Out West

Out West

It began with bloody noses. My third night in Utah, I brushed my wrist against the sudden heaviness, brought back a slick palm. I left a broken trail to the sink, blood like delicately splayed roots on my sheets, the tang of it on my dry lips, my chin. It brought a strange tightness to my chest, the sight of so much red—bright, animal—on those thin slips of toilet paper. This had never happened to me before. And then it happened to me again the fourth night, the fifth.

Those first mornings I would get up with the aftertaste of fear like something acidic in my throat. My fingers—slender, well-nailed, a point of pride—swollen and fat, long bloated things. This was Utah for me, this was how it started: mild dehydration, dryness in every aspect of the air, fear on me like a dog’s smell. Caught in the confluence of two canyons, the Duchesne a quiet blue companion, I looked out of the wide-eyed windows of Stockmore Guard Station, one-thousand one-hundred and ninety miles away from home.

This was Out West. I had arrived.

On May 28, 2012, I worked my first day on the Kings Peak Wildland Fire Module. The next day my second, the next my third, and so on until October 13, 2012, when I worked my last and brought an end to my first fire season.

If I’m in the mood to think about things cleanly, I use numbers to describe those months: 144 days out West, 123 days at work, 21 days on break. Five 2-week rolls. Fifteen fires. Four helicopter rides, 87 nights on the ground, eight showers in August and September. In total, 964 hours of overtime.

But that feels like lying. While sharp, while clean, these numbers are at best half-truths, a streambed hung in mud, the reflection of the clouds obscured, distorted. And while I cannot give my entire fire season over to words—reality is too much for this—I can make an impression of it, a track in the dirt. In “144 Days,” I want to break into the best bits, the loudest memories, and, because fire is as much a foreign language as Spanish or French or Portuguese, I want to begin to explain it.

It began with bloody noses. And then, somehow, it ended.

*Names and some details have been changed.

My short non-fiction piece “Kings Peak” discusses my decision to work as a wildland firefighter.

Lingo

Roll: A “full roll” refers to working 14 operational days on a fire, not including travel to and from the fire (which can add up to another 4 days), plus an additional “rehab” day (cleaning trucks, reassembling trailer, sharpening tools, ordering new supplies, etc.) once home; after a full roll, the crew must take two days off, which are both paid; occasionally these two days will be given “in place”—the crew is put up in a hotel near the fire so that they can be brought back for another roll without having to travel excessively far, as occurred to us (16 days in Idaho, 2 days off in Montana, 15 more days in Idaho).

Photos 1. On the Uinta Fire in the High Uintas Wilderness in the Ashley National Forest (crew member's photo) 2. On the Pinyon Fire on the Salt Lake City National Guard Base (crew member's photo)