitness test for firefighting at the age of 71. It’s called the “pack test,” and you have to walk three miles on flat ground with a 45-pound pack in under 45 minutes. That’s a four mph pace, and it’s harder than it sounds. Good for you, Papa.

It’s the season for prescribed burns, where I learned most of what I needed to know about firefighting. Every year around this time I remember that I made a choice after the big fire year in 2000 to go back for a Ph.D. rather than to apply for one of the many permanent jobs that opened up in fire suppression. It was the right decision, but I’ll always be a firefighter, too.

So here’s an essay for the old-timers who joke about the Forest Circus but keep coming back for the money every year, for the women who run chainsaws and make the best crew bosses, and for the college kids who need all the overtime and hazard pay they can get to pay down their loans.

Note: Names and some identifying details in the following essay have been changed.

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From the Associated Press

Initial Attack

It was cold in the moldy warehouse where I sat with the rest of the rookies on the Fire Crew. I slouched a little lower in my seat, shivering as the chill of the metal chair crept through my jeans, popping the collar of my wool shirt to keep the draft off my neck. It was early June in northwest Montana, and we were nearing the end of Guard School, a week of basic training required of all new recruits. Light flickered over our faces as we watched a training video about deploying the fire shelter, a wad of aluminum foil we were required to carry with our gear at all times as a last-ditch shield against a runaway blaze. Throughout the week we watched several accounts of burnovers where hotshot crews or smokejumpers ignored Watch Out situations or the ten standard Fire Orders, got trapped by the flame front, and hunkered down in their shelters, weathering gusts as hot as 400 degrees.

This film sounded like it was narrated by an Eagle Scout who had never seen a real fire. After close-up shots of a brand new backpack, a shiny Pulaski tool, and an unopened plastic pouch stuffed with a fire shelter, the camera cut to a scene where a middle-aged man in Nomex jogged into a clearing on a cloudless day with a Pulaski in one hand and a fire shelter in the other. He scraped halfheartedly in the dirt with the Pulaski hoe while the narrator explained how crucial it was to remove all wood or grass from the deployment site, so as not to be cooked from underneath. The camera zoomed in on the man’s hands as he slowly stripped the red tab from the package, tugging the foil shelter free. I tensed with vicarious desperation, as if I were watching a close-up of a man in a horror film treading through a darkened room with his back to the killer. I could imagine the firestorm — big howling gusts of flame — and I knew the guy inching into his shelter would be cooked if the scene were in real time.

I felt some of this dread again later, as we all lined up to practice deploying the shelter on the rocky lawn outside the warehouse. The folded fire shelter was the size of a college dictionary and weighed four or five pounds. Shaken flat it looked like an oversized bed sheet, elastic bands puckering each corner. The trick was to grip one of the ends and toss the rest loose, shaking the folds open and holding the shelter vertical while taking a cross step into the base, spinning around to plant the other foot, then drawing the top overhead like a cocoon and falling onto all fours before spreading prone. The whole process, we were told, should take twenty seconds or less. Instructors prowled the lawn, tugging on the silver bubbles to make sure the rookies inside had pinned down the fabric with their elbows and toes. When my turn came, I tossed the shelter into a sheet in no time, stumbled a little stepping into it, and dropped into deployment mode in about forty seconds. As I lay in the dark, pinholes speckled the inside of the foil like stars. I couldn’t imagine trying to shake the packet loose in high winds with smoke burning my eyes and my blood spiked with adrenaline. No way could I do that in twenty seconds or less.

I waited for an instructor to tug on my shelter, listening to the others joke about how much I looked like a baked potato, and I knew this dry run was not enough. We were kids who had big bonfire parties in the woods and drove home fish-faced down steep gravel roads and jumped from sixty foot cliffs into waterfalls for the fun of it. We needed more of a wake-up call, like live machine gun fire. One of the instructors held our attention by keeping a chainsaw at his elbow with the chain removed. When one of us nodded off, he’d drop start the saw, stick the bar between the sleeper’s legs and gun the throttle. We needed something like that to really get this fire shelter deployment down. But most of the teachers read our handouts to us word for word and then gave us open book tests. At the end of the week every last knucklehead got a firefighter’s red card with the basic credentials for initial attack and deployment to the fires racing across the arid West.

We would get our chance at the big time, shipping out to California for fourteen days of overtime and hazard pay, but more often than not the job fell to grinding tools and rolling hose at the station, heckling each other to stave off boredom as we waited for one of the lookouts to call in a lightning strike. Every day in the field we hefted axes and chainsaws, hacking our way through roots and rocks to prep the edges of a prescribed burn, sometimes felling trees or slashing our way through jackpots of fallen snags and hornets’ nests to create a fuel break. It was risky work, and even if there was no constant threat of death, it was a little like the mix of tedium and danger returning soldiers describe in a war. We had to trust each other, and working with fire, even just patrolling the ashy remnants of a blaze where pockets of heat lurked beneath the char, woke something within us.

The Fire Crew drew a lot of college kids like me who signed on through the student requisition program designed to bring us back to our rural hometowns for the summer. But there were teachers on our crew, and ski bums who worked only to finance their backcountry treks, and grizzled characters undaunted by the waning timber and mining industries who supported their families by cobbling together seasonal Forest Service work and odd winter jobs. There were men and women as young as eighteen and as old as sixty, rednecks and hippies, alcoholics and chain smokers, future doctors and lawyers and dental hygienists, fundamentalists and atheists and lapsed Catholics, retired smokejumpers, Zen philosophers, elk hunters, PETA activists, mechanics, electroshock victims, cancer survivors, veterans of Vietnam and the Gulf, gay and straight and bi, pacifists, Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, socialists, and anarchists. There was a good chance that on any given topic a fair share of us would disagree, yet there was a loose kinship among us. Whatever squabbling arose eventually fell silent beneath the radiant heat of a backburn or the click of our tools in the dirt. There was a sense that we were on vacation from the real world, that our workplace lay a little beyond the threshold of the everyday, and in some ways this freed us to be truer to our natural selves than we might have been among family and friends.

Photo by Drea Burbank on Unsplash

Our supervisor was Lonna Huff, a tall no-nonsense woman who had climbed through the ranks as a college seasonal like us, then as a crew leader, finally graduating to Assistant Fire Management Officer. She answered to Howard, the FMO, who was as old-school as they came, an old fire dog with bushy white eyebrows, one good lung left, and a temper as short as a cherry bomb fuse. We had a few crew leaders who worked with us in the field. Milo was a big, bearded guitarist who lived with his parents and also moonlighted as a lay preacher. He was tempered somewhat by Jack, a high school English teacher and marathoner with a taste for Irish whiskey and the wit to go with it. Jack kept us laughing, and Milo kept us honest.

We torched the prescribed burns just after Guard School, before the snow in the high country had all melted away. The controlled burns taught us everything we really needed to know about how to gauge the effect of wind and slope and cloud cover on a fire, how to flank the edges with a dirt trench, how to set up the pumps and hoses. When it came time for a burn, Milo and Jack backed our fire engines up to the tool cache, and we began loading the gear. Each engine had cabinets for tools and hose fittings welded to the sides of the red water tank. Two diamond grill racks sat atop the cabinets, where we stacked rolls of hose and secured the load with crisscrossed bungees. The pumps were stored in red wooden boxes, which we lashed to the racks on the rear of the engine. When that was done, we strapped down two Port-a-tanks, which looked like plastic swimming pools tied to a collapsible metal frame. Then we drove out to the burn unit in a green truck caravan: the fire engines, the club cab we called the Six Pack, and another rig for Lonna and Howard.

The Kootenai National Forest is big country, roughly three times as large as Rhode Island. The Three Rivers District, where I was raised and now worked, covers more than half a million acres in the northwest corner of Montana, where the Yaak and Kootenai and Bull River valleys lie between the Idaho and Canadian borders. Growing up there made me certain I knew the place, but I began to see it differently from the vantage of the Fire Crew, driving gated roads I’d never explored even on foot, looking down on the valley from peaks I’d glimpsed for many years from the highway. It was like getting to know family as a young adult, recognizing frailty in an uncle who had always seemed formidable and aloof, or sharing a laugh with an aunt whom I’d feared, catching a glimpse of larger terrain. It was an expansion of borders, my own imprinting on the place, a blooming of my visceral knowledge of home. As I rode shotgun with Milo in the fire engine, turning from the Yaak River Road onto gravel spurs, then bumping up rutted logging roads, I felt as if I were void of thought, drinking in the cedar and fir trees scraping their boughs along the sides of the engine, soaking up the long vistas into British Columbia when we broke into a clearing.

When we arrived at the burn site, Milo walked the rookies along the logging road at the top of the plot, teaching us how to size up the country as we lined the unit with hose. “See that big draw down there?” he’d say, pointing to a funnel-like dip in the mountainside. “That’s going to be a natural chimney when we back down the hill. It’ll pull the smoke right off the fireline back into the middle. It’s something to see.” The burn sites were logging units where thirty or forty acres of dead branches and waste wood needed to be torched, to prevent fire danger in the summer and to prepare the plot for replanting the following spring. This was after the heyday of clearcuts, so there were still several mature trees scattered throughout the clearings – seed trees, as they were called.

Once we had scouted the edge of the burn, we began assembling the Port-a-tanks and pumps, which were the heart of the control strategy. The rubber reservoirs held about 1,500 gallons, twice the capacity of the tanks on our fire engines. The pumps drew water from the reservoir through a suction hose, feeding the trunkline we laid around the perimeter of the burn. Every two hundred feet we’d add a gated Y valve and a lateral hose with a spray nozzle that could reach a hundred feet in either direction, and once Jack or Milo started the pump each of the rookies would claim a nozzle and begin soaking the forest above the road and along the flanks of the fire line, where the radiant heat and airborne embers would grow most intense. I liked the buck of the hose when I switched the nozzle open and the pressure surged, thrumming in my arms as I waved the stream over the mountainside. The effect was hypnotic.

As dusk approached we huddled back at the fire engine to divide into teams and review the safety briefing. Howard and the more experienced crew members each took a drip torch. Most of the rookies were to carry a Pulaski to one of the nozzles and stand guard, watching for spot fires across the line. Two engine teams shuttled water to the Port-a-tank throughout the night, tending the pumps. The lighting squad unscrewed the caps of their drip torches, five-quart stainless steel canisters with long handles and looped spouts with wicks welded to their undersides. Loosening a little air valve on the front of the torch allowed fuel to drip from the spout onto the gleaming wick, which could then drop a line of burning droplets across the hillside.

Once the sun sank over the ridge, it was time. The lighters spread out across the top of the unit, each within twenty or thirty yards of each other. Howard gave the high sign, and each struck a match to the torch wick, little tongues of flame leaping up across the slope. When they turned the spouts to the ground and began to move as one through the dusk, a line of fire burst from the ground. Once each lighter reached his neighbor’s strip, the whole team dropped about thirty feet downslope. It took a while for the first strip of the burn to take hold, and they needed a solid layer of black at the top of the burn to act as a fuel break, so after watching the blaze run up to the edge of the road for a spell, the lighting team lowered their torches for a second strip across the hill. Though nearly every burn broke across the fireline at some point, there was a logic to backing down the hill, letting each strip burn into the next rather than touching off the bottom of the unit and watching the flame front race over the road to the top of the mountain.

Before long the fire began to snap and roar. Jack whooped and pumped his fist as Milo looked on, smiling. Once the burn really started to cook, uprooted stumps and small logs below us kicked free, bouncing down the burn like a punted football. The lighters were wading through hip-deep timber slash trying to keep an eye out for runaway logs, falling frequently and bashing their shins and cursing as they tried to keep their torches level. Smoke boiled over the skid road at the top, where we were hunkered down along the trunkline with our nozzles wide open, soaking the brush and trees upslope. We would never stand so close to a big wildfire as we did on the burn, and there was a kind of crazy joy in brushing against the real thing, even when the wind turned and the smoke began to sting our eyes and we had to fall prone, pressing our cheeks against the earth to keep from choking. Deep-sea diving in shark habitat and getting rattled about in a steel cage by a hammerhead must be a little like how it felt to hold the line at the top of the burn. Often the flames roared so close my face and neck felt as if they were blistering.

When smoke swamped the road, the rookies all cleared out to the edges, where we stood mesmerized by the wild thing the lighters had unleashed. By the time they reached the middle of the burn, the drip torches at the far edges would have dropped a little lower than the rest, the fire arcing across the slope, cresting in the draw where the heat drew the flaming flanks into itself. Standing at the edge, I watched showers of sparks shoot out across the line, lifting on a hidden breeze as Milo said they would, whirling back into the center of the blaze as if pulled by a magnetic force. Dervishes and devils whirled out of the center of the furnace as the fire sucked and blew its own wind. Along the edges, where the cedar slash lay piled in wind rows, the flames sometimes grew so fierce that the bark on trees twenty feet across the line spontaneously combusted from the radiant heat. No matter our politics or age or what we might have been arguing about just a minute or two before, when we saw fire erupt on a tree trunk out of thin air, we all stood mute with awe. 

As night fell it was as if the rest of the world disappeared. All that existed was the snarling, sinuous flame. Stumps and logs glowed in the core of the blaze. As the lighters finished their strips along the bottom and the fire backed away from the blackened road, we rookies bumped down along the flanks and manned the laterals, soaking the singed cedar and fir outside the line. The nozzle leaked from the pressure, and my leather gloves drank up the frigid water. Downslope winds cooled my face while the fire baked my backside. Near the end of the shift we gathered along the bottom of the burn, faces shimmering in the flames, even the jokers gone quiet with wonder and fatigue. And when it was done, sometimes in the dead of night, sometimes at daybreak, we climbed the edge of the burn, where the flanks had turned white with ash, and carried the wood smoke into the cabs of the trucks, where we slept against one another without shame, our noses and cheeks thawing from each other’s warmth.

For the next week we would patrol the burn to mop up, walking in a grid along the edges to dig up the hot spots, searching logs and stumps for heat with our bare hands, then scraping the wood clean of any lingering coals. This was what most firefighting was like, trudging through a moonscape of ash or sharpening tools at the station. But there were those wild nights when I learned how fire behaves, those spring burns we pretended to control, which I must remember as my true initial attacks.