On the Burning Edge (15 page)

Through the sickness and the hazing, Chris MacKenzie berated Donut more than anybody. “So you want to be a hotshot, huh?” was among the nicest things he said to Donut when he dropped off the back of the line during hikes. Chris’s hazing got so bad that they nearly came to blows. Donut finally had to ask his squad boss to make Chris back off. After that, Chris came up and talked to Donut.

“It’s nothing personal,” Chris said to Donut, by way of apology. “I got it bad when I was getting raised up as a rookie. This is how you learn.”

“Dude, why, though?” Donut asked. “Making me feel like a piece of shit doesn’t make me want to hike any faster.”

Bizarrely, the confrontation made them fast friends. Chris taught Donut little tricks to make the job easier: carrying a Clif Bar in his breast pocket, stowing aspirins in his line gear, clipping a carabiner to the outside of his pack to make setting up a tarp quicker, packing Tylenol PM on every tour. The little bit of acceptance made the job’s punishment more palatable, and the two hotshots ended up moving in together after Donut’s first season. Since that heinous fire on the Mexican border, Donut had operated under the belief that the fire line was the only place a hotshot could prove his mettle.

As far as Donut was concerned, the slop-over on Thompson Ridge was the first time 2013’s rookies had been truly tested on the fire line. Dawn’s gray light warmed the eastern slopes of the Jemez Mountains, and the line spooled out behind Donut and the scrape. Each tool stroke sent a shudder up Donut’s long arms. He was tired. Everybody was. Donut paused between strokes to switch off his headlamp and drink water.

The rest of the scrape kept cutting up the New Mexico dirt. Grant, who seemed to be growing into the job’s physical demands, was chugging along just fine. Sean Misner, another rookie on Bravo, was wearing thin and Woyjeck was so exhausted that at the end of the shift, two other hotshots would have to carry him off the line.

Donut had always been content to let others lead. But with Chris out because of his mom’s brain tumor, Clayton working as a task-force leader trainee, and Steed scouting ahead, Donut felt duty-bound to step up.

“Let’s finish this thing off! Swing those fuckin’ tools!” Donut hollered from the front of the scrape, his voice tinged with a shrillness that gave him an edge of insanity. He bent harder into his Pulaski strokes, the dirt flinging behind him as if blasted by a leaf blower, and picked up the pace. “Welcome to hotshotting, boys!” he said.

R
enan was still in a wheelchair when a blast of heat blew into the air-conditioned lobby of an Albuquerque hospital and Eric Marsh walked through the sliding doors in his Nicks-brand fire boots and tan Nomex, his handlebar mustache thicker and prouder from a month’s growth. Renan hadn’t known Marsh was coming to pick him up to drive him back home to Prescott, but he wasn’t thrilled to find out.

Dammit
, Renan thought.
I came to Granite Mountain to win the Rookie of the Year award, and now the man who hands them out is bringing me home from the hospital
.

He felt ashamed. Plus it was a long drive back to Prescott, and Marsh wasn’t exactly a conversationalist. He was the guy that Renan did everything in his limited power not to upset.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” Marsh said, patting him on the leg. “You gave us quite a scare.”

The hospital tests revealed something different from what Renan had suspected. It wasn’t a return to the illness that had haunted him in his youth. Pure exhaustion had triggered intense and painful muscle spasms that caused him to lose consciousness—but it was only muscle
spasms. It would take time for the buildup of lactic acid to leave his gripped muscles, but, being young and fit, he was otherwise healthy. Marsh loaded Renan into the truck. As they hummed westward through the open desert, the smoke column at Thompson Ridge grew smaller in the rearview mirror.

They talked about the potential of Renan’s returning to the hotshots. It wasn’t possible that summer. Given his past, Renan presented too great a liability for the City of Prescott, but depending on how his recovery went over the next few weeks, Marsh offered him a chance to work on the chipping crew—the three or four men who spend their summer creating defensible space around Prescott.

“I’d like some time to think about it,” Renan said, a little disappointed.

Eventually the conversation drifted away from fire, and Marsh opened up. He told Renan about the “charity-case horses” he had picked up on the Navajo Reservation. One, a paint called Honey, had a diabetic foot and couldn’t be ridden, but nor could Marsh stand to get rid of him. He loved the horse too much. Renan had never seen Marsh so relaxed. He put Renan at ease, making him laugh with sly and slightly off-color jokes and a friendly candor that seemed contradictory to the superintendent the veterans describe in stories.

This was the Eric that his friends and family knew. Life had improved for Marsh after Granite Mountain earned its hotshot status. The sting of his second divorce eased, and he fell in love again. Marsh met his third wife, Amanda, at a Denny’s in 2009 during a date with a different woman, who had asked her friend Amanda to join her as the third wheel just in case things got awkward. The date went well—just not as planned. It was Amanda and Marsh who hit it off. Amanda shoed horses for a living, and with her plainspoken language and country ways, she rekindled Marsh’s love of horses, a passion that had lain dormant since his youth.

A week later, they were dating regularly, and within a year they were living together at her horse ranch on the outskirts of town. Marsh proposed to Amanda during an ice-climbing trip to the
fourteen-thousand-foot peaks of southern Colorado and, since then, their relationship thrived in winter—it was the season when they could spend time together.

“Eric was ninety percent hotshot and ten percent mine,” Amanda would say, but she learned Marsh’s dedication to his job the hard way. When they were first married, she would shift around appointments with clients to spend time with Marsh when he returned—at random and for only a couple of days—from fire assignments. But trying to cram six months of marriage into two days every few weeks was intense, unrealistic, and exhausting. The highs were dizzying, but so were the lows. The time away brewed insecurity and unattainable expectations about how their relationship should have functioned during the limited time they shared together.

After the first summer of their marriage, Amanda accepted the reality that winter was their season together. The next fire season, when Marsh returned from assignments, Amanda would keep working and let her husband relax as he preferred: with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and
Family Guy
on the TV.

Marsh’s job performance improved dramatically after he met Amanda. Reviews that once straddled the line between “does not meet expectations” and “meets expectations” became almost exclusively “exceeds expectations.” One firefighter he worked with even saw fit to write a letter to Marsh’s supervisor lauding his performance: “He motivated without belittling. He had a good humor and knew when and how to use it. He believes in the 10 and 18 and understands those guidelines were born out of the ultimate sacrifice.”

But what Marsh hadn’t anticipated was that the greater wildland community still didn’t welcome Granite Mountain into its ranks, even though it was a sanctioned hotshot crew. The other hotshot superintendents in Arizona and New Mexico treated Marsh as the outsider. That resistance was commonplace for the culture.

“One superintendent I worked with didn’t talk to me for three years,” said Jim Cook, the former superintendent of the National Park Service’s Arrowhead Hotshots, one of the first non–Forest
Service/BLM crews to join the hotshots’ ranks. “The first time he spoke to me was after Arrowhead spent all day putting in this heinous piece of line. The supe walked past my crew and the only thing he said to me was ‘Nice line.’ It was a huge breakthrough.”

If Marsh was treated with isolation, so was Granite Mountain. He responded to other crews’ quiet belittling of his men by reaffirming his pride in their job: If his men believed in their work, they’d do it well. He regularly told his crew, “You’re the best hotshots in the nation.”

While many longtime firefighters felt that Granite Mountain was a good hotshot crew, they still believed that the best crews could be run only by the most experienced superintendents. Time on the line is synonymous with a firefighter’s ability to anticipate a fire’s next move and direct his or her crew accordingly. Some superintendents have almost forty years’ experience fighting wildfires, with more than twenty-five at their crew’s helm. By comparison, Marsh had a moderate level of experience. He’d been a superintendent for a total of nine years. Granite Mountain was a hotshot crew for five of those.

During that time, Marsh had developed a reputation for inconsistency on the line. He refused assignments more senior superintendents readily accepted, while taking on aggressive assignments his seniors turned down. On Arizona’s Horseshoe Two Fire, in 2011, Granite Mountain’s third year as a hotshot crew, Marsh agreed to back-fire off a densely vegetated ridgeline, an assignment that more senior superintendents on scene had refused. Granite Mountain and the other crew they were working with lost the burnout. All crews eventually lose burnouts—it’s one of the job’s unavoidable realities—but other hotshot superintendents on the Horseshoe Two Fire commented that Marsh’s decision-making on the line had been suspect.

Later, on a blaze in Idaho, Marsh refused an assignment that he felt would have exposed the crew to many trees that were likely to fall with a strong gust of wind. In the aftermath, the division filed an evaluation stating that Granite Mountain had failed to meet the objectives. Marsh’s response to the negative review was defensive and exceptional: He handwrote a six-page letter to the incident management
team detailing the circumstances from his perspective. His point, which he made with ample exclamation marks, was clear: “Resources need the ability to refuse unsafe assignments without fear of reprisals. This is not about me vs. Div A, but rather about a crew being punished with a bad evaluation for trying to go home safe!”

Some of Granite Mountain’s hotshots took note of how seriously Marsh seemed to take himself and his profession. One time, when he’d shown up to the station wearing a bandanna around his neck, one of the squad bosses complimented Marsh on his “cute scarf.” He recoiled and corrected him.

“It’s a neckerchief,” Marsh said.

Privately, this only made the guys laugh harder. A few of the more senior firefighters, Steed among them, poked fun at Marsh behind his back.

By 2011, Marsh was looking to move beyond the superintendent position. He was forty-one and felt he was getting too old to handle the constant pounding of the fire line. Marsh set his sights on Wildland Division chief, a position that would put him in charge of planning defensible space for Prescott. With the retirement of that division’s current chief, Darrell Willis, on the horizon, the fire department went as far as hiring Granite Mountain a new captain, a Forest Service veteran hotshot named Aaron Lawson, to allow Marsh to eventually transition into the chief’s job. Lawson was well qualified to take over as Granite Mountain’s superintendent.

While the plan sounded good on paper, Marsh and Lawson never got along. Willis chalked it up to the fact that Marsh was “one of the most ethical and loyal people” he knew. While it isn’t clear if Willis’s observation was about what an upstanding person Marsh was, or a subtle jab at Lawson, one thing was evident: Lawson was at a disadvantage from the start.

After years of simmering tension and one-upmanship among Granite Mountain, Forest Service, and BLM hotshot crews, Marsh had reached the conclusion that the Forest Service was dominated by ego-driven, petty, and aggressive firefighters who tended to act brashly for glory and viewed any assignment other than directly fighting fire
as beneath them. In a document describing what set Granite Mountain apart from federal crews, Marsh wrote, “In a workforce dominated by Forest Service and other federal hotshot crews…we are odd. We look different. Not because our buggies are white instead of green, but because we smile a lot. We act different. We are positive people….Our folks are smart, motivated, and highly trained professionals that don’t see any task as ‘beneath them.’ ”

At the time of Lawson’s hire, Willis was pushing Marsh and the crew to adopt what he called “the Prescott Way,” his overarching philosophy that the hotshots’ first priority was to always act like the civil servants they were. During the winter, Granite Mountain’s overhead plowed residents’ driveways and hung Christmas lights around the courthouse square. In summer, the whole crew did fuels treatments around homes. Lawson certainly wasn’t against helping people when they needed it—he’d long done that during his tenure on Forest Service crews—but the sheer volume of Granite Mountain’s charitable and community-oriented tasks must have come as a surprise to him.

Whether it was Lawson’s inability or unwillingness to adapt to the Prescott Way or simply a personal issue, the friction between the two men only continued to mount, and Marsh was clearly relieved when Lawson quit after just two seasons. In his June 2012 self-appraisal of his job performance, Marsh wrote that he was proud “to keep the crew focused while undergoing a personnel issue with my assistant. It was difficult to not be angry and vengeful in that situation.” Until Marsh could find a suitable replacement, he’d remain Granite Mountain’s superintendent.

Granite Mountain hadn’t caught
the slop-over on Thompson Ridge. By the time the sun rose, it was apparent that they’d fallen just short of finishing the job. But in the morning, a Forest Service hotshot crew took care of the rest in a few easy hours.

The operations chief who designed the burnout later apologized to Steed for pressuring him into chasing the fire. The subdivision of
homes was no longer threatened. Nor was Los Alamos. And the local press, which had covered the burnout, knew nothing of the few thousand extra flaming Ping-Pong balls that had supposedly been launched into the forest. Despite the burnouts, the vast majority of the backfire had actually turned out to be the equivalent of a prescribed burn pulled off during the peak of fire season. Some of it had burned hot, but most was low-intensity. Thanks in part to Steed and Granite Mountain, Day’s management team could proudly point to its accomplishments on Thompson Ridge. Over the next few decades, wildfires in the area should pose less of a threat.

Day’s management team started releasing some of the six hundred firefighters on scene, but Granite Mountain wasn’t going home yet. They were kept on with a few other crews to monitor the fire. For the men, that meant mopping up, punctuated by a few shifts burning out pockets of green fuel still inside the line. Like a well-earned sigh after a series of testing and exhausting shifts, the downtime during Granite Mountain’s last days on Thompson Ridge provided opportunity for great fun and small dramas.

Before heading out
for one night shift, Steed brought all the hotshots to an After Action Review, a group discussion among the overhead of the engines, crews, and helicopters involved in the burnout. Granite Mountain was the only full crew there. The operations chief and division walked these forty or so firefighters through the original plan, then the superintendent or captain of each resource involved debriefed about his or her crew’s experience. Steed intended for the After Action Review to serve as a learning opportunity for the hotshots, which perhaps it did, but most of the men saw the meeting as the setup for a long string of locker-room jokes.

Later that night, the hotshots assigned themselves roles and held an impromptu skit mocking the After Action Review. They drew a penis-shaped map of the fire and hung the sketch on the side of a buggy. Grant played the operation chief, the star. He opened the
“meeting” with a mopey confession: “First, I take full responsibility for this. This is my fault. This is all my fault.” Then the others stepped in.

Scott assumed the role of another hotshot superintendent on scene who happened to be Native American. He adopted the stereotypical accent and joked about the crew having to use “smoke signals to coordinate with Granite Mountain” because “the flame lengths were taller than our tepees.” The only thing that made the men laugh harder was Donut’s impersonation of Steed. He sped up his voice to hyperactivity and talked about when the “Gatorades got burned up,” then paused mid-discussion to knock out a few push-ups “to tone my bis and tris” and improve his “beach bod.” The hotshots howled.