English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  The day was not August’s hottest, but hot enough. It was vital that all six plumes of smoke be gotten to as quickly as possible, before midday heat encouraged these smudges to become genuine fires. The job of smokechaser always seemed to me a hellish one, shuffling along a mountainside with a big pack on your back and then, when you finally sighted or sniffed out the pocket of fire, using a shovel or a pulaski to smother it to death. All the while, dry trees standing around waiting to catch any embers and go off like Roman candles.

  No, where firefighting of any sort was concerned I considered myself strictly a distant witness. Alec had done some, a couple of Augusts ago on the fireline against the Biscuit Creek blaze down on Murray Tomlin’s ranger district at the south end of the Two, and as with everything else he showed a knack for it. But I did not take after my brother in that flame-eating regard.

  It was mostly good news I was able to repeat to my mother when I visited the house for gingersnaps just past mid-morning. In those years the official Forest Service notion for fighting forest fires was what was called the ten A.M. policy: gain control of a fire by ten the morning after it’s reported; if it’s still out of hand by then, aim for ten the next morning, and so on. Chet had reported to headquarters in Great Falls, “We’ve got ten A.M. control on four of ours”—the South Fork, Billygoat, and the two Phantom Woman situations. All four were snag strikes, lightning gashing into a dead tree trunk and leaving it slowly burning, and the nearest fire guard had been able to put out the South Fork smolder, the lookout man and the smokechaser stationed on Billygoat Peak combined to whip theirs, while the Phantom Woman pair of smokes were close enough together that the smokechaser who’d been dispatched up there managed to handle both. So those four now were history. Jericho Reef and Flume Gulch were actual blazes; small ones, but still alive and trying. A fire guard named Andy Ames and a smokechaser named Emil Kratka were on the Flume Gulch blaze. Both were new to that area of the Two, but my father thought well of them. “They’ll stomp it if anybody can.” Jericho Reef, so much farther back in the mountains, seemed more like trouble. Nobody wanted a back-country fire getting under way in weather like this. Paul had nibbled on the inside of his lips for a while, then suggested that he collect the CCC crew that was repairing trail on the North Fork and go on up to the Jericho Reef situation. My father told him that sounded right, and Paul charged off up there.

  “Fire season in the Forest Service,” said my mother. “There is nothing like it, except maybe St. Vitus’ dance.”

  • • •

  Ours was the only comparatively good news in the Two Medicine National Forest that Saturday. At Blacktail Gulch down by Sun River, Murray Tomlin was still scooting his smokechasers here and there to tackle a dozen snag strikes. The worst of the electrical storm must have dragged through Murray’s district on its way to Great Falls. And on his Indian Head district south of us Cliff Bowen had a fire away to hell and gone up in the mountains, under the Chinese Wall. He’d had to ask headquarters for a bunch of EFFs, which were emergency firefighters the Forest Service scraped together and signed up in a real pinch, from the bars and flophouses of Clore Street in Helena and Trent Avenue in Spokane and First Avenue South in Great Falls and similar fragrant neighborhoods where casual labor hung out. It was going to take Cliff most of the day just to hike his EFFs up to his fire. “Gives me a nosebleed to think about fighting one up there,” my father commiserated.

  • • •

  “Sunday, the day of rest” was the mutter from my father as he headed to the ranger station the next morning.

  Had he known, he would have uttered something stronger. It turned out to be a snake of a day. By the middle of the morning, Chet was telling Great Falls about ten A.M. control on one of our two blazes—but not the one he and my father expected. Jericho Reef was whipped; Paul and his CCs found only a quarter-acre ground fire there and promptly managed to mop it up. “Paul should have taken marshmallows,” my father was moved to joke to Chet. Flume Gulch, though, had grown into something full-fledged. All day Saturday, Kratka and Ames had worked themselves blue against the patch of flame, and by nightfall they thought they had it contained. But during the night a remnant of flame crawled along an area of rock coated with pine needles. Sunday morning it surfaced, touched off a tree opposite from where Kratka and Ames were keeping an eye on matters, and the fire then took off down a slant of the gulch into a thick stand of timber. In a hurry my father yanked Paul and his CCs back from Jericho Reef to Flume Gulch, and I was killing time in the ranger station, late that morning, when Chet passed along the report Paul was phoning in from the guard cabin nearest Flume Gulch.

  Thus I was on hand for those words of Paul’s that became fabled in our family.

  “Mac,” Chet recited them, “Paul says the fire doesn’t look that bad. It just keeps burning, is all.”

  “Is that a fact,” said my father carefully, too carefully. Then it all came. “Kindly tell Mr. goddamn Eliason from me that it’s his goddamn job to see to it that the goddamn fire DOESN’T keep burning, and that I—no, never mind.”

  My father got back his breath, and most of his temper. “Just tell Paul to keep at it, keep trying to pinch it off against a rock formation. Keep it corraled.”

  • • •

  Monday made Sunday look good. Paul and his CC crew still could not find the handle on the Flume Gulch fire. They would get a fireline almost built, then a blazing fir tree would crash over and come sledding down the gulch, igniting the next jungle of brush and windfall and tinder-dry timber. Or sparks would shoot up from the slope, find enough air current to waft to the other steep side of the gulch, and set off a spot fire there. Ten A.M. came and went, with Paul’s report substantially the same as his ones from the day before: not that much fire, but no sight of control.

  My father prowled the ranger station until he about had the floor worn out. When he said something unpolite to Chet for the third time and started casting around for a fresh target, I cleared out of there.

  The day was another scorcher. I went to the spring house for some cold milk, then in to the kitchen for a doughnut to accompany the milk down. And here my father was again, being poured a cup of coffee by my mother. As if he needed any more prowl fuel today.

  My father mimicked Paul’s voice: “ ‘Mac, the fire doesn’t look that bad. It just keeps burning, is all.’ Jesus. How am I supposed to get through a fire season with help like that, I ask you.”

  “The same way you do every summer,” suggested my mother.

  “I don’t have a pair of green peas as assistant and dispatcher, every summer.”

  “No, only about every other summer. As soon as you get them trained, Sipe or the Major moves them on and hands you the next fresh ones.”

  “Yeah, well. At least these two aren’t as green as they were a month ago. For whatever that’s worth.” He was drinking that coffee as if it was going to get away from him. It seemed to be priming him to think out loud. “I don’t like it that the fire outjumped Kratka and Ames. They’re a real pair of smokehounds, those guys. It takes something nasty to be too much for them. And I don’t like it that Paul’s CCs haven’t got matters in hand up there yet either.” My father looked at my mother as if she had the answer to what he was saying. “I don’t like any of what I’m hearing from Flume Gulch.”

  “I gathered that,” she said. “Do you want me to put you up a lunch?”

  “I haven’t said yet I’m going up there.”

  “You’re giving a good imitation of it.”

  “Am I.” He carried his empty coffee cup to the sink and put it in the dishpan. “Well, Lisabeth McCaskill, you are famous the world over for your lunches. I’d be crazy to pass one up, wouldn’t I.”

  “All right then.” But before starting to make his sandwiches, my mother turned to him one more time. “Mac, are you sure Paul can’t handle this?” Which meant: are you sure you shouldn’t let Paul handle this fire?

  “Bet, there’s nothing I’d like more. Bu
t I don’t get the feeling it’s being handled. Paul’s been lucky on his other fires this summer, they both turned out to be weinie roasts. But this one isn’t giving up.” He prowled over to the window where Roman Reef and Rooster Mountain and Phantom Woman peak could be seen. “No, I’d better go up there and have a look.”

  • • •

  I didn’t even bother to ask to go along. A counting trip or something else routine, that was one thing. But the Forest Service didn’t want anybody out of the ordinary around a fire. Particularly if his sum of life hadn’t yet quite made it to fifteen years.

  • • •

  “Mom? I was wondering—” Supper was in the two of us. She had washed the dishes and I had dried. I could just as well have abandoned the heat of the house for an evening of fishing. But I had to rid myself of at least part of what had been on my mind the past weeks. “I was wondering—well, about Leona.”

  Here was an attention-getter. My mother lofted a look and held it on me. “And what is it you’ve been wondering about Leona?”

  “Her and Alec, I mean.”

  “All right. What about them?”

  I decided to go for broke. “I don’t think they’re going to get married. What do you think?”

  “I think I have a son in this kitchen who’s hard to keep up with. Why are Alec and Leona tonight’s topic?”

  “It’s not just tonight’s,” I defended. “This whole summer has been different. Ever since the pair of them walked out of here, that suppertime.”

  “I can’t argue with you on that. But where do you get the idea the marriage is off?”

  I thought about how to put it. “You remember that story Dode tells about Dad? About the first time you and Dad started, uh, going together? Dad was riding over to call on you, and Dode met up with him on the road and saw Dad’s clean shirt and shined boots and the big grin on him, and instead of ‘Hello’ Dode just asked him, ‘Who is she?’ ”

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “I know that story.”

  “Well, Alec doesn’t look that way. He did earlier in the summer. But when I saw him at the Double W that time, he looked like somebody had knocked the blossom off him. Like Leona had.”

  My mother was unduly slow in responding. I had been so busy deciding how much I could say, without going against my promise to Alec not to tell what a botch his Double W job was, that I hadn’t realized she too was doing some deciding. Eventually her thoughts came aloud:

  “You may have it right. About Leona. We’re waiting to see.”

  She saw that I damn well wanted a definition of “we.”

  “Leona’s parents and I. I saw Thelma Tracy the last time I was in town. She said Leona’s mind still isn’t made up, which way to choose.”

  “Choose?” I took umbrage on Alec’s behalf. “What, has she been seeing some other guy, too?”

  “No. To choose between marrying Alec and going on with her last year of high school is what she’s deciding. Thelma thinks school is gaining fast.” She reminded me, as if I needed any: “It starts in a little over a week.”

  “Then what—what do you think will happen after that? With Alec, I mean. Alec and you and Dad.”

  “We’ll just have to see in September. Your father still has his mad on about Alec throwing away college. For that matter, I’m not over mine either. To think, a mind like Alec’s and all he wants to do Is Prance Around Like—” She caught herself. Then got back to her tone of thinking out loud: “And knowing Alec, I imagine he’s still just as huffy as we are.”

  “Maybe”—I had some more careful deciding than ever, how to say this so as not to bring about something which would rile Alec even more—“maybe if you and Dad sort of stopped by to see Alec. Just dropped by the Double W, sort of.”

  “I don’t see how it would help. Not until Leona and the college question are out of the way. Another family free-for-all won’t improve matters. Your father and your brother. They’ll have to get their minds off their argument, before anything can be done. So.”

  The “so” which meant, we have now put a lid on this topic. But she added, as if it would reassure me:

  “We wait and see.”

  • • •

  Say this for the Forest Service life, it enlarges your days. Not long after my mother and I were done with breakfast the next morning, the telephone rang. Everybody in a ranger’s family knows the rings of all the lookout sites and guard cabins on the line. The signal was from the fire guard Ames’s cabin, the one nearest to Flume Gulch.

  “Rubber that, will you, Jick,” called my mother from whatever chore she was on elsewhere in the house. “Please.”

  I went to the wall phone and put the receiver to my ear. Rubbering, which is to say listening in, was our way of keeping track of matters without perpetually traipsing back and forth between the house and the ranger station.

  “Mac says to tell Great Falls there’s no chance of controlling the fire by ten today,” Paul was reporting to Chet. “If you want his exact words, he says there isn’t a diddling deacon’s prayer of whipping it today.” Even on the phone Paul’s voice sounded pouty. My bet was, when my father arrived and took over as fire boss, Paul had reacted like a kicked pup.

  “Approximate words will do, given the mood Mac’s been in,” Chet told Paul. “Anything else new, up there?”

  “No” from Paul and his click of hanging up.

  I relayed this, in edited form, to my mother. She didn’t say anything. But with her, silence often conveyed enough.

  When the same phone ring happened in late morning, I called out, “I’ll rubber.”

  This voice was my father himself.

  “It is an ornery sonofabitch,” he was informing Chet. “Every time a person looks at it, it looks a little bigger. We better hit it hard. Get hold of Isidor and have him bring in a camp setup. And tell Great Falls we need fifty EFFs and a timekeeper for them.”

  “Say again on that EFF request, Mac,” queried Chet. “Fifteen or fifty? One-five or five-oh?”

  “Five-oh, Chet.”

  Pause.

  Chet was swallowing on the figure. With crews of emergency firefighters already on the Chinese Wall fire and the fires down in the Lewis and Clark forest, Two headquarters in Great Falls was going to greet this request for fifty more like the miser meeting the tax man.

  “Okay, Mac,” Chet mustered. “I’ll ask for them. What else can I get you?” Chet could not have realized it, but this was his introduction to the Golden Rule of a veteran ranger such as my father when confronted with a chancy fire: always ask for more help than you think you’ll need. Or as my father said he’d once heard it from a ranger of the generation before him: “While you’re getting, get plenty.”

  “Grub,” my father was going on. “Get double lunches in here for us today.” Double lunches were pretty much what they sound like: about twice the quantity of sandwiches and canned fruit and so on that a working man could ordinarily consume. Firefighters needed legendary amounts of food. “And get us a real cook for the camp by tonight. The CC guy we been using could burn water. I’m going to get some use out of him by putting him on the fireline.”

  “Okay,” said Chet again. “The double lunches I’ll get out of Gros Ventre, and I’ll start working on Great Falls for the fifty men and a timekeeper and a cook. Anything else?”

  “Not for now,” allowed my father. Then: “Jick. You there?”

  I jumped, but managed: “Yeah?”

  “I figured you were. How’s your fishing career? Owe me a milkshake yet?”

  “No, I didn’t go yesterday.”

  “All right. I was just checking.” A moment, then: “Is your mother around there?”

  “She’s out in the root cellar, putting away canning.”

  “Is she. Okay, then.”

  “Anything you want me to tell her?”

  “Uh huh, for all the good it’ll do. Tell her not to worry.”

  • • •

  “I will if I want to,” she responded
to that. “Any time your father asks Great Falls for help, it’s worth worrying about.” She set off toward the ranger station. “At least I can go into town for the double lunches. That’ll keep Chet free here. You can ride in with me.”

  While she was gone to apprise Chet, the Flume Creek fire and my father filled my mind. Trying to imagine what the scene must be. That campsite where my father and I, and Alec in the other summers, caught our fill of brookies and then lazed around the campfire; flames now multiplied by maybe a million. In the back of all our minds, my father’s and my mother’s and mine, we had known that unless the weather let up it would be a miracle not to have a fire somewhere on the Two. Montana weather, and a miracle. Neither one is anything to rest your hopes on. But why, out of all the English Creek district of the Two Medicine National Forest, did the fire have to be there, in that extreme and beautiful country of Flume Gulch?

  I heard the pickup door open and my mother call: “Jick! Let’s go.”

  I opened the screen door and stepped from the kitchen. Then called back: “No, I think I’ll just stay here.”

  From behind the steering wheel she sent me a look of surprise. “Do you feel all right?” That I would turn down a trip to town must be a malady of some sort, she figured.

  “Yeah. But I just want to stay, and do some more papering on my room.”

  She hesitated. Dinnertime was not far off, her cookly conscience now was siding with her motherly one. “I thought we’d grab a bite at the Lunchery. If you stay, you’ll have to fix your own.”

  “Yeah, well, I can manage to do that.”

  As I was counting on, she didn’t have time to debate with me. “All right then. I’ll be back as soon as I can.” And the pickup was gone.

  I made myself a headcheese sandwich, then had a couple of cinnamon rolls and cold milk. All the while, my mind on what I had decided, my eyes on the clock atop the sideboard.

  Each day a room of time. Now each minute as slow as the finding and pasting of another page onto my bedroom wall in there.