Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  The smoke will never roll away and leave a clear picture of the head of the line reaching Dodge and his burned bunch grass. Dodge later pictured the crew as strung out about 150 feet with at least eight men close enough together and close enough to him so that he could try to explain to them—but without stopping them—that they could not survive unless they got into his grass fire. At the Review, he made very clear that he believed there was not enough time left for them to make it to the top of the hill, and events came close to supporting his belief. In the roar and smoke he kept “hollering” at them—he was sure that at least those closest to him heard him and that those behind understood him from his actions. In smoke that swirled and made sounds, there was a pause, then somebody said, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here.” and a line of them followed the voice.

  The line all headed in the same direction, but in the smoke Dodge could not see whether any of them looked back at him. He estimated that the main fire would hit them in thirty seconds.

  In the smoke and roar Rumsey and Sallee saw a considerably different arrangement of characters and events from Dodge’s. Indeed, even the roommates differ from each other. Both agree with Dodge, however, that the line was stretched out, with a group at the head close to Dodge, then a gap, and then the rest scattered over a distance that neither could estimate exactly but guessed to be nearly a hundred yards. In fact, when in the summer of 1978 Rumsey, Sallee, Laird Robinson, and I spent a day together in Mann Gulch, the two survivors told Laird and me they were now sure some of the crew had fallen so far behind that they were never close enough to Dodge to hear whatever he was saying. The implication of Dodge’s account is that they all passed him by, but Rumsey and Sallee believed that some of them hadn’t. As to the head of the column, Sallee limits it to three—himself and Rumsey plus Diettert, who was also a pal and had been working on the same project with Rumsey before the two of them were called to the fire. To these three, Rumsey adds Hellman, the second-in-command, and indeed suggests, with Dodge agreeing, that it was Hellman who said, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here,” and so furnishes the basis for the charge that Hellman was doubly guilty of insubordination by being near the head of the line after Dodge had ordered him to the rear and by encouraging the crew to ignore Dodge’s order to remain with him and enter his fire. Rumsey’s testimony, however, will never settle Hellman’s place in the line and hence his role in the tragedy, for Sallee was positive and still is that Hellman was at the head of the line when Dodge ordered the men to drop their tools but that he then returned to the tail of it, repeating Dodge’s order and remaining there to enforce it. So direct testimony leaves us with opposite opinions of Hellman’s closing acts as second-in-command of Smokejumpers on their most tragic mission. Either he countermanded his superior and contributed to the tragedy or, according to Sallee, being the ideal second-in-command, he returned to the rear to see that all the crew carried out the foreman’s orders and to keep their line intact.

  An outline of the events that were immediately to come probably would not agree exactly with the testimony of any one of the survivors or make a composite of their testimony, as might be expected, but would be more like what follows, and even what follows will leave some of the most tragic events in mystery and litigation.

  Rumsey, Sallee, and Diettert left Dodge as one group and took the same route to the reef; two of them survived. Some of the crew never got as high up the slope as Dodge’s fire. Hellman reached the top of the ridge by another route and did not survive. The rest scattered over the hillside upgulch from the route taken by the first three, and none of those who scattered reached the top. As Sallee said the summer we were together in Mann Gulch, “No one could live who left Dodge even seconds after we did.”

  In fact, the testimony makes clear that Diettert, Rumsey, and Sallee scarcely stopped to listen to Dodge. As Rumsey says, “I was thinking only of my hide.” He and Diettert turned and made for the top of the ridge. Sallee paused for only a moment, because he soon caught up with Diettert and Rumsey, and actually was the first to work his way through the opening in the reef above. When asked at the Review whether others of the crew were piling up behind while he stood watching Dodge light his fire, Sallee said, “I didn’t notice, but I don’t believe there were. Rumsey and Diettert went ahead—went on—I just hesitated for a minute and went on too.”

  In the roar of the main fire that was now only thirty seconds behind them they may not even have heard Dodge, and, if they did hear words, they couldn’t have made out their meaning. Rumsey says, “I did not hear him say anything. There was a terrible roar from the main fire. Couldn’t hear much.”

  It probably wasn’t just the roar from without that precluded hearing. It was also the voice from inside Mount Sinai: “I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe. I went up the right-hand side of Dodge’s fire.”

  Although Sallee stopped a moment for clarification, he also misunderstood Dodge’s actions. “I understood that he wanted us to follow his fire up alongside and maybe that his fire would slow the other fire down.” Like Rumsey, Sallee interpreted Dodge’s fire as a buffer fire, set to burn straight up for the top and be a barrier between them and the main fire. And like Rumsey, Sallee followed the right edge of Dodge’s fire to keep it between them and the fire that was coming up the gulch.

  The question of how Hellman reached the top of the ridge after leaving Dodge at his fire cannot be answered with certainty. What is known is that he made his way from where Dodge lit his fire to the top of the ridge alone, that he was badly burned, that he joined up with Rumsey and Sallee after the main fire had passed, that he told Rumsey he had been burned at the top of the ridge, and that he died the next day in a hospital in Helena. The most convincing guess about how he reached the top of the ridge is Sallee’s. When he and I stood on the ridge in the summer of 1978, I asked him about Hell-man’s route to the top and he said that naturally he had thought about it many times and was convinced there was only one explanation: while he, Rumsey, and Diettert followed the upgulch (right) side of Dodge’s fire and so for important seconds at least used it as a buffer protecting them from the main fire coming upgulch, Hellman must have followed the opposite, or downgulch, side of Dodge’s fire and so had no protection from the main fire, which caught him just before he could get over the ridge.

  Sallee talks so often about everything happening in a matter of seconds after he and Rumsey left Dodge’s fire that at first it seems just a manner of speaking. But if you combine the known facts with your imagination and are a mountain climber and try to accompany Rumsey and Sallee to the top, you will know that to have lived you had to be young and tough and lucky.

  And young and tough they were. In all weather Sallee had walked four country miles each way to school, and a lot of those eight miles he ran. He and Rumsey had been on tough projects all summer. They gave it everything they had, and everything was more, they said, than ever before or after.

  As they approached the reef, its significance changed for the worse. They saw that the top of the ridge was beyond the reef, and unless they could find an opening in it, it would be the barrier keeping them from reaching the top. They might die in its detritus. The smoke lifted only twice, but they saw a crevice and steered by it even after it disappeared again. “There was an opening between large rocks, and I had my eye on that and I did not look either way,” Sallee says.

  Halfway up, the heat on Rumsey’s back was so intense he forgot about Dodge’s buffer fire, if that is what it was, and, having spotted the opening, headed straight for it. It was not only upslope but slightly upgulch and to the right. In the smoke nothing was important but this opening, which was like magnetic north—they could steer toward it when they couldn’t see it. Rumsey was in the center. Sallee was even with him on his left; Diettert was just a few steps behind on his right.

  The world compressed to a slit in the rocks. Rumsey and Sallee saw neither right nor left. When asked a
t the Review whether they saw pincers of fire closing in on them from the sides, they said no; they saw only straight ahead. Ahead they saw; behind they felt; they shut out the sides.

  To them the reef was another one of those things—perhaps the final one—that kept coming out of smoke to leave no place to run from death. They can remember feeling sorry for themselves because they were so young. They also tried not to think of anything they had done wrong for fear it might appear in the flames. They thought God might have made the opening and might take it away again. Besides, the opening might be a trap for the sins of youth to venture into.

  Beyond the opening and between it and the top of the ridge they could see no flames but there was dense smoke. Beyond the opening in the smoke there could be fire—beyond, there could be more reefs, reefs without openings. It could be that beyond the opening was the end of God and the end of youth. Maybe that’s what Diettert thought.

  Rumsey and Sallee felt they were about to jump through a door in a plane and so had to steady themselves and believe something was out there that would hold them up. It was as if there were a tap on the leg. Sallee was in the lead and was first through the crevice. It was cooler, and he believed his faith had been confirmed. He stopped to lower the temperature in his back and lungs. Rumsey was through next. As a Methodist, he believed most deeply in what he had been first taught. Early he had been taught that in a time of crisis the top of a hill is safest. It was still some distance to the top, and he never stopped till he got there.

  Diettert stopped just short of the opening. On his birthday, not long after his birthday dinner and just short of the top of the hill, he silently rejected the opening in the reef, turned, and went upgulch parallel to the base of the reef, where for some distance there is no other opening. No one with him, neither Rumsey nor Sallee, saw him do this—it is known by where his body was found. Diettert, the studious one, had seen something in the opening he did not like, had rejected it, and had gone looking for something he did not find. It is sometimes hard to understand fine students. Be sure, though, he had a theory, as fine students nearly always have.

  While Sallee was cooling his lungs, he looked down and back at Dodge and the crew and for the first time realized why Dodge had lit his fire.

  I saw Dodge jump over the burning edge of the fire he had set and saw him waving his arms and motioning for the other boys to follow him. At that instant I could see what I believe was all the balance of the crew. They were within twenty to fifty feet of Dodge and just outside the burning edge of the fire Dodge had set. The last I recall seeing the group of boys, they were angling up the slope in the unburned grass and fairly close to the burning edge of the fire Dodge had set….

  When Dodge first set the fire I did not understand that he wanted us boys to wait a few seconds and then get inside the burned-out grass area for protection from the main fire.

  Dodge’s description of his fire is mostly from inside it.

  After walking around to the north side of the fire I started as an avenue of escape, I heard someone comment with these words, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” and for all my hollering, I could not direct anyone into the burned area. I then walked through the flames toward the head of the fire into the inside and continued to holler at everyone who went by, but all failed to heed my instructions; and within seconds after the last man had passed, the main fire hit the area I was in.

  When asked at the Review if any of the crew had looked his way as they went by, he said no, “They didn’t seem to pay any attention. That is the part I didn’t understand. They seemed to have something on their minds—all headed in one direction.”

  He wet his handkerchief from his canteen, put it over his mouth, and lay face down on the ground. Whether he knew it or not, there is usually some oxygen within fifteen inches of the ground, but even if he knew it, he needed a lot of luck besides oxygen to have lived, although Rumsey and Sallee were to say later that the whole crew would probably have survived if they had understood and followed Dodge’s instructions.

  It is doubtful, though, that the crew had the training and composure to interpret Dodge’s instructions even if some of his words reached them over the roar. The close questioning Rumsey and Sallee received later at the Review revealed that their training in how to meet fire emergencies consisted of a small handful of instructions, four to be exact and only one of which had any bearing on their present emergency. The first was to backfire if they had time and the right situation, but they had neither. The second was to get to the top of the ridge where the fuel is usually thinner, where there are usually stretches of rock and shale, and where the winds usually meet and fluctuate. This is the one they tried, and it worked with only seconds to spare. The third instruction was designed to govern an emergency in which neither time nor situation permits backfiring or reaching a bare ridgetop. When it’s that tough, the best you can do is turn into the fire and try to work through it, hoping to piece together burned-out stretches. The fourth and final warning was to remember that, whatever you do, you must not allow the fire to pick the spot where it hits you. The chances are it will hit you where it is burning fiercest and fastest. According to Dodge’s later testimony, the fire about to hit them had a solid front 250 to 300 feet deep—no one works through that deep a front and lives.

  Even if the crew’s training had included a section on Dodge’s escape fire, it is not certain that the crew would have listened to Dodge, would have entered the fire and buried their faces in the ashes. When asked at the Review if he would have gone into Dodge’s fire had he received previous instruction about it, Rumsey replied, “I think that if I had seen it on a blackboard and seen it done and had it explained so that I understood it I think I surely would have gone in—but of course you never can tell for sure.”

  Dodge survived, and Rumsey and Sallee survived. Their means of survival differed. Rumsey and Sallee went for the top and relied on the soul and a fixation from basic training. The soul in a situation like this is mostly being young, in tune with time, and having good legs, an inflexible destination, and no paralyzing questions about what lies beyond the opening. When asked whether he had “ever been instructed in setting an escape fire,” Dodge replied, “Not that I know of. It just seemed the logical thing to do.” Being logical meant building one fire in front of another, lying down in its ashes, and breathing close to the ground on a slight elevation. He relied on logic of a kind and the others on time reduced to seconds. But no matter where you put your trust, at a time like this you have to be lucky.

  The accounts that come down to us of the flight of the crew up the hillside nearly all conclude at this point, creating with detail only the happenings of those who survived, if only for a day, as Hellman did, or, like Diettert, at least reached the reef. Counting these two, only five are usually present in the story that goes on up the ridge. Only a sentence or two is given to those who, when last seen by Dodge, were all going in one direction and when seen finally by Sallee were angling through openings in the smoke below him as he looked down from the top of the ridge. Although they are the missing persons in this story, they are also its tragic victims. There is a simple aspect of historiography, of course, to explain why, after last seen by the living, they pass silently out of the story and their own tragedy until their tragedy is over and they are found as bodies: no one who lived saw their sufferings. The historian, for a variety of reasons, can limit his account to firsthand witnesses, although a shortage of firsthand witnesses probably does not explain completely why contemporary accounts of the Mann Gulch fire avert their eyes from the tragedy. If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a historian, must follow compassion wherever it leads him. He must be able to accompany his characters, even into smoke and fire, and bear witness to what they thought and felt even when they themselves no longer knew. This story of the Mann Gulch fire will not end
until it feels able to walk the final distance to the crosses with those who for the time being are blotted out by smoke. They were young and did not leave much behind them and need someone to remember them.

  THE FOREMAN, DODGE, ALSO must be remembered, as well as his crew, and it is. again the storyteller’s special obligation to see that he is. History will determine the direction or directions in which the storyteller must look for his enduring memories, and history says Dodge must live or die in his escape fire. Ordinary history says he lived by lying in the ashes of his escape fire until the main fire swept over him and cooled enough to let him stand up and brush himself off. The controversial history that was soon to follow and has lasted ever since charges that Dodge’s escape fire, set in front of the main fire, was the fire that actually burned some of the crew and cut off others from escaping. Historical questions the storyteller must face, although in a place of his own choosing, but his most immediate question as he faces new material is always, Will anything strange or wonderful happen here? The rights and wrongs come later and likewise the scientific know-how.

  The most strange and wonderful thing on the hillside as the escape fire swept up it, shutting it out of sight in smoke and heat, is that a spot of it remained cool. The one cool spot was inside Dodge. It was the “characteristic in him” that Rumsey had referred to when Dodge returned from the head of the fire with Harrison and muttered something about a death trap. It was the “characteristic” he was best known by, the part of him that always kept cool and aloof and believed on principle in thinking to itself and keeping its thoughts to itself because thinking out loud only got him into trouble. It was this characteristic in him that had started him to lead the crew downgulch to safety, then didn’t like what it saw ahead and turned the crew back upgulch trying to outrun the fire without his ever explaining his thoughts to the crew. His running but not his thinking stopped when he saw the top of the ridge, for he immediately thought his crew could not make the top and so he immediately set his escape fire. When he tried to explain it, it was too late—no one understood him; except for himself, they passed it by. Except to him, whom it saved, his escape fire has only one kind of value—the value of a thought of a fire foreman in time of emergency judged purely as thought. The immediate answer to the storyteller’s question about the escape fire is yes, it was strange and wonderful that, in this moment of time when only a moment was left, Dodge’s head worked.