*

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.

]]> http://susanmunroe.com/and-it-burns-burns-burns/feed 5 http://susanmunroe.com/finally-fire http://susanmunroe.com/finally-fire#comments Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:01:12 +0000 Susan Munroe http://susanmunroe.com/?p=366 The heat was oppressive. The sun shone down unimpeded, hit the black, ashy ridge top, and bounced back up through our feet and into our faces. Ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, but my crew was walking through the part of the forest where the fire had burned the hottest, nuking the trees into crisp, [...]]]> The heat was oppressive. The sun shone down unimpeded, hit the black, ashy ridge top, and bounced back up through our feet and into our faces. Ninety degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, but my crew was walking through the part of the forest where the fire had burned the hottest, nuking the trees into crisp, black skeletons, and incinerating any grass or ground cover into a fine powder. “Moon dust,” Kim from Pleasant Grove called it, referencing the way it exploded around our feet as we walked, only to settle heavily within seconds. No shade for us: only dust, ash, smoke, and heat. My nostrils burned. Sweat poured down my legs and my face and soaked through my yellow Nomex® shirt into the straps on my line pack. The Cliffs Fire, in the Kolob Canyons wilderness area, twenty-five miles east of Cedar City, UT, had all but put itself out on the same day that my crew arrived. We were the Northern Utah Regulars – the NUTREGs – and we were fresh and excited and busting at the seams to fight fire, any fire. We were a 20-person hand crew assembled from eight distinct regions: a few engine slugs, two squads from the Salt Lake area, three BLM employees, one guy from the State fire organization, and a couple of Forest Service employees whose full time jobs were not fire-related, but were trained and qualified to work on fire incidents when required. For many of us, this was our first fire of the season (July 29), if not of our careers. And now it looked like we might not even get to fight it.

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…