Life on a Fire Line Is Life at Its Limit

Suddenly a streamer of flame was racing up a line of pitch on the Jeff pine. In a second the top of the tree exploded. Someone yelled “Crown out! Into the burn!” and all of us scrambled into the smoke and flames that minutes before we hoped we had contained. The fire took off like gas burning on water, flashing over the top of the forest. Crowned out, we say. Now it would be impossible to stop. Especially with all this heavy fuel at zero moisture content, and with the hot, dry wind that had started this inferno in the first place.

“Fooey!” (or something like that) said the crew boss.

It was dark. There was a moon, but its light had been extinguished by the smoke. With goggles nearly as filthy as the air, I sensed rather than saw the other head lamps and yellow shirts around me. We were tired--no, exhausted beyond words is more like it. Which is why nobody spoke. We just leaned on our shovels or rakes or the long-handled axes called Pulaskis and breathed shallow poisoned breaths through the bandannas over our faces.

The crew boss was on the radio, reporting back to base: The fire had gotten away from us.

For three 18-hour days we’d been on this project. Even through the smoke I could smell those days accumulated in my fire-retardant shirt. There weren’t showers yet in our camp. No ice, either. And the weather was hot. And the fire made it even hotter. You’d think the wind would alleviate the heat a little, but instead it was the prime enemy, punching at us as we tried to race it through the brush and tall timber. It swirled us in smoke, and in the heart of smoke, you can’t see, you can’t breathe; Your eyes run rivulets of precious water; your head swims in the carbon monoxide. All you can do is follow the guy in front of you as you scrape your share of the firebreak line.

Muscle and stamina. The hand crews.

What they needed here were bulldozers. An army of them. But the ‘dozers were down around the vacation homes with roofs made of frivolous cedar-shake shingles that would ignite faster than an Eagle Scout’s fire. Besides, it was too steep up here. Eventually, though, the mechanized equipment would probably have a chance at this fire, as fast as it was going. Wouldn’t take long for it to burn over two ranges.

A spot of slurry, the slimy pink fire-retardant, itched on my neck. Tomorrow, with the light, the slurry bombers would be back. This evening they dropped on us. We didn’t see them coming through the smoke and barely had time to dive for cover as they skimmed the trees and dumped their load. Slurry is made to stick to what it hits, to smother the flames, and a direct hit on a person can kill. Slurry on your shovel just adds to the exasperation. The slickness on my slurried handle rubbed a blister through my glove.

A branch cracked overhead and came crashing down. The sparks splattered up around us. Too tired to run, we all just turned our heads. Griz leaned over and brushed some sparks off C.J.’s shirt.

In fire training they give you a little handout that lists 10 signals that shout WATCH OUT! One of the WATCH OUTs is “when you feel like taking a nap on the line.” In training I thought that this was ridiculous. Who could fall asleep in the adrenaline rush of fire? Now, though, the urge to lie down in the coals with the fire crackling all around was almost irresistible. The yellow web gear pack on my back weighed a thousand pounds. I could take it off, pull out the fire shelter, crawl in and sleep until California burned to Oregon. Maybe by then nobody would care about trees anymore. Maybe by then they’d have ice in the camp. Ice water. The mirage planted itself into my throat. I thought of my canteen and the muddy, ashy water that we’d found a couple hills back. Oh. Never mind. That gallon was gone half an hour ago. At two in the morning you could be sure no one was going to be hiking around trying to resupply crews’ canteens. And with the smoke and inversion, there’d be no air support. I sucked my tongue.

“Goll darned shoot fooey!” the boss said (or something like that). He told us that the project leader wanted us to chase the fire and tie into a rock wall and stream that the map showed was just a quarter of a mile away. Of course, the map didn’t remember that it hadn’t snowed up here all winter and it hadn’t rained all summer, and the stream that we were to tie into was probably as dry as my mouth.

“Alright,” he said. “Come on. Get movin’. Come on. Let’s take a hike.”

Not even a break for C-rats heated on a shovel.

I shifted my body into automatic. I rubbed a little smudge window into the lens of my goggles to be able to see the smear of light from Joe’s headlamp in front of me. Somehow my arm lifted the rake. Somehow my feet followed Joe at the regulation 10 paces. The boss and the sawyers went on ahead looking for widow-maker snags.

Through grit-clogged nostrils I smelled my sweat. Four more hours till dawn. Maybe eight till we got to sleep. Maybe a lifetime till the wind died and the fires stopped. At least until the snows.

The straps of my web gear sliced my shoulders. We started the line, each of us scraping a little deeper, and followed the fire to the rock wall and the dead stream, maybe all the way to Oregon.