The Peaks

The Peaks

“The hotshot firefighters are the genetic freaks of nature,” says Greg, or maybe it’s Chet, possibly Vince. “These real real big guys. Always first on a wildfire, just work like crazy.” Two quick beats of silence on the telephone line. “You’d have to be pretty tough to do that.”

Sitting on a bench in the gray March light, you lean back, feel the slight tug of stomach muscles. The phone is warm against your ear, your pink cheek. You’ve spoken to so many AFMOs—Assistant Fire Management Officers, the permanent firefighters in charge of hiring seasonals for U.S. national forests—that you’ve begun to blur them all together, the names and the voices and the low, rolling conversations. You sense that this AFMO, Greg or Chet or Vince, would like to say more to you, but those words—the ones he means—remain a slick film on his molars. You’d have to be a man to do that.

…

You want to be a wildland firefighter. You determined this with startling clarity on a January night. Your body sank into the family hot tub as the dark hands of the trees turned on themselves in the wind. You could not see your neighbor’s porch light because of your father’s shed, but the glow seeped outward, soaking the gutters and eaves, buttering the snow in dull yellows. When you tipped your head back, water filling up the holes in your ears, you liked the cold, muted calm. Longed to be outside forever. Looking up at the shivering shapes of the stars, you realized how much you wanted to do this. That you could do this. You’d seen female firefighters during your archaeology internship in the Kaibab National Forest: gray-haired  Punky, doe-eyed Maggie, the hotshot who wore her hair like a golden fan up high on her head, the small, nose-ringed woman who asked your advice on running trails, who stretched her arm in one long roll of muscle.

You let the thought settle, stared out into the gentle Iowa dark. After you stood with your toes in the snow-frothed grass and after you slid into the kitchen through the glass doors and after you padded quietly through your house, fingers tracing lines along the textured walls, you found that you were still determined. You wanted to be a wildland firefighter.

…

The firefighters in national forests are federal employees. On AVUE Central, the government’s contracted hiring site, twenty pages vet candidates: Are you blind? Missing extremities? Tell us about your military service, your security clearances, all those pretty little stamps in your official and personal passports. They ask if you’re male or female, if you’re black or brown or white. They glean what they can from “Clare Boerigter” and “Spanish: Professional Language Skills” and “Lived in Country: Middle East, Three-Five (3-5) Years.” You picture a man in a federal building as he pulls out tender mouthfuls of information, soft and fatty meat.

You are allowed to enter nine locations into your AVUE application, nine crews to which you can submit yourself. An interactive map lists ranger districts by state, but not who’s hiring or for what type of crew—hotshots blowing in for initial attack, handcrews beating line, engines laying hose, the smoke jumpers, the fire modules, the helitack teams. You start with Washington, with Oregon, and the five firefighters you call tell you, as though they’ve all practiced together, that it will be a difficult year for seasonal firefighters. Nobody has money. Crews are being halved. But, a Washington AFMO tells you, Region 4 is trying to diversify, and they’re giving the seasonal hiring process the shake-up. More women, more ethnicities. He lists the states of Region 4, slow and lightly slurred: “That’d be Utah, Nevada, parts of Wyoming, southern Idaho. You might see about trying them.”


Continue reading “The Peaks” in The Siren: http://sirenjournal.org/nonfiction-archive/issue-2-clare-boerigter-the-peaks/

*Names have been changed