The Arrival

The Arrival

I. 

There was snow on Wolf Creek Pass. And sky, so much sky. The two-lane road climbed from Kamas in a series of bends, peaked at over nine-thousand feet, and then fell to seven-thousand to meet the Duchesne River, to run along the canyon bottom. There was a large handmade sign before one of the cattle guards: WARNING - Cows on Highway. Every so often long drives would shoot off to the left and right, the rooves of ranches poking their noses up above the lodgepole and aspen and beetle killed pine. The road to Grandaddy Lakes hit Wolf Creek Pass at an imperfect angle, hit just as the pavement curved slightly up, slightly out. I took this turn, drove a hundred feet, signaled left. A big brown and yellow board read: Stockmore Guard Station / Ashley National Forest. I remember looking at the hills, the bald scrub hills, and thinking that it was an insufficient word for them. In Iowa, where the land is flat, there are hills; these here belonged to a different class entirely.

The asphalt receded into gravel as I passed the yard: a long building and cache with a fence perimeter. Inside there were two trailers, some broken farm equipment and three Kings Peak branded trucks. And then, just past the yard, the guard station itself – squat, rectangular, yellow, the dirt lawn occasionally patched with green and brown grass. The key stuck in the back door, and when I finally shouldered my way in, it was to an empty kitchen. A sign on one of the three fridges read “Open.” A cupboard was marked “Free.” A room on the main floor said, “Olivia and Clare.”

The bed was narrow, the two windows thin and slotted high up on the graying walls. The closet was mostly empty: a floral wrap-around dress, a Bridger-Teton Interagency Fire work jacket, a straw cowboy hat, tennis shoes and pink and brown flip flops. Olivia had Italian comic books, a foodie magazine (“Wasatch Cuisine” or something similar) and old copies of The Onion. Even after I’d moved in, put my things on the dresser, my duffel bag under the bed, our room felt unused, felt lonely. The first night we shared it together, Olivia slammed open the window, let in the wind and the sixty-degree weather. It became habit, the slam of the window, until I was opening it too, automatically almost, even on the weekends when the room was mine. Olivia taught me early in the season. Sleep in the cold.

II.

Stockmore Guard Station was forty-five minutes away from Duchesne, the one-stoplight town where the Kings Peak ranger station was located. Park City, home to the Sundance Film Festival, was an hour away; Salt Lake City, nearly two. The closest town, Hanna, was ten minutes down Highway 35. Its most prominent feature: a bar, café and restaurant all congealed to one another like jam. Inside the restaurant, they served fry sauce—a Utah specialty: mayonnaise and ketchup mixed—while outside, hummingbirds swarmed the hanging feeders, thick as flies.

Right next door to Stockmore, the cache housed bits of everything: chainsaw bars, MREs, bladder bags, tools, p-cord, leather gloves, files, Jerry’s, belt weather kits, fire shelters, Handy-Dandys… It was for storage and re-supply and maintenance, an inventory nightmare.

Outside the cache, the trucks—white and green-striped—had peculiarities and personalities and the bad habit of needing a jump after two weeks parked. They were big and diesel and heavily modified: Fatback, or lovingly Fatty, had a permanent topper and a slide-out shelf in its bed (which, if parked on an incline, was liable to come screaming out at whoever was unlucky enough to need a tool or chainsaw or whatever else was stored). The other truck, Cream, was so named because of the ease for which it could be mistaken for an ice cream truck, this back compartment allowing us to store an ungodly amount of equipment. The supervisor’s truck—creatively the “Sup Truck”—housed an extra diesel fuel tank in its bed, a long red box of Jerry’s marked “Moon Lake” and a general yardsale of tools, maps, line gear and months old peanut butter Cliff Bars. The Kings Peak trailer, in which could be found, among other things, an ATV, printer, generator and three action-packers labeled “Kitchen Supplies,” “Satellite Equipment” and “Survival Kit,” sat in anticipation a few feet from Fatty. On its roof, ten QBs, 10 boxes of MREs and a scattering of sun bleached Gatorade flats snuggled in together.

The idea was that we would be efficient and self-sufficient. We had a two-hour travel restriction tethering us to Stockmore, where everyone lived and everything waited: Fire Ready. Between the three trucks and our trailer, we could sustain ourselves for a roll, even an extended 21-dayer, without much resupply, if any at all. Drop us in the woods, is what we were saying, forget we’re even out here.

I liked it. We took care of ourselves.

Lingo

MREs: Initially designed for military use, a “Meal, Ready-to-Eat” is a small brown package containing a high-calorie meal and is eaten when other food cannot be delivered to firefighters; it includes such delights as instant coffee (usually taken as a swilled-with-water-in-mouth shot), a flameless heater (which must be leaned against “a rock or something” while in use), jalapenos cheese spread, Hoo Hah! chocolate bars and such wonders as “Boneless Pork Chop,” “Beef Patty” and “Sloppy Joe Filling”; according to the inspired packaging, MREs are “Warfighter Recommended, Warfighter Tested, Warfighter Approved.” After discussing said MREs with a former-Marine-current-Smoke-Jumper, who lived on nothing but for six months, this was clearly not the case (although he did show me how to make a cookie with the creamer, sugar and matches in the condiments package).
Piss pumps: Officially known as “Collapsible Backpack Pumps,” often called piss pumps or bladder bags, these 5-gallon bags of water are worn like a backpack on top of line gear (which is always awkward and involves a complex flip-and-swing motion to heft all that water weight over one’s head); a small hand pump comes off the back of the bag allowing the wearer to squirt water on small spot fires or hot spots; used during mop up when water from engines or hose lays is not available.

Tools: Used to dig line: the Pulaski, good for breaking up hard ground, and combi, used to scrap dirt back, are the two most common, although there are such tools as the rhino, rake, double bit, pounding ax (for sounding trees), etc.

P-cord: A lightweight parachute cord made from nylon and used in the suspension lines of parachutes during WWII; incredibly durable and fairly flame resistant; used to rig sprinklers, create shelters, fix packs, etc.
Files: Round files (look like a long ribbed pencil) are used to sharpen the teeth on chainsaws; flat files (rectangular, a few inches wide with a tapered handle) are used to sharpen tools. Sharper the chain, better the cut; sharper the tool, easier the digging.
Jerry’s: Large metal fuel canisters used to refill chainsaws, portable pumps, ATVs, generators, etc.

Belt weather kits: Small kits carried in line gear and used to measure weather; should include a sling psychrometer (used to gauge temperature, relative humidity and dew point), bottle of distilled water, anemometer (wind gauge), weather log and compass.
Fire shelters: What looks like a silver blanket when deployed, a fire shelter protects against radiant and convective heat; made from aluminum foil, woven silica and fiberglass, fire shelters are attached to the bottom of every firefighter’s line gear and are a last resort defense; firefighters inside their fire shelters have stilled died, and many survivors are still badly burned.
Handy-Dandys: A pocket-sized Fire Use Guidebook with information about weather, clouds, probabilty of ignition, fuel types and a whole host of other gems.
QBs: A 5-gallon plastic water bladder housed inside a cardboard box; kept in trucks and at fire camps as potable water; refilled, sometimes daily.
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. View of Stockmore from Fun Time Hill (a favorite PT hike) 2. Road from Stockmore to Duchesne 3. Stockmore Guard Station 4. On the road to Park City

An Apology

An Apology

Memories can be dangerously illusive things.

On my first two-week roll, I discussed at length the tenuousness of reality with another firefighter. Sitting on the curb of a Mormon Temple on the border of Utah and Nevada, I talked about one of my strongest childhood desires, which was to see things as they were, as they really, really were. I held a paper plate on my lap—dinner—and played with the grit and gravel, pushing it beneath my fingernails, tossing it softly across the parking lot, softly towards the row of fire trucks. Around us, crews settled on the pavement, on the grass, under a playground slide, under the stars. I wanted to see without bias, I told him, I wanted to see from outside myself. I wanted the sort of truth spelled with a capitol: Truth that was indisputable, incorruptible, above suspicion, real. 

Days later on a different fire, we rearranged rocks into a circular pattern. I told him what I knew now: perception cannot be divorced from reality because reality is perception. The lens I’ve built inside my head, my very particular way of seeing, makes reality. Without perception, the world is merely received, unprocessed and unmitigated, a sensation of the present moment. There is no true real, no baseline from which, by our own false perceptions, we deviate more or less. There is reality and reality and reality, mine and his, with no singular real standing. 

This is how I choose to make my apology. Memories, my perceptions of the past, are mine, wholly and inescapably. I still taste that old desire, to see and to see clearly—and though I cannot, I can never, I hope to be fair to the events that passed and to the people who passed in them.

Discúlpame, you say when you inadvertently brush shoulders. You are trying, but the sidewalks are narrow. Lo siento, you say, which means I’m sorry, although direct translation—I feel it—is far more mysterious.

Discúlpame, I want to say now, lo siento.

Photo 1. & 2. Grouse Creek 3. Views from Mormon Temple in Grouse Creek

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)