Sage, aka: 1982 Honda XR 100

Rock climbing a few weeks ago, two ski instructor friends, Jordan and Dennis, pulled me aside.  “Susan.  We heard that you’ve been riding a dirt bike.”  Dennis put his hand on my shoulder and stooped to look me in the face.  “Really??”  I bit my lip and tried not to smile.  “It just…it doesn’t seem like you.  You’re such a hippie.”  I could only nod, sheepish but proud.

Chris (my boyfriend, as introduced in my last post) is a versatile outdoors person: skier, snowboarder, hiker, camper, boater, and dirt biker.  I matched him card for card except for the dirt biking (and snowboarding) which was okay with me, but not so much with him.  Suddenly, motorcycling became a frequent topic of conversation.  Chris started introducing friends to me as “Travis, one of those super awesome guys I go biking with,” or “Laurie – man, you should see her tear it up on her bike!”  Carolyn, one of our supervisors at the Brighton ski school, got wind of the game and called several times, pointedly mentioning that her old dirt bike “could really use someone to take it out and play”.  And so, one night I went over to Chris’s house and there it was: Carolyn’s 1982 Honda XR 100.  Chris rolled it out so I could sit on it (“Just to get a feel for it, that’s all.”).  He bit his lip as I swung one leg over and settled onto the seat, and I could see him trying to contain his excitement.  I surrendered.  “Okay!  Okay, I’ll try it.”

There’s a lot to think about on a motorcycle.  Both hands and feet have important jobs, and then there’s the rest of the body, committed to balancing and steering.  The left hand operates the clutch.  The left foot shifts gears.  The right hand has to run the front brake and the throttle, while the right foot covers the rear brake.  The bike’s twenty-seven years old.  They didn’t make electric starters for bikes twenty-seven years ago.  Starting means flicking the gear lever into neutral, holding the clutch in, and then kicking the foot lever on the right side to fire it up.  It takes a few kicks to get her purring.  I was nervous as Chris coached me from neutral into first gear.  The first time I popped the clutch the front wheel lifted, I squeezed the throttle in fear, and with a terrifying roar, the bike flipped out from under me and crashed down onto the landscaping rocks in front of Chris’s house.  That was almost the end of my motorcycling career, but Chris was persistent.  The second lesson came on a Memorial Day camping trip in Wyoming.  The whole motorcycle crew was there, with their motor homes and generators, and more dirt bikes than I could count.  Huge clay hills rose steeply from the border of our camp, and from sunup til sundown, the bikes whined and snarled up and over and around and through the hills.  Except for me.  I put-putted around the camp in first gear, my body tense under the borrowed helmet, elbow pads, chest protector and knee pads.  I slid my feet in my heavy fire boots along the ground for balance.  I was in no hurry to join the crazies at the top of the hill.  “This is fun?”  I wondered.  “I’m a hippie,” I reminded Chris.  “I don’t like noisy, environment-destroying things!”

Susan the hippie's first wobbly steps as a motorcyclist.

“Hippies invented these things.  They make it possible to do more, to go farther.  They’re environment-explorers.”  He gave me his best persuasive grin.  “Come on; let’s try for second gear this time.”

Weeks later, after more lessons and more practice, with Chris as the patient coach, I’ve learned that the bike’s weight is easier to handle when it’s moving quickly, and that the smaller, 4-stroke engine gets better gas mileage than an average 4-cylinder car.  We ride in the desert, not in the mountains, through sage brush, sand, and clay, miles from civilization.  The desert-scape is beautiful, but monotonous.  The terrain I could cover in one long, hot day on foot is less than a quarter of the distance possible on a motorcycle, and the engine’s noise dissipates rapidly in the open air.  Steep hills are still terrifying, as are speeds greater than 30 mph (braking, downshifting, and turning are also challenging), but I’m getting a feel for the interplay of clutch, gears, and throttle, and on the flat straightaway, I enjoy the feeling of being in control of such a powerful machine.  Susan the…motorcyclist?  Perhaps not, but it would seem that my hippie sensibilities aren’t as opposed to riding a dirt bike as I’d thought.

One weekend, Chris and I drove into the salty desert west of the city.  We passed the Great Salt Lake on the way.  The biggest water for miles, it runs all the way into the horizon, and with the smell of salt and the wheeling sea gulls, it’s the closest thing to the ocean I’ve seen in months.  Jack and Jen, other ski instructor friends, were waiting for us out in the desert, near the sand dunes.  They buzzed off in a second, and I waved Chris ahead while I started my bike, slipped it into first, and slowly urged it up into second, then third gear.  The terrain around the dunes was flat and solid, and I felt confident enough to relax and look up from the trail.  Chris, Jack, and Jen were small, colorful shapes ahead of me, dwarfed by the immense dunes which shone golden in the sun.  Behind them, to the east, a storm was brewing and the sky was colored indigo.  Where the furthest dunes met the horizon, the sunlight became refracted, inverting the shape of the dunes into a shimmering mirage: fata morgana, a phenomenon I hadn’t seen since Antarctica.  The warm wind felt good in my face, and I nudged the bike into fourth gear with my left toe.  That’s when I realized I was smiling.

Back in May, I moved northeast out of Sandy into Cottonwood Heights, a stone’s throw from the canyon where I spent my winter.  I’m living with two ski instructors, Tim and Connie, and their two boys (10 & 8), plus three cats, one turtle, and one black Labrador/Great Dane mix.  It’s a house they built themselves, custom-designed to comfortably fit their six-foot-plus frames.  I need a step stool to reach the top shelves of the pantry, and I have to stand on my tip-toes to work at the countertop. The house is full of light, music, and color.  The windows at the front of the house are open to a panorama of the Wasatch Mountains.  There are speakers in every corner, even in the bathroom, and Jack Johnson, Michael Franti, Joni Mitchell, and Bruce Springsteen are regulars on the playlist. Photographs of family and friends plaster the fridge, walls and tables. My room is huge and bright, with six floor-to-ceiling windows.  It’s a room that begs to be decorated and inhabited.  For the first time, my few backpacking possessions seem inadequate, and within a week of moving in I’d already arranged to have my favorite Peruvian rug shipped to me from NH.  Tim and Connie’s is a house that feels like a home.

Though I endure rather than enjoy the city life, staying in Salt Lake through the summer has allowed me to take pleasure in being a part of a community of friends and their dogs, of rock-climbing partners, hikers, strong, creative women and outdoorsy men.  Winter relationships have grown and blossomed.  Chris, or Koogs, my skiing partner, has become my best friend and boyfriend, and partner in most things.  Together we’ve road-tripped to Colorado and to Utah’s Shakespeare capital to see Henry V.  We’ve hiked and biked and camped; gone to outdoor concerts, festivals, barbeques and parties; dog-sat, floated the Weber River on inner tubes, and soaked in the Diamond Fork hot springs.  Having someone with whom to share the summer enriched each moment and experience.

One of the summer’s highlights was a trip to Moab, Utah’s red rock Mecca and the gateway to Arches National Park.  Chris and I left Salt Lake one Friday night in May as the full moon was rising, and spent the weekend camping on top of a rock, with no roof over us but the stars.  On foot and on borrowed mountain bikes, we explored Edward Abbey’s desert paradise.  Early spring in the Utah desert means vivid green life against red buttes and mesas.  Biking before sunset on our second night, we turned a corner and observed a small grove of mature aspens standing in front of a sheer red wall.  Their bark glowed green in the low sunlight, and their slender branches curved gracefully, elegantly, as if frozen in the middle of a slow, twisting dance.  In that cool, potent moment, I believed we had found the lost Ent-wives of the Lord of the Rings.

As the warmth of the summer in the desert west fades and I look ahead to a second winter spent in Salt Lake City, it would be easy to be fearful, to wonder why I’m not moving on, as my custom has been.  Instead, I’m excited.  I feel like a new stage is coming in the life of Susan the Traveler.  The wave of serendipity that I’ve been surfing has become an eddy, a current swirling contrary to the main flow.  Though the pace has slowed, the voyage continues, and I’m happy to float on these friendly waters, trusting the swell to carry me where I belong.  I’ve got a new set of telemark skis and my old job at Brighton back, and I’m ready to make the most out of the winter and enjoy my new community of friends.  Let it snow!

*

Nine days before, the Northern Utah Regular Crew had been released from the Cliffs Fire and was on the road again, pushing south to Arizona. We pulled over for a potty break at the Glen Canyon Dam visitor’s center, and Maren took my picture at the overlook. Orange and white rocks and bright blue water fill the frame behind me. I’m making the money sign with my hands, rubbing my fingers against my thumbs. This is me getting paid to take my picture at Glen Canyon on my government-sponsored road trip! Past the dam, the road wound through narrow, red slits in the rocks, then descended into the dry, flat prairie below. The entire horizon had disappeared behind a curtain of thick, blue smoke, and we were still 100 miles away from the fire.

There are countless theories of fire management. Where the fire is burning – near a large town or city, in a designated wilderness area, in a large tourist area – and what the forest management plan of the landowners is will determine the strategies and tactics. We, the NUTREGs, had been sent to the Kaibab National Forest, near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, where the local policy is to allow fires to burn instead of suppressing them completely. This approach promotes a healthy forest by cleaning out underbrush and allowing larger trees to grow to maturity. When lightning strikes, as it did a few days before our crew arrived, the forest managers let it burn unhindered but supervised within a pre-determined boundary. The fire we were assigned to monitor, the Anderson, had flared up and begun to burn outside its allowable perimeter. We arrived after dark, and were sent directly to the front to dig hot line around the slop-over. Our crew spread out across the edge of fire where it was burning in the duff. Pulaskis and shovels went first to churn up the soil and cut through any roots. The scraping tools followed, exposing the mineral soil, and I came last, armed with a rake. It was my job to be quality control, and to scrape burning material into the fire, and any unburned out into the green. Black to black and green to green, we say. The flames were small, but the smoke was thick in my throat and the fire cast an orange light that was gorgeous and dramatic against the otherwise featureless dark. Finally, I felt like a real firefighter.

The first night’s excitement quickly gave way to tediousness. With the fire safely contained once more, our job became fire-sitting: keeping our eyes on the fire and making sure it didn’t escape its boundaries again. Even though we saw little dramatic fire activity, there was plenty of smoke in the air from stump holes, smoldering downed logs and the occasional torching tree. My legs were black from walking through ash, and the inside of my nose became crusted with hard, black fire-boogers. Piney smoke scent clung to my clothes and stayed in my throat and sinuses: vaguely comforting, like a hot, smoky Christmas. High winds kept us busy for a few days as we hiked over the unburned terrain in a grid pattern, our eyes scanning the ground for embers blown out of the fire perimeter. Gridding makes for long, frustrating days, as communication is passed from person to person down the line, like a game of Telephone, and doesn’t always arrive at its intended recipient in coherent form. Feet begin to ache in the boots; backs begin to ache under the weight of the issued backpacks. Everyone carries thirty pounds of standard gear, plus a fire shelter. The shelter weighs five pounds, is shaped like an oversized brick, and is stored in a separate compartment under the pack, where its square corners rub large raw patches on the buttocks as we walk. “Shelter Ass” is a common complaint among firefighters.

The crew settled into a comfortable routine. We drove fifteen miles into town every evening. Herds of elk, twenty, sometimes thirty strong would bound across the road in front of our headlights. We found their shed antlers in the woods while we gridded. Our vehicles began to look like hillbilly hunting rigs, with antlers tied to the roof and to the front grilles. There were signs on the main road that announced “SMOKE: CONTROLLED BURN” and “Do Not Report Smoke”. I’d smile as we passed them – they’re talking about our fire! Dinner and breakfast was in Tusyan (the last town before Grand Canyon Village, it’s not a town so much as a tourist trap) at the Best Western hotel buffet. We’d line out and march into the clean, pink bathrooms to wash our hands, then line up again to go through the buffet. Filthy, stinking, black-faced and ravenous, we wolfed our food down alongside the white, summery tourists speaking French, German or Japanese and politely nibbling at their meals. The line between town and the neighboring wilderness was often blurred. Coyote, deer and fox were often spotted trotting down the sidewalk in Tusyan, or grazing in the landscaped storefronts. I came out of the hotel one night to see a small bull snake clinging to the faux stonework front, twisted between the square “bricks”, his tongue flickering like the laser on an automatic door. Nights were spent in the Tusyan campground. I slept without a tent every night, watching the moon grow larger and the stars dimmer, feeling at peace in the outdoors.

After twelve days of doing the boring work, we were finally given the chance to have some fun. We were two days away from being sent home, and the Kaibab forestry management wanted to tighten up the borders of the Anderson fire. It was ringed on four sides by a narrow dirt road, which should have been enough to hold the fire, but the management wanted to send our NUTREG crew home without having to replace us. The plan was to burn off the southwestern edge of the fire, to remove any fuel from between the fire and the road. I was given a drip torch (five gallon metal cylinders that drip a mix of gas and diesel over a flaming wick and then onto the ground as liquid fire), along with Kim and Monica from Pleasant Grove, and the rest of the crew teamed up with two local fire engines and spread out along the road where we’d be burning. Their job was to make sure none of our fire crossed the road.

It was hot and hard to breathe, and I felt sad at the destruction even while the adrenaline made my heart beat faster and a deep, primitive fascination made my eyes wide. I dripped the flaming mix on sage brush and in the deep pine needles at the base of the old ponderosa pines and then watched it creep outward in a black ring of fire. The rings met other rings and grew in strength, then climbed into the low juniper trees and immature pines. It didn’t take much fuel, only a few drips for a twenty-by-twenty square. The fire did the rest on its own. I was stationed on the edge of the road; Kim and Monica were working further interior. Brandon, our burn boss, moved back and forth between us, directing our torches, making sure our safety zones were still clear. When it got too hot we backed off and stood on the road, watching the smoke darken and thicken. The forest behind us had become a roiling apocalypse: I could hear the air being sucked in around burning trees, see the flames growing until they exploded into 100-foot plumes that whipped straight up the trees until they were engulfed. The smoke turned black each time a tree torched. It billowed violently in layers of blue, gray, black, and white thick enough to block out the sun. The light changed from bright sunshine to yellow sulphur and then, as the fire intensified, the only color was smoke. Branches ignited, flared, and curled up toward the trunk in sparkly orange curlicues. I watched a moth the size of my palm try to climb up the side of a tree to safety. It was sluggish and unbalanced in the super-heated air.

The speed of the destruction was incredible. One minute, crunchy green and brown leaf litter, thick sage and juniper, the next, black inferno. The scent of the sage rose as it burned. The heat, as I dragged fire along the edge of the road and dotted the trees closer to the flames, ranged from mildly uncomfortable to painful on my exposed ears and cheeks. I kept a bandana around my neck to pull over my face for protection, and pulled my shroud out of my hard hat and around the back of my neck. Engine 742 had pulled up into the middle of the firefighters holding the line, and was spraying water on a huge ponderosa on the edge of the road that was burning on one side. Brandon pulled Kim, Monica and I off of the fire, across the road, to allow the flames to die down a little before laying more fuel on the ground. At the same moment, the wind paused, as if drawing its breath, and everything was still for ten seconds. Then the wind exhaled, toward the east this time, and then all hell broke loose, and Brandon was running toward Engine 742 as the fire whirl roared, twenty feet high, spewing embers and live fire onto the ground on the wrong side of the road. Our crewmembers that were holding the line ran to help and the spot was quickly lined, the engine extricated, and the flames calmed. It was scary and exhilarating, thirty long seconds when anything could have happened. Fire fascinates us, and we love it when things start blowing up, love that it’s our job to be on the front line when it does.

We got helicopter rides, fourteen days of sixteen hour shifts and hazard pay, got to see a whole new part of the country, AND got to set it on fire. All the veterans voiced their satisfaction, but me, the first-timer, I was content to sit in the back of the truck on that last night as we drove back to town, tired, smoky, dirty, staring at the full moon as it rose over the horizon. It was wreathed in the smoke we’d made that day. A firefighter’s moon.

It was an exciting beginning: I was walking into the Salt Lake district office at 1700 hours, after another long day of little to do, when my supervisor pushed through the door into the parking lot and shouted to me, Grahame, and Maren, “NUTREGs got called up! Meeting at dispatch at 1830. Get your stuff – you’re going to Cedar City.” There was no room for nervousness. The excitement was all. Finally, we were going to fight fire! This was the start of overtime hours, of travel benefits and per diems, hazard pay, and the hope of the elusive, mythical fourteen-day tour. Fourteen days is the maximum time an individual is allowed to work without any time off. In a busy summer, a person might get several two-week assignments, back to back to back if they’re lucky. This is where the money starts to add up. This summer, however, nobody’s working that long. Nationwide, the fires have been small and quickly controlled. Being called out on the NUTREGs crew means that we are available for fourteen days, but if we’re not needed beyond two, three, four days, we’ll be sent back home and disbanded, and then it will be someone else’s turn to answer the next call. Everyone’s been hurting for work this summer. Everyone on the NUTREGs was crossing their fingers for a fourteener, knowing the high probability against a full ride.

With potty breaks and refueling stops, dinner, breakfast, and a ten p.m. curfew, it took us until 1100 the next morning to arrive on scene at the Cliffs Fire incident command post. Then there was paperwork, then plenty of time to get our gear in order, and then we were directed to the helibase. The helibase. My ears perked up when I heard that. The fire was behind the green cliffs we could see from the highway. A hike would have taken hours. Instead, two helicopters, a maroon A-star and a smaller, yellow ship, were shuttling crews to the top of the cliffs, to the center of the fire. I went in the first load. I sat up front, Sarah, my supervisor, and Kelly, from the Mt. Green helicopter crew, sat in the back, and then we were off, juddering over the other crews waiting to be transported, then over the highway, then lifting over the cliffs, higher and higher until the red rock buttes behind the cliffs rose into sight, like a forbidden red city behind green walls. The helicopter landed in the burned area, the black, on top of the cliffs, and we were ushered out through the rotor wash that whipped ashes into my face and tugged at my pant legs. Smoke made the day seem dark and hazy, and ominous purple thunderheads to the west pushed erratic winds across the devastated terrain. The scene was electric with adrenalin. When the whole NUTREGs crew was present on the cliff-top, we set off hiking, our two chainsaws in front setting a fast pace, despite the tricky footing over unburned tree stems and rough, round, pock-marked lava rocks. I stepped over the occasional cactus, cooked to a crisp on the outside, still wet and green on the inside.

Bound for the eastern flank of the fire, our job was to patrol the edge of the black and the start of the green, unburned area, to scout out any burning material that might spread the fire, and to extinguish it. The eastern flank was a forty-degree slope that ended at rocky cliffs. The soil was sandy, dotted with loose rocks. Simply standing in place became a challenge, as the ground would give way under our feet and leave us scrambling for purchase. My ankles ached from the constant exertion of keeping my feet perpendicular to the slope. We found trees burning at the roots, stump holes with live embers, and smoking logs. The sawyers cut down the trees as we found them, and we dealt with the stumps and logs by scooping the sandy earth into and over them, rubbing them out with our gloved hands, or scraping the embers off with our tools. I found a stump still flaming, and tried to scrape it out, but my feet kept slipping out from under me. I clung to a burned tree branch with my right hand while my feet did the moon walk in the sand, and with my left hand tried to direct my tool into the stump. I knocked smoke and embers into my face, but did little to staunch the flames, until Maren appeared above me and shoveled a load of dirt over the whole mess. The threatening purple clouds eventually delivered a brief downpour, and we took cover beneath the unburned pinyon pine branches. A thin ribbon of water poured off the red walls across the canyon as I sat and shivered. “Well, so much for this fire,” Bob from the BLM commented. That first night, and the second, we slept on top of the cliffs; “spiked out”, in fire lingo. I ate my first MRE (Meal Ready to Eat), for dinner at 2130, and rolled up in my sleeping bag between the rocks on the edge of the black, exhausted, filthy, sore, and happy.

The second and third days on the Cliffs Fire were less exhilarating. We rechecked the areas we had worked the day before, but high nighttime humidities had reduced all but the most tenacious spots to quietly smoking non-threats. During our sweep of the area, Kelly startled a diamondback rattlesnake, three feet long, three inches in diameter. Another girl spotted a tiny brown scorpion on her lunch bag. Vigilance was still necessary, although the fire had burned out. Shifting into “monitoring” mode, our crew split in two and spread ourselves along the edge of the fire, keeping eyes peeled for new smoke. I found a shaded spot below a rocky pink outcrop, and stared across the canyon at the red rock, and watched two helicopters dropping buckets of water on the remaining hot spots. I turned my radio on to “scan” and listened to the traffic between the firefighters on the ground and the smooth-voiced pilots trying to coordinate the bucket drops. The helos had found a good dip site on the other side of the canyon, and were traveling back and forth with their 800-gallon buckets. When full, the buckets leaked, streaming water across the horizon in a glittering swathe. By afternoon, even the helicopters had finished their job, and were sent back to their base. The sky and the radio became quiet, and I spent the rest of the day hunting shade, digging butt-trenches in the dirt, reading, napping, taking pictures, playing music and movie games with the crew, telling stories, and making occasional forays up the hill to survey the ashy waste and the majestic red and green panorama on the other side of it. Long, boring, and yet better than any day spent waiting and sitting around at the district. A second night at the same spike camp, a second day of eating MREs and stale Jimmy John’s sandwiches, a second day of 16 hours with hazard pay. On the morning of the third day, we knew we would be released from the fire. There had been no further activity on our line, or anywhere else on the fire, and we were told to continue monitoring, but to be ready to be helicoptered back to the base by early afternoon. It was a frustrating afternoon, despite the helicopter ride back down the cliffs. We were only three days into our tour, and we were being sent home. I’d gotten a taste of what it’s like to be a firefighter, finally, and now I was being sent back to the boredom of busy work at the Salt Lake district office.

This is when we got the call from Arizona. We were sleeping in a field next to the helibase, fed and showered but resigned to our returning home the next morning. I heard our crew boss’s phone ring, and wondered. Could this be another assignment? Brandon had been on the phone all afternoon, trying to find us another fire, another job, anything to keep us on the road and working. He’d had no luck, he told us before we went to bed. And then his phone rang, a half-hour later. I didn’t know for sure until the morning, when he and Sarah stood in front of us and told us there was good news and bad news. “The good news is there’s hot breakfast!” We cheered. MREs are effective calorie blocks, but they can’t beat a fresh breakfast burrito and hot coffee. “The bad news…” she paused dramatically. “We’ve been reassigned!” To the Kaibab National Forest, on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We were going to Arizona!

Here ends Part One of the NUTREGs narrative. Stay close – Part Two to follow soon…

White's 10-inch, lace-to-toe Smokejumpers, men's size 5.

Welcome to the new Susan. From hippie world traveler to burly, smoke-breathing firefighter. Instead of hugging trees, now I’m wishing they’d catch on fire so I could save them and start getting some of that legendary overtime and hazard pay. It’s not a natural transition; it’s taken training and various other components.

Start with $453 boots.

White's Smokejumpers - BEFORE fire season.

White’s Smokejumpers: ten inches tall, handmade, leather, Vibram® soles secured with fireproof thread and steel screws, reinforced toes and logger’s heels. They’re tough to break in, and not only for the hard leather and hard foot beds that wear red puffy blisters into sensitive heels and arches. I wore my new boots to my first day of chainsaw training. The six foot lumberjacks who taught saw school peered down their impressive beards and indicated my shiny, clean White’s with a twitch of the chin or elbow. “This must be your first year,” one said, his eyes raised appraisingly to my face. “Oh, well…” I looked down and saw their battered, scarred boots next to mine. “What gave me away?”

It was a relief, during our field testing day, to scuff my boots in the dirt and fill the eyelets with sawdust as I felled my first two trees. Armed with a 28” Stihl 044 saw, thick green chaps, a felling axe and a pouch of wedges, I strode up the hill behind my tester. My legs felt heavy; I had to lengthen my stride and step purposefully, balancing the 25-lb. chainsaw on my shoulder. I dropped two trees, two bug-killed pines. My arms shook as I finished the back cut on the last tree and stepped away, watching it land right where I’d placed it. Tired but thrilled, I caught a glimpse of my shadow as we came out of the trees and crossed the road back to the trucks. It looked like a firefighter’s shadow.

Add Nomex®: the forest green and sunshine yellow fire-resistant uniform of the wildland firefighter. The pants are stiff and the cargo pockets make them heavy, loaded as they are with ear plugs, lighter (every good firefighter knows how to start a fire as well as put it out), Leatherman (or comparable pocket tool), pen, notepad, Smokey calendar (for documenting hours worked and tasks completed), and the indispensible IRPG (Incident Response Pocket Guide – required, abbreviated “how-to” for every imaginable fire scenario). I also wear my gloves on a carabiner at my belt, and, because I work on an engine, I carry a spanner wrench for tightening hose fittings.

There are several types of firefighting resources in the employ of the federal government. Initial attack (IA) squads respond to a fire when it’s first spotted, typically when it’s a single tree that’s been hit by lightning and can still be handled by six people with shovels and a chainsaw. Hand crews fight fire the same way that the IA squads do, using tools and saws to cut miles of line – a wide swath of mountainside cut and scraped down to mineral soil – in an attempt to stop the fire from advancing in a certain direction. Every fire fighter will work on a hand crew at some point in his or her career, whether it’s an initial attack effort or while fighting a 50,000 acre fire in conjunction with other resources. Helicopters and air tankers are expensive but essential tools that can quickly drop hundreds of gallons of water or retardant on large fires, as well as transport ground crew and supplies to remote edges of a fire. Finally, there are fire engines, smaller, modified versions of the shiny red pavement queens that deal with structure fires in cities and towns across the US. I work on Engine 411 in Salt Lake City, serving the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache (yoo-IN-tah) National Forest. There are seven people on my crew. Shane is our engine boss and Watson’s our lead; between the two of them they have close to twenty years of firefighting experience. Graham (25), Brock (21), and Tomas (23) have worked on the engine for 2-4 years each. I’m the new person, the FNG, and so is Maren, the only other woman on the team: a 19-year-old, blond, French student from Brigham Young University. I like my crew. I like rolling around in our engine and unloading at a gas station or campground and moving like black-booted posse through the parking lot.

Stir in some required training. In six weeks I’ve been paid to attend chainsaw school, fire school, resource management school, map-reading class, radio class, SOP class, pump school, driving school, sensitivity-and-political-correctness class, first aid and CPR class, rules-and-regulations class, and ATV school. Fire school was a week long. Lessons ran the gamut from the sleep-inducing: “Chain of Command”; to the confusing: “Programming Radios”; the fascinating: “Weather and Fire Behavior”; and the terrifying: “How and When to Deploy Your Fire Shelter”. The latter involved an hour of video footage of walls of flame against night skies, shots of mangled trees choked with smoke, and a somber narrator’s voice describing how Firefighter X’s series of errors led to his hellish demise. After being properly scared into paying attention, we were led outside as a class and given practice shelters made of green nylon. We took turns being timed, shaking out the fabric, wrapping ourselves up, rolling around on the green lawn. It was about 65 degrees, partly cloudy, and extremely difficult to imagine someday facing a 6,000 degree flame front with only a bottle of water and a sheet of aluminum foil to keep me alive.

Today’s June 21. It’s pouring rain. As of a week ago, Utah had received 120% of its average rainfall for June. The mountainsides are a patchwork quilt of saturated green leaves and fat grasses. White clouds hang around the peaks like pillows. Nothing’s burning. There’s lightning every day, but the rain douses it immediately. Anything it strikes sucks up the scorching energy and carries on being wet and happy. The government, however, pays me to be on duty forty hours a week, and as there are no fires, the crew’s got to do something to keep busy. This means classes. It also means sharpening tools, washing hose, building hose packs, and lots of thumb-twiddling.

Pour on copious amounts of exercise. We train as a crew, at the gym if it’s raining, hiking if it’s not. When we hike we dress in full fire gear, hardhats, long sleeves and all, carrying our 30lbs of required personal gear plus a tool (shovel, rhino, Pulaski, combi) or a chainsaw or a can of gas for the saw. We carry radios and practice passing messages from the head of the line to the back, and we go as fast as we can as far as we can until we can’t. Then we do pushups, wall-sits, lunges, and crunches. Marching as we do in a line, in bright yellow shirts and blue hardhats, we draw attention on the trails. One day we paused for a water break on a rock outcrop halfway up Mt. Olympus. The sound of spinning rotors suddenly drowned out our conversation as the Channel 4 news-copter appeared above us and zeroed in, its nose camera swiveling to catch us in action. We waved and grinned and shook our heads.

The hikes are hard, even for me. And it’s only going to get harder. And hotter. Training, gear, and instruction aside, I’ve been told again and again that I won’t get it until I actually see a fire and smell the smoke and feel what it’s like to dig line for sixteen hours straight. I’m missing that one crucial ingredient, and it’s going to have to stop raining before that happens. In the meantime, I listen to the stories of my crew, absorb the advice of the lumberjacks and the other experts, explore my national forest, and look forward to that first spark.

Happy Susan.

My new God’s name is Ullr.

Floating. Floating all day. On 24 inches of freshies, on good vibes between friends, on rays of sun sparkling on snow crystals in the air. Floating in the afterglow of a fantastic day. The Wasatch got dumped with snow all day yesterday, and I called in “overwhelmed” at my Solitude night job, leaving my Wednesday wiiiiiide open to pay tribute to Ullr (ooh-ler), the Norse god of snow.

I went out with Brighton friends, Jack, Koogs, and David. We rode to the top of the Great Western chair and slipped our way out of bounds and paused between the huge, smooth, wind-sculpted cornices that hung over Lacko-Waxen, a 100-meter (wide and deep) bowl on the back side of Clayton’s peak. We peered through the tips of our skis at the sparkly white expanse of untouched snow below and dropped in one at a time. David launched a small jump at the bottom of the bowl and landed in a cloud of snow. “I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING!” he howled as he continued making turns in the nearly chest-deep snow. Hiking back up, out of the bowl, I followed Jack as he broke trail up the side of the hill. It’s quiet outside of the resort. Placing my feet carefully in each boot-shaped hole, I climbed, hearing only the breath moving in my lungs and the crunch and squeak of the snow in the boot pack. My skis rocked slightly in their straps on my backpack. The sun came and went, warming my back and highlighting my shape on the snow in front of me.

Following the boot-pack back to the top...so we can ski it again.

It was so good, we did it again. This time taking a slightly different line, to the right, I tore over a small knoll and turned into the funky fall-line, carving in powder that would be over my head if I fell, my head bursting with pleasure with each smooth, soft slice. The snow made a sound like pffoooooo as it exploded under my skis and flew into my face and into my lungs. It’s like breathing in dry diamonds; tiny frozen crystals melting on the walls of my lungs. The four of us climbed back up to the ridgeline and followed it farther out of bounds under the summit of (Mt.) 10-4-20. White snow and glowing sun and black, rocky, mountains overlapped against the inconstant, day-after-the-storm sky like a collage edged in silver. Light snuck through the clouds and dappled its way along the tops of the trees, blessing the evergreens with golden-green halos. I moved down through the aspen trees, twisting and turning and still finding endless, deep, untracked snow, arriving at the run out, where an established ski trail snakes through the flats and the trees, back to civilization. Rushing through the trees with my skis plastered to the trail, I slid around and up the sides of corners like I was on a bobsled track, ducking branches and drafting behind Koogs on his snowboard, dodging and laughing when he tried to trip me up.

Popping out of the trees back into the resort boundaries was like waking up out of a dream. There were so many people, happily churning their way down groomed trails that have already seen a dozen, a hundred other skiers. Their very presence was noisy, and I was stunned to remember that this is where I am usually skiing, and happy to be there. Hours later, I sat in the bar with Jack. We were both smiling, vaguely, as we sipped from our Pabst Blue Ribbon 24oz cans and studied our cards over his caribou-horn cribbage board. I slowly pegged my way to victory, and Jack turned his cards over and sighed, tired, satisfied. “What a day. What a day.” Amen to that. Praise be to Ullr, and praise be to Wasatch Powder.

I can’t wait to get spoiled.

Salt Lake City, Utah, home of the Greatest Snow on Earth (they say).  With seven ski areas within ten miles of each other, all less than an hour drive from the city, all averaging 500 inches (12 m) of powder every winter, I don’t care if it’s the “greatest” or only so-so, just as long as they let me ski on it.

Twice a week I work the counter at the Brighton ski school, selling lesson packages and directing harried parents to the rental shop, the bathrooms, the cafeteria.  My uniform is jeans, a fleece vest, and a baseball hat or beanie.  I answer phones and smile at customers and when it’s slow no one minds if I read a book behind the desk or slip out to take some runs.  I love my job.  I hitchhike to work or to ski every day from the mouth of the canyon, me and a handful of other bums.  Yesterday I rode up with a registered nurse who described to me the first time he witnessed a C-section birth.  “Dude, I grew more in that half an hour than I did through all of puberty!”  Today I waited in a line of cars that snaked for ten miles through the jutting canyon walls.  I watched the emergency lights spinning for an hour, on the other side of the trees where a truck had rolled over the embankment.

I live with Kathy, a cheerful massage therapist, and her husband Troy, a construction worker.  Winter and the flagging economy give him plenty of hours to fill playing WWII video games and shouting at the University of Utah football team.  Kathy’s sixteen-year-old, Mackenzie, makes occasional appearances as a dark-haired zombie on a stool in front of the TV on the kitchen counter.  I have a room to myself, furnished, full use of the kitchen and a living room, wireless internet, and the company of a balding cat when I want it.  They’ve also loaned me a bike for the winter.  Not having a car, the bike means freedom, and being able to visit the local library twice a day.  I grin at how much faster a bike is than walking, even as my teeth chatter and my hands turn to ice in the wind.

Beginning a life in a new place is always hard, and I’m a little bit lonely, despite the friendliness of my co-workers and the kindness of the Eaton family (wonderfully gracious friends from back east who gave me a place to stay when I arrived and helped me find work and housing).  I’m still smiling, though, and I can look ahead to a month from now when the slopes will be overflowing with snow, when regular paychecks will be plopping into my checking account, when I know the names of all the ski instructors I work with, when I am too busy to think, when I’m apparating from powder day to night job to day job to drinks at the pub with the other scruffy snow addicts, when all of this is normal, when I forget that I’ve ever lived anywhere else.