Young Men and Fire (30 page)

On the graph the effect of the surface winds on light fuels is illustrated by the increasing steepness of the line representing the course of the fire. From points 7 to 8 Rothermel estimates the fire was traveling 360 to 610 feet per minute with an intensity of 5,500 to 9,000 Btu’s per foot per second. At this speed it could cover the 220 yards in one to two minutes and arrive at point 8 at 5:55 or 5:56.

The men covered the 220 yards between points 7 and 8 in two minutes, a figure meaning that they had almost doubled their average speed between points 6 and 7. Four miles an hour was a terrific speed for the crew to maintain on that slope. At the turnaround Dodge had estimated the fire to be between 150 and 200 yards behind the crew; at point 7 only 75 to 100 yards behind. Now at point 8, only 220 yards farther, the fire had closed the gap to 50 yards. Rothermel’s added testimony is that, beyond point 8, the fire had to be going about five times as fast as at point 6—660 feet per minute, or 7.5 miles per hour.

At point 8 too many questions remain to stop now and try to get answers to all of them. The central and most bitter of these questions is, Was the fire that cremated the Smoke-jumpers the main fire or did the foreman’s escape fire keep its advanced position and reach the Smokejumpers first? Let us first accompany those yet to die as far as we can before making the escape fire stand trial, as undoubtedly it should, before it finds its resting place in history.

5. From the escape fire to the farthest cross.
As we measure the remaining distances and times, we can divide our problem, like the grave markers, into two discernible tiers—the front-
runners, led by the Four Horsemen, who were within a minute of reaching the top, and those on the lower tier, who, after passing Dodge at his escape fire, seemingly just went on sidehilling but without the strength to climb any longer. There were no fundamental differences, however, in the fire conditions the two tiers faced.

The official transcript describes the fuels in this area around point 8 as chiefly cheat grass and fescue. Rothermel says:

I assume it to be equally divided between fuel models 1 and 3. Model 1 is the light fuel model that describes cheat grass very well; model 3 is a heavier grass model that should account for the fescue, weeds, and brush in the area. The fuel moisture calculates to be very close to 3 percent, a very low value. Probably the worst problem was the very strong wind that was gusting to forty miles per hour in the open. It was probably scouring close to the ground, giving midflame winds of fifteen to twenty miles per hour.

Rothermel’s description of the fire conditions continues until it leads to his projection of how soon the men on the lower tier, and presumably the slowest among the front-runners, died:

With these conditions, and estimating the fuel was divided equally between fuel models 1 and 3, the fire is estimated to have been spreading at 660 feet per minute with flames ranging from ten to forty feet in length. At this rate, I estimate the slowest men were caught in forty-five seconds, at 5:56, just a hundred yards from Dodge. The rate of these men over this last hundred yards figures to have been near four hundred feet per minute, or about four and a half miles per hour.

That is a remarkable speed for the slowest of the fastest to maintain, especially if they lost some time at the escape fire trying to understand what Dodge was saying to them. One other piece of on-the-spot evidence was used in arriving at this calculation of their speed—Dodge’s statement to the Board of Review that it would take the fire no more than thirty seconds
or one hundred yards to catch the tail end of the crew sidehilling past him.

Those at the head of the line who came within a minute of the top of the ridge come close to taking us to the edge of reality. We have referred to them as the Four Horsemen; let them remain as such to the end. The average distance of their crosses from Dodge’s escape fire is 375 yards. Rothermel theorizes that for them to get this far they were not with Dodge when he started his fire “but rather began their strong push at point 7.” There is firsthand evidence that, for one of them, this was the case. Sallee says in his second official statement, made on December 12, 1951, that “I had noticed Navon cut off up the hill away from the crew just before we broke out of the timber and hadn’t noticed him rejoin the crew.” No doubt, for we have seen before that when the former parachute jumper from Bastogne didn’t like the way things were going in the United States Forest Service he took matters into his own hands. But I can find no mention among the statements made about the fire by any of its survivors of the individual conduct of the other three front-runners, and I am inclined to think that the other front-runners stayed with the bunch but outran them and that one of them, Henry Thol, Jr., outran Navon.

If Rothermel is right that the front-runners began their push at point 7, they traveled about 600 yards to the site of their grave markers. He projects that their rate of travel from point 7 would average 460 feet per minute, or five and a quarter miles per hour. However, if the possibility I am inclined to believe is correct, if the other three left Dodge at point 8, and if we allow them fifteen seconds or so to watch him start his fire, then they would have traveled 375 yards in about two minutes before the fire caught up to them. “That is 562 feet per minute, or six and a half miles per hour.” As Rothermel goes on to say, “That is a slow jogging pace” and would have been almost beyond reality to maintain for 375 yards on a slope where I had to crawl with gloved hands on a hot August afternoon.

All of us have the privilege to choose what we wish to visualize as the edge of reality. Either tier of crosses allows us to picture the dead as dying with their boots on. On some of the bodies all but the boots were burned off. If you have lived a life that has thrown you in contact many times with nature, you have already discovered that sometimes you can deal with nature only by allowing it to push back what until now you and others thought were its edges.

N
O ONE WHO SURVIVED SAW
what happened to those who became crosses on that hillside. Until the fire had passed, Dodge lay facedown in the ashes of his fire gasping into his wet handkerchief. Rumsey and Sallee were later to testify that, as they escaped up the side of the hill after leaving Dodge, there were long flames and engulfing smoke most of the way but that two or three times the smoke lifted for a moment. Something like this is probably how it will be with us to the end of our Mann Gulch story. Outcroppings of reality will come to us only in glimpses, as they came to Rumsey and Sallee, but I know what all along I have been waiting to see. In the Forest Service reports issued after the fire there is scarcely a see-you-later-alligator farewell for the thirteen men who were killed. When Dodge was asked at the Board of Review if any of those about to die looked his way as they went by, the foreman replied, “They didn’t seem to pay any attention. That is the part I didn’t understand. They seemed to have something on their minds—all headed in one direction.” The last Sallee could recall seeing them, “They were angling up the slope in the unburned grass and fairly close to the edge of the fire Dodge had set.” Then the smoke and the Great Ambiguity settle in. But I expect to see more. I have long expected to catch glimpses of them as far as they went. Could you expect less from a boy who grew up in the woods and grew old as a schoolteacher and so spent most of his life staying close to the
young who are elite and select and, by definition, often in trouble? I came to Mann Gulch expecting to catch glimpses of them as far as they could go. That’s why I came.

The fire had gained on the crew at every stage of the race, until even the fastest had to fall. For a moment only the Four Horsemen were higher up the hill and still alive and for only a part of that moment would they see tragedy was among them. You can see tragedy coming from a considerable distance when you are older, but when you are young tragedy does not pertain to you and certainly never catches up to you. There are pieces of premonitions of tragedy floating around, but they do not yet add up to your tragedy. There are separate stabs of fear, of pity, of self-pity, but to a degree in separate parts of the body. Then suddenly they all merge into one sense, the encompassing sense of inevitability. It is everywhere on you as it becomes the essential whole of all that is preparing to be your tragedy. It becomes the cause of your mounting fear, your pity, and your self-pity, telling you that, no matter what, it does no good to be proud and good and young. Then, almost at the end, it makes possible the triumph that can come at the end of tragedy for the young who are select and elite—the triumph of retaining your pride when you know you have lost for good before you have had a chance in life to make good, except for this.

F
ROM THE ELEVATION OF RETROSPECT
we can see it all coming together more clearly and sooner than those who were there and running. For us the signs are many that in minutes the blowup would bring a total convergence of sky, young men, and fire, and after that the dark; on the top of the hill, though, there were only occasional partings in the smoke, the flames themselves were blinding, and those inside the flames and smoke could no longer see what was happening to them and would happen next. We would not have started to
follow the course of wildfire if we had not assumed that all of us, when called upon, could view an earthly scene from imaginative perspectives, something like the Sky Spirits in Thomas Hardy’s poetical drama,
The Dynasts
, who comment upon tragedies of man from distant horizons. The title of another of Hardy’s finest poems, “The Convergence of the Twain,” suggests convergences yet to come in Mann Gulch. Hardy’s convergence is between the elite, brightly lit, and fastest ship of its time, the
Titanic
, with an iceberg moving inexorably out of “a solitude of the sea / Deep from human vanity.” We can set aside the difference between the ice of the poem and the fire of the story; from the beginning of the world either way has been taken as the way the world may end, and surely there is little philosophic difference between the convergences of fire and ice.

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event,

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said “Now!”

There is, however, a mathematical difference between the perspective from a distant horizon and the view from the ground. From the ground, our approaching tragedy, like the
Titanic’s
, had been linear, arithmetic, and two-dimensional. From the ground, it had occurred on one line as Behind caught up to Ahead, but the Spinner of the Years, viewing wildfire and young men from an even more distant horizon than our own, would see Geometry as well as Arithmetic in what was occurring at lower elevations. Not just Geometry but Solid Geometry—lines becoming curves and curves closing into circles and circles blowing up into spherical monsters
whirling burning branches into the sky—and for a short time, a very short time, a thin line moving among these expanding solids.

At the appropriate moment when the Spinner of the Years said “Now,” Sallee crawled through the crevice 170 yards above where he had left Dodge and took a good look back. He was the only survivor who stopped just to look. Although Sallee was not on a distant horizon and did not have the complete view of the Spinner of the Years, he saw three and possibly four geometries of fire: Below and Above him, Above being almost Beside him; and possibly Ahead of him in the head of the gulch already filling up with smoke.

And certainly Behind him were two fires, Mann Gulch’s two famous fires, the main one now only fifty yards or less downgulch and in front of it the escape fire. In fact, he saw all the preconditions of a tragedy only moments away, without realizing it was imminent and inevitable and tragic. Both he and Rumsey, after the fire had passed the rock slide where they had taken refuge, thought that the rest of the crew were probably as safe as they were. Maybe you have to be born with a special sense of the inevitable to see it coming.

On a big fire, fire could be everywhere, but you can’t look everywhere or your problem gets unmanageable. Rumsey kept the problem simple by looking only for the top of the hill and nothing else, and he got there—only Sallee saw the lower edge of the main fire pass below the lower end of Dodge’s escape fire, but evidently he thought it was a stray stream of fire and didn’t let it bother him by thinking it might be a killer. The fire as it existed in his mind was something behind them that had jumped from the lower end of the opposite side of the gulch and was still behind them.

No matter who you are it is hard to adjust yourself to the fact that a forest fire is not all a big roar behind you getting closer—a dangerous part of it is very sneaky and may actually have sneaked ahead of you or is trying to and doesn’t roar until it is about to close in on you. The fire that had jumped to the north side of the gulch had also been sneaking upgulch in
the dense timber on the south side where it began, rolling burning cones downhill and setting spot fires, until in the semidarkness something invisible touched something else invisible and suddenly there was a fire front surrounding the head of the gulch. In a few minutes the head of the gulch descended into the lower circles of its own Inferno and the blowup became complete in Mann Gulch.

It was about this time that ranger Jansson, looking up Mann Gulch from the river, saw that the upper end of the gulch had disappeared into one vast flame. By then the fire passing below the lower end of Dodge’s fire, which looked like Behind to Sallee, had moved straight upgulch and merged with the fires that had become Ahead in a great flame, as Ahead was already disappearing in one flame out of the gulch. Below was soon to be Above as well as Behind and Ahead. It was not just a convergence of the twain but of a quatrain, for Above surely was rolling its torches downhill to meet the main fire spreading up from Below.