English Creek

by Ivan Doig

  “He must have had his mind changed,” I speculated.

  “Must have,” Paul conceded. He looked Stanley over. “Have you ever cooked for a fire camp before?”

  “No,” responded Stanley. “But I been in a fire camp before, and I cooked before. So it adds up to the same.”

  Paul stared. “For crike’s sake, mister. Have you got any idea what it takes to cook for a bunch of firefighters? They eat like—”

  “Oh yeah,” Stanley inserted, “and I almost forgot to tell you, I also’ve ate fire camp grub. So I been through the whole job, a little at a time.”

  “Uh huh” emitted from Paul, more as a sigh than an acknowledgment.

  Stanley swung his gaze around the camp in interest. “Have you got some other candidate in mind for cook?”

  “No, no, I sure as the devil don’t. I guess you’re it. So the feed ground is yours, mister.” Paul waved to the area where the cookstove and a work table and the big T table to serve from had been set up. “You better get at it. You’re going to have CCs coming at you from down that mountain and EFFs coming up from Great Falls. Figure supper for about seventy-five.” Paul turned to me. “Jick, I appreciate you getting those lunches up here. If you start back now, you’ll be home well before dark.”

  “Well, actually, I’m staying,” I informed Paul. “I can be Stanley’s flunky. My mom said it’s okay.”

  Possibly this was the first time a member of a fire crew ever arrived with an excuse from his mother, and it sure as hell was nothing Paul Eliason had ever dealt with before. Particularly from a mother such as mine. You could all but see the thought squatting there on his mind: what next from these damn McCaskills?

  But Paul only said: “You sort that out with your father. He’s the fire boss.” And sailed off to finish worrying the camp into being.

  Stanley and I began to tour our feed ground. The muleloads of groceries and cooking gear Isidor Pronovost had brought in by packstring. An open fire pit and not far from it the stove. Both were lit and waiting, as if hinting that they ought to be in use. A long work table built of stakes and poles. And about twenty feet beyond it, the much bigger T-shaped serving table. I could see the principle: tin plates and utensils and bread and butter and so forth were to be stacked along the stem of the T so the fire crew could file through in a double line, one along each side of the stem, to the waiting food at both arms of the T. The food, though. That I could not envision: how Stanley and I were going to manage, in the next few hours, to prepare a meal for seventy-five guys.

  “So,” Stanley announced. “I guess—”

  This I could have completed in my sleep—“we got it to do.”

  The Forest Service being the Forest Service and Paul being Paul, there hung a FIRE CAMP COOK BOOK on a nail at the serving table. Stanley peered over my shoulder as I thumbed to the page titled “First Supper,” then ran my finger down that page to where it was decreed: “Menu—beef stew.”

  “Slumgullion,” Stanley interpreted. “At least it ain’t mutton.”

  Below the menu selection, instructing began in earnest: “Place large wash boiler, half full of water, on fire.”

  “Christamighty, Stanley, we better get to—” I began, before noticing the absence at my shoulder.

  Over beside the packs of groceries, Stanley was leaning down to his saddlebags. Oh, Jesus. I could forecast the rest of that movement before it happened, his arm going in and bringing forth the whiskey bottle.

  I don’t know which got control of my voice, dismay or anger. But the message was coming out clear: “Goddamn it all to hell, Stanley, if you start in on that stuff—”

  “Jick, you are going to worry yourself down to the bone if you keep on. Here, take yourself a swig of this.”

  “No, damn it. We got seventy-five men to feed. One of us has got to have enough damn brains to stay sober.”

  “I know how many we got to feed. Take a little of this in your mouth, just enough to wet your whistle.”

  When things start to skid they really do go, don’t they. It wasn’t enough that Stanley was about to begin a bender, he was insisting on me as company. My father would skin us both. My mother would skin whatever was left of me after my father’s skinning.

  “Just taste it, Jick.” Stanley was holding the bottle out to me, patient as paint.

  All right, all goddamn right; I had run out of thinking space, all the foreboding in the world was in me instead; I would buy time by faking a little swig of Stanley’s joy juice, maybe after putting the bottle to my lips like this I could accidentally on purpose drop the—

  Water.

  Yet not quite only water. I swigged a second time to be sure of the taste. Just enough whiskey to flavor it faintly. If I’d had to estimate, perhaps a finger’s worth of whiskey had been left in the bottle before Stanley filled it with water.

  “It’ll get me by,” Stanley asserted. He looked bleak about the prospect, and said as much. “It’s worse than being weaned a second time. But I done it before, a time or two when I really had to. Now we better get down to cooking, don’t you figure?”

  • • •

  “The Forest Service must of decided everything tastes better with tin around it,” observed Stanley as he dumped into the stew boiler eight cans each of tomatoes and peas.

  “Sounds good to me right now,” I said from where I was slicing up several dozen carrots.

  • • •

  “You got time to slice some bread?” Stanley inquired from where he was stirring stew.

  “Yeah.” I was tending a round boiler in which twelve pounds of prunes were being simmered for dessert, but figured I could dive back and forth between tasks. “How much?”

  “This is the Yew Ess Forest Service, remember. How ever much it says in the book.”

  I went and looked again at the “First Supper” page.

  Twenty loaves.

  • • •

  “Jick, see what it says about how much of this sand and snoose to put in the stew,” Stanley requested from beside the wash boiler, a big box of salt in one hand and a fairly sizable one of pepper in the other.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “It which?”

  “All the cookbook says is ‘Season to taste.’ ”

  “Aw, goddamn.”

  • • •

  My right arm and hand felt as if they’d been slicing for years. I remembered I was supposed to set out five pounds of butter to go with the bread. Stanley now was the one at the cookbook, swearing steadily as he tried for a third time to divine the proportions of salt and pepper for a wash boiler of stew.

  “What’s it say to put this butter on?”

  His finger explored along the page. “Pudding dishes. You got time to start the coffee after that?”

  “I guess. What do I do?”

  “Fill two of them halfbreed boilers in the creek. . . .”

  • • •

  All afternoon Paul had been going through the camp at such a pace that drinks could have been served on his shirttail. But he gave Stanley and me wide berth until he at last had to pop over to tell us the fire crew was on its way in for supper.

  He couldn’t help eyeing us dubiously. I was sweaty and bedraggled, Stanley was parched and bedraggled.

  “Mind if I try your stew?” Paul proposed. I say proposed, because even though Paul was camp boss it was notorious that a cook coming up on mealtime had to be handled with kid gloves.

  This advantage must have occurred to Stanley, because he gave Paul a flat gaze, stated, “If you’re starved to death, go ahead; I got things to do,” and royally strode over to the work table where I was.

  We both watched over our shoulders like owls, though. Paul grabbed a spoon, advanced on the stew tub, dipped out a dab, blew on it, tasted. Then repeated. Then swung around toward us. “Mister, you weren’t just woofing. You can cook.”

  Shortly the CCs streamed into camp, and Stanley and I were dishing food onto their plates at a furious rate. A day on a fire lin
e is ash and sweat, so these CCs were not exactly fit for a beauty contest. But they were at that brink of manhood—most of them about Alec’s age—where energy recovers in a hurry. In fact, their appetites recuperated instantly. Some CCs were back on line for seconds before we’d finished serving everybody a first helping.

  Paul saw how swamped Stanley and I were with the serving, and sent two of his CC camp flunkies to take over from us while we fussed with reheating and replenishment. The fifty emergency firefighters from Great Falls were yet to come.

  So was my father. I had seen him appear into the far end of camp, conferring with Kratka and Ames, now his fireline foremen, and head with them to the boss tent. He wore his businesslike look. Not a good sign.

  I was lugging a resupply of prunes to the T table when I glanced into the grub line and met the recognition of my father, his hand in mid-reach for a tin plate.

  For a moment he simply tried to register that it was me standing before him in a flour sack apron.

  “Jick! What in the name of hell are you doing here?”

  “ ’Lo, Dad. Uh, I’m being the flunky.”

  “You’re—” That stopped not only my father’s tongue but all other parts of him. He stood rooted. And when I sunk in, so to speak, he of course had to get his mind to decide who to skin alive for this, Paul or Chet.

  “Mom said I could,” I put in helpfully.

  This announcement plainly was beyond mortal belief, so now my father had definite words to express to me. “You’re going to stand there with your face hanging out and tell me your mother—” Then the figure at the stove turned around to him and he saw that behind this second flour sack apron was Stanley.

  “Hullo, Mac,” Stanley called out. “I hope you like slumgullion. ’Cause that’s what it is.”

  “Jesus H.—” My father became aware of the audience of CCs piling up behind him in the grub line. “I’m coming around there, you two. You better have a story ready when I arrive.”

  Stanley and I retreated to the far end of the kitchen area while my father marched around the T table to join us. He arrived aiming huffy looks first to one of us and then the other, back and forth as if trying to choose between targets.

  “Now,” he stated. “Let’s hear it.”

  “You’re kind of on the prod, Mac,” observed Stanley. “You don’t care that much for slumgullion, huh?”

  “Stanley, goddamn you and your slumgullion. What in the hell are the pair of you doing in this fire camp?”

  Stanley was opening his mouth, and I knew that out of it was going to drop the reply, “Cooking.” To head that off, I piped: “Mom figured you could use our help.”

  “She figured what?”

  “She wouldn’t have sent us”—adjusting the history of my inception into the trip with Stanley and the lunches—“if she hadn’t figured that, would she? And what’s the matter with our cooking?” Some CCs were back in line for third helpings; they didn’t seem to lack appreciation of our cuisine.

  I noticed something else. My father no longer was dividing huffy looks between Stanley and me. He was locked onto Stanley. My presence in this fire camp was not getting my father’s main attention.

  As steadily as he could, after his afternoon of drought and wholesale cookery, Stanley returned the scrutiny. “Mac,” he said, in that rasped-over voice from when my father and I first met him on the trail that day of June, “you’re the fire boss. You can put the run on us any time you want. But until you do, we can handle this cooking for you.”

  My father at last said: “I’m not putting the run on anybody. Dish me up some of your goddamn slumgullion.”

  • • •

  It was getting dusk when the EFFs arrived into camp like a raggletaggle army. These men were drift, straight from the saloons and flophouses of First Avenue South in Great Falls, and they more than looked it. One guy even had a beard. Supposedly a person couldn’t be hired for emergency firefighting unless he owned a stout pair of shoes, but of course the same passable shoes showed up on guy after guy in the sign-up line. Most of these EFFs now were shod in weary leather, and hard-worn blue jeans if they were ranch hands, and bib pants if they were gandy dancers or out-of-work smeltermen from Black Eagle. Motley as they looked from the neck down, I paid keener attention to their headgear. There was a legend in the Forest Service that a fire boss once told his sign-up man in Spokane: “Send me thirty men if they’re wearing Stetsons or fifty if they’re wearing caps.” Most of these EFFs at least were hatted; they were used to outdoor work, were not city guys except for recreational purposes.

  I remember that this time, Stanley and I were lugging another boiler of coffee to the T table. For I damn near dropped my end when a big guy leaned out of the back of the grub line, peered woozily toward me, then yelled in greeting:

  “Hey, Jick!”

  Wisdom Johnson had not advanced conspicuously far on his plan to head for the redwood country for the winter. As soon as Stanley and I got the boiler situated on the table, I hustled to the back of the grub line to shake hands with Wisdom.

  “That First Avenue South,” he marveled. “That’s just quite a place.”

  Uh huh, I thought. And Bouncing Betty is quite a guide to it.

  • • •

  What my first night in a fire camp was like I can’t really tell you. For when Stanley and I at last were done washing dishes, I entered my sleeping bag and that is the last I know.

  • • •

  Breakfast, though. If you have not seen what six dozen firefighters will consume for breakfast, the devastation may shock you. It did me, after I awoke to the light of a gas lantern and Stanley above it half croaking, “Picnic time again, Jick.”

  Whack off a hundred and fifty slices of ham for frying. Mush: two sixteen-quart round boilers of water and four pounds of oatmeal into each. Milk for the mush, fifteen tall cans of Sego mixed with the same of water. Potatoes to make fried spuds—thank the Lord, we had just enough of the canned variety so that I didn’t have to start peeling. Fill two more halfbreed boilers for coffee, slice another oodle of bread, open seven cans of jam.

  Enough grub to feed China, it looked to me like. But Stanley viewed matters and shook his head.

  “Better dig out a half dozen of those fruitcakes, Jick, and slice them up.”

  I still blink to think about it, but only crumbs of those fruitcakes were left when that crew was done.

  • • •

  That morning my father put his firefighters to doing everything that the Forest Service said should be done in such a battle. Fireline was being dug, snags were being felled, wherever possible the flames were being pinched against Flume Gulch’s rocky outcroppings. One saving grace about a fire burning its way down a north slope is that it usually comes slowly, and my father’s crews were able to work close, right up against the face of the fire. On the other hand, Flume Gulch truly was a bastardly site to have to tackle. The fire had started at the uppermost end of the gulch, amid a dry tangle of windfall, and was licking its way down through jungly stands of Douglas fir and alpine fir and an understory of brush and juniper and more windfall. “Heavy fuel,” as it’s called. Burning back and forth on the gulch’s steep sides as a falling flaming tree or a shower of sparks would ignite the opposite wall of forest. So, in a sense, in a kind of slow sloshing pattern the fire was advancing right down the trough of nature’s version of a flume, aiming itself into the creekside trees along the North Fork and the high grassy slope opposite the gulch. And all the forested country waiting beyond that slope.

  To even get to the fire my father’s men had to climb up the face of the creek gorge into the gulch, and once there they had to labor on ground which sometimes tilted sharply ahead of them and sometimes tilted sideways but always tilted. At breakfast I had heard one of the CCs telling the EFFs that Flume Gulch was a spraddledy-ass damn place.

  Besides being high and topsy-turvy the fire battleground was hot and dry, and my father designated Wisdom Johnson to be the Flume
Gulch water cow. What this involved was making trips along the fireline with a five-gallon water pack on his back, so that the thirsty men could imbibe a drink from the pack’s nozzle—the tit. “I thought I had done every job there was,” claimed Wisdom, “but I never hit this one.”

  About mid-morning, when he came down from the gulch to refill, Wisdom brought into camp my father’s message for Paul. Paul read it, shook his head, and hustled down the trail to phone it on to Chet at the ranger station.

  “What’d it say?” I pumped Wisdom before he could start back up with his sloshing water pack.

  “ ‘No chance ten A.M. control today,’ ” Wisdom quoted. Then added his own view of the situation in Flume Gulch: “Suffering Jesus, they’re a thirsty bunch up there.”

  “A lot of Great Fall nights coming out through the pores,” Stanley put in piously from the work table where he and I next were going to have make double lunches for the seventy-five firefighters. Which, the cook book enlightened us, amounted to a hundred and fifty ham sandwiches, a hundred and fifty jam sandwiches, and seventy-five cheese sandwiches.

  • • •

  “ ‘Slice the meat about four slices to the inch,’ ” I read in a prissy voice. “ ‘Slice the bread about two slices to the inch.’ Christamighty, they want us to do everything by the measurement and then don’t provide us any damn thing to measure with.”

  “Your thumb,” said Stanley.

  “My thumb what?”

  “Your thumb’s a inch wide. Close enough to it, anyhow. Go by that. The Forest Service has got a regulation for everything up to and including how to swat a mosquito with your hat. Sometimes, though, it don’t hurt to swat first and read up on it later.”

  My thumb and I set to slicing.

  • • •

  At noon Paul and his pair of camp flunkies and Stanley and Wisdom and I lugged the sandwiches and canned fruit and pork and beans up to the fireline.

  I had grown up hearing of forest fires. The storied fire summers, Bitterroot, Phantom Woman, Selway, this one, they amounted to a Forest Service catechism. Yet here, now, was my first close view.