On the Burning Edge (10 page)

“Dude, you gotta relax,” Renan told him. “You’ve gotta find something to look forward to. What do you like? Not movies, but something you can do out here. Something to take your mind off of this shit.”

“Hand-rolled cigarettes. I like those,” Grant said. He placed the back of his hand just above the ash to feel for heat—nothing—then buried his bare fingers into the pit he’d been working. Only the remnant warmth of the coals remained.

“Get some, then. At the next gas station stop, buy a pouch and smoke ’em down. In the meantime”—Renan tossed him a can of Copenhagen. “But don’t get addicted. Leah wouldn’t like that.”

In the evenings after
their shifts, the crew went for dinner to the nearby station of the Blue Ridge Hotshots, a Forest Service crew based in the Coconino National Forest. Blue Ridge normally would have dealt with the Hart Fire, given how close it was to their station, but they weren’t even in Arizona. The SWCC had sent Blue Ridge to New Mexico after the Thompson Ridge Fire began. Since it started,
the blaze had moved progressively closer to the eighteen-thousand-person town of Los Alamos. Blue Ridge’s empty station had cell-phone coverage, running water, and a cache of Gatorade, which, as was common among hotshot crews, Granite Mountain helped themselves to.

One night while relaxing at the station, Chris MacKenzie, Alpha’s lead firefighter, received a nightmarish voice mail. His mom had a brain tumor. She was going to the hospital for surgery.

“She said she was going to be fine,” Chris told Donut, his roommate, and Clayton Whitted, Alpha’s squad boss. “It’s a routine procedure. I should just stay here. I need the money.” In some ways, staying with the crew was easier than seeing his mom incapacitated in a hospital bed.

But Clayton insisted Chris leave to see his mom. “You’re going, Chris,” Clayton said. “You’re leaving tomorrow and you’re going to be there for your mom.”

Chris left the crew that next morning and, down another key crew member, Donut stepped into his lead firefighter position. Granite Mountain stayed to work the Hart Fire for another couple of shifts. By most of the hotshots’ standards, the fire had been an easy one. But a few days later, after another long and slow shift on the Hart, Grant cracked.

Outside of Blue Ridge’s station, Alpha squad sat in the back of the buggy, eating the steaks the Coconino National Forest had provided for dinner. Moths bounced off the cab lights, and in the chill of the spring night, some of the men wore beanies and hooded sweatshirts. Steed expected they’d be heading home to Prescott in the morning. The Hart Fire was lined, mopped up, and now mostly cold.

Grant sat quietly in the back of the buggy while the other men chattered around him. Hotshotting is at once intensely social and oddly isolating. The men get no time alone. Anthony Rose, apparently bored, started calling to Grant from his seat up front. Whatever it was—a reference to Leah, a lighthearted insult about Grant looking every bit as tired as he felt—Grant didn’t like it. He stared at the back
of Tony’s head. Grant agreed to play by the hotshots’ rules, but he wouldn’t do it at the cost of his dignity.

“You’re picking on me because I’m the only person you can pick on,” Grant said. “You’re nothing but a bully.”

A hush fell over the buggy. Rookies didn’t usually talk back, let alone with vehemence, and Grant’s tone of voice brought to mind that he’d been a varsity wrestler in high school. Tony turned around, surprised. Rookies got picked on; that was hotshotting’s social contract. On Granite Mountain, it took a year for the men to claim ownership of the title of hotshot. To build pride in the crew and give men a reason to return after their first season, Marsh had instituted a policy that rookies had to wear different T-shirts than the veterans. Until they finished their first year, new guys were treated as second-class. Grant found it frustrating. He’d willed himself through most of his life’s challenges—prescription drugs, wrestling, Steed’s workouts. But his willfulness couldn’t force obstinate hotshots to treat him with the respect he felt he deserved.

“We’ve all passed our critical training,” Grant continued, his voice rising. “Right now, I don’t need your shit.” Tony, who had recently found out his girlfriend was pregnant, ratcheted up the tension. He smirked dismissively at Grant, until Renan set his plate down, stepped across the aisle in the buggy, and gently pulled his friend outside.

I
t’s a six-hour drive from the Coconino National Forest to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, where the Thompson Ridge Fire was burning. That morning, just before the hotshots left the Hart Fire for home, the SWCC dispatched Granite Mountain to the rapidly expanding blaze. The distance provided the hotshots with one of the job’s great pleasures: the road trip. With no work to do and many miles of wild landscapes to pass through, the men could spend the day lounging and napping until their next shift. On fire assignments, the buggies became home.

Alpha’s was tricked out. Last year’s squad had all chipped in to buy a flat-screen TV that still hung above the half wall that separated the eight hotshots from the squad boss and the lead firefighter in the cab. All the way from the Hart Fire to the Jemez, Alpha squad played movies. Grant loved it. He called Leah and left a quiet voice mail.

“Just calling to let you know we got reassigned to a place called Thompson Ridge, New Mexico, outside of Albuquerque. Hoping that we’ll be able to stay in contact with you. Anyways, that’s where I’ll be. If not, love you and miss you.”

Then he promptly kicked back in the air-conditioning and let Chris Farley’s
Black Sheep
soothe his frayed nerves.

Bravo cultivated a more rustic vibe in their buggy. The squad, led by Bob Caldwell and the enormous Afghan War veteran Travis Turbyfill, included Bunch, Zup, and Woyjeck. Not yet a week into the first fire assignment, the back of the Bravo rig had the sweet but mostly sickly smell of body odor, woodsmoke, and rot. Empty Gatorade and water bottles rolled around the floor. Somebody had mounted an elk’s antlers—flecked with drops of red retardant—above the half wall. Surrounding this proud centerpiece were postcards collected from every state where Granite Mountain had fought fires: Minnesota, Alabama, Washington, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, California, New Mexico, Nevada. Copenhagen chewing tobacco lids were taped to the walls. So were knives and forks lifted from restaurants, a horseshoe hung with the points up so the luck didn’t run out, and a picture of a frowning cat that read,
THIS IS MY HAPPY FACE
.

What both buggies shared were the small cardboard boxes that sat on the windowsill beside each hotshot’s seat. In them, the men stowed their personal items: books, decks of cards, magazines, sunflower seeds, instant coffee. For hotshots on assignment, gas station convenience stores were the source of all good things.

Granite Mountain stopped at one in the Navajo country of northeast Arizona. Dust and tumbleweeds drifted across dirt roads so rough they saw traffic only from locals in rusting American-made pickups. It was a hundred degrees, and hotter by the pumps. For many convenience store owners in the West, seasonal firefighters mark the change of seasons as much as warming days do. Firefighters are good for business. Cold drinks, hot coffee, sunflower seeds, ice cream, chocolate, and logs of chewing tobacco, each one holding five cans, flew off the shelves by the armful.

“Dude, put those generic chips back. Get me the goods,” Bunch said to Grant, who was carrying a load of snacks to the counter. The previous month, Grant had challenged Bunch to play him in a game of disc golf. Bunch refused. The harder Grant tried to gain acceptance, the more the veterans pushed him back. Grant chided Bunch until he finally agreed to a match, but Bunch set the terms: Loser buys the
winner the chips of his choice at every gas station stop for the rest of the season. Bunch won by six strokes.

Bunch grabbed a bag of Tostitos and cheese dip and piled them onto Grant’s stack, which included Zig-Zags and loose tobacco for rolling cigarettes—something to look forward to. Satisfied, Bunch stashed his chips and dip into his cardboard box, where they’d stay until the end of their assignment. He knew that after two weeks of MREs and disappointing lunches of Wonder Bread sandwiches packed with an inch and a half of deli ham, Red Delicious apples, and canned and always lukewarm juice, Bravo squad would be craving a proper snack.

The Thompson Ridge Fire
had grown to seventy-four hundred acres in the five days since it started.

After the blaze tore through the oak field that Todd Lerke, the first incident commander, hoped would contain it, the fire jumped the roads he’d mapped out as contingency lines. Flames then spread northeast up eleven-thousand-foot Redondo Peak and threatened the Valles Caldera, a national preserve of open meadows and forests. A few historic cabins now sat directly in the line of the fire’s spread. The bigger concern, though, lay just five miles beyond the Valles Caldera: Los Alamos and its Department of Energy–run labs. Since 2000, two separate fires that had started in the Santa Fe National Forest had razed hundreds of Los Alamos homes and burned sensitive lab property, some of it rumored to house a uranium dump from World War II. The town dreaded the prospect of yet another large burn.

So did the Santa Fe National Forest. On June 2, the SWCC put Incident Commander Bea Day and her team of Southwest-based logistics, planning, safety, operations, and finance experts in charge of the fire. Nine hotshot crews were already on scene by the time Granite Mountain pulled into the fire camp outside Jemez Springs to get their assignment. Unlike the low-key Hart Fire or the one-shift-and-done prairie fire, Thompson Ridge required a robust fire camp to support the more than five hundred firefighters on scene.

Thompson Ridge was considered a Type 2 blaze, the nation’s
second-highest priority. The numeric system that’s applied to the National Preparedness Level—the country’s readiness to attack wildfires—is flipped on its head to classify wildfires. Type 5 incidents, which might be a single burning tree or a campfire that requires very few resources to control, are the lowest-priority blazes. The highest are Type 1 incidents: complex, multifaceted fires that can cost many millions of dollars and may require thousands of firefighters and logistical support personnel to contain.

Classification is determined not by a blaze’s size but by its potential and complexity—towns endangered, major freeway closed, nuclear waste facility threatened. Where only a few observers may be needed to track the progress of a hundred-thousand-acre burn in Alaska’s wilderness, a four-acre fire near the suburbs of California’s San Bernardino Mountains may be deemed a Type 1 incident at its outset. Charged with orchestrating the most complicated firefights are incident management teams like Day’s. There are sixteen Type 1 teams—the most qualified—and thirty-six Type 2 teams nationwide. Management teams can vary in size from seven to seventy experts, most of whom hold full-time jobs with federal or state fire agencies. When a national forest requests a team to manage the fire, a GACC or NIFC orders the militias of logistical and tactical experts up from their agency day jobs.

Since the Incident Command System was first developed, after a rash of blazes plagued Southern California in the 1970s, NIFC’s rapid logistical deployment system has become so refined that the Federal Emergency Management Agency turns to the Fire Service, along with the National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers, to assist with disaster relief. Hurricanes Katrina and Irene, the
Columbia
shuttle disaster, and 9/11 all utilized NIFC’s Type 1 incident management teams.

Thompson Ridge was by far
the largest blaze Granite Mountain had seen so far that season. Camp was set up on a helicopter landing pad atop an open ridge miles behind the flames. Tents and trailers sprawled across a few acres. On-site was a high-speed Internet hot spot, a cell-phone
tower, and a portable weather-monitoring system brought by a meteorologist assigned to cover only the fire area. There were semis packed with hoses, extra shirts and pants, pumps, Pulaskis, and fuses; and semis packed with cases of Gatorade and brown-bag lunches. Portable showers sat by the mess tent, where hotshot crews from Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana stood in a long line for cafeteriastyle food served by caterers from Albuquerque.

The whole place smelled of dust and diesel, with the occasional acrid waft of urine from the Porta-Potties. Gasoline-powered generators hummed endlessly, diesel trucks rattled around camp, and a fine dust that fire boots and tires had ground to the consistency of talcum powder coated everything. If Steed had his druthers, Granite Mountain would spend as little time as possible in fire camp. Immediately after arriving on scene, Steed and the squad bosses left the men at the buggies and headed into the mass of trailers and tents for that night’s briefing. A makeshift stage had been set up in the middle of the camp, and an oversize printout map of Thompson Ridge was hung on a whiteboard. The fire’s perimeter looked like a lobster claw wrapping around Redondo Peak.

Day’s team had divided the 557 firefighters on scene into a day shift and a night shift. Gathered around the map were the overhead from fourteen different engines and hotshot crews that, like Granite Mountain, had been assigned to work through the night of June 6. Steed grabbed an information packet that Day’s team had compiled about the fire and took his place among the crowd of thirty or forty firefighters. While he waited for the briefing to begin, he flipped through the twenty-four-page packet, which included information on everything from weather forecasts and expected fire behavior to special concerns like the 188 known archaeological sites within the Thompson Ridge area.

The briefing started shortly after 5
P.M
. with the incident meteorologist delivering the forecast for that night. These specially trained weathermen use a network of sensors and firefighter-provided information to create forecasts specifically for the fire site. That day,
strong afternoon winds had exceeded the meteorologist’s expectations and pushed the blaze’s eastern front—the pincers—down the back side of Redondo Peak and perilously close to the historic cabins in the Valles Caldera. Day’s team had always expected the fire to move east, following the terrain and the prevailing winds, but what surprised them was how quickly the flames had closed the distance on the homes. The strong winds blew the fire through almost four thousand acres of drought-cured trees, doubling the blaze’s size in less than twenty-four hours. The forecaster predicted the winds would die down shortly after sunset, which set up a window for the firefighters to go in and protect the cabins.

Darrell Willis, the City of Prescott’s Wildland Division chief and Granite Mountain’s boss, happened to work for Day’s team. On Thompson Ridge, his role was night-operations chief, the tactical adviser who executed the big-picture strategy for how to attack the fire at night. Willis shook Steed’s and the squad bosses’ hands, but he had more pressing business to attend to. The forecaster handed him the microphone, and Willis briefed the gathered firefighters on the night’s actions.

The management team had split the fire into geographic areas. The regions, or divisions, are named alphabetically, with the first, usually the one closest to the fire’s head, dubbed Alpha (for A) and the second called Zulu (for Z). The scale leaves room for twenty-four more division breaks, should the fire continue to grow in size and complexity. There were six divisions on Thompson Ridge, and commanding each was a division chief who acted as the field general for his or her piece of the fire. That night, Willis assigned Granite Mountain, along with three other hotshot crews and seven engines, to work under Allen Farnsworth, a retired Bureau of Land Management firefighter from Durango, Colorado, who was in charge of Division Zulu. Willis had tasked Farnsworth with controlling the head of the blaze, and he wanted Steed and the hotshots to try saving the houses by burning the forest.

It was almost 9
P.M
.
when Granite Mountain entered the grasslands on the western side of the Valles Caldera. The hotshots exited the buggies beside a group of hewn-timber cabins. The scenery made it obvious why the Valles Caldera has been used to portray scenes of idyllic frontier living in Tommy Lee Jones, Pierce Brosnan, and Johnny Depp films. The rounded summit of Redondo Peak served as the backdrop. Pines surrounded the meadow. A mountain stream flowed through the caldera. On the night of June 4, most of it was on fire. Darkness seemed to magnify the flames, silhouetting the cabins and the men and women protecting them. It was a classic hotshot fire: wild, dynamic, complex. Renan knew enough to act like he’d been there before. He packed another pinch of tobacco into his dry mouth and held the can out to Grant, who took it readily.

“This is it, boys,” Scott said, doing that odd dance young men sometimes do when excited. He bounced on his toes with his arms straight down as if he were holding buckets of water. “This is what we’ve been training for,” he said. “This is the
big
show.”

A four-wheel-drive fire engine with extra-high clearance rumbled past toward a stand of torching trees, and a wave of embers blew over a cabin on the edge of the meadow. Another engine crew, emergency lights flashing, cooled the sparks.

When another stand of trees got torched nearby, Grant turned to Renan and actually cupped his ears. “Holy shit!” he yelled. “That’s loud!”

There was little doubt that Granite Mountain would be working sixteen-hour shifts until Thompson Ridge was wrapped up. That might take weeks. Physically and mentally, Grant convinced himself he could handle the discomfort, but the promise of so much hard work elicited a feeling closer to dread.

Even standing before such a raw display of nature’s power, Grant, like most hotshots, didn’t consider his job unnecessarily high-risk. The flames were a source of awe—not fear.

“What are the odds of me dying in a fire?” he’d once asked his mother, to reassure her of his safety. “Think about it, Mom.”

Grant’s instincts were well founded. In spite of firefighting’s apparent dangers, compared with many other professions it’s relatively safe. Since fire agencies began keeping track of deaths in 1910, 1,075 firefighters have died on the line, a rate of about 10.5 per year. Between 2000 and 2013, 261 firefighters were killed in the line of duty—considering the fifty-six thousand men and women who are estimated to work fires every year, this is an average ratio of one death for every three thousand workers. For reference, in 2012, an average year in terms of fire-line deaths, the job was considerably lower risk than logging, commercial fishing, roofing, or garbage collection.