On the Burning Edge (6 page)

“We were the redheaded stepchildren,” Maldonado said. “They didn’t want us at home, and they didn’t want us on the fire line.”

For one thing, Crew 7 looked different from other fire crews. Instead of buggies, those burly custom people movers, Crew 7 drove white twelve-passenger vans. The rigs weren’t capable of handling the wear and tear from twenty young men with fierce addictions to chewing tobacco and little allegiance to sanitation. If buggies get nasty—they do—then the vans were leagues worse. The fire gear was stored in the back, and the seats were so full of dirt that clouds of dust would puff up when the men sat down. The air-conditioning in one van didn’t work at all. As a joke, the unlucky squad assigned to the hot van tucked canned tuna fish into the functioning cooling vents of the other van—the smell was putrid. When Crew 7 rattled into fire camp, the other hotshot and handcrews immediately took notice. Most cringed.

“Hotshotting is a good old boys’ club, and new crews are never welcomed, especially when they’re from other agencies. Whatever Marsh went through wasn’t unique,” said Jim Cook, who was the superintendent of the Arrowhead Hotshots, out of Kings Canyon National Park, in the 1980s and 1990s. Arrowhead was among the country’s first Department of the Interior crews. “But the shit you get as an upstart isn’t for performance. It’s for tipping the world sideways.”

When Cook started Arrowhead, the established hotshot superintendents were far from welcoming toward new crews. Back then, many crews still had ties back to the hotshots’ predecessors, the Civilian Conservation Corps fire crews and the forty-man fire teams that sprang up in Oregon in the late thirties. Though these teams were effective, research on line-construction speed, logistical ease, and the
simple management challenge of wrangling forty young men prompted the crew size to be cut to twenty firefighters. The first hotshot crews—the name referred to the fact that they were always given the most intense assignments—emerged in their present form in the late 1940s, after many years of wildfires threatened thousands of homes in Southern California. By the 1960s, the Forest Service, the agency primarily responsible for the creation of hotshots, had stationed nineteen crews near major western airports so they could be flown anywhere in the country within twelve hours. The maturation of President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System nullified the Forest Service’s need to fly crews to fires. Good roads made it cheaper and more efficient to drive the men to blazes, and today hotshots rarely leave their crew buggies behind.

By the nineties, hotshots had evolved into an esteemed organization in the wildland fire community, and the crews became accelerated pipelines for career-driven firefighters. In a matter of a few large fire seasons, a hotshot could spend more than 250 shifts on fires—more than most structural firefighters spend on blazes over their entire careers. Because of their ample fire-line experience, a select few hotshots go on to highly skilled positions in fire management, becoming smoke jumpers, incident commanders, investigators of fire fatalities, or, like Cook, academics whose research can shape the future of fire-line decision-making.

Though the early hotshots were much more militarized and in vastly better condition than the civilian teams Forest Service rangers like Ed Pulaski had raised to battle violent blazes decades earlier, they still relied on only a few qualified firefighters to make decisions. The biggest difference between the new crews and the old militias came down to cultivated pride. The young hotshots believed they were the best firefighting force ever created, and that anybody who cared to claim the title needed to earn it first.

While Crew 7 were
trying to become hotshots, during one shift on a blaze in Oregon, a firefighter from another crew grabbed a can of
spray paint and drew a line in the middle of the road. Next to it he wrote,
DON
’
T CROSS IT
. Many firefighters simply refused to talk to the guys or eyed them up in the chow line. The Forest Service firefighters’ concern, whether justified or, much more likely, not, was that a municipal crew wouldn’t have their backs on the fire line. Marsh and his men were officially given a chance to prove themselves in 2007, when Crew 7 was made a hotshot training crew—one step beneath actual certification.

By then he’d changed Crew 7’s name to Granite Mountain and upgraded its second-rate gear to the best equipment available. A sign in their gear cache read,
TOTAL COST OF A WELL EQUIPPED HOTSHOT:
$4,000. Marsh sold the vans and bought two $150,000 white-and-red crew hauls that, when parked beside the green trucks of the Forest Service and the yellow trucks of the Bureau of Land Management, announced that Granite Mountain was proudly different. Perhaps best of all, Marsh moved the men out of the rat-infested radiation barn by the lake and into the downtown fire station. The city gave Marsh $15,000 to fix it up. To get the most out of the money, he and the crew did much of the work themselves and cut costs wherever possible, even scrounging chairs from the side of the road or the dump. They had Steed’s brother install the linoleum floors, inlaying in the white floor black tiles that read
GMIHC
(Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew). If any rookie touched the black tiles, he had to do ten push-ups.

Granite Mountain’s two seasons as a hotshot-crew-in-training were intense. It started with a live certification drill, similar to the one 2013’s crew would be going through in Prescott National Forest but with considerably more scrutiny. A pair of longtime Forest Service hotshot superintendents shadowed Marsh and his firefighters as they were put through a series of tests meant to replicate any scenario hotshots might encounter on the fire line. The other superintendents threw at Marsh and his crew a drill that demanded they guide in air tankers, coordinate fire-line operations with bulldozers and a half-dozen fire engines, operate without Marsh as superintendent, and decide when it was safe to attack a blaze and when they needed to step
back and watch the fire burn. The crew put out rapidly expanding spot fires, felled enormous trees, and dealt with medical emergencies in the form of bee stings, heat exhaustion, chainsaw cuts, and burns.

Marsh and Granite Mountain excelled, but they wouldn’t hear the other superintendents’ ruling for months. In the meantime, they returned to the fire line, where the tests kept coming. They stopped one fire from scorching a subdivision near Payson, on the notoriously dangerous Mogollon Rim, and another by accepting an assignment that no other crew on scene would take: a thankless and grueling job that required cutting twenty-six hundred feet of line from the rim of Idaho’s Hells Canyon to the Snake River. Despite these accomplishments, it was August 2008 before the crew heard back about the ruling on Granite Mountain’s hotshot status. At that point they were working a fire in Northern California’s Klamath National Forest, a swath of 1.7 million acres of ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, and poison oak forest that drops from nine thousand feet to the Pacific Ocean in less than fifty miles. That morning, the smoke hung in long white strips above the many river valleys cutting through the peaks.

Marsh gathered the men beside his new Dodge 4500 with its customized taillights. Next to the initials was a big
T
, for “training crew,” which Marsh had taped there to ensure other hotshots knew that Granite Mountain wasn’t claiming a title it hadn’t yet earned.

“I got the call,” Marsh told them. He flicked out his knife and scraped the
T
from the back of his truck.

“We’re hotshots,” Marsh said, allowing himself a smile. Granite Mountain was one of the only municipal hotshot crews in the country. “This honor is yours, gentlemen. You earned it. Congratulations.” Then he led his men back out to the fire line.

Back in Prescott during
the tail end of 2013’s training drill, the single-file line of panting hotshots broke up at the top of the dusty trail in the Prescott National Forest. Renan, still gasping, followed the other hotshots in Alpha squad to their buggies. Somebody put on a Tupac album, and the heavy beats of gangster rap thumped across
the campsite. As the men refilled their waters and chainsaw gas, Marsh watched, as he’d done all day, how the hotshots performed. He didn’t camp with the men that night. Not long after sunset, Marsh drove away. It was the last time many of the hotshots would see Marsh until he rejoined the crew near the end of June.

Renan and Grant climbed into the Alpha buggy. Clayton Whitted, Alpha’s squad boss, had ordered the two to keep track of each other throughout the season. They’d help each other run errands in fire camps, keep track of the other guy on the line, and even be there when the other went to the bathroom. Grant, amused by the idea of having a minder, called Renan his “battle buddy.” Cheesy and flippant, the catchphrase made a few of the senior guys laugh, but it irked others.

As rookies, Clayton had given the pair one more lowly job: unloading the other hotshots’ overnight gear. Along the ceiling of each buggy ran a shelf that held the crew’s black duffel bags, each filled with a sleeping kit, a few changes of clothes, a dozen clean socks, and various creature comforts—books, journals, men’s magazines, portable music players—to entertain them during moments of calm on the line.

“Brutal day, huh?” Renan said, tossing a bag to Grant. “Eric was riding me pretty hard back there.”

“Yeah, that sucked,” said Grant, who caught the bag and threw it into the pile outside the truck. “Did you hear Scott tearing me a new one?”

“Hilarious, man. I saw you go down and thought for sure you weren’t coming back up,” Renan said. “I was like, well, looks like I’ll have a new buggy mate. Grant’s knocked out.”

“Rookie!” one of the veterans called into the truck. “Toss me a Gato.”

Renan opened the cooler and underhanded a cold bottle of Gatorade to the veteran, who nodded in thanks.

“Nah, I just got too hot,” Grant said. “I had my yellow buttoned up to my neck.” Renan laughed at the thought of his overdressed friend sweating profusely and overheating from a wholly preventable cause.

“Puking always makes me feel better anyways,” Grant said.

Meanwhile, in Bravo’s buggy, Brandon Bunch, a former bull rider and fourth-year sawyer, and Wade Parker, his swamper, had pulled the type of move hotshots would talk about for years to come. That morning before their shift, Wade had bought twenty steaks, and Bunch had thrown a propane grill beneath his seat in the buggy. He knew the hotshots always camped after their training day, and that meant Meals Ready to Eat, the pre-packaged military breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that crews eat on fires. The veterans didn’t need practice eating MREs.

MREs have been a staple of the hotshot diet since they were developed, during the Vietnam War. Over the years, the variety and quality of the food has come a long way from “Ham Slice” and “Frankfurter and Beans.” Wars tend to increase the variety of MREs in circulation, and since 1993, more than 241 new items have been approved. Some, like Chicken Pesto Pasta with Patriotic Cookies, are decent. But the meals, which are heated by a water-triggered chemical reaction, always produce a nauseating stench. Granite Mountain would have plenty of opportunities to compare tasting notes on the variety of MRE flavors. Bunch and Wade knew as much. Steaks were a rare gift—one they were happy to give.

“For everybody, but the rookies gotta eat their MREs first,” Bunch said, sparking up the propane grill. “Sorry, fellas.” He happily ensured that this year’s rookies went through the same traditions he had: The veterans picked the rookies’ meals.

Anthony Rose, a second-year hotshot originally from Illinois, ripped into the boxes and started sorting through the flavors. He’d come to Granite Mountain via a firefighting position on an engine in Crown King, a 164-person community east of Prescott. He’d been picked on regularly in his rookie year. The memory of the hazing he’d weathered was still fresh, maybe even magnified by his own marginal position of power.

“Dig in, Grant,” Tony said as he tossed him an MRE.

After a long day of swinging a tool, hunger usually makes it possible to forget that MREs are little miracles of science more than they are food. But that night, Grant couldn’t get excited about eighteen-month-old,
deoxygenated meat when the men he’d worked with shoulder-to-shoulder all day were celebrating the end of their training with steak.

Grant took up a spot by the campfire, where he tore into the package and chewed through powdery biscuits while Tony, Bunch, and the veterans laughed over the grilling meat.

Grant was used to being treated with a certain level of respect. He could agree to play the hotshots’ reindeer games while on the crew, but only if it gained him entry into the club. A charismatic kid who’d been an athlete in high school, Grant was the well-dressed and earnest one who moved with ease between all social groups. He didn’t hold grudges and didn’t see a reason for social hierarchy. When he’d first moved to Prescott, he used to join his aunt Linda and a group of her friends on morning walks, on which he was the only man and the youngest person by twenty years. Not surprisingly, the women loved it when Grant joined them, but his charms fell short on Granite Mountain. None of the hotshots cared how somebody was used to being treated. Respect had to be earned on the fire line. That took time.

A
fter the crew passed its two-week critical, Granite Mountain was available to fight fires anywhere in the country. At a moment’s notice, even if rain was dousing Prescott, the hotshots could be loaded into an airplane and shipped to a fire fifteen hundred miles away. Trouble was, few fires were burning anywhere in the country, and that meant Granite Mountain stayed put in Prescott. By early May, the crew had spent weeks working in and around the station, and stagnation wasn’t good for anybody. The men wanted to do the job they’d been training to do, and the longer it took to get an assignment, the more likely it became that some bored hotshot would do something stupid and create problems for himself and the department.

Every morning, Steed started the crew’s day with the same routine. They met in the ready room, where one hotshot added daily Internet-found factoids to a whiteboard—random things about the amount of milk cows produce, or the hottest days in history—and Steed volunteered another to read aloud the situation report, a summary of all the nation’s fire activity. On May 1, activity was light, with fewer than a thousand new starts and fewer than ten of those designated as large, meaning one hundred acres or more if the fire was in
timber and three hundred acres or more if it was burning in grass. Given that the Southwest was as dry as in any year in recent memory, it seemed strange that no fires were burning in the region. The last measured rainfall at Prescott’s Sundog Weather Station was .11 inch, three weeks earlier. April had been the third month in a row with less than a quarter of Prescott’s average precipitation, and Arizona’s scant winter snowpack had already melted off of even the twelve-thousand-foot peaks to the north. Whether it was a wayward spark or the men’s own restlessness, something was bound to break the calm.

Steed’s best tool for taming the impulses of nineteen young men was exhaustion. His morning workouts only got harder as the men’s fitness improved, and after a couple of hours of running, hiking, sit-ups, pull-ups, and push-ups, he sent them to thin the forest and brush in J. S. Acker Memorial Park, a city park so overgrown that the police often busted meth addicts getting high in its thickets. Day in and day out, the men ground through the same routine: Steed’s training followed by five or six hours of running chainsaws and chipping brush.

The men invented ways to stave off the monotony. Alpha and Bravo competed in anything that could be made a competition: Ultimate Frisbee, cake eating, saw work. Then there were the shenanigans. The squad bosses, Clayton Whitted and Bob Caldwell, both balding, shaved their heads at work and forced Grant to do the same. He shrugged when he showed Leah the buzz cut. Thus far, he’d protested most hazing because he found the rituals childish and a little insulting. This one he couldn’t avoid, though: Bob, his cousin, was involved. He had to support him. “Sometimes you just have to give in,” Grant said to Leah.

He gave in again on his twenty-first birthday.

“Don’t tell anybody,” Renan had warned Grant. “Everybody’s going to give you shit if they find out.”

But Grant either didn’t care, didn’t believe him, or actually wanted to be the center of attention, because that morning he let the news slip. When Steed heard, he concocted a birthday cake from MREs: crackers, pound cake, and cookies frosted with packets of peanut butter and chocolate-hazelnut butter churned together. The crew sang
“Happy Birthday” and laughed as Grant ate a barely digestible few thousand calories of sugar before the morning workout. He couldn’t finish, and Renan chipped in to help, but Grant still vomited up his birthday cake during that day’s training.

The calm finally broke on a warm and breezy evening in early May. Outside, plastic bags and wrappers from the food stand across the street pinwheeled into the chain-link fence, where they caught and flapped in the breeze. It was nearly time to go home for the day. Some of the hotshots were sharpening tools or putting an edge on their chainsaw chains, but most of the crew lounged about the saw shop. They perched on the workbenches, snacking on the cookies and crackers taken from MREs and arguing the finer points of hoppy vs. cheap beer. As usual, Renan didn’t add much to the clamor. From the first day of the season, his goal had been to earn the Rookie of the Year award, an annual honor that would get his name on a plaque beside Wade Parker and Andrew Ashcraft, two hotshots on track to securing permanent fire jobs—exactly what Renan wanted. To avoid getting singled out, he did the opposite of Grant and kept his head down and his mouth shut.

Renan listened to the endless drone of radio transmissions coming through a speaker set up in the station: a city engine returning to quarters, a battalion chief going off duty for the day, a car wreck. He usually ignored the radio chatter, but today Renan was listening more intently. That morning, during the daily briefing in the ready room, Steed and the crew had talked about the Red Flag Warning the National Weather Service had issued for the Prescott area. It meant that that day the region had entered a period when dry fuels, warm temperatures, and strong winds were aligning. In such conditions, wildfires threaten to be explosive and extremely difficult to control.

Renan felt a surge of adrenaline when he heard radio traffic about a wildfire burning in grasslands near a subdivision twenty-five miles north of the station. Granite Mountain was a half-hour away. Dispatch might send them.

He ran across the pavement to the buggies and pulled his line gear off the shelf and into a pile on his seat. He checked every pocket of
the bag to be sure he had everything he needed: extra AA batteries for his headlamps and radio, six quarts of water, an MRE, a warm layer, a Clif Bar, chewing tobacco. He’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Some men and women
seem born to be firefighters. They’re woodsmen from places where the trucks are lifted and the high school parties are held around bonfires on ridges with views of towns like Truckee, California; Missoula, Montana; and Redmond, Oregon. Prescott is such a town. Like nearly half of the crew, Renan grew up there, but none of the guys he went to high school with ever expected that he’d become a hotshot, even if he was a gifted athlete.

At sixteen, Renan contracted the West Nile virus and developed neurological complications related to the pathogen. The symptoms—deafness, paralysis, and seizures—left him in a wheelchair for two months during his freshman year of high school. By his senior year, thanks to a combination of physical therapy, a cocktail of drugs, time, and learning how to better manage the stress that often triggered the seizures, he’d brought the condition under control enough to play catcher on Prescott High’s varsity baseball team.

After high school, he wanted to work with his hands. He set his mind to becoming a structural firefighter. He craved the feeling of accomplishment that physical labor provided. He took fire science classes at Yavapai College. But there are far more candidates than jobs in structural firefighting, which requires more education, earns slightly better pay, and offers more professional stability. Despite applying to a few departments, he couldn’t get a position. Like Grant, Scott Norris, and many of the other guys, Renan saw Granite Mountain as a way to distinguish himself from the other applicants. Marsh didn’t hire him when he first applied to Granite Mountain in 2011; neither his résumé nor his physical aptitude stood out among the twenty or thirty men and women who applied that year. Renan came back prepared in 2013.

This time, he passed the physical test easily. He wore a shirt and
tie to the follow-up interview, a highly unusual formality among hotshot crews. As a means of communicating the seriousness of becoming a hotshot, Marsh required his applicants to dress up and interviewed applicants in the ready room.

When Renan arrived, Marsh sat at the head of a long Formica table in front of the whiteboards. Flanking him were his squad bosses and lead firefighters—five hotshots in total, all wearing their yellow fire shirts tucked into green pants. They asked Renan to sit alone at a table facing them.

Marsh always asked the same question first: “Tell me how Granite Mountain started.”

Renan stammered through the answer: fuels crew to hotshots in six years. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses kept firing questions his way: “Have you ever lied at work?” “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever been through?” Renan paused for a moment before answering the last one. He never intended to bring up the illness. He hadn’t relapsed in years, and the doctors didn’t think his fighting fires would pose a danger to him or the crew.

“The two months I spent in a wheelchair,” said Renan. He told the whole story: the haunting numbness that crept up his spine and signaled a seizure’s approach, the exhaustion that lingered for months after, the white void of blindness, the fear that his sight might never return, the struggle to accept what he couldn’t control, the decision not to let it hold him back. Marsh, Steed, and the squad bosses listened to Renan intently. Interviews didn’t usually turn up such captivating stories.

Renan was working as a valet attendant at a Scottsdale golf resort when Marsh called to tell him that he wasn’t getting the job. Marsh judged the risk to be too great—too much liability for the city and the crew. That afternoon, Renan drove the hour and a half back to Prescott so he could ask Marsh to his face what it would take to change his mind. He told Marsh that the illness had passed and that if he hired him, he’d do everything to stand out—his career was at stake. A week after that meeting, one of Granite Mountain’s top applicants
accepted another job. Renan was again parking cars at the golf course when he got another call, this time from Steed. “How would you like to be a part of the crew?” he asked. Renan danced a celebratory jig while Izod-clad retirees milled about the clubhouse.

Back at the station,
the door of the saw shop swung open and Steed marched in. “Load up! We got a fire!” he boomed. The men hustled to the rigs, and by the time Grant got in the back of the Alpha buggy, Renan’s seat belt was already buckled.

The hotshots caravanned—Steed’s supe truck up front, followed by Alpha and Bravo—as they drove across the flats of the Prescott Valley and toward a plume of light gray smoke. Around noon, the grass alongside Perkinsville Road had caught fire, and gusty winds had pushed the flames to nearly a thousand acres.

Donut, who controlled the stereo, put on a rap tune, “Bugatti,” by Ace Hood: “Damn, life can switch on you in a matter of seconds.” Donut slapped the ceiling with the flat of his hand, yelling out the chorus: “I woke up in a new Bugatti!”

Kevin Woyjeck, a twenty-one-year-old rookie on Bravo squad, thumbed out a text message to his dad, who was a firefighter in Southern California.

WOYJECK
: 25 miles away…We see smoke.

DAD
: Calm…Get your calm on.

WOYJECK
: Everyone’s calm. Don’t worry. I’m super. Calm.

Renan peered out the window, hoping to glimpse the fire. A helicopter worked the blaze, and sunlight glinted off the fire engines already on scene. He paid closest attention to the column.

Smoke tells a fire’s story; it’s the signature. The obvious by-product of combustion, smoke is a mix of evaporated moisture and released gases. Bits of charred wood and soot wafting upward give the visible vapor color. Heavy materials—timber, oil, and houses among them—
that burn hotter and more slowly also tend to produce darker smoke. But on the prairie fire, the smoke was thin and white, angling eastward over the plain with the breeze. It told Renan that the blaze was a wind-driven brush fire: cooler than a timber burn but in quick-burning brush and grasses. Firefighters tell legends of brush fires that, during the windiest days in Southern California, keep pace with interstate traffic. Grass and brush fires are the most volatile burns.

“Yellow up, boys,” Clayton, Alpha’s squad boss, yelled to the back from his seat in the cab. Renan’s mouth was dry. He and the other hotshots put on their fire-resistant shirts.

When they arrived on scene,
the fire turned out to barely justify Donut’s choice of the “Bugatti” song. A total of thirteen engines, an air tanker, and a hundred-some firefighters had beaten Granite Mountain to the blaze. The blitzkrieg had worked. The fire was mostly out.

While Steed went to get Granite Mountain’s assignment from the incident commander, Renan took in the whole scene. The fire’s scar looked like burned cropland. Countless wisps of smoke screwed skyward, but only one pocket of active flames remained. The hotshots had shown up too late to catch the large air tanker dropping slurry near the subdivision, but a helicopter still worked overhead. One of the engines on scene was still knocking down the flames with a stream of water.

“Hose!” one of the enginemen yelled.

The call signaled to his crew members that they needed to extend what’s called a progressive hose-lay. One of the crew dropped to his knees and shut off the water just behind the nozzle by pinching the hose closed with an industrial-strength clamp. Meanwhile, another man added a hundred-foot length to the end of the lay, reattached the nozzle, and released the clamp. The whole operation took less than a minute, and with water and a hundred more feet of hose to drag along the fire’s edge, the crew resumed spraying down the flames. With engines on all flanks of the fire, there wasn’t much work left for Granite
Mountain. Had they arrived when the blaze started, they may well have witnessed some incredible fire behavior—spot fires, little flaming tornadoes. Instead, the wind died, and so did the flames.

There wasn’t much work left for Granite Mountain to do. Steed directed Alpha’s and Bravo’s scrape to put in a quick line. He sent a few guys to burn out a small pocket of unburned grass inside the fire’s interior, thereby limiting the likelihood of spots by controlling the burn’s intensity. Once that was done, he and the hotshots “mopped up,” or used hand tools, dirt, and water laced with foam to douse the dangerous embers closest to the lines. The shift barely constituted hotshot work.