Taking the Heat: Remember the Firefighters

We did not sleep for three days. Some of us had to carry drinking water in warm canvas sacks up a thousand-foot ridge. The rest of us slowly extended the fire trench down the sides of the fire. The bottom of it we let go for a while--a fire doesn’t go very far or fast downhill.

We had done a good job in heading off the fire. What you do in the first couple of hours after you hit a fire is what counts, and if it isn’t right you had better take that young ranger’s advice and give yourself over to prayer. Bill and the man he had made fire foreman had both experience and gift, and it takes gift as well as having been there before to know where to hit a fire hard enough to turn it in its tracks. When it’s less than 110 degrees and nothing is about to burn you to death or roar at you and your lungs will still breathe the heat and your eyes aren’t closed with smoke, it’s easy to state the simple principles of a science, if that’s what it is. All you’re trying to do is force the fire into some opening at the top of the ridge that’s covered with shale and rocks or, if such openings don’t abound in your vicinity, to force it into a thin stand of alpine pine or something that doesn’t burn very fast. But with the inferno having arrived and the smoke so thick you can see only two or three men ahead of you, it’s gift and guts, not science, that tells you where the head of the fire is, and where an open ridge is that can’t be seen, and where and when the wind will turn and whether your men have what it takes to stand and wait. Don’t forget this last point when you place your men--it isn’t just horses that panic when the barn burns. But we were placed right and either we had guts or we were too sick to care. Anyway, we stood and the wind stayed with us and we crowded the big fire with our backfires and turned it into the timberline.

From “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky.” This excerpt, drawn from the second novella collected in Norman Maclean’s book “A River Runs Through It,” is based on Maclean’s experience fighting fires for the U.S. Forest Service when he was 17 years old.