Carried Into the Blaze by a Parachute and the Thrill of Danger

“Jumping Fire” is a beautifully crafted, wise yet thrilling book that will endure as long as there is an appetite for vicarious adventure and a curiosity about why people are driven to do dangerous things that most of us would consider crazy.

At 58, Murry A. Taylor, is the nation’s oldest smoke jumper, one of some 1,000 people (mostly men) who parachute down to newly started forest fires to try to put them out before they get going strong. Taylor has been doing this extraordinarily dangerous work since 1965.

What drives a jumper? Taylor says that as a boy in California’s San Joaquin Valley, he loved the thrill of jumping off houses and barns and very tall diving platforms. In discussing why few native Alaskans become jumpers, Taylor notes that “most nonnative smoke jumpers are products of a culture that places a great deal of emphasis on aggressiveness, individuality and self” in contrast to the communal, patient and tolerant life of the Indian and Eskimo villages of Alaska.

To tell his story of smoke jumpers and their exclusive craft, Taylor relies on a journal he kept in the summer of 1991. As he narrates his progression of jumps in Alaska and then in the Northwest, he weaves in tales of other smoke jumpers and other seasons until, by the end, he has presented a vivid picture of an occupation celebrating its 60th birthday this summer with a reunion in Redding, Calif.

Taylor also tells us about the many women he was once with but inevitably lost. He lost them to his greater love, or maybe it is better to call it an addiction--smoke jumping. He describes with finesse the supercharge, erotic in its intensity, that smoke jumpers feel as, flying in a circling, aging airplane 3,000 feet above the ground, they leap into the rushing air aimed for a spot they have picked as the landing zone. Of one jump in Alaska, Taylor writes:

“From the intense roar of the plane, I had emerged into a wide open sky where the only sound was the distant jump ship and the soft fluttering of my chute as I drifted 2,500 feet above the Earth.

“To the west I could see all of Fairbanks, far out into the Tanana valley, and beyond--across a hundred miles of wilderness, to the jagged silver-blue skyline of the Alaska Range.”

In this jump, he successfully steered his chute between menacing trees, but landed in a small, stinky and icy pond. In all of his 355 jumps, Taylor has never been seriously injured, but he did cut his right leg with a chain saw, suffer a broken collar bone and, like many smoke jumpers, damage his knees. He has also been knocked unconscious a few times. Taylor is eloquent and melancholy about those firefighters who did lose their lives, and grateful for their memories.

In fact, Taylor dedicates his book with the words, “For the Smokejumpers,” and the intensity of the comradeship the men feel for one another is one of its major themes. Their affection is expressed at times in elaborate male horseplay, expressed certainly in mutual support in difficult and sometimes terrifying moments when a fire threatens to trap them and, at the end of the season, when each man goes his own way for the winter, expressed in a deep sense of loss. Taylor subtly conveys his apparent belief that the strength of the bonds between the men, and their fierce attachment to their proud calling makes more difficult--if not impossible--the ties of wife and family.

There is plenty of lore in “Jumping Fire” to satisfy even the most avid devotee of the Western and Alaskan landscapes and their forests. There are two kinds of smoke jumpers, those who, like Taylor, work for the Bureau of Land Management, part of the Department of the Interior, and those who work for the Forest Service, part of the Department of Agriculture. Although the two groups are rivals, they mostly cooperate. The biggest difference seems to be that the Forest Service jumpers use round parachutes and the BLM jumpers use rectangular ones, which they call “square.”

After a brief tour later this month to promote his book, Taylor will return to Alaska, as he has for so long, to fight fires during the fire season. Then possibly he will return to the lower 48 to fight fires in the Northwest when fire season there typically picks up. But he has said that this will be his last season as a smoke jumper. He has left with us, in “Jumping Fire,” a warm and intimate tribute to the smoke jumpers who’ve traded domestic comfort and safety for lives of brave, daring action.