In the summer of 1989, Uncle Mark called in a favor to
his colleague Carl West, the Fire Management Officer for the U.S. Forest
Service at the Mapleton Ranger district, to add me to the Brush Disposal
Crew. Only a few days after completing final exams my freshman year at
the UO, I reported for duty. Nobody knew who the hell I was, until Carl
showed up to instruct his secretary to have me complete the hiring, payroll and
tax forms.
In these days, local loggers felt threatened by the
efforts to protect the old growth forests as a natural habitat for the Northern
Spotted Owl, which was protected under the Endangered Species Act.
People working for the U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management (BLM,
indignantly referred to as “Bureau of Large Mistakes”) were not particularly
popular among local loggers, even though most of the Forest Service workers I
encountered seemed to share the logger’s views in opposition to Spotted Owl
protection. The issue was bigger in Southern Oregon where loggers and
environmental groups routinely clashed. The Forest Service was in a
tricky position of carrying out policy without pissing off their communities.
Within a few days of starting I was sent off a
three-day “Fire School” near Tillicum Beach to learn the rules for being a
wilderness firefighter: how to use a Pulaski to dig a good fire trench, how to
deploy a safety shelter, always being aware of the escape route, and being
alert for snags that have notoriously fallen and killed fighters in the
past. There were two of us from Mapleton taking the training on that day,
and our training was combined with that of The Angell Job Corp Program (I
think) helping trouble-making teens get on path to a job. At every break, the
foul-mouthed troubled teens would head outside to smoke cigarettes. Most of
them didn’t want to be there. I think that it was only a few more days
after fire school that I was told to pack a bag and prepare to get a call for
fire in Idaho.
Large fires are given names. My first was the
“King Gulch” fire in Idaho. We were among the first crews to work on it,
and I recall our first shift starting at night and finishing late
morning. That first day we ate at a Wendy’s and slept on the High School
Gymnasium. By the second day the fire had grown, more crews showed up, and all
the support services arrived – buses, military size tents, food and water
trucks, communication centers, helipad, port-a-pots, and semi-trucks with built
showers, and concessionaires. The logistics of a large fire is impressive.
Within a couple more days the concession stand would sell t-shirts for the
“King Gulch” fire printed on it. I never bought the souvenir shirts for the
fires I went on, and I don’t recall the names of the others. This was
before cell phones; and the best way to send messages home was through a
network of HAM Radio operators who serviced the fire camps.
For a punk college kid, working for the Forest Service
was a good deal. On fires, there was little opportunity to spend money:
food and accommodations were provided. We earned a lot of overtime hours
and could earn hazard pay if we were the first crew on the scene or rode in on
a helicopter to the fire site. I enjoyed riding in the helicopters!
Most of the fires I went on were caused by lightning strikes in the dry
mountains in Idaho, Eastern Washington and Oregon; we referred to their storm
clouds as “cumulus overtimeus”. I earned good money: especially in 1990,
which was a bad fire year. However, what I saved sure went fast once I
went back to school!
I never felt like I was ever in any serious danger
fighting fires. One time I was running a water hose from the windward
size of a sizeable spot fire in a dry, dense desert forest area. The wind
dramatically shifted, turning the smoke fire and in my face. I was quickly
surrounded in dense smoke, which caused me to gag and stung my eyes as I
fumbled toward a safe spot just a few steps away.
One other time our crew was working at night along the
side of a very steep canyon. We were digging line around a fire that was
mostly contained and not very active. Apparently we were to tie a fire
line that was being excavated by a tractor on top of the ridge that we were
working below. As we worked our way up the ridge, I became aware that the
slope was getting steeper and steeper. It was about 4 am. As the
sky was just starting to turn to day light, I stopped to look around and
realized that we were virtually hugging to the side of a very steep cliff,
wearing Vibriam soled work boots on mostly slickrock. One false step or trip
would have ended me or anyone on my crew.
My crew was replaced on that fire line: our shift was
done and we were heading back down the trail that we had dug. Halfway
down the ridge we heard the distinct echo of a boulder tumbling down the slope,
accompanied by the terrifying yells from the crew that replaced us. On
the radio, seconds later, we heard what happened: oblivious to their presence,
the bulldozer working above pushed a boulder over the edge of the ridge where
the crew was working. As the crew chief said on the radio, “It was kind
of like bowling at humans”. It could have been worse: the only injury was
a firefighter who twisted his ankle while dodging the boulder.
I’m always astounded by news of firefighters who have
died on a fire, and am captivated by Norman Maclean’s book “Young Men and
Fire” and his son, John Maclean’s book “Fire on the Mountain”. (The
latter is about a fire in the mid-90’s near Glenwood Springs, Co, a place I
like to vacation to). So many calculations have to go wrong for people to
die on the scene.
When there were not wildfires to go on, I worked on
the Brush Disposal Crew on the Siuslaw National Forest. I collected as
many work hours as I could, indifferent to the duties. This include
“hooting” for owls at midnight (surveying for spotted owls), helping light and
clean up controlled burns on plots of land that had been timbered, cutting
miles of trail, and clearing overhanging brush from the forest service
roads. I was occasionally a torchbearer, helping to ignite a control
burn. The torches are canisters is filled with a combination of diesel
fuel and gasoline. I don’t recall the proper proportions of the fuels:
but I do remember once receiving a dangerous torch that had too much
gasoline. The fire shot out of my torch like a flame thrower.
I enjoyed working in the woods in the summer.
The work was often physical, and that made it fun. I recall once being
2/3rd of the way down a steep hillside for a control burn we were
cleaning. The Argon gas canister of the Probeye, an infrared thermal
viewer used to find “hot spots” that needed to be put out, was empty and I was
volunteered to hike to the top to get another. As I started out, my chief
got on the radio to bet that I couldn’t get to the top in five minutes. I put
it in overdrive and barely made it to the top to win the challenge. I
always finished my summers feeling like I was in great shape: and that helped
me in the coming college ultimate season, too! I was shocked that I had
gained about 15 pounds in one summer.
To run a chainsaw as part of the brush crew, you had
to have Cork boots, instead of the typical Vibram soles. I refused to buy
another pair of boot for something that I was rarely asked to do.
Instead, I dug around the basement of grandma and grandpa’s house and found
Mark’s Cork boots. They were at least 3 sizes too big and largely worn
out, but I made them work with about three pairs of thick socks. I was
frankly dangerous with the chainsaw. The saws we used were large and
heavy. I was not! I struggled to keep pace with my counterparts who
were bigger and stronger than I was. A chainsaw can kick, which required
forearm strength to control. Outsized by the chainsaw, by the end of a
day, all my concentration was on not losing control due to arm fatigue and
subsequently losing a limb.
When not on a fire, I stayed with Grandma and Grandpa,
who treated me to home cooking. I tried to earn my keep by mowing their lawn
and splitting cedar shingles, and making a run to the dump as needed.
After dark I would help grandma shuck peas that she harvested from her garden
or prepare green beans and beets for canning (something I still do for myself).
To get from Florence to Mapleton early in the morning
I had a small Dodge pickup. After my first season it sprung an oil leak
and then broke a piston. My second year I used a rusted out Datsun B-210,
that Grandpa acquired from George Reedall (sp?). It had been sitting under
a pine tree for several years and had tree sap cemented on it and pine needles
filling the air vents. It had bad electrical problems, and eventually a puff
of smoke caused the headlights to fail one morning on my way to Mapleton.
I ended up carpooling with another firefighter and then called Grandpa and pick
up the dog from the side of curb. Before my third year, I traveled to
Bakersfield to pick up the 1974 Dodge Charger SE that was a hand-me-down from
Grandma to Mark. We put a new battery in it and I was on my way home. It
was kind of a thrill to white knuckle it at 120 miles per hour through the
desert (it had more power to give, still, but I didn’t have the nerve!).
I enjoyed my summers with the Forest Service, and in
my third year I even won an award: with a group of senior people sitting in the
bed of a pickup that I was driving around a corner of one-lane forest service
dirt road, I encountered a water tanker coming up the road. Surprised, I
overreacted and steered pickup too far off the road into the soft
shoulder. Luckily I saved it from rolling and corrected enough to keep
the pickup on the road. For my heroism in saving the roll-over, one of
the guys in the bed of the truck announced that I had won “the goofy
cock-sucking fuck up of the year award.”
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