Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  Soon after, the excursion boat returned to Hilger Landing and started down the river with Hersey, his nine drunks, and the remaining equipment. Of the total nineteen, only three had ever been on a fire before. Two were soon to be made straw bosses, an indication of what kind of fire crew they were going to be.

  On the way down the Missouri now, Jansson came to a bend in the river where he could see that the fire had “slopped over” on the Meriwether side of the ridge. The “slop over” was already two or three acres, and the ranger was alarmed. The moment he saw the fire starting down the Meriwether slope he had to change plans—all would now land at Meriwether and Hersey would take the crew up the Mann Gulch-Meriwether trail to the top of the ridge and contain the fire on the Meriwether side. Then Jansson would continue downstream in the Padbury boat and scout the fire as originally planned. As usual, this plan left Jansson both the quarterback and the man in motion looking for trouble, and it’s hard for even a good man to play two positions at once.

  The excursion boat, being faster than the Padbury boat, passed Jansson and his crew before they reached the Meriwether landing, and Jansson was able to inform Hersey of his change in plans. But because the Padbury boat had to tread water while the big excursion boat docked and unloaded its equipment, Jansson had to wait some more. In the woods, as in the army, it’s often a case of hurry up and wait, and Jansson did not get high marks in waiting.

  The ranger told Hersey to take all nineteen volunteers and get on the fire as soon as possible, stopping only at the guard camp 150 yards up the canyon to radio an order to the supervisor’s office. Hersey says he was to tell the office “that this was no training fire,” “to get in gear, and give us all the support possible.” Specifically, he was to order two new crews of fifty men each with “experienced overhead,” one for Meriwether and one for Mann Gulch. He was also to tell Canyon Ferry Ranger Station to try to get in touch with the Smoke-jumpers by radio and to tell them if they were still in Mann Gulch to come down the Mann Gulch—Meriwether ridge to the slop over and join Hersey’s nineteen men there. Then, before starting up the trail that comes out of Meriwether Canyon like a ladder about to topple backwards, Hersey gave his bar stools a lecture. He told them when they got to the fire they would try to hold two sides of it—the upgulch side so that the jumpers could get through and join them and the side approaching the Meriwether trail to keep their own escape route open and to save the tourist beauty of Meriwether Canyon.

  They probably didn’t get to the fire until nearly six o’clock. Jansson thought they should have been there sooner.

  Jansson had left at about 4:35 in the Padbury boat to carry out his plan to scout the fire and, if he found the jumpers, to bring them back to Meriwether. When the boat passed the mouth of Mann Gulch, the fire was still on the upper third of Mann Gulch’s north-facing slope, although heavy smoke was blowing from it across the gulch to the other side. The Pad-bury boat continued on downstream until it approached the mouth of Elkhorn Creek, a little more than a mile below and to the northwest of Mann Gulch. As far away as Elkhorn the air was feathered with ashes. The Padbury boat then returned upstream to the mouth of Mann Gulch, which by now was so full of smoke Jansson could not see up it. If he wanted to know what was happening there, he would have to walk. As usual, he was precise with figures. He says he started up the gulch at 5:02.

  At about that time Dodge’s crew had collected the cargo parachutes after their jump, had had something to eat, and then had tooled up and started for the fire. So, at approximately the same time, the fire was being approached from both its upper and its lower ends.

  JANSSON WALKED UP THE BOTTOM of Mann Gulch for almost half a mile, noting that the fire was picking up momentum and still throwing smoke over his head to the north side of the gulch where farther up Dodge had rejoined his crew and was now leading them toward the river. Then right behind Jansson at the bottom of the gulch a spot fire flowered. Then several more flowered just below the main fire. Then a few tossed themselves as bouquets across the gulch, grew rapidly into each other’s flames, and became a garden of wildfire.

  What the ranger was about to see was the beginning of the blowup. Seemingly without relation to reality or to the workings of the imagination, the flowers that had grown into a garden distended themselves into an enormous light bulb and a great mixed metaphor. Flowers and light bulbs don’t seem to mix, but the light bulb of the mind strung itself inside with filaments of flame and flowers, bloated and rounded itself at its top with gases, then swirled upgulch to meet the Smoke-jumpers trying to escape downgulch. In a few minutes they met. Then only a few minutes later the blowup passed out of the gulch, blew its fuse, and left a world that is still burned out.

  JANSSON WAS PROBABLY THE FIRST to walk through a blowup propelled by a fire whirl, to drop unconscious in its vortex, to revive only a few feet from its flame, and to live to record it. Afterwards, he would keep returning to Mann Gulch with tape and stopwatch to check his original recordings of distances and times, and once he returned with objective observers to check him. He struggled to determine whether what had happened really had and really had measurable boundaries on earth. But we should already know enough about him to expect that we are about to observe a rare phenomenon of nature through the eyes of an especially fine observer. Jansson was a good enough observer to have been picked in the early years of the serious study of fire behavior by Harry Gisborne as one of his select group of rangers to field-test some of the early theories of the Priest River Experiment Station. To Jansson, Gisborne was an idol, as he was to nearly all those who first approached the study of forest fires scientifically, and as he is to some of us still living.

  Later in this story of the Mann Gulch fire, it won’t be enough to follow along merely as observers of Jansson’s observations. There are things we see now that he would not have noticed, and there are things he saw but couldn’t explain that we can put together. We know now pretty much what happened, because in part it happened in Mann Gulch and made its own contribution to the greatly enlarged inventory of our present knowledge of forest fires and so of our knowledge of many things about the woods. It did not do this immediately, and it was far from the only fatal forest fire that led to the congressional appropriations for the three great National Forest Fire Laboratories, one with its two wind tunnels right beside the Smokejumper base in Missoula. But before the Fire Labs, there had to be other fatal fires, other parents and communities sharing the same grief, and other newspapers making public records of grief. There also had to come a time when some of the most important members of Congress were from logging states and were members of just the right committees. So it came finally not in God’s time but in the considerably slower time of bureaucracies, yet it came.

  Even to me. It’s different with me now from when I first started climbing Mann Gulch. Now I carry inside me part of the purgation of its tragedy. It is the part of me and the tragedy that knows more about forests and fires because of this forest fire. If now the dead of this fire should awaken and I should be stopped beside a cross, I would no longer be nervous if asked the first and last question of life, How did it happen?

  ALTHOUGH IT WAS NOT UNTIL the 1950s that the science of fire behavior became sufficiently advanced to explain blowups, it will be helpful to store up here for later use what so fine an observer as Jansson saw as he drew near to this tragedy of winds and fire.

  Jansson noted strange sights as he went up the gulch. For one thing, since he could see for only two hundred yards because of the dense smoke, he knew immediately something big was on its way. He could see and hear rocks rolling, displaced by the heat. He could see and hear dead snags break off, without causal explanation, and he could see and hear that “flames were beginning to whirl and roar.” At first these flames just flapped back and forth, signs of unstable air. But the unstable air started to spiral and the flames began to swirl like little dust devils. Soon, however, they united to become something like a tornado, caused by fire and c
ausing fire and perfectly named a “fire whirl.” What he refers to as a “holocaust” is a still later development, one that occurred when these fire whirls were starting other fire whirls that were starting still other fire whirls. Beside him, around him, and in front of him was a vast uproar trying to break the sound barrier. Behind him, sounds were tapering off and becoming silent, as sounds were turning into lights. The world behind him was becoming a circle of lights about to be turned out. Hell may have such illumination preceding such blackness.

  Fire whirls both intensify existing fire and cause new fires. Their rotating action is that of a giant vortex, and, as giants, they can reach two thousand degrees in temperature. Fires that become giants are giant smoke rings with a downdraft in the center which is full of deadly gases and, what is more deadly still, heat so great it has burned out much of the oxygen; the outer ring is an updraft sometimes reaching the edge of the atmosphere.

  Some fire whirls, not all of them, are flame throwers. Some pick up burning cones and branches. Some of the giants pick up burning logs and toss them ahead, starting spot fires sometimes a long way ahead. When these spot fires unite, firefighters can be trapped between two fires, as Jansson was soon to be.

  A crown fire, as we know, is racing if it advances a mile an hour, but a fire whirl can go almost as fast as the wind.

  ALTHOUGH JANSSON THOUGHT HE HAD put out of mind the possibility that the jumpers or anything human besides himself could be in Mann Gulch, he began to hear metallic noises that sounded like men working. That’s the sound of flames heard by those alive after the flames go by. It is the thinking of those living who think they can hear dead men still at work.

  Even with the flames closing in, Jansson had to follow the sounds in his head another eighth of a mile upgulch until any possibility that men were working in Mann Gulch had been obliterated. While he walked that eighth of a mile, the crown fire on the north-facing slope behind him had burned to the bottom of the gulch and the spot fires that had jumped to the opposite slope had converged behind him into one fire coming upgulch at him.

  This fire front on the south-facing slope was in a few minutes to become the blaze only seventy-five yards behind the Smokejumpers after they dumped their heavy tools to run faster, and the crown fire which Jansson saw moving into the bottom of the gulch was to become the roar the Smoke-jumpers heard below them at almost the same time. At almost the same time everything was closing in on them and Jansson.

  At 5:30 Jansson turned back and started to get out of there quick but still walking. Then the fire began to whirl continuously. When a streamer from it swept by, he realized after a couple of whiffs that the whirl could “cook out his lungs.” He began to run. Now, he says, the whirl “was practically upright. My position was in the vortex, which was rapidly narrowing. I held my breath as I crossed the wall. There was no flame, just superheated air and gases and a lot of reflected heat from the crown fire. I conked out from a lack of oxygen, fell on my left elbow, causing a bursitis which later caused my arm to swell.”

  When he came to, “the black creep of the fire” was only a few feet behind him. He had fallen victim for a few seconds to the two major enemies that threaten fighters of big fires—toxic gases, especially carbon monoxide, and lack of oxygen from overexertion and from hot air burning out the oxygen.

  When he finally reached the boat, at 5:41, he placed himself in the bow next to Mrs. Padbury and watched the whirl for a few minutes. He thought again about the sound of men working that he imagined he had heard and again put it out of mind. Then he smelled his own vomit, apologized to Mrs. Padbury, and moved off to the side.

  At the Board of Review, he was asked this question, to which he gave a short answer:

  GUSTAFSON: In looking back up Mann Gulch draw…what was the picture as to the fire at that time?

  JANSSON: A blowup.

  Before the Padbury boat reached Meriwether Landing, superintendent Moir was in midriver in a speedboat preparing to go downstream. When the two boats met, Jansson transferred to the speedboat, and they landed where they could climb to an observation point giving them a complete view of Mann Gulch. Jansson says, “At that time it was apparent that all of Mann Gulch had burned out, but it appeared that the big blowup in Mann Gulch was over.”

  “At that time” can only be estimated, but it was shortly after six o’clock. When all is said and done, we still accept the hands of Jim Harrison’s watch, which were melted permanently at about four minutes to six, as marking approximately the time that the fire was catching up to the crew.

  About twenty minutes had passed between the time that Jansson left the mouth of Mann Gulch and the time he turned to view the whole of it. Near at hand, trees still exploded from the heat of their own resin, at a distance vast sounds were being converted into silent lights and the lights were being turned off, and nowhere were there any longer noises as of men working.

  For a time the Mann Gulch fire was to become extinct in the minds of the world outside Mann Gulch. Jansson and Moir returned upriver to the Meriwether camp, planning the next day. The newly discovered York fire took on even greater importance after Jansson heard someone on the York fire radio calling frantically for additional help. When Jansson was unable to get through on the radio to ascertain the facts, the assistant supervisor, Favre Eaton, was sent from Meriwether to take charge of the York fire. Too many fires were going in too many directions for anyone to think of the Smoke-jumpers. Jansson says that “during the three-way conference between Moir, Eaton, and myself at Meriwether I am positive that there was nothing said about the Smokejumpers.” For some time the Smokejumpers even passed out of existence on radio, no one noticing that their whereabouts were unknown, everyone assuming that Smokejumpers were infallible firefighters and were taking care of themselves wherever they were. For some time after Eaton left for the York fire and the superintendent with him, Jansson’s main concern was why his crew of drunks hadn’t returned from the cliffs before it got dark and they fell off.

  5

  IN THIS STORY OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD and the inside . world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing—the fateful blowup. Such is much of tragedy in modern times and probably always has been except that past tragedy refrained from speaking of its association with screwups and blowups.

  This story some time ago left the inside world at its very center—Dodge had come out of the timber ahead of his crew, with the fire just behind. He saw that in front was high dry grass that would burn very fast, saw for the first time the top of the ridge at what he judged to be about two hundred yards above, put two and two together and decided that he and his crew couldn’t make the two hundred yards, and almost instantly invented what was to become known as the “escape fire” by lighting a patch of bunch grass with a gofer match. In so doing, he started an argument that would remain hot long after the fire.

  At the time it probably made no sense to anyone but Dodge to light a fire right in front of the main fire. It couldn’t act as a backfire; there wasn’t any time to run a fire-line along its upgulch edge to prevent it from being just an advance arm of the main fire. Uncontrolled, instead of being a backfire it might act as a spot fire on its way upgulch and bring fire from behind that much closer and sooner to the crew.

  Dodge was starting to light a second fire with a second match when he looked up and saw that his first fire had already burned one hundred square feet of grass up the slope. “This way,” he kept calling to his crew behind. “This way.” Many of the crew, as they came in sight of him, must have asked themselves, What’s this dumb bastard doing? The smoke lifted twice so that everyone had a good chance to ask the question.

  The crew must have been stretched nearly all the way from the edge of the timber to the center of the grassy clearing ahead, where D
odge was lighting his fire. Rumsey and Sallee say that the men did not panic, but by now all began to fear death and were in a race with it. The line had already assumed that erratic spread customary in a race where everything is at stake. When it comes to racing with death, all men are not created equal.

  At the edge of the timber the crew for the first time could have seen to the head of the gulch where the fire, having moved up the south side of the gulch, was now circling. From the open clearing they also could see partway toward the bottom of the gulch, where it was presumably rocks that were exploding in smoke. They didn’t have to look behind—they could feel the heat going to their lungs straight through their backs. From the edge of the clearing they could also see the top of the ridge for the first time. It wasn’t one and a half miles away; to them it seemed only two hundred yards or so away. Why was this son of a bitch stopping to light another fire?

  For the first time they could also see a reef twelve to twenty feet high running parallel to the top of the ridge and thirty yards or so below it. This piece of ancient ocean bottom keeps the top of the ridge from eroding, as the rock lid on the top of a butte on the plains keeps the butte from eroding into plains. But no one was thinking of geology or probably even of whether it would be hard to climb over, through, or around. At this moment, its only significance was that it seemed about two hundred yards away.

  When the line reached its greatest extension, Rumsey and Sallee were at the head of it—they were the first to reach Dodge and his fire. Diettert was just behind them, and perhaps Hellman, although these two stand there separately forever and ask the same question, What did Rumsey and Sallee do right that we did wrong? For one thing, they stuck together; Diettert and Hellman went their separate ways.