Young Men and Fire

by Norman Maclean

  I told Laird, “On the 1952 contour map, the spot where Dodge lit his fire is three contour lines downslope from where he was when he stood up after the main fire passed him by, and each contour on the map represents twenty feet of elevation.”

  “God,” Laird said, “do you think there’s a marker there?” We both looked at where a marker ought to be if it were still standing, and could see only grass. Even so, both of us would have bet that some fifty feet laterally toward the mouth of the gulch and then some sixty feet downslope was where Dodge lit his gofer match. Neither of us, though, made a dash to find out, and only slowly and almost anonymously revealed to each other what was holding us back. Eventually, but clearly, we acknowledged to each other that, if we were right in our location of the origin of Dodge’s fire, Sallee could not have seen Dodge or the crew from the crevice he and Rumsey had located the summer before.

  We studied the reef above us. Directly above was a wide open saddle, then upgulch a short distance from the saddle the reef appeared and had no break in it, then after the solid stretch of reef was a crevice. Without moving from where we sat, we studied the new crevice, which was on a slight angle to the right above us. Beyond it was still another wide saddle, the one which the summer before had brought us to the top of the ridge from Rescue Gulch, and after it was the crevice that Rumsey and Sallee had picked as the one through which they had reached safety.

  “How far do you think it is to this new crevice almost straight above us?”

  “About two hundred yards,” I answered. “One hundred to two hundred yards would make it fit with the testimony in my packsack.”

  Laird nodded. “Maybe a little less than two hundred yards,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  We again divided missions; Laird was to go “down,” and I was to go “up”—neither of us had to be more specific than that. Lloyd-Davis and the measuring tape went with me; our chief job in going “up” was to measure the distance from Dodge’s fire to the new crevice. Laird sidehilled fifteen or twenty yards toward the mouth of the gulch before starting “down.” “Down” was where we hoped Dodge had lit his fire—about twenty yards down.

  I have had to learn a good many things to tell this story—one is how it might feel to die in the heat of the Inferno. Since the Inferno is also a pit, I have had to learn how to die in the Inferno always falling down, and always falling down I now know is a terrible way to die—it destroys the confidence before it destroys the body, and it must be terrible to die with nothing left but the body.

  As Lloyd-Davis and I headed up the ridge toward the head of the gulch, I looked for Laird and saw him far off stretched out in the shade of the one standing snag on a lateral ridge toward the head of the gulch.

  Even so, he got to the horses before we did, and, thinking of me, he led my horse at least a hundred yards downslope, and I held my horse by her bridle to steady myself. For a guy who should have been close to death, Laird looked pretty animated. “If you had one wish in the world,” he asked, “what would you wish most?” I said without hope, “A drink of cold water.” He was deeply disappointed. “Come on, now,” he said. “If you had just one wish in the world, what would you wish?” Cold water still had to be the only answer, but it wasn’t the right one. I just stood there leaning against my horse and looking at him. He looked back at me—pleadingly. Finally he couldn’t wait any longer for me to get enough oxygen and brains to wish right. “The wooden cross,” he said, trying to contain himself. “The wooden cross. It had fallen and was hidden in the grass, but it was right where it was supposed to be.”

  I was glad it was still his turn to speak, because I was still unsteady. He said sure enough it was a wooden cross, and he had found it almost exactly where the photograph and Dodge’s testimony would have met—at the base of the largest tree on the hillside and the only one for some distance around. “So it was almost exactly where all three projections meet—the photograph, Dodge’s testimony, and Sallee’s memory—almost at the base of that single large tree, except it’s fallen now and the grass is tall.”

  He added quickly, “It was lying in the grass almost hidden, but I cleaned it off and set it up and piled rocks about it. You will see when I get my film developed.”

  I turned my horse around so she stood below me. I needed the foot advantage that gave me to crawl into the saddle. My horse immediately started for the top of the ridge and probably for home, so I had to check her to give my speech. “It’s about 175 yards from the site of Dodge’s fire to the crevice,” I told him. He looked pleased and said, “That’s about right.” I told him, “Sallee in his testimony said it was about 200 yards, and that’s about what it looked like to me.” He said, “It’s so steep and rocky there it looks farther than it is, especially when you know you are going to have to climb it. One hundred seventy yards is probably right.”

  I held my horse back a moment longer. “Guess,” I asked him, “what’s on the other side of this crevice when you crawl through it?”

  “Don’t tell me,” he said, his eyes wide.

  “You’re right,” I told him. “At the far end of the crevice is a juniper bush that Rumsey could have fallen into.”

  We both believed in the juniper bush, and we both now wondered how it could suddenly be uncomfortably cool, as it had been on the evening of that record-hot day of August 5, 1949. We were leaving a strange world.

  AT THE DIVIDE BETWEEN MANN GULCH and Willow I turned my reluctant horse around and took a look at Mann Gulch. It is not possible from there to see all the way to the river because of the bend near its mouth where the fire blew, jumped the gulch, and started up the canyon to meet the crew coming down. So the entity you see looking down Mann Gulch is not quite all of Mann Gulch, but the frame left of the Mann Gulch fire. It is a small, fierce, self-contained world made up of many worlds set off from the outside by fierce slopes and rocks. On either side is a different world, mountains to the south and west and plains to the north and east, different ways to live and die. The two-mile world of the Mann Gulch fire had already changed to many worlds for me, with many different feelings—the romantic earth of young men descending from the sky to find fire; the brutal earth performing a tragedy in a sentence; an earth, increasing in fierceness, refusing to yield up any more secrets of how to put things together; and always the sad world that parents cannot bear to visit. All were worlds in which I might have lived. Looking down on the worlds of the Mann Gulch fire for probably the last time, I said to myself, “Now we know, now we know.” I kept repeating this line until I recognized that, in the wide world anywhere, “Now we know, now we know” is one of its most beautiful poems. For me, for this moment, anyway, my world was changed to this one-line poem. Finding it a poem, I hoped I could next complete it as a tragedy, more exactly as a story of a tragedy, more exactly still as a tragedy of this whole cockeyed world that probably always makes its own kind of sense and beauty but not always ours.

  There was no water until we reached Willow Creek. I was sorry for the horses, but I was no longer sorry for us. Such can be the effect of the beauty of a very short poem.

  11

  BEER DOESN’T SEEM TO DO MUCH to remove dehydration, but it makes it easier to admit error. On the third bottle I said to Laird, “I think I can explain how we went wrong in locating the origin of Dodge’s fire last year when Sallee and Rumsey went with us into Mann Gulch.”

  Laird said, “I think I can too.”

  We were back at the Fish and Game Commission ranch, had unloaded the saddle horses from the truck, and were now leaning on the front fenders of Laird’s truck, one on each fender, both of them too hot to touch but not to lean against. We were too tired to sit down in the shade, if there was any, so we put the plastic bag with the rest of the beer between us on the hot hood of the engine. We figured, since beer couldn’t take away dehydration, we might as well drink it warm.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it,” I said. “I mean, I’ve thought a lot about it before today.”

&nb
sp; “That goes for both of us,” Laird said.

  For a beginning, I tried to separate out the differences in basic evidence to explain how we went wrong. Oddities explain it—oddities of terrain and oddities of psychology, although oddities of psychology aren’t usually as odd as they first seem. What’s really odd is how the terrain and the psychology came together in odd ways. Within fifteen minutes we had pieced together an explanation with only minor differences between us.

  The first oddity that led us to error was that in 1978, for otherwise good reasons, we had approached Mann Gulch from Rescue Gulch. Approaching Mann Gulch from Rescue Gulch is approaching it from its side, so the first thing we saw of Mann Gulch was its northern ridge. That meant, of the key points in the fire we were trying to locate, we looked first for the crevice because it was the closest to us. Psychology also guaranteed that the crevice would be our first location point—Rumsey and Sallee owed their lives to it.

  But it was a dangerous procedure to use the crevice as the starting point from which to reconstruct the tragedy that happened below it. Both Laird and I had already observed an oddity at the top of Mann Gulch, a pattern of terrain that recurs along the ridge: first, there is a wide open saddle where the reef has not extruded or, more likely, has eroded away, then the reef emerges as a fairly solid cliff, then the cliff lowers and splits into a crevice or several crevices, then the reef erodes away into another wide open saddle followed again by the reef appearing as a solid cliff, which again erodes into a crevice and farther on into another wide open saddle—and so on up most of the ridge.

  Given this recurring pattern of open saddle, cliff, and crevice, it was dangerous to reconstruct our map according to the first crevice we found, because there are quite a few crevices on the Mann Gulch ridge that to Rumsey and Sallee might look like the one they had squeezed through nearly thirty years ago in smoke and exhaustion.

  The game trail explains at least in part why we went wrong. We were naturally following it and game naturally looks for the lowest place to cross the ridge and the lowest place nearby was the wide open saddle upgulch from us. So we reached the top of the ridge sidehilling upgulch, and upgulch is the way we kept going, although as it turned out the game trail took us past the right crevice. It was behind us when we reached the top.

  Perhaps there is a greater oddity that permeated all these little oddities, one that perhaps influenced all our movements on the field of catastrophe that day. Part of what I wanted to find out in Mann Gulch that year was how much two tough, able outdoorsmen would forget about the most unforgettable experience in their lives, and I felt fairly sure that part of the reason the two survivors came back to Mann Gulch with two amateur experts on the fire was that they were looking for answers to the same question. They wanted to see if they would recognize Armageddon if it were not in flames.

  Even the beginning to the answer I reached is complex and contrary to expectation: (1) They remembered, seemingly with total recall, an incident on the periphery of their experience in which, after they were safe, they had tried to save one of their crew (Hellman). (2) Their errors came when they tried to tie to reality the places most crucial to their own salvation—that is, the origin of the escape fire where they cut loose from their foreman and took their own lives in their own hands, and the crevice where they saved their lives.

  Almost certainly, ordinary expectations projected opposite conclusions—that they would remember most accurately the two crucial incidents in the most crucial moments of their lives and that their memory for details would fade. But the fox went the other way, as the fox often does when the fox is psychology. What they remembered with remarkable accuracy is what happened after the fire passed them by and they crawled out of their rock slide, knowing at last that they were safe. Their relocation of Hellman’s cross by the rusted can of Irish white potatoes is not the only example. I walked with Rumsey part of the way out of Rescue Gulch late that July 1 afternoon, and, with nothing we were saying to bring this up, he said to me, “This is where I first saw the rescue crew the night of the fire when I started for the Missouri River to get water for Hellman.”

  It had been about midnight when he had met the rescue crew coming up, and the rise we were standing on was not particularly distinguishable and there are many not particularly distinguishable rises on the several finger ridges running down the slope of Rescue Gulch.

  “Look down this ridge,” he said, and I did. “See that big rock, with two smaller ones near it?” I could see something like some big rocks two hundred yards downridge. “Well,” he said, “they were coming up this ridge. They naturally had their flashlights on, but I didn’t see their flashlights because they were coming up behind the rocks. I could see the lights reflected in the sky, but the first I knew that they were behind the rocks is when the rocks appeared out of the dark and began to glow. Suddenly flashlights blinked between the big rock and the little ones, and I yelled to the rocks.”

  If any psychological generalization can be based on this day in Mann Gulch, it would be something like this: we don’t remember as exactly the desperate moments when our lives are in the balance as we remember the moments after, when the balance has tipped in our favor and we know we are safe and have turned to helping others. Even if this is something of an explanation, it leaves unexplained what we mean by “remember.” In Rumsey and Sallee’s memory, the experience of their flight from death is not bound together by narrative or cartographic links—it would be hard to make a map from it and then expect to find ground to fit the map. It has the consistency more of a gigantic emotional cloud that closes things together with mist, either obliterating the rest of objective reality or moving the remaining details of reality around until, like furniture, they fit into the room of our nightmare in which only a few pieces appear where they are in reality.

  There is always a good deal of housekeeping going on in our dreams—sometimes I think there is only one remembered objective detail that gives position to whatever else is “remembered” of outer reality. Most certainly our day in Mann Gulch was made to fit the crevice.

  SO IT HAD TAKEN US THREE YEARS to locate two places on the ground—a summer to discover whether any survivors still had addresses on this earth; then a winter to induce the two still alive to return to the top of the ridge they had been trying to forget, followed by a summer when they came back and were ghosts for a day; and then still another summer for Laird and me to find out that they had been successful in forgetting certain things. Three years and two established locations; it doesn’t seem like much, even though we had been following a lot of other trails during those years leading to parts of the story of the Mann Gulch fire—trails of experts on death, especially death by fire, and the many trails of Earl Cooley, who with his partner was the first ever to drop on a forest fire from a parachute and who tapped the calf of the left leg of each of those about to die in Mann Gulch to get them on with their last jump. Later I was to see the sad trail of the once majestic C-47 that had dropped its crew into Mann Gulch when the great bird of the sky circled the airstrip in Missoula and disappeared forever into the blue, sold into slavery to an African company. Stories and stories—a storyteller has all kinds of stories going at one time out of which he hopes he can find one story he can tell at one time.

  I had decided that a search for the main line of the multiple story should include an attempt to determine the speed of men and of fire in their race between established points and to relate the decreasing distance between men and fire with the tragically increasing intensity of the fire’s heat. And I did try to proceed in this quest by closely studying the survivors’ testimony concerning the closing gap between them and the fire. But testimony in such circumstances naturally lacks exactness and even agreement, and before long Laird and I came to the precipice of doubt with the discovery that official testimony about the time and distance of the race may have been tampered with. For an interval, we thought there was no way of going any farther with this part of the story
until and unless a method could be found of ascertaining time, distance, and speed other than by pacing and grade school arithmetic. In my often aimless visits to the Smokejumper base I almost always had to pass the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, where without my realizing it they were developing such a method. I had already heard—usually from young members of the Forest Service—that in the Northern Forest Fire Lab they made mathematical models of fire, and I was mildly curious, although I didn’t know much more about mathematical models of fire than that they are used in the operation of the National Fire Danger Rating System and so have something to do with predicting the rate of spread on any given day of forest fires real or hypothetical. Occasionally I would say to myself, “Some day when I am too old to chase real forest fires, I will come back here and try to find out what a mathematical model of a forest fire is, if by then it is not too late.” So I would keep on going past the Fire Lab to where there would be a bunch of visitors watching a game of volleyball being played with surprising ferocity by young men who also to the surprise of the visitors were not as big as the Minnesota Vikings. When the game was over, the young men would return to “the Loft” and, to the ever-increasing surprise of the visitors, would sit in front of sewing machines and peacefully mend their parachutes. They were very skillful with their sewing machines and damn well better have been, since their lives hung on their parachutes.

  On a good many days in my search for the story of the Mann Gulch fire I never got any farther than “the Loft.” At one end of it was a glass cage containing the Loft foreman, Hal Samsel. Hal is the son of a Forest Service ranger and was born in a ranger station and all his own professional life has been in the Forest Service, most of it in the Smokejumpers—in fact, in early August of 1949 he had just returned to the Smokejumper base from an earlier fire or his number would have been called to go to Mann Gulch. There isn’t much he doesn’t know about the woods, whether viewed from the ground or the sky, and he can tell stories about the woods from either perspective. He is a master storyteller, the only one I ever heard who could tell a whole story with only two grammatical subjects.