Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  The moment the jumper starts falling is umbilical; he starts by counting, putting “one thousand” in front of each number to slow each count to a second. If he gets to “one thousand five,” he knows he is in trouble and pulls the handle that releases the emergency chute on his chest. If, however, his umbilical relation to the plane is properly severed by his twelve-foot static line, his regular parachute explodes, the woof vibrates in the rocks below, and his feet are thrown over his head. So it is to be born in the sky—with a loud noise and your feet where your head ought to be. So it is to be born in the sky with a loud noise—the moment you cease to be umbilical you become seed, blown by the wind. It is very lonely for a young man to be seed in the wind. Although you are seed, the sky still seems like the womb and you as seed are blown around the sky’s interior parts until you light on the top of a tree or hard rocks or grass, the grass often being only a cover for hard rocks. If you land on the top of a tree, you are probably lucky, especially if you have a long rope in your pocket by which you can let yourself down to the rocks—but only a small percentage when they touch earth land on the tops of trees. Try as they may to avoid landing on rocks, many do. Landing smoothly from the sky does not come naturally to man.

  As in life generally, it is most common to land in grass that thinly covers very hard rocks. If a jumper lands on flat ground at all, it is something like jumping off the roof of an automobile going twenty-five miles an hour, and in 1949 he finished his jump by taking the “Allen roll,” landing sideways, with the right side from the hip down taking the shock, the upper part of the body continuing to pivot to the right until the body falls on its back and then rolls over on its knees. As a jumping instructor once said, the roll is to spread the pain all over the body.

  So it is to appear on the earth from the sky. It is not surprising, considering the punishment the jumper takes at both ends of the jump, that no big man can be a Smokejumper, and we have to remind ourselves from time to time that, although we keep saying “men,” most of them are still close to boys and that they are not very big boys. Most of the seventeen or eighteen thousand visitors a year at the Smokejumper base in Missoula, having heard, possibly from the Smokejumpers themselves, that the Smokejumpers are the Forest Service’s best, expect to see the Minnesota Vikings professional football team practicing outside their dormitory, but instead they see teams of fairly ordinary-looking boys playing volleyball, their sizes ranging from five feet four to six feet two, with a maximum weight in 1949 of 190 pounds. The name of the game is not important to Smokejumpers. The competition is. In the Smokejumpers they don’t recruit losers or big men, who don’t seem to be made to drop out of the sky.

  This was a fairly rough landing. Sallee lit in a lodgepole, his feet just off the ground, but none of the rest of them were lucky enough to break their fall. They rolled through rocks, although only Dodge was injured. Hellman and Rumsey came to help him and found him with an elbow cut to white bone, the cut somehow self-sealed so that it did not bleed. They bandaged the elbow, and Dodge said only that it was stiff, and the next day he said only that it was stiffen

  They crawled out of their jump suits that made them look part spacemen and part football players. In 1949 they even wore regular leather football helmets; then there was wire mesh over their faces, the padded canvas suit (with damn little padding), and logger boots. They tagged their jump suits and stacked them in one pile. Their work clothes, unlike their jump suits, were their own, and they were mostly just ordinary work clothes—Levis and blue shirts, but hard hats. None in this crew appeared in white shirts and oxfords, although Smokejumpers have appeared on fires in their drinking clothes when there has been an emergency call and they have been picked up in a bar, and a jumper is quite a sight in a white shirt and oxfords after he has been on a fire for three or four days and had a hangover to start with.

  Then the plane began to circle, dropping cargo. It was being dropped high and was scattering all over the head of the gulch. Because the cargo had been dropped at two thousand feet instead of the customary twelve hundred so the pilot would not have to take his plane close to the ridgetops in the heavy winds, the men had to collect the cargo over at least a three-hundred-square-yard area. In those days the bedrolls were dropped without benefit of parachutes and popped all over the landscape, some of them bouncing half as high as the trees. The parachutes were made of nylon because grasshoppers like the taste of silk. In a modern tragedy you have to watch out for little details rather than big flaws. By the end, every minute would count, but it took the crew some extra minutes to collect the cargo because it was so scattered. Suddenly there was a terrific crash about a quarter of a mile down the canyon from the landing area. It turned out to be the radio, whose parachute hadn’t opened because its static line had broken where it was attached to the plane. Another detail. The pulverized radio, which had fallen straight, told the crew about how far downgulch from the landing area they had been jumped, so the spotter must have been allowing for about a quarter of a mile of wind drift. It also told them something else—that the outside world had disappeared. The only world had become Mann Gulch and a fire, and the two were soon to become one and the same and never to be separated, at least in story.

  They finished collecting and piling up their cargo. Dodge estimated that the crew and cargo were dropped by 4:10 P.M. but that it was nearly 5:00 before all the cargo had been retrieved.

  Dodge made the double L signal on the landing area with orange sleeves, signaling to the plane, all present and accounted for. The plane circled twice to be sure and then headed for the outside world. It headed straight down Mann Gulch and across the glare of the Missouri. It seemed to be leaving frighteningly fast, and it was. It had started out a freight train, loaded with cargo. Now it was light and fast and was gone. Its departure left the world much smaller.

  There was nothing in the universe now but the terminal glare of the Missouri, an amphitheater of stone erected by geology, and a sixty-acre fire with a future. Whatever the future, it was all to take place here, and soon. Of the Smoke- jumpers’ three elements, sky had already changed to earth. In about an hour the earth and even the sky would all be fire.

  They could see the fire from their cargo area, at least they could see its flank on the Mann Gulch slope, and even at five o’clock they were not greatly impressed. Rumsey didn’t think any of them regarded it as dangerous, although he did think it would be hard to mop up because it was burning on steep and rocky ground.

  Then they heard a shout from the fire, but it was impossible to distinguish the words. The crew had been led to believe before they left Missoula that there would be a ground crew on the fire (hence, their having no maps), so Dodge told the squad leader, Bill Hellman, to take charge of the men and see that they ate something and filled their canteens while he himself took off for the fire to find out who was on it.

  They spent only about ten minutes at the cargo area before they started tooling up. Sallee and Navon carried the saws; the rest were double-tooled. They thought they were going to work. Actually they were leaving an early station of the cross, where minutes anywhere along the way would have saved them.

  3

  SINCE THEIR TOOLS HAD BETTER FIT our hands if we are going to a fire, we should try them on here and see how they would have been used if the fire had been reached while it was at its present size of about sixty acres. At that size it is doubtful that the crew would have tried to hit it on its nose—it is dangerous business to attack a good-sized fire straight on.

  Instead, they would have started flanking it close to its front and tried to steer it into some open ground, some stretch of shale or light grass where the fire would burn itself out or burn so feebly that it would be safe to take on directly. It’s a ground fire of this size that, as suggested earlier, is brought under control by digging a fire-line around it, a shallow trench two to three feet wide scraped deep enough to expose mineral soil. All dead leaves, needles, even roots are removed so that nothing can bu
rn across it. If any dead trees lie across it, they also must be removed and likewise any standing trees with low branches that the fire might use to jump the line. To put a fire “under control” is to establish and then hold such a line around it, especially around the part of it that is most likely to advance. What follows is called “mopping up,” working back from the fire-line into the interior of the fire, digging shallow graves and dropping still-burning trees into them, and of course burying everything on the ground that smokes.

  The tools that perform these two operations are, with one exception, those that have done most of the hard work of the world—axes, saws, and shovels.

  Sallee says he was single-tooled and was carrying a saw, and Navon started with the other saw, which he soon traded off to Rumsey, who was carrying the heavy water can. Power saws, of course, were already invented, but those early ones were mechanical monsters; it took a whole crew just to crank one, so they were of no use to the Smokejumpers until well into the 1950s. The crew’s two saws would have been two-man handsaws, and in making a fire-line would have been used to cut trees lying across the line or standing too close to it. In mopping up, they would have been used to drop the burning snags.

  The not-always-clear references to tools by the two surviving crew members indicate that besides these two handsaws the crew had two or three shovels and eleven or twelve Pulaskis. Laird Robinson, who when I first met him was information officer at the Smokejumper base in Missoula, says that number sounds about right for a crew of sixteen at that time.

  Even the numbers show that the Smokejumpers’ tool of tools was the Pulaski. It was the forest firefighters’ one invention, primitive but effective, invented strictly for firefighting. It was even named after the Forest Service’s most famous fire-fighting ranger, Edward Pulaski, who in 1910, when many thought the world was ending in flames, put a gunnysack around his head and led forty-two half-paralyzed men through smoke to a deserted mining tunnel that he remembered. The cold air rushed out of the tunnel and was replaced by heat so intense it set fire to the mining timbers. Pulaski kept the fire in the tunnel under control by dipping water with his hat from a little stream that went by the mouth of the shaft, and he had enough control over his men to make them lie flat with their mouths on the ground. He was badly burned and finally passed out, and from time to time they all fell unconscious. But all recovered except five men and two horses.

  The Pulaski is a kind of hybrid creation, half ax and half hoe. I remember the first one I ever used, an early, handmade one, nothing more than a double-bitted ax with one bit left on and a little hoe welded to where the other ax-bit had been. Even after all these years the Pulaski is still the tool for digging fire-lines. A little hoe goes deep enough because its job is to scrape the stuff that would burn off the surface of the ground. So the hoe makes the line; the ax-bit chops little trees or shrubs along the line that might let the fire jump across, and it has other uses, such as chopping roots. When the foreman ends his first lesson to his trainees on how to use a Pulaski, he says, “For the next couple of hours, all I want to see are your asses and your elbows.”

  Behind the crew with the fast Pulaskis come a couple of men with shovels, who clean out and widen the fire-line, and, of course, in the mopping-up operations, shovels are all-important in making shallow graves and burying whatever is still smoking.

  The crew strung out on the trail. Those with the unsheathed saws were behind because the long teeth and rakers of the saws make them hard to carry and dangerous to follow too closely; most of the double-tooled men were carrying Pulaskis and for the second tool either a shovel or a water canteen or a first-aid kit or a rattlesnake kit. The flank of the fire was in plain view only half a mile across the gulch. Although from the cargo area its most advanced front on top of the ridge was not visible, they had seen it from the sky and remembered that on top of the ridge it was burning slowly downhill into a saddle. They had no trouble guessing what they would be doing ten or fifteen minutes from now when they caught up to their foreman and the fire. He would line them out on both the Mann Gulch and Meriwether flanks to make fire-lines that would keep the fire from spreading farther down either canyon and so limit its advance to the top of the ridge where, forced into the saddle and light grass, it would be easy to handle. Dodge would space the men with Pulaskis about ten to fifteen feet apart, depending upon the ground cover, and they wouldn’t raise their heads until they had caught up to the man in front of them. Then they would tap him on the leg with a Pulaski and say “Bump.” If the two men right behind had also finished their stretch, they would say “Bump Three.” To a Smokejumper, “Bump” is a musical word if he is the one who sings it out.

  When Smokejumpers work next to a regular crew of Forest Service firefighters, they take pleasure in leaving them bruised with “bumps.”

  As the crew started for the south side of the gulch, they had it figured out before they even had an order. They would work all night establishing a line around the fire. From then on, it would depend. The Smokejumpers couldn’t be touched when it came to getting a line around a fire, but they usually didn’t win medals in mopping it up. They were all in the business for money—the forestry school students, the fancy M.A., M.D., and Ph.D. students, and especially the jump-happy boys who hoped to make enough money in the summer to shack up all winter in Honolulu. So there was no use putting a little fire out of its misery too soon when you would be paid overtime.

  THE CREW STARTED UP THE SIDE of the gulch toward the fire. It was about five o’clock. The next day a wristwatch of one of the boys was found near his body. Its hands were permanently melted at about four minutes to six. This must come close to marking the time when it was also over for most of the others. So there were about fifty-six minutes ahead of them, time to do only a little thinking, and undoubtedly only a little is all they did.

  It is not hard to imagine what was in their heads. They knew they were the best and they were probably thinking at least indirectly about being the best, sizing up the fire ahead as a kind of pushover. They thought of what they were in as a game and they were the champs and the fire didn’t look like much competition. They already had developed one of the best ways of facing danger in the woods, the habit of imagining you are being watched. You picture the mountainsides as sides of an amphitheater crowded with admirers, among whom always is your father, who fought fires in his time, and your girl, but even more clearly you can see yourself as champion crawling through the ropes. You would give this small-time amateur fire the one-two, and go home and drink beer. It was more than one hundred degrees on that open hillside, and all of them were certainly thinking of beer. If anything troubled them, it was the thought of some guy they had tangled with in a Missoula bar who they were hoping would show up again tomorrow night. And each boy from a small town such as Darby, Montana, or Sandpoint, Idaho, was undoubtedly thinking of his small-town girl, who was just finishing high school a year behind him. She had big legs and rather small breasts that did not get in the way. She was strong like him, and a great walker like him, and she could pack forty pounds all day. He thought of her as walking with him now and shyly showing her love by offering to pack one of his double-tools. He was thinking he was returning her love by shyly refusing to let her.

  The answer, then, to what was in their heads when they started for the fire has to be “Not much.”

  LIKE THE FRONTIER CAVALRY, the Smokejumpers didn’t kill themselves off at the start of a march. They loosened up for about a quarter of a mile downgulch and then began to climb toward the fire, but they hadn’t climbed more than a hundred yards before they heard Dodge call to them from above to stay where they were. Shortly he showed up with Jim Harrison, the recreation and fire prevention guard stationed at the campground at the mouth of Meriwether Canyon. Harrison had spotted the fire late in the morning while on patrol duty, returned to Meriwether Station, and tried unsuccessfully to radio both Missoula and Canyon Ferry Ranger Station outside Helena at 12:15, ten minutes before
the fire was first officially reported by the lookout on Colorado Mountain, thirty miles away. After he had tacked a sign on the station door, “Gone to the fire. Jim,” he again had climbed the fifteen-hundred-foot precipice between Meriwether Canyon and Mann Gulch, and had been on the front of the fire alone until Dodge found him around five o’clock. He had tried to do what he was supposed to do—stop the fire from burning down into scenic Meriwether Canyon. Meriwether Canyon is a chimney of fifteen-hundred-foot precipices and pinnacles. In minutes it could draw flames through the length of its funnel and be heat-cracked rocks forever after. It is one of America’s tourist treasures, and Harrison had fought to save it. Later, two sections of fire-line that he had scraped with his Pulaski were found burned over at the top of the ridge between Meriwether and Mann. His tracks were there too, burned over.

  Harrison was known to many of this crew because he had been a Smokejumper himself the summer before in Missoula, and ironically had switched to patrol duty and cleaning up picnic grounds to please his mother, who was afraid smoke-jumping was dangerous. Now here he was with Dodge and this crew of Smokejumpers on its mission of August 5, 1949, and he might as well have run into General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, on their way to the Little Big Horn.

  In addition, as recreation and patrol guard he could not have been in as good physical shape as the jumpers—the forest supervisor’s description of his job makes clear that primarily he was a “recreation guard,” keeping the public grounds and facilities at Meriwether Landing tidy for the tourists, and only upon special assignment was he to get into patrol and fire prevention work. As the supervisor told the Board of Review, Harrison had made only one patrol before August 5. Realizing he was in need of exercise, Harrison would hike up to his patrol point on his days off, but he couldn’t have been in shape to keep up with the jumpers if the going got tough. And yet, that day he had twice climbed the perpendicular trail to the top of the ridge between Meriwether and Mann and fought fire alone for four hours while the Smokejumpers had done nothing but jump and walk a quarter of a mile plus a hundred yards.