Young Men and Fire

by Maclean, Norman

  When Jansson saw the waterbuck in camp, he became alarmed. Because the Smokejumpers had become nonexistent in Jansson’s mind, it was his own men fifteen hundred feet above his head who, he thought, were in danger. The returned waterbuck was a sure sign that Hersey intended to stay on the ridge and fight, and Jansson did not want him fighting fire after dark on the edge of fifteen-hundred-foot pinnacles with a bunch of drunks. Now, for the first time, he also became alarmed about the jumpers, who, the waterbuck was telling him, had not shown up on the Meriwether ridge. If they weren’t with Hersey’s crew, there were few places in the world that they could reach where they would be safe.

  Jansson immediately ordered the radio at Canyon Ferry to get the radio at Missoula to use all frequencies to locate the whereabouts of the jumpers. When he was advised by Missoula that it was unable to establish contact with the jumpers on any frequency, he then asked for the exact location of their jumping area. “While they were giving me the exact spot,” he says, “foreman Dodge and jumper Sallee walked into the guard cabin at Meriwether and Dodge reported that he had two injured men. This was at approximately 8:50 P.M.”

  The volunteers and the picnickers and the drunks crowded into the cabin. Jansson had to take Dodge outside and up the canyon to get any coherent information from him, but what did Dodge know that was coherent? He knew that back in what earlier in the day had been Mann Gulch were two badly burned men, one with a name Dodge did not remember, and one unburned man, Rumsey, watching the burned man with a name, Hellman. What else was in the amphitheater for sure was fear and the smell of overcooked flesh.

  Jansson immediately ordered through the Canyon Ferry radio one doctor, two litters, blankets, and blood plasma. At ten o’clock Hersey came in with his terrified postdrunks, having kept them on the fire until they had been several times trapped by it. He told Jansson about Harrison’s tracks, and, even more alarming, he told Jansson he had seen no jumpers or their tracks.

  “We decided,” Jansson says, “to consider the rescue work the No. 1 job and the fire the No. 2 job. I asked Hersey to look after the fire job while I went for the jumpers.”

  IT IS LIKE THAT IN THE WOODS and even in the wide world generally—the rescue of men and women, alive or dead, comes first. Of course, some step on the gas and leave them lying on the pavement where they landed and some sneak off, like Egyptian bas-relief, with their profiles looking one way and their bodies going the other way. But most people think they can be of help, and some even seem born to rescue others, as poets think they are. The best of them goof, especially at first, because only a few have the opportunity to keep in practice. Then as they catch on again they become beautiful in performance if one can step back for a moment to look. Almost as beautiful as when, having completed their job of deposing death, they fade into complete anonymity. It was very hard, for instance, to rescue the names of those Jansson picked for his rescue team. Even though he must have regarded them as his best, they all made mistakes, especially at first. But they also support the statement that one of the finest things men and women do is rescue men and women, even when they know they are rescuing the dead. This statement takes into account the Egyptian bas-relief, the drunks, and the sobbing radios.

  AT 10:30, WHILE THE RESCUERS were still waiting at Meriwether for the doctor and medical supplies to arrive, rumors and uncertainties were spreading through the camp. They spread in waves and, like waves, spent themselves draining into the sand, but one kept resurfacing—the rumor that there were injured men downriver waiting to be picked up. Jansson left in a speedboat hoping to bring back the eleven missing men, but the report turned out to be about Dodge and Sallee, who had been seen walking upriver by several boatloads of picnickers. This is a common enough way to start off a rescue operation—running after a rumor that turns out to be a misinterpretation of something already known.

  For a while Jansson patrolled the lower river, signaling with a flashlight and occasionally cutting off his motor and yelling. Finally a speedboat arrived with two doctors in it, T. L. Hawkins of Helena and his guest, R. E. Haines of Phoenix, Arizona, and Jansson transferred to their boat and landed at the mouth of Mann Gulch. Soon the big excursion boat with the rescue party in it arrived, only to discover they all were at the mouth of the wrong gulch—Dodge and Sallee had come down a gulch below Mann Gulch. When they arrived at this lower one that came to be called Rescue Gulch, they discovered that the litters had been left six miles back at Hilger Landing. Almost as soon as the speedboat started back to get them, rumors and tension mounted among the crew. One of the worst things a rescue crew does is wait—they wanted to start uphill immediately to find the injured men and let the litter crew come when the litters arrived. Jansson knew he had only one man who could lead them back through night and fire and rolling rocks and exploding trees—Sallee, who alone knew that he was just seventeen years old. Acting again on the assumption that the one sure way to quiet a crew is to get them to do something, Jansson lined them up and conducted roll call, only to discover he had six or seven men too many. They were picnickers who had smuggled themselves into the big excursion boat in the hope they could join the rescue crew. He had to cut them out and send them back. That left him with a crew of twelve, counting himself, the doctors, and Sallee, all tough men who had worked all day and now would work all night and probably the coming day in the agonizing valley.

  It was 11:30 before Jansson and his crew started up Rescue Gulch. They had two litters but only one blanket, which, as it turned out, was all that was sent back to them when they had sent out for blankets. By now the insanity of the fire had passed on, and it lay twitching around its edges, like something dead but still with nerve ends. Its self-inflicted injuries had been great and had turned black. It lay in burned grass and split rocks with its passion spent. The crew crossed through the weakened fire-line into the world that might be dead.

  About two-thirds of the way to the top they heard a shout, which turned out to be Rumsey coming down the hill to refill the canteen for Hellman, who had been drinking water, getting sick at the stomach, then drinking more water until he drank it all. Rumsey told Jansson that he thought his guard Harrison was dead, because when last seen Harrison had been sitting with his pack on his back not able to take it off. Rumsey didn’t know if the others had survived.

  Later at the Review, when Jansson was asked if Rumsey had made any detailed comment to him at this time about himself, Jansson replied, “He made the following comment, ‘The Lord was good to me—he put wings on my feet and I ran like hell.’“ This was one good Methodist talking to another.

  Nearly half a mile away the crew could hear Hellman shouting for water. In the valley of ashes there was another sound—the occasional explosion of a dead tree that would blow to pieces when its resin became so hot it passed the point of ignition. There was little left alive to be frightened by the explosions. The rattlesnakes were dead or swimming the Missouri. The deer were also dead or swimming or euphoric. Mice and moles came out of their holes and, forgetting where their holes were, ran into the fire. Following the explosion that sent the moles and ashes running, a tree burst into flames that almost immediately died. Then the ashes settled down again to rest until they rose in clouds when the crew passed by.

  Jansson, Rumsey, and Sallee pushed ahead of the main party to get water to Hellman. Jansson was the leader of the rescue crew, and he should tell it: “Hellman’s face, arms, legs, and back were severely burned with loose flesh hanging in patches. He complained of the cold and was very thirsty. We let him rinse out his mouth and take on a little water. Water upset his stomach at first.”

  In ten or fifteen minutes the two doctors arrived. They gave Hellman a hypo and one quart of plasma, applied salve, transferred him to a litter, and then covered him with the one blanket. According to Jansson, “Bill’s burned flesh had a terrific odor. He was in severe pain but took his experience magnificently. Bill’s courage made men weep.”

  JANSSON HAD SEEN MEN WEEP and had wep
t himself, but as soon as he saw that the problem was medical and the medical men were there, he was on the move again. He picked two of the rescue crew to accompany him across the ridge and into Mann Gulch to explore ahead for the doctors and be ready to point out where the living and the dead lay hidden. He must have picked out the two he trusted most—one was Don Roos, assistant ranger from the Lincoln District, and the other the seventeen-year-old boy he had met only a few hours before who by now was on his way to prove his own secret belief that he was the best man on the crew.

  It was 1:20 A.M. when the three crossed the ridge and started down the other side, where they soon ran into what Jansson describes as a “twelve-foot rim rock breaking off on the Mann Gulch side.” Jansson says they had trouble finding a gap in it; others before them had, too.

  It would not be exact to say that the three in descending at night into the remnants of Mann Gulch were descending into the valley of the shadow of death, because there was practically nothing left standing to cast a shadow. Since dead trees occasionally exploded and then subsided weakly into dying flames, perhaps it would be more exact to say they were descending into the valley of the candles of death. Rumsey speaks of the night as a “pincushion of fire.”

  At about 1:50 they heard a cry below and to the right. As they continued to descend, “the updrafts brought a very suspicious smell,” but Jansson says that, because the wind was tricky, it was difficult to determine “whether there was a series of bodies ahead or whether we were just smelling Sylvia.”

  It took them another ten minutes to find Sylvia, probably because Sylvia had been slipping in and out of consciousness during that time.

  When Jansson, Roos, and Sallee reached him, Sylvia was standing on a rock slanting heavily downhill. Hunched over and wobbling to keep his balance, he couldn’t stop talking. “Please don’t come around and look at my face; it’s awful.” Then he said, “Say, it didn’t take you fellows long to get here.” He thought it was 5:00 in the morning. Jansson pulled out his watch and said, “It’s 2:00 A.M. on the nose.” Then in his report, Jansson speaks to us. “Since his hands were burned to charred clubs, I peeled an orange and fed it to him section by section.”

  Sylvia said, “Say, fellows, I don’t think I’ll be able to walk out of here.” Jansson told him his walking days were over for the time being and he was “going to get a free ride out.” He tried to make this a joke, although it is hard to make jokes at night on a hillside that smells of burned flesh.

  Sylvia was worried about his shoes, which Dodge had taken off and placed behind a rock, so Jansson combed the slope with a flashlight until he found them. The knowledge that his shoes had been discovered comforted Sylvia, probably because he could not retain knowledge and had slipped back to thinking he would have to walk to the river.

  About 2:20 the doctors and most of the rescue crew arrived and treated Sylvia as they had Hellman. Dr. Hawkins agreed with Jansson that it would be dangerous to attempt to move Sylvia and Hellman before daybreak, although the crew was ready to start stumbling in darkness through rocks and reefs to the river.

  Sylvia complained of the cold, as Hellman had, but Hellman was wrapped in the only blanket the crew had brought back on its return trip from Hilger Landing. Since most of the men were not wearing jackets, “some of them stripped off their shirts and undershirts to wrap around Joe to keep him warm.” As he was still cold, half-naked they huddled close to him.

  When he got warm, he got happy again. Several years ago Dr. Hawkins, who treated both Hellman and Sylvia on the ridge and then in the hospital, told me that, if I were burned and wanted to be as happy as Joe Sylvia had been, I should get terribly burned. “Then,” he said, “your sensory apparatus dumps into your bloodstream.” He added, “Usually it takes until the next day to clog your kidneys. In the meantime, it is possible to have spells when you think you are happy.”

  Since only two could cuddle close to Sylvia at a time, others of the rescue crew spread out across the hillside looking for eleven missing men by flashlight and candlelight. It was like high mass until dawn—lights walked about all night in darkness.

  Sylvia encouraged those who remained with him by telling them that before they had arrived he had heard voices of men calling from above. They were the voices of men working and he had shouted back at them. Perhaps, then, it would be more exact to call Mann Gulch on this night the valley of candles and voices of dead men working.

  DAYLIGHT CAME A LITTLE AFTER four o’clock, and Jansson walked only a few yards before running into Harrison’s body. He identified it by the Catholic medallion around its neck and the snake-bite kit which he had given Harrison when Harrison became recreation guard at Meriwether. His body lay face down pointing uphill and looking as if, instead of being a Catholic, he were a Moslem fallen in prayer. Jansson describes the earth as it looked at daybreak.

  The ground appearance was that a terrific draft of superheated air of tremendous velocity had swept up the hill exploding all inflammable material, causing a wall of flame (which I had observed from below at 5:30 P.M. the previous evening) six hundred feet high to roll over the ridge and down the other side and continue over ridges and down gulches until the fuels were so light that the wall could not maintain heat enough to continue. This wall covered three thousand acres in ten minutes or less. Anything caught in the direct path of the heat blast perished.

  Three thousand acres is close to four and three-quarters square miles.

  At about 4:40 A.M. they started to carry Sylvia down Mann Gulch to the river. The crew that left with him was only six men and the doctors, so Sallee had to take his turn carrying the litter. It was also up to him to help identify the bodies—they tagged three while carrying Sylvia down the hillside. Jansson, who was noted for being a hard man on himself and his men, was sorry for Sallee. What a great compliment for a seventeen-year-old.

  While they continued downhill, Jansson continued to be puzzled about why Harrison’s body had been found so close to Sylvia. He had heard from both Sallee and Rumsey that Harrison had given out from exhaustion, so Jansson had expected to find his body much lower on the hillside and farther back than any of the others. That he got up and climbed to where he did is as much a monument to his courage as the cross they put there afterwards.

  Jansson is the only one to have left an account at all inclusive of the discovery, identification, and removal of the bodies. Near each body he left a note under a pile of rocks identifying the body and summarizing the evidence on which the identification had been made. He may have intended to expand these notes into a more complete account, but he never did. If he had tried to say more, it would have been too much, for him and for us.

  Lower down the hillside than they thought any of the crew would be found, they came upon Stanley J. Reba’s body; but when they examined it, they found he had broken a leg and then no doubt had rolled down the slope into the fire. He had literally burned to death. Most of the others, in all likelihood, had died of suffocation and were burned afterwards.

  Sylvia was carried to the mouth of Mann Gulch by Jansson and his crew of six, arriving there only a short time before Hellman reached the river by way of Rescue Gulch, carried by Rumsey and other members of the rescue crew. Neither Sylvia nor Hellman was suffering, because, as Dr. Hawkins adds, “their burns were so deep and hard their nerve ends were destroyed.”

  Each man was soon picked up by a speedboat, and each man’s spirits rose. Sylvia arrived at the hospital in Helena about 10:00 A.M. and Hellman about half an hour later. Dr. Hawkins told me that 10:00 was about time for the kidneys to fail. He immediately ordered an examination, and the report was as expected, “no urine found.” There soon came an end to euphoria; both Sylvia and Hellman were dead by noon.

  By 1:00, Jansson, who had been in charge of moving Sylvia to the hospital in Helena, was back in Mann Gulch to renew the search with a fresh crew, including Dodge, and a helicopter to fly the bodies to Helena. According to his plans, he should have been there at least
three hours earlier, but the “eggbeater,” which had been ordered from Missoula, picked him up at 12:30 instead of 9:00. It’s hard for the woods and machines to run on the same schedule, and almost never is it the woods that are late.

  Jansson had been the first one to be taken in on the helicopter shuttle, and he immediately started uphill tagging bodies. He started where they had found the three at daybreak and then, as he says, worked up the ridge “by contours.” He says that he did not have much time to gather up the personal effects scattered around the bodies: “The terrific blast of heat burned all clothing off, releasing non-inflammable effects, which, if not pinned down by the body, were carried as high as one hundred feet farther up the hill.” He found watches or the remains of wallets only by rolling a body over.

  Late in the afternoon he looked downhill and saw a “charred stump of a man.” He already had found the ninth body, “so I didn’t count him and didn’t go close enough to determine if it was really a remains.” He was through for the day, a long day that had begun early the day before. Not until the next morning, the morning of the seventh, were all the remains found.