Hotshots (6 page)

“Was the wind this squirrelly the day of the fire?” I asked Mike.

“Worse,” he said.

“I'm smelling something burning or burnt. Could it be the fire after all this time?”

“Could be. Yellowstone smelled for months. I've lost my sense of smell myself. I've eaten too much smoke. I'll be coughing up black stuff until November.” He looked across the canyon to a spot near the top of the opposite ridge. “That was where I escaped to. It was good black PJ—that's what we call piñon, juniper—and it didn't burn again. But down below there was more Gambel oak. The fire was in the drainage, then it started up this side. That's where it blew up, jumped the canyon, and trapped the firefighters.” He pointed to a line of white crosses climbing the slope that resembled stitches on the naked hill. Each one marked a place where a firefighter had fallen and died. “The hotshots had been coming back up. The blowup took them by surprise. They weren't as concerned as they should have been because the area they were in had burned previously. They didn't know about the reburn potential of Gambel oak.” Mike turned hard eyes toward Hogue, who busied himself with his radio.

The
wind blew into our faces and covered us with a layer of pink dust that clung to everything but the bristles on Hogue's white mustache. When the dust settled I could see a rectangle carved into the slope to the left of the crosses. I peered through my Aunt Joan's birding binoculars and focused on the rectangle that had been formed by four burned logs. Inside a stick figure made from pink stones was wearing a hard hat and running.

Mike saw where I was looking. “The firefighters left that monument. Makes a statement, doesn't it?”

“Yeah,” I said. Someday something slick and smooth would be erected here, but it would never have the power of this crude, raw box.

Mike hitched up his pack, turned around, and looked at the opposite ridge. Red sticks were attached to the sides of his pack and bottles of oil dangled from the bottom. He pointed at a spot near the middle of the saddle. “That's where Ramona was.”

I looked down into the drainage, trying to visualize what Ramona could or could not have seen. Even without the trees there were so many ridges and gullies in the South Canyon that there didn't seem to be anyplace you could see all of it at once.

Hogue cleared his throat. “Actually, the interagency report placed Ramona Franklin about fifty yards south.”

“That's bullshit.” Mike said. “Her post was exactly where I said it was.”

“Where is she anyway?” Hogue asked, glancing around the naked canyon. “Isn't she supposed to be meeting us here?”

“She's coming,” Mike said.

Hogue looked at his watch. “When? Indian time?”

“I said she was coming.”

“If she thinks the report misrepresented her position this is her chance to explain,” Hogue said.

“She's not going to say anything in front of you but ‘Yes, sir,'” Mike answered. “She's got a kid. She needs the money. She needs the job. You can take if from me, that was Ramona's post, that's where she was assigned, and that's where she stood.”

“Why wasn't she on her radio? No one mentioned hearing her in the report.”

“She didn't have anything to say.”

“There was talk she programmed her radio to the wrong frequency.”

“Ramona knows how to program a radio. The problem with this fire wasn't that Ramona couldn't see it. The problem was that there was no aerial surveillance.”

We were near the ridge top and it was hard to maintain your balance in the strong wind. Hogue was digging in his heels. “That wasn't the only problem,” he said. “The hotshots were constructing
fireline
downhill. They didn't drop their backpacks when threatened. They didn't deploy their fire shelters. Those are three situations right there that shout watch out. It's all in the interagency report.”

“You know what you can do with your interagency report …You can take your …” Mike hitched up his backpack, giving him the hunched shoulder silhouette of a mountain goat. He leaned forward as if intending to butt Hogue's head, but he stopped himself, saying, “Never mind.” He began striding downhill.

Hogue stared at Mike's retreating back. “The Forest Service sure isn't what it used to be,” he said. I didn't particularly feel like hanging around Hogue reminiscing about the good old days, so I followed Mike down the precipitous slope, feeling the earth crumble beneath my feet. It was dust now, but one day rain would turn this hill into a mud slide. My knees hurt from holding the rest of me in check. Climbing hurts your knees when you go down and your lungs when you go up. Mike stopped about halfway down and stared across the narrow drainage at the row of white crosses. When I caught up, his eyes were tearing from the wind and the pain. “Joni is the number-seven cross,” he said. He shook himself and channeled the pain into measuring the natural forces. “That slope is sixty degrees. The wind was forty miles an hour the day of the fire. It's thirty-five today.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Experience.”

He sounded convincing to me, and Hogue, who had climbed down to where we stood, didn't challenge him.

“See that spot?” Mike pointed to a place beneath the crosses where the fallen trees were thicker.

“Yeah.”

“That's where the fire jumped the drainage. In order to escape it the hotshots would have had to run over six hundred yards in a minute. It wouldn't have made any difference whether they carried their packs or dropped them and stripped naked. No one can run that fast on a sixty-degree slope. It can't be done and I'm going to prove it. Joni could sprint one hundred yards in fifteen seconds. I can do it in ten. He handed me a stopwatch. “I'm going to run the distance with and without my pack. Will you time me?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, let's do it.”

The crosses were a short distance away as the bird flies or the fire jumps, but getting to them was a steep and difficult climb down to the drainage and back up the other side. Mike did it faster than Hogue and me. When we caught up, he had taken a rose from his backpack and placed it at the foot of Joni's cross. Several of the other crosses were marked by ribbons and flowers.

“I'm going to start at the place where the fire jumped the drainage,” he said. “Time me to the top cross. That's two hundred and fifty yards.”

“
Okay,” I said.

He ran the distance first with the pack and then without. Each time he began with a fierce burst of speed but slowed down as he ascended the slope. Even without the pucker factor he seemed to be running as hard as anyone could. It took him four minutes to run the distance with the pack. Three and a half without. He came over to me when he had finished, but he was still in the zone. His eyes had a look of glazed ferocity and total concentration. Hogue saw it and moved further up the slope.

“Mike?” I said.

He shook his head and came back to the present. “How'd I do?”

“Thirty seconds faster without the pack.”

He did some mental calculations. “I was right,” he said. “No way she could have made it out of here with or without the pack.”

“Does it help to know that?”

“It proves they were wrong. It proves they had no right to criticize her in their report. Joni knew what she was doing.” He put his hand on her cross. “That was for you, babe,” he said. “And now I gotta get out of here.” He shouldered his pack, wiped his eyes, and began climbing uphill.

Hogue was standing near the second cross from the top. “This is where Chancellor's ax was found,” he said when Mike reached him.

“So?” replied Mike.

“His body was found in the number-nine position.”

“I know that,” Mike snapped. Hogue was an annoying mosquito who didn't know when to buzz off. Mike was a person who didn't want to be bugged. Tension was building in the narrow canyon.

“He must have dropped his pack and gone back to help the women out.”

“Chancellor didn't drop his pack. When the flames hit him they burned the ax off.” Mike spoke slowly, leaving spaces between the words as if he were talking to a child or a jury. “The women on this crew were hotshots who were dropped into a red-flag situation. They didn't need Chancellor's help. They needed the support of the Forest Service. They needed a fire supervisor who knew what the hell he was doing.”

“If the flames hit Chancellor here, then why was his body found in the number-nine position?” Hogue asked.

“He was on fire at that point. He was already dead. He didn't know what he was doing. He just ran.” Mike's words came closer together now. His patience was running out.

Hogue's response was a shrug—a stupid, annoying gesture. Maybe he didn't know any better, maybe he couldn't help himself. This situation seemed to be taking on its own momentum and spiraling out of control. The death and the tension in the canyon were bringing out the beast in everyone. The
conditions
were ripe, the wind was up. Mike was about to explode and there wasn't anything I could do to stop him. In a way it was a relief when the blowup came.

“You're a pain in the ass, you know that!” Mike shouted.

Hogue's response was to tighten his lips. “That's insubordination,” he answered. “It'll cost you your job.”

Mike grabbed Hogue by his lapels. “As far as I'm concerned you can shove your fucking job. I'm out of the Forest Service.” Mike was in Hogue's face. His hair was electric. His eyes were wild.

The eye in the calm of the storm was Hogue's unruffled contempt. “This is what happens when you hire people based on their gender or color instead of their ability.” There were no more secrets on this naked hill. It was all coming out: the meanness, the prejudice, the anger, the power. “If you ever find Ramona Franklin on this mountain you can tell her she's out of the Forest Service, too.” Hogue's narrow eyes indicated he was mean enough to do it.

“You son of a bitch,” Mike said. He dropped Hogue's lapels and stomped up the mountain, leaving deep imprints in the soft soil and me alone with Tom Hogue.

7

M
IKE WAS OVER
the ridge long before we got there. With or without the anger factor it was a long, steep climb. Hogue paused occasionally, waiting for me to catch up. The altitude was turning my heart into an engine running on low-octane gas. I felt that even if I could suck up every bit of oxygen in the South Canyon, it wouldn't be enough.

“I don't enjoy this sort of thing much anymore,” Hogue said at one point.

Did he mean the hiking, I wondered, the fighting, or the firefighters who'd fallen on this hill?

“The Forest Service isn't what it used to be.” He'd already said that. “Everybody wants a piece of the forest these days: the loggers, the spotted owl lovers, the ranchers, the environmentalists. I'm looking forward to retirement.”

“Right,” I replied. Women had invaded the old boy network. They shouldered the saws and jumped from the planes and were working their way up in management. If Hogue stuck around long enough he might even get one for a boss, and she could make it harder for him to fire a point woman (or anybody else) in an angry fit. But catching my breath seemed more important than wasting any more of it on him.

When we reached the helipad Hogue looked at his watch. “Only two-ten,” he said, but we could already hear the helicopter buzzing across the valley.

He got the pilot on the radio. “There's a fire burning at Crested Butte. I'm on my way up there,” the pilot squawked. “You guys still need me to pick you up?”

“Mike Marshall took off. I'm planning on walking myself, but I've got a lady here who seems a little tired.”

“I'm not
that
tired,” I said.

“It's a strenuous hike. You sure you're up to it?”

“I'm up to it.”

“Okay,” said Hogue, getting back on the radio. “Go on up to Crested Butte. We're walking.”

Hogue and I started down the wooded side of the mountain. By now Mike could already be near the parking lot. He'd know the way out; he'd done it before. But there really was only one way—down. Ramona could be waiting for him at the car, or she could be anywhere else on the mountain, leaving her tribute. It would be easy enough to lose a person in the PJ forest. All I could see was the juniper in front of me, the piñon behind, the Gambel oak clustered everywhere—and all of it taller than I was. Hogue had
gone
on ahead but it didn't matter; he wasn't my idea of a great traveling companion. The forest wasn't as lush as it had appeared from the air. There were places where the fire had spotted, where cinders had jumped the ridge. I didn't see any fallen trees, but some of the trunks were charred black and the smell of the burn seemed even stronger over here.

Hogue waited for me at the top of a side ridge, one of the few places on the mountain where you could get a clear view of the canyon. We stopped and took a long drink of water from the bottle in his backpack. The wind seemed to have died down. At least it wasn't turning me into a big-haired woman or blowing dust in my face.

“How'd you finally get the fire out?” I asked Hogue.

“Bucket drops, slurry,” he said.

Across the drainage, snuggled among the piñon, juniper, and Gambel oak, was the trophy house I'd seen from the air. It was the size of a destination resort. From here I could also see into the parking lot at the trailhead. Mike's car was there, but I didn't see Mike, Ramona, or the Barkers. North of the parking lot a dusty cloud hovered over the drainage area like a smoke signal that had run out of lift. The winds had slowed down enough to hold it in place.

“Is that smoke?” I asked Hogue.

“Dust,” he replied. “It's a false smoke. There's a road down there. Kicks up a lot of dust this time of year.”