When a Fire Burns Hot

by Corey Richard

  Fast Horse stopped and studied his surroundings. He figured that he had reached the thermal belt, the level under which the cold air settled, usually at night, leaving the warm air above to dry the organic fuels. Dead limbs hung down from the lodgepole pines. Some of these limbs almost reached the ground, with little space between them and other dead branches above. A fire could climb the branches with ease, and he remembered that he hadn’t lectured this crew about ladder fuels like these. He moved on, taking note of the branches like a mouse takes note of a hawk and continues going about the business at hand.

  From a young ponderosa nearby, he plucked a long, green needle and held it between the index finger and thumb of each hand. He bowed it in the middle and immediately it snapped, dryly, before it had bent a quarter-circle. It was as he feared: the fuel moisture here was incredibly low. The danger was understood, accepted, and automatically factored into the entire safety equation. He scanned the horizon in vain for a glimpse of the fire, hoping to gauge its behavior. He then set out in search of the flames.

  Minutes later, he finally reached the fire’s front and was not surprised to see that flame lengths averaged about four feet. He postulated that here, the fire was burning at a slightly faster pace than it was at the elevation at which they had begun their line. He had been right to start the line so far from the fire, lessening the chances of the fire blocking them before they reached the top. Still, he knew he should always keep in mind the warning the pine needle had offered: anything could happen.

  The crew broke for a late lunch about halfway up the hillside. Most sat haphazardly on any flat spot they could find. Derrick, however, ate his sandwich while roaming the surrounding forest. At one point in his short journey, he stopped and examined a ponderosa from all angles and positions, supine included. It held so much power for him, power that seemed impossible to overcome. He tried to absorb everything the tree had to offer him.

  Alaska, meanwhile, grunted at his flattened sandwiches before flinging both into the bushes and grumbling to himself.

  Frank, across from Alaska, had positioned himself beside Alice, hoping to patch up the rift between them. He looked up and saw that all of Squad Two was out of earshot. His eyes accidentally met Randy’s and both exchanged uncertain looks, as if they were sizing each other up anew, and in a different manner than they had the first time. He then looked back at Alice, who was smoking a cigarette.

  “Alice, how is it that you want to run a ranch and do all this labor all the time, but you still smoke?” he asked, teasingly.

  Alice looked at Frank without turning her head. His expression of concern had too closely resembled criticism, and she considered it unworthy of a reply. She blew a cloud of smoke into the air and turned away from him.

  “Uh, just curious,” Frank said, backpedaling. He tried in vain to think of something more to say in hope of starting a conversation flowing between them. He sensed they would be close again soon, however. He was the only friend she had out there. He relaxed and imagined what it would be like to accept Alice’s invitation to visit her ranch. He would likely be the only man there. The women would undoubtedly view him as a prized object, being starved for male attention, especially the type of attention he could give them: understanding and compassionate, not brutish and condescending. He imagined he’d go there regularly between fires, or even stay the winter. Men like Jim would drool imagining his life. In many ways, it paid to be a woman’s ally. He was on the right track.

  He abruptly checked himself, and instead imagined that he was being handed the reins of the crew by Fast Horse during some important Forest Service occasion. He guessed that Fast Horse was likely to retire to his reservation at some point soon; probably had only a few seasons left in him. While he acknowledged that it would be sad to see him go, he calculated that from there he could go anywhere in the agency.

  No, he couldn’t think like that, he told himself, and forced an exit from his imagination.

  “Saddle up!” The words crackled over Frank’s radio. He was pleased to repeat the command and see that everyone was responsive and on their feet without too much delay, though he considered the lunch break unacceptably short. He was set on finishing the line, and looking back with pride on a day in which he had led his squad in helping to stop a forest fire.

  Scott looked over at Frank with tired eyes and said, “Give a white man a whip... he’ll be crackin’ it, all right.”

  Frank didn’t give much heed to Scott’s comment, other than to try and discern if it was a whine. Scott’s lips dropped from their ready position to droop slightly, as he bent over and wearily picked up his tool.

  “Space out!” Frank yelled, as his firefighters lined out, and soon his squad was again behind the rest of the crew, improving the line at their feet. Frank looked behind him to see that everyone was working at an adequate pace, and inadvertently let a small gap form between himself and the nearest member of Squad Two.

  Scott finally decided that he had had enough of Frank’s businesslike silence. Frank was getting too damn serious; not only about his job, but about almost everything else. Frank had even let Jim get to him earlier that morning, he recalled. He was glad, though, that Frank had finally realized that Jim wasn’t worth the respect he had tried to give him and the rest of Squad Two. Looking up at Frank from his stooped position, he offered, as a playful taunt, “That Jim finally got to you, huh Frank?”

  Frank didn’t look at Scott, nor did he return the smile offered; his lips tightened into a sneer. “Fuck Jim,” he said tersely, under the influence of another dose of bravado.

  Scott laughed deeply. “That’s it, my man. You got that right.”

  “Fuck Squad Two,” Frank said with the same bitter detachment, having been boosted by Scott’s encouragement.

  Scott smiled to himself, as if he had just received his fourth ace. “Sure you don’t want me to try an’ talk to ‘em for ya?” He asked, laughing on his words.

  “Fuck ‘em,” Frank said softly, staring into the distance for a brief moment and squinting his eyes like a gunslinger in a Western. He tightened his grip on the handle of his Pulaski before he stooped to resume working. He enjoyed the feel of the heavy, balanced tool in his hand. His first fluid swing struck a section of living root, severing it before the sharp blade came to rest deep in the dry dirt.

  Then, up from the bottom of the canyon, a slight breeze drifted toward the firefighters. The crew welcomed its cooling influence, and many rose to let the air brush pleasantly over them. Then a slightly stronger gust kicked up a little dust and lifted some of the smoke out of the valley.

  “All right, maybe we’ll finally see what the fuck we’re doing!” Frank exclaimed, hoping to rally his squad.

  About ten minutes later, Fast Horsed howled “Mooove ooout!” over the radio, and rushed downhill in the direction of his crew like a one-man waterfall.

  “What the fuck is he doing?” Frank said in disbelief. He saw his dreams vanishing.

  Shroeder lurched uphill to meet Fast Horse. “There was no order to pull out. We’re almost done!” he shouted, nearly out of breath.

  “I don’t care. We’re pulling out.” Fast Horse did not stop his descent and strode nimbly around Shroeder, having calculated that there was no time for a standoff. He glided past the ranks of his firefighters as if airborne, and arrived at what was to be the front of a retreating line. The Mexicans had been the first to turn and prepare to descend. The other two squads had done so only as Fast Horse passed by.

  “Come on! I said move out! Let’s go!” Fast Horse yelled urgently.

  Nothing more was said, as the crew began walking down the line they had just created. Their thicksoled, heavy boots pounded the ground under them, kicking up small clouds of dust with each thumping step.

  Frank, in the lead behind Fast Horse, quickly felt the power of their retreat. He admired his own steady stride and felt stronger wit
h each heavy step, which he imagined to be surer than most. It was he who would lead his squad to safety if the situation became critical. He would protect them and be deserving of their respect. He and Fast Horse. He was so close to his leader he could hear him breathe.

  The Incident Commander received notice that the high-pressure system had appeared much earlier than expected. He guessed it would move fast in displacing the low pressure system that had been holding the smoke and flames in place all over the District. His mind became awash with plans. He immediately keyed his desk radio and ordered the two air tankers standing by to take to the air, figuring that very soon they would be able to see well enough to drop the retardant on the worst of the flames. He then ordered an assortment of crews presently mopping up to reinforce lines, which were in danger of being crossed by flames, especially where ranches and houses might be in jeopardy. He knew instinctively that if these areas were burnt over, the political fallout was sure to reach him. He wondered next if there were any crews that might be attempting a frontal assault on any fire. He realized that there was only one: the crew he had sent in to cut off the Devil’s Gulch fire. He got on the radio and ordered them to pull out; then he cursed himself for not doing so immediately after receiving the new information about the weather.

  The order to go to their safety zone came to McDaniels when the Willamette crew was halfway down their line.

  “Already on the way,” Fast Horse answered on his radio.

  “Copy that. Stay at the safety zone till I give further orders,” McDaniels said calmly, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “Copy.”

  “McDaniels clear.”

  “Willamette clear.”

  Each crewmember checked in the direction of the flames as they became engulfed in a thick wave of fresh black smoke. They saw no fire, but could hear a new roar coming out the dense blackness.

  Fast Horse yelled into his radio over noise like that of a freight train, “Don’t panic! We’re almost to the safety zone! There’s plenty of time!”

  None managed to relax, and several nearly stumbled as they stepped on the heels of the firefighters in front of them. The roar of the flames grew steadily louder, and soon it was as if a fleet of huge airplanes was taking off in the firefighters’ direction. Black smoke from the fire was again driven in hot blasts at their staggered line, and visibility was reduced to a matter of feet as the crew became encased in sootfilled air. Periodically, the firefighters clamped their eyelids shut for relief from the smoke, which now seemed like an acid mist. They were retreating as if through night, and laid blind trust in their leader. They had no choice.

  One by one, they stepped out of the moving blackness and onto the scree slope. Suddenly the wind increased to a steady blow and lifted a good portion of the smoke up and out of the valley. The veil had been lifted. Now a swelling, angry black column could be seen towering in the near distance. Part of it billowed and eddied angrily over the heads of firefighters as they looked on. Many yelled triumphantly, being under the impression that they had made it to safety. It had seemed like a close call to most. They let down their guard and relaxed slightly, reflecting on the startling speed with which conditions had changed from calm to life-threatening.

  Fast Horse shouted at them again, “C’mon! Get behind the boulders! Shit is gonna come rolling down here any second! Heads up, everybody!”

  The crew obeyed immediately and filed into place behind the large boulders that lay close to the creek’s edge. They dropped to the ground and huddled behind these protective barriers, waiting and watching in nervous anticipation. Fast Horse scrambled, stealthlike, in front of the large rocks, unexpectedly slapping any firefighter’s appendage not adequately concealed, before he too took cover, dropping to his knees beside Shroeder.

  “We should have waited for orders! We still would have made it!” Shroeder said, panting hard and irritated.

  Fast Horse scarcely listened to his Liaison, but did offer a response: “Orders or no orders, I was pulling out. We’re out here -- they aren’t.”

  “Yeah, but we still would have made it! Now it looks bad that we didn’t wait. We should have asked, or at least advised them we thought we should pull out.”

  “I was gonna tell ‘em, but I was pulling out no matter what. That was a tight spot we were in, and I wasn’t takin’ any chances. If I had asked and they said there was no danger, then I would really have been disobeying orders then, huh?” Fast Horse turned from Shroeder and keyed his radio on the crew’s own frequency. “Squad bosses, everyone well hidden?”

  “Sí.”

  “Yep.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Stay tucked in till I give the command to get up.”

  “Copy.”

  “Copy.”

  “Copy.”

  Although in a state of nervous anticipation, the crew became increasingly eager to catch a glimpse of the oncoming flames. They anxiously studied the advancing column, which was now streaked with glowing red sparks. Then, finally, the serpent reared its brilliant head. Crewmembers whooped and muttered as the tip of a huge flame leapt into view, almost fifty feet above the horizon. The crew’s glowing, eager faces, flush with excitement and nervousness, shared the emotion of the moment. More flames quickly followed, bounding forward until a good portion of the near horizon was awash in flames. The flames pushed closer to the huddled crew in a riotous, raucous procession, and finally blasted their exposed faces with hot air.

  It was the lodgepole pines that gave the fire much of its energy, and the flames plowed through them mercilessly, leaving only bare poles poking out of the ground in their wake. As fire haltingly flooded the land, a noise that resembled the sound of thousands of bed sheets being furiously ripped soon became nearly deafening.

  Fast Horse tried to relax. He had done all he could and told himself that they were safe. Still, the flames were menacing even to him, and he became filled with concern.

  The crew sat in silence, now stunned, as ashes and small live embers shot out of the fire and rained down upon them. They had not imagined that the sight they were witnessing would be so impressive. The conflagration was now almost directly up slope from them, and they shielded their faces from the heat when poking their heads up, clandestinely endangering themselves to catch a glimpse of the performance. In many places, flames danced madly across the treetops, painting the sky a red hue and creating a blizzard of sparks. Everything seemed to catch fire, as if the highly inflammable land was already resigned to its severe fate.

  A burning log thumped down the hill, passing between the rocks of squads two and three to lay hissing and bubbling in the creek below. Then a couple more burning logs rolled down and came to rest on the scree patch, never making it to the water, flames continuing to scour their outsides. Rocks too were loosened, some after splitting into pieces from the heat, and tumbled dangerously close to the huddled crew. Several landed in the creek with a splash; others crashed against the boulders the crew hid behind.

  The crew watched as a tongue of flame hurriedly licked the tops of the trees on the other side of their new line. More flames rallied mightily, and finally found their path; they took one giant leap over the line before hopping gleefully from tree crown to tree crown up the valley, not stopping to finish their work. Only later, when burning debris from the older trees fell to the ground, did everything that lay below finally catch fire, turning young trees into fiery little skeletons.

  The quantity of live embers jetting from the apocalypse increased to a torrent. Many started small spot fires in advance of the fire’s front which were quick to join the conflagration as it fervently sprang forward.

  A share of the embers reflected brightly in Scott’s wide eyes as he watched them land across the creek and ignite a bush, leaving no side of the valley safe. “Everythin’ gone, man,” Scott exclaimed, enraptured. “Fuck yeah!”

 
Scott’s zeal was almost embarrassing to Frank, and he turned back towards Alice and yelled, “Pretty impressive sight, huh?”

  Alice nodded. She had lit a cigarette, and was satisfied and comfortable being a spectator of the destruction.

  The unrestrained fire leapt towards one of the first ponderosa pines visible to the crew. This tree, a member of the most fire-resistant species in the forest, had likely witnessed tens of fires over the centuries, but still showed no signs of disfigurement. Its thick, strong branches stretched out boldly from its trunk and culminated in bristly bunches of delicate, long green needles. But today the stately tree’s existence was imperiled. Fifty- and sixty-foot flames shot up from the tops of the spindly lodgepole pines below, stretching in an effort to reach the ponderosa’s lowest branches. A few lower limbs were finally touched by fire, and the crew watched as the flames haltingly climbed several of the evenly-paced branches before giving up. Then, again, fire leapt up from below, this time with enough energy to rush over the tree’s entirety; the monstrous pine seemed to explode at once, every needle blazing nearly simultaneously to send up an enormous sheet of fire over a hundred feet above its top. Thick black smoke snaked upwards from the flames’ ends, to join with the rest rushing out of the valley. Moments later, the flames on the large pine died, vanishing as quickly as they had appeared.

  Hundreds of years of growth were over.

  In the wake of the ponderosa’s demise, several excited yells emerged from the lungs of Squad Two, who slapped each other’s hands.

  Frank, too, had fiendishly relished the destruction of the old tree. He had relished the messiness of the wildfire, which destroyed so thoroughly. Only after the ponderosa was left as a looted, smoking monument to what had been did he feel a pang of remorse. He told himself to curse humanity’s lack of vision, and to remember that fire should not have been able to do what it had done if things were as they should be, if fires had been allowed to continue to burn here on a regular basis. But the sight of another monstrous ponderosa unexpectedly torching off in the distance again excited him. The huge amount of energy expended was nearly unfathomable. The awesome sight was captivating and, in an odd way, satisfying. It was almost enough to make him accept the unacceptable, and even justify the unjustifiable. That was just the way things were. He couldn’t do anything about it now.