On the Burning Edge (4 page)

Leah fell for Grant’s sincerity. His unabashed love for her was like nothing she’d ever experienced, and his honesty about emotion was raw and endearing. They moved in together and talked often of eloping in the fall of 2015. Leah was far more outdoorsy. She liked sleeping under the stars and craved exercise. When Grant first signed up to be
a hotshot, they joked that she was far and away the better candidate for the job. Instead, Leah worked as an assistant at a property management firm and put her aspirations of going to college to be a photojournalist on hold. Before going to work, she made Grant salads for lunch, which otherwise would have been gas station burritos and maple bars, and when he came home she would coddle him as he complained about the punishing workouts that Steed dished out every day. In the beginning, he’d come home to her threatening to quit. But Leah never doubted Grant’s toughness. She was less certain that he could handle the time away from her.

“For the first time in his life he actually had a place he felt he belonged,” Leah said. They shared a comfortable rental with their dog, Derek, and a few roommates. His job bartending and washing dishes at a local Mexican restaurant was the only hitch in what Grant otherwise considered the smoothest period of his life.

When Bob first suggested that Grant apply for Granite Mountain in the winter of 2012, the prospect wasn’t appealing. Leaving Leah for any amount of time, let alone many months, sounded awful to him. So did sleeping in the dirt. Ultimately, though, the lure of professional job experience and a chance to earn a year’s salary with just eight months of work trumped Grant’s love of creature comforts. Plus, Leah pushed him to take the job. Her encouragement made it easier to believe that hotshotting, no matter what challenges the job presented, couldn’t possibly be worse than manning a sink.

“Get your ass up! Don’t you fucking quit!”

Back on the side of the mountain, Scott Norris, a wiry twenty-eight-year-old redhead who’d transferred to Granite Mountain from a Forest Service hotshot crew that spring, pounced on Grant before he could catch his breath. It was usually the squad bosses’ job to discipline the rookies, but Scott, who’d wanted to make a career of firefighting, took it upon himself. A few of the guys marching behind Steed glanced back. Grant was still down on one knee, but now he was vomiting again.

Kneeling on the ground, his vision blurred by fatigue, with Scott yelling at him and the other hotshots still racing up the hill, Grant
managed to stumble to his feet. Becoming a hotshot might not have been his dream, but backing down from a challenge wasn’t in his nature. Grant gritted his teeth, hauled the box of water to his shoulder, and chased after the rest of the crew.

Marsh and Steed had
designed Granite Mountain’s training day with a larger purpose in mind. The crew would build a line that, later in the fall or winter, would serve as a line meant to contain a prescribed burn. The eventual fire would accomplish two objectives. First, it would mimic the natural low-intensity blazes that were common to the Prescott area before fire suppression took hold as the dominant land management policy, in around 1910. And second, the burn would check any future wildfires by leaving something like a moat of blackened forest around Prescott.

The prescribed-burn plot needed to be lined at some point that summer, and Steed intended for Granite Mountain to tackle the project with the same urgency they would if the flames were already marching down Whiskey Row. He ordered the saw teams—the sawyers and swampers—to clear a thirty-foot-wide swath of trees, brush, and limbs on the edge of the pink flagging. The scrape would follow behind, digging a ten-foot-wide path down to mineral soil in the middle of the swath. When complete, it would look as if a bulldozer had plowed through the forest and a trail crew had built a jeep road through the middle of the swath.

Scott started working. During the five seasons he’d spent fighting fire with the nearby Payson Hotshots, a crew based a hundred miles to the east, he’d learned to run a chainsaw well. When he came to Granite Mountain, he expected that Steed would bump him back to the scrape with the rookies. Regardless of prior experience, on the Payson crew, new guys always swung hand tools.

Running chainsaw is the most dangerous job on the line. Hundreds of men have knocked out their front teeth while traversing mountains with saws on their shoulders; many have burn scars on their necks from where the muffler, hot from running all day, touched
an exposed piece of skin. Sawyers wear Kevlar chaps, eyewear, and gloves to protect themselves in the event that they slip, but on every crew in the nation, somebody has a story of a chainsaw injury. Some are gruesome. Some are life-threatening. It doesn’t take much imagination to conjure what happens when some unfortunate hotshot touches a spinning chainsaw.

Many crews won’t allow new hotshots, even those with fire experience, to be sawyers until they’ve proved themselves fit, capable, and safe. It wasn’t long after watching the fluid and confident way Scott ran chainsaw that Steed offered him one of the crew’s lead sawyer positions.

Scott tugged his machine to life and set it to idle beside him while he pushed in earplugs and pulled his hands into leather work gloves he’d turned inside out to prevent blisters. Joe Thurston, a thirty-year-old Utah native and father of two, had been assigned to be Scott’s swamper, and he followed Scott in to work. There was elegance in the way the team moved.

Unable to talk over the screaming engine, Joe occasionally touched Scott’s shoulder to alert his sawyer of an overlooked limb. Otherwise, the men, ever aware of the other’s presence, seemed to dance around each other. As he grabbed cut limbs, Joe always left a couple of feet between his hands and Scott’s saw. At a manzanita bush a little smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle, Joe pulled the branches back to make it easier for Scott to see. The sawyer lopped the limbs off inches above the ground. When one dropped, Joe and Scott made eye contact, and Scott held the saw still for an almost imperceptible moment. In that pause, Joe reached toward the still-whirling chain, grabbed the branch, and tossed it off the fire line. It took seconds to clear the manzanita. Falling trees took longer.

At a larger pine that sat in the middle of the fire line’s path, Scott first removed the limbs, running the saw up and down the eighteen-inch-diameter trunk in one fluid motion. Then he hugged the trunk and looked up, assessing the tree’s natural lean and determining which direction he wanted it to fall to make Joe’s job of removing it from the
line easier. Once decided, Scott aimed the pine where he wanted it to go by cutting the trunk perpendicular to its lean. Eight inches above that, at a forty-five-degree angle, he made a second cut that intersected the first. With the toe of his boot, Scott kicked out of the pine a chunk of wood roughly the size and shape of a large watermelon wedge and, still on his knees, spun around to the opposite side of the tree.

“Back-cutting!” Scott bellowed. Travis Carter, the squad boss in charge of the sawyers and swampers, cast a quick glance in Scott’s direction to ensure the other three saw teams were a safe distance away from the tree, and Scott checked to make sure Joe was safely behind him. Then, satisfied, he revved the saw and made a flat cut on the back side of the tree. Wood chips bounced off his wire mesh goggles and clung to beads of sweat and the stubble of his red beard. On trees that he was trying to fell against their natural lean, Scott would have Joe hammer a shoe-size plastic wedge into the back of the tree with the small yellow-handled sledgehammer the swamper sometimes carried in the back of his pack.

But wedges weren’t necessary on this tree, and the deeper Scott cut, the more the pine leaned over a strap of wood—a hinge—he’d intentionally left in the pine’s interior. Then it cracked, and Scott stepped back as the tree broke off the stump and crashed to the forest floor. Every hotshot on the line could feel the ground shake. Scott didn’t pause. He strode over to the fallen tree and bucked it into smaller pieces that Joe was already tugging off the line.

Wildfires occur in every state
in America. Minnesota’s Boundary Waters, Maine’s North Woods, Iowa’s cornfields, even what little patches of wildland still exist on Long Island: At one point or another, all of it has probably burned, and most of it will burn again. Every few years, Alaska’s endless wilderness torches with such intensity that the fires uproot century-old trees. These behemoth blazes can generate vortices of swirling wind, flames, and smoke so powerful
that they carry half-ton logs thousands of feet into the air. Somehow fire finds the conditions it needs to thrive in the swamps of Florida’s Everglades and the bogs of Louisiana. The natural process of flame and regrowth is many millennia old. For four hundred million years, fuel, oxygen, and heat have combined to make flame.

Americans have been aggressively putting out wildfires only since the beginning of the twentieth century, but in that time we’ve invented firefighting tools as varied as the landscapes where they’re used. Recently, some of the tools have become higher-tech: There are oversize four-wheel-drive fire engines with water turrets that drain twenty-five-hundred-gallon tanks in minutes, helicopter-borne torches that can set ablaze thousands of acres of grasslands in a single pass, remotely piloted drones used to scout potential fire lines without endangering life, and infrared cameras mounted on small planes to map a fire’s perimeter and intensity.

But a hotshot’s work depends on the relatively simple tools he carries in his hands, and there’s one tool every hotshot and wildland firefighter in the country knows intimately: the Pulaski. In 1910, the thirty-five-hundred-person timber town of Wallace, Idaho, sat in the path of a blaze that would grow to the size of Connecticut. Ed Pulaski, a Forest Service ranger, had been tasked with keeping the flames out of Wallace. At one point, he commanded fifty farmers, fathers, and drunks enlisted from the town’s doorsteps and bars. Few, if any, knew how to fight fires. When the wind rose and the fire exploded, flames trapped Pulaski and his crew in a canyon. Against their screams and protests, the ranger forced his men into a mineshaft and blockaded the entrance with his body. To run was to die. Pulaski drew his .44 revolver and said, “The next man who tries to leave the tunnel I will shoot.”

The militia of firefighters lay down beside one another like sardines, sucking in the cool air puddled on the bottom of the mineshaft. Orange light cast by the fire sprung into the darkness, and it grew so hot, the wooden joists and braces caught flame. Pulaski lost consciousness. When the fire passed and the first of the forty-five or so survivors crawled over their leader’s lifeless body, someone said, “Come on outside, boys—the boss is dead.”

“Like hell he is,” came Pulaski’s response. He lay in the ash, his hands and arms burned and one eye blinded from the smoke. The Big Burn, as the fire came to be known, gutted Wallace and killed at least eighty-seven firefighters and townsfolk. Five of those men were under Pulaski’s command. He never fully recovered. For the rest of his life, he tended to the graves of the fallen and rarely left his home and blacksmith shop in Wallace, where he invented his namesake tool and the icon of wildland firefighting. The ax on one side of the tool’s head can be used to chop limbs from trees or cut thick roots; the adze on the other end can clear pine needles and leaves from the forest floor. As such, from Colorado’s plains to Southern California’s brush to Tennessee’s thick timber, the Pulaski works well in every fuel type. Today, firefighters’ caches all across the country store tens of thousands of the tools that bear Pulaski’s name.

At least four of the hotshots on Granite Mountain were using Pulaskis the day of the training fire. Donut, who is six feet tall, had customized his with a longer handle. As lead Pulaski, he went first, cutting roots and mats of pine needles and otherwise setting the path for the line. The ten other hotshots in the scrape followed behind. A few feet separated each man, and, unlike out ahead where the saw teams were working, it was relatively quiet in the scrape. Donut and the veterans in the scrape talked about baseball, beer, girls, and food as they swung their tools.

Swinging hand tools at a rabbit’s pace doesn’t generate the same risks as running chainsaw or swamping, but it comes with its own special brand of hazards. There’s the obvious—the business end of the tool. In the few hours they’d been cutting line, Donut had already taken a few thousand tool strokes, each time flinging an adze full of dirt into a berm of cut brush, limbs, and pine needles forming on the green side of the line. Already his pants were covered in dirt, and dust filled the creases on his face. At one point, the Pulaski’s head skipped off a rock and clanked into Donut’s shinbone. He let out a stream of curse words and felt a wave of nausea. The hotshots around him winced, but they’d all felt the same thing.

Donut’s momentary pain didn’t slow the otherwise steady pace of
the work for long. What did is when Donut attacked a forearm-thick root that crossed from the black (or future black) to the green. If the root burned, the prescribed fire could spread across the line and escape. When Donut paused to chop through it, the other hotshots stacked up behind him and progress slowed. But Donut stubbornly refused to admit defeat to a root. He switched to the Pulaski’s ax end, wound up into an overhead swing, and buried the sharpened bit into the root. Still, it didn’t break free, and from the back of the line came the call “Take a bump!” It meant Donut needed to leave the root for the next guy and keep advancing the line.

The call had come from Bob Caldwell, the squad boss working at the back of the scrape. After five seasons fighting fires, Bob had proven himself a strong leader and over the winter of 2013 had earned one of the three coveted squad-boss positions on Granite Mountain. At just twenty-three, Bob was the youngest, least experienced, and baldest of them. In all likelihood, he was also the smartest. He loved Hemingway, Coors beer, and hotshotting; on a trellis in his backyard, he’d hung a wooden sign that read,
I
’
D RATHER DIE IN MY BOOTS THAN LIVE IN A SUIT
.