The Fire Rises

The Fire Rises

My father was an Eagle Scout when being an Eagle Scout meant something. When I was young, he taught me the proper way to build a campfire, and also about Houdini, and the way Houdini died. My father told me that—if I fell asleep near running water—dragonflies would come and sew my eyelids shut. For nightmares, he once offered ibuprofen.

I am sitting on the floor of my room in Stockmore Guard Station in Utah, and though I’m not thinking about any of this directly, these bits are always there. I palm a pair of wool socks, a raincoat. I’ve surrounded myself with plastic baggies, and they look like the shiny skins of organs under the lamplight, each waiting for my hands to pack it full and seal it tight. I am slow and methodical, touching everything. Fourteen pairs of seamless underwear, two sports bras, a puffy jacket with four duct-tape patches. One baggie is medicinal: Desitin, hydrocortisone, and Benadryl, for sleeping. I put all objects into piles: BIC lighters and ball-point pens and extra leather shoelaces. Other firefighters have told me that I will always be forgetting something, that over the years I will get worse, not better, at packing my personal gear bag.

Because it is the beginning of fire season, nothing smells yet. The sleeping bag and liner—both assigned to Bill last year—are neutral, newly laundered. My spare crew t-shirts are un-routed by sweat lines and only one of them, so far, is holed: five tears on the right shoulder, the nipping of my chainsaw’s metal dogs. All the gear issued to me this season is marked, in sharpie, with a number one—the sleeping bag; sleeping pad and liner; personal gear bag like a large, rough-skinned duffel; radio; GPS; and camera. I was number eight last season, but this year I am the crew’s “number one girl.”

I say, “I am the only girl this year.”

They’ve built a fire in the pit outside my window, and I listen to their voices—all nine of them—as I take my time, do the gear bag up right. It is a new situation still to me, to live in a guard station with only men, to look forward at the months and to see that these are the people who will fill them. I do not know then how this will work, that I will be close to my crew in a way women are not usually close to men, in a way that is familiar and easy and everyday.

And it is every day. Because in wildland firefighting, crews like to go out on “full rolls,” or fourteen-day shifts on a wildfire. These fourteen days will usually start at 0600 and end at 2200, 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., unless a high-ranking supervisor can justify more than sixteen hours of work in a day. On either side of these fourteen operational days, crews are allotted four days for travel and a single, final day for rehab, for sharpening tools, cleaning trucks, mending the broken. After a full roll, crews will reset with two mandatory, paid days off—which is the only chance we’ll have to be away from each other, and only then if you’ve got the luxury of a home that isn’t the shared guard station. Then we become available again.

My first fire season, which was last year, saw me work five full rolls with a jumbled sixth—a week here, four days there—on smaller, initial attack fires. I tallied up numbers when the end came in October: fifteen fires, four helicopter rides, eighty-seven nights on the ground. In August and September, I’d showered just eight times. In less than five months, my crew had banked nine-hundred and sixty-four hours of overtime. All of it we worked together.

I lay the baggies out next to my gear bag. After tonight, my bag will be stowed in one of our three fire trucks where it will remain, untouched, until we pop our first fire. And then I’ll be living out of it for up to two weeks at a time, rationing my toothpaste and my contact lens solution. This is how I begin to think in essentials; this is how I learn what is enough.

 

 

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*Names have been changed