When a Fire Burns Hot

by Corey Richard

  The crew soon found themselves following an elk trail, marked by marble-sized black droppings, that meandered through an open field of huge stumps and thick brush. Almost everyone had a feeling of strength and importance that morning as they headed to the combat zone, but it was the sawyers’ images of themselves that was the mightiest. These men each had to carry a thirtyfive pound saw and, for a dollar an hour more, risked cutting off an appendage or getting crushed by a tree; but they didn’t mind. At the men’s previous jobs, the going rate for handling a saw had been more than double their present wage, but cutting was a return to their working roots; they relished the thought of holding the formidable weapon in their hands again and exhibiting their wellhoned skills to the rest of the crew. Wearing leg chaps, they sauntered forward, looking very much like cowboys in a western movie.

  The firefighters arrived at a forest of old growth, the edge of which stood above the clear-cut below like a tremendous cliff. These were not the behemoth trees of the wetter, west-side forests, but they made a deep impression on the crew, whose feeling of significance waned slightly. The crewmembers crossed a small creek by walking on top of a huge fallen tree that looked like it had blown over, likely due to the inability of the clear-cut to provide protection from the wind. They looked at the water beneath their feet, running clear and cold with enough volume to tell them that this area received more rain than the area of the previous day.

  Shroeder stopped periodically to consult the map when the flagging, which had been tied to tree limbs that morning, no longer showed the way.

  The crew’s uphill advance slowed after an hour as they climbed a steeper section. Tree branches, as well as a covering of bushes, obstructed the firefighters’ path, and they often had to fight their way forward. In their struggle, several people slipped backwards and cursed the lack of available footing.

  The crew finally stopped at an open area. No more flagging could be seen through the smoky air. Shroeder checked the map while the panting, sweating crew rested, periodically shutting their watering eyes for relief from the stinging smoke. Fast Horse wasted no time and set out over a hill, which rose up steeply in front of them, as if knowing intuitively the direction in which the flagging trail headed next.

  “Wirahwee!” someone shouted.

  “Wirahwee!” other crewmembers’ voices echoed.

  Within seconds of his departure, Fast Horse yelled to confirm that the next ribbon of flagging was on top of the small hill, and the crew slowly plodded forward under the tiring influence of the smoke. As the huffing, straggling firefighters crawled up the steep incline, sometimes on all fours, Fast Horse looked down on them critically.

  “Come on!... Underwear! Underwear!” Fast Horse yelled.

  “Underwear!” Some of the Mexicans parroted between gasps for air, knowing that “underwear” was Fast Horse’s version of the Spanish word andale, like “dominos” was his version of vamanos, “let’s go.”

  “I sure hope I can move better than you when I’m your age. What did you do all winter?” Fast Horse taunted, imparting a message about the importance of fitness that was to be taken seriously.

  After climbing the small hill, the path began to traverse the mountain. The crewmembers caught their breath while walking on level ground, and soon regained a portion of their selfesteem, after having faced the humiliating fact that they were, to varying degrees, in less-than-exemplary physical shape. Fast Horse and Shroeder picked up their pace and the sawyers in the front soon resumed their saunter. Then, without warning, both sawyers dropped their saws to the ground, freeing themselves to join their swampers in what looked a strange jerky dance. It involved slapping themselves as quickly as they could in random places on their bodies and screaming in short, quick, panicky bursts. The four men then set out running frantically in different directions, arms flailing in the air.

  For a moment, the rest of the crew stopped in amazement, lacking an explanation for the men’s odd behavior. Seconds later, several people from Squad One began doing the same spastic dance before Jim finally managed to scream, “Bees!... Fucking bees!”

  The first two squads, eyes white with terror, continued to scramble madly amidst their own cries of pain, trying to get away from the dreaded insects. As soon as they were at more than a safe distance from the disturbed hive, a great deal of cursing and even some whimpering took place as the brave men whisked bees off themselves and each other.

  Squad Three, after initially backing up, saw they were out of range and began laughing hysterically at the sight of grow men whipping off their packs and frantically searching for the little creatures. Squad Three were joined by Fast Horse and Shroeder in laughing, and soon their abdomens hurt and tears welled up in their eyes. Some leaned on their tools for support.

  “Afraid of some little bees, men?” Fast Horse said, unable to resist an opportunity to jeer.

  “D’ja get ‘em all off?” Jim asked his unwilling assistant, John, in a quivering voice. “They really got me, maan!”

  “I got my own bees to deal with!” John cried out in a panic.

  Alice let out a highpitched squeal of a laugh.

  “Eh, you guys better regroup for a counterattack,” Fast Horse teased.

  Fast Horse’s face, however, suddenly drained of its jocularity. He rushed downhill like water in a mountain creek, streaking through bees and groaning men, until he arrived at the side of Carlos, who sat with a dazed expression in his nearly-shut eyes, his head and neck swollen to almost twice their normal size. Carlos appeared frightened and confused as he strained to keep air moving in and out of his lungs.

  “Hey Carlos, did you know that you’re allergic to bees?” Fast Horse asked, breathing hard as he threw his pack off.

  Carlos shook his head very slowly, his lips too thick to form words.

  Fast Horse rummaged through his backpack and withdrew a small pouch. “Well, Carlos, I hate to tell you this... but you look like one a them big tamales,” he said, and laughed.

  Carlos’s pudgy lips tried to form a smile, and he barely managed a strained laugh.

  Fast Horse withdrew a syringe from the little bag and pulled Carlos’s pants down without hesitation. “Where’s your tiger-striped underwear?”

  Carlos squeezed out a couple more laughs.

  “This epinephrine will take the stuffin’ out of you,” Fast Horse said, and jammed the needle into Carlos’ thigh before the downed man could find his fear.

  Everyone looked on silently as Carlos began to shake uncontrollably.

  “It’s okay, Carlos, that’s just the side effects. It’s intramuscular, so it does that. Won’t hurt ya.”

  After some minutes, Carlos’s shaking subsided, his breath quickly returned to normal, and his face had regained its former shape.

  “I need the medical kit!” Fast Horse called.

  Alice quickly delivered the kit she had been assigned to carry. Fast Horse gave Carlos two antihistamine pills, which the patient swallowed with some water from Fast Horse’s own canteen. Carlos then smiled and sat up slowly, saying, “Okay, tank you very much!” as if someone had lanced a boil for him instead of possibly saved his life.

  The crew released its laughter.

  “I feel fine... let’s go ponch some line, ese!” he said, motioning like a robot at the trail of flagging.

  Another wave of laughter dissipated most of the lingering anxiety.

  “I think you just sit down and shut up for a while, ese,” Fast Horse said, beginning to laugh himself.

  “Okay, meester.”

  When the crew directed their attention away from Carlos, Fast Horse said, “But really, Carlos, you got to get some shots like this one at the med tent and carry ‘em with you always. Those little fuckers could have killed you a minute ago there. I’ve seen more people flown out of fires from bees than from anything else, and every once and a while you hear about one of
‘em dyin’.”

  “Okay, I promees,” Carlos said, his face losing its smile. “But I’m okay now, let’s go.”

  “You should go back to the bus, I think.”

  “I feel fine... really, Fast Horse.”

  “Well, I guess we can see how it goes. First you rest up a bit.”

  Fast Horse walked through the now vacant bee zone, picking up the two saws and delivering them to the sawyers before approaching Shroeder to inform him of the need for delay.

  After an hour, the crew, Carlos included, resumed their advance until they came to a creek that had carved a large ravine out of the hillside. Fast Horse stepped carefully across boulders jutting out of the water and stomped his foot on the ground of the opposite bank. “This here is our end point. A tree-falling crew came in yesterday and dropped any trees they thought would burn and fall across the creek up to here... probably get a crew to dig a line later. But we’ll be heading uphill, perpendicular to the creek. I want the two end people making cup trenches, and just remember everything I told you. So... whenever you’re ready, sawyers...” Fast Horse again tugged on his everpresent reins, turned, and headed uphill, with Shroeder in tow, to scout the path of flagging.

  The two sawyers and their swampers crossed the creek and, after a series of yanks on the pull cords, their saws started. After being revved several times, the machines were whining anxiously at full speed. Jim started up the hill first, exuding confidence at every step. Amidst a flurry of wood chips, he quickly cut sections out of each of several downed trees in his path to make room for the line, employing an economy of motion, his actions deliberate and precise. His swamper, John, followed behind and tossed the sections of log downhill to rest beside the creek on what would soon become the green side of the line.

  As soon as Jim was a safe distance uphill, George stepped forward and prepared to make his first contribution to the effort. He looked up and saw a snag he figured had the possibility of catching fire and falling over the line. “Clear out!” he yelled and made eye contact with his swamper. He then sidled up to it purposefully, with an air of importance. He first sliced a wedge out of one side and then, from the other side, he cut straight through the tree until it cracked and fell away from him, landing across the path where the line would go with a hollow thud. He cut a section out of the rotten snag to make room for the line, and left it for his swamper to remove.

  The sawyers continued cutting brush, logs, and trees until they were out of sight of the crew, the high-pitched whines of their saws still resounding though the forest. They left behind a wide-open corridor where no hint of one had been before.

  The row of yellow-and-brown firefighters stood, poised, gripping their tools, ready to tear up the earth before them. Julio was first to step forward; using the grub end of his Pulaski, he quickly scraped small portions of debris off the ground as he scuttled up the hill. A shovel-bearing man followed him and performed a slightly different version of the same act. Soon, a dirt line began to take shape.

  “Bump up! Just hit and bump up. There’s a lot of people behind you,” Fast Horse yelled, amidst the thudding and clanking of tools striking the earth and ripping sounds of plants being cut and dismembered.

  Alaska was the first of his squad to cross. He gave Alice a demonstration of the obvious with a couple useful tips thrown in before he stood up and let her work. At one point, while she stooped, he stepped back, and she considered uneasily that he might be studying her from behind. She didn’t turn around to test her suspicions, however. Her grip tightened on her Pulaski and she kept working. She guessed she would have to tell him off at some point, but didn’t want to get worked up right then; she just wanted to do her job.

  “C’mon, Earth, put a little muscle into it! This girl... um... woman is doin’ a better job than you. Disgraceful,” Alaska said, and wondered why he was the only one laughing.

  Paul and Alice both looked up from their work to glare at their boss with eyes filled with resentment. “There he goes again,” Scott muttered to Frank, as they stepped carefully on the protruding stones to cross the creek.

  “C’mon, get goin’ down there!” Alaska yelled at the pair, as they began making their first cup trench.

  “Bump up, Paul!” Fast Horse yelled. Paul, who was taking more off the line than his allotment, had let a large gap develop between himself and the person ahead of him.

  Paul huffed slightly when he heard Fast Horse’s words, and abruptly advanced ten feet to angrily chop the stalks of a bush not standing close enough to the line to pose a threat of breaching the firebreak.

  Fast Horse approached the frustrated youth. Paul continued chopping.

  “Don’t worry too much about that stuff, it’s pretty far away,” Fast Horse said, as he passed by.

  Paul left the bush in disgust, moving on to chop at a root poking out of the ground in the line’s center.

  Shroeder stood at the front of the crew and looked down approvingly. Things were going well, just as he had anticipated. He thought back on the time when he decided to apply for a job in the Forest Service. One fateful day, a fraternity brother told him that the Forest Service was recruiting people like himself with degrees in forestry. He was nearing graduation at the time, and figured he might as well start thinking about the future, so he went to the little career planning office at the University and asked for an appointment with the Forest Service recruiter. A few days later, a man in a newly-pressed, green uniform came to talk to him about work in the Agency.

  The recruiter was affable and full of smiles, seemingly more interested in telling stories than spitting out numbers and recruitment pitches. He told Shroeder about the time he had been put in charge of taking an important figure in the Forest Service on a “show me” tour. The recruiter confessed that he had been terribly nervous, given that this was one of his first big assignments as head of the Fisheries Department in a particular forest. He had planned to take the man, who was flying in from D.C., to one of the more remote fisheries workstations that the Forest Service had set up in that District. There he would let “big city man” rest from his trip while, at opportune moments, plugging the work that they were doing on the forest.

  “So we took the float plane in there,” the little man in the uniform continued. “Some of the boys in Fisheries stuck up there for the summer put on their dusty old uniforms and tried to look all starched up. The Assistant Deputy Director looked around some, asked us about our work. You know, polite talk an’ all. Then he asks about the types of fish in that lake up there. Well, we told ‘im there were rainbows and lake trout. Then, Shroeder, you know what he says? Well, he looks at us and says, “How about we take one of those rod surveys to see what we got in here?” Hell, we didn’t think anyone outside our own District knew what a rod survey really was. The next thing we knew, we were all out in this little boat fishin’ and tellin’ jokes, prob’ly the best day that guy had since he got stuck in D.C. So then he suggests we take a few back to ‘further examine the quality of the fish.’ And I’ll tell ya, Shroeder, with some garlic and lemon, we found the quality of those fish to be pretty damn good!”

  The recruiter had then laughed loudly, though he had surely told the story many times by that point. “The guy even did the cooking... all within the regulations, mind you,” the recruiter added, and then lowered his voice to impart some secret information. “The fifth of Jack Daniels the Assistant Deputy Director had tucked away in his bag wasn’t, I guess, but hey, you gotta live it up once and a while.”

  Shroeder and the recruiter had hit it off, even if the man’s idea of “living it up” seemed somewhat timid to Shroeder, who was still braving the revelry of his college fraternity days. The two made another appointment to meet, and the next time the recruiter showed him pictures of people in the field doing the kinds of jobs open to Shroeder, as well as those that might open for him in the future. Shroeder liked best the picture of a man in a s
harp-looking uniform in the woods addressing an attentive group, the members of which all wore similar uniforms. He looked at the recruiter’s own starched and pressed uniform, with its little pins and name tag, and felt as if he was in the presence of someone important. He hadn’t decided why the men in these uniforms seemed important, but he just felt they were. They were all a part of something.

  “With what you’ve got, you could be anything given a little hard work,” the recruiter had said, after he sensed Shroeder had taken the bait. “I think you would best fit in the timber department, as you’ve got a forestry degree; now, you’ve got a choice to apply in seven Districts that have openings.”

  Shroeder nodded while looking back to the picture of the meeting, which still lay in front of him. He could be part of it, he thought. He could see himself in that picture. They were even giving him a choice as to where he could go.

  “How’s a GS 7 sound, with full bennies?” the man asked, as if he was doing him a favor rather than quoting the current starting level of anyone with an applicable college degree at that time.

  Shroeder looked up at the man with chest puffed full and said, “Can I be put in charge of the timber department?”

  The man smiled encouragingly. “Not right away, but I expect that if you do the job as it’s assigned, in a few years you’ll probably run the timber department in your District, or maybe even on another District. There’s no limit as to what you can be or where you can go in our organization.” The man then laughed before adding, “Providing, of course, that you’re near a National Forest.” The man’s face then suddenly wore a slightly more solemn look and he added, as if it was an afterthought, “Well, there’s Washington, D.C., of course.” He looked up furtively to see a hopedfor gleam in Shroeder’s young eyes.