A season in purgatory

They wait. It is the bulk of their job, this waiting, and they fill it with necessary tasks. They roll hose. They clean the engine. They hone their bodies. They ready themselves for fire.

Few of them can articulate what compels them to fight wildland fires. They fall back on describing their obsession in bits and pieces: the hikes, the outdoor work, the camaraderie, the deadly magnificence of flame. To Brian Beresford, a Native American and captain in the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, it’s simple: “It’s the only way left to be a warrior.”

This is the story of a half-dozen warriors and their season with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. It is the story of childhood dreams and the adult realities that intrude on them. For some, the compulsion to fight fires started with TV’s “Emergency.” They wanted to be Johnny Gage or Roy DeSoto, rushing on Rescue Squad 51 to Rampart General. Others panicked at the prospect of a bleak office cubicle. Some found a family they never had.

The warriors know that most people think they have the coolest job on the block. But while the post-Sept. 11 hagiography of firefighting aptly honors the dead of the World Trade Center, it’s hard to be a hero every day. Particularly if on that day you scrub the station toilets, polish the truck, lug 65 pounds of hose on a practice hike, cook for your crew, and then watch someone else’s fire on the news.

Even when the warriors get the fire they crave, opportunities for heroism are limited: smoke jumpers and dive-bombing water drops are the exception, not the norm. The vast bulk of firefighting is mule work, cutting and scratching lines around fires with simple hand tools, laying down hundreds of feet of hose to cool down the burn area well after the firestorm has subsided. That tedium is the equity, socked away a day at a time, cashed in for the few astonishing moments lived at the perilous edge.

Each spring and summer, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection ranks swell with 1,450 itinerant firefighters, hired for anywhere from a summer to nine months. They are mostly young; many can’t order a beer legally. Another 200 of the agency’s permanent firefighting cadre (3,800 men and women) are pushed up to temporary officer positions, the young leading the younger. Those who come to the Yucaipa station, at the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Mountains, are a mixed lot. A few have college degrees. Others joke that they picked CDF because those were the letters they saw most often on their report cards.

During this year’s fire season, Todd Williams, a former business major assigned to a CDF hazardous-materials unit in Riverside, will bump up from engineer to captain of a wildland crew for the first time. He is 35. Shana Shuttleworth, 32, will struggle to prove she can drive a fire engine like the men, and lead a rookie crew. Rusty McCulley, 30, will chalk up what he hopes will be his pivotal season--or he’ll have to go back to selling motorcycles. Brett Taylor, 20, will live with his parents, hoard his salary and spend it this winter on college courses that will boost his firefighting credentials. Rob Menor, who traded civil engineering for fighting fires, will see some of the best fires the year has to offer. He’ll turn 20 during the burning season. David Roberts, also 20, will taste disappointment. They’ll be watched over by Clyde Chittenden, a taciturn, 48-year-old battalion chief who juggles duty as Yucaipa’s fire chief with supervising strike teams sent to battle wildland fires throughout the state.

The first reality check for wildfire warriors comes early. The job isn’t just about forest fires. The men and women with the pine tree on their shoulder patch and the bear on their badge also fight structure fires, rescue people from wrecked cars and serve as the rural or municipal fire departments for 23 counties, a dozen cities and more than a score of special fire districts statewide. In Yucaipa, a city transitioning from chicken farms and orange groves to tract homes and golf courses, that means CDF firefighters run out to trailer parks a half-dozen times a day to attend to elderly victims of strokes, falls or loneliness. While there are plenty of CDF firefighters happy to fulfill these urban duties, for those looking for wildland blazes, serving on the city engine is like catching in the bullpen.

The ride of preference is Engine 3576, a short, muscular truck made for bad roads. It’s one of a pair of wildland firefighting engines housed at Yucaipa that can be called anywhere in the state--anywhere in the country, if needed. For most of the year, Chittenden has struggled to keep either of the state-wide engines in house. They’ve been to fires every week, and other engines and crews have moved up to cover for them.

The season started in January, months ahead of schedule, with fires that burned as angry as a summer inferno. By mid-November, 7,622 fires had charred 491,333 acres statewide, well above the average over the last five years, which have been among the worst spans in state history, according to the CDF and the U.S. Forest Service. (Nationwide, 7.1 million acres went up in flames, the worst tally in a half-century, according to the National Inter-Agency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.)

If there’s a time and a place to be a wildland firefighter, it’s now, in Southern California, where what does not burn in summer can be whipped to flames by the Santa Ana winds of fall.

On Aug. 27, the place for the warriors to be is Julian, in San Diego County. Several suspicious fires break out in the early morning, and Chittenden gathers a strike team of five engines--20 firefighters--from San Bernardino County. Julian is familiar territory. Two weeks prior, Chittenden had returned from a weeklong fire near the small town that consumed 61,000 acres, destroyed 37 homes and left him slack-jawed at tornadoes of flame dancing across 50-acre swaths of knotty manzanita.

“I’ve been in this business for 25 years and I’m seeing things literally that I’ve never seen before,” Chittenden tells his team as they gather shortly before dawn in the parking lot of the CDF headquarters in San Bernardino. There are “four or five” fires, all suspected arson, he warns. “None of them are really screaming, but assuming this guy or gal continues [setting them] there’ll be more action,” he says. “Let’s not kill ourselves getting down there. We know the route.” With that, the strike team heads south. All told, CDF will send 25 engines at a cost of $55,000 a day.

Todd Williams takes a seat beside the engineer and Rusty McCulley rides behind him. They don’t know much about each other. Williams grew up in Orange County, in a milieu of surfing, suburbia and punk rock. McCulley was either on welfare or homeless most of his childhood, following the threadbare dreams of his grandmother. He grew up mostly in Upper Lake, a tiny town in Lake County.

“We were always on welfare,” he explains. “We were always moving. Actually, the whole story was there was going to be this family-uniting thing. My real mom was going to come out from Texas, and we were all going to move to Oregon and be this big happy family.” They packed an old Impala with all their possessions and headed to Oregon. When they realized their dreams didn’t match their funds, they turned back to California. The money finally ran out around Redding. “We picked up cans and whatever to get money for gas and food,” McCulley says. “We’d live in rest-stops, off the side of the highway. This one time we ran completely out of money and we were trapped, on the Sacramento River. We just lived there for a while.”

A hulking man whose biker looks belie a gentle manner, McCulley jokes that he can win any hard-luck contest. He spent time in a foster home. Even when they did settle down, he left home after a spat over dating a Hupa Indian girl. McCulley spent most of high school living on friends’ couches or spare beds. At the same time, he started hanging out in a firehouse in Upper Lake. The firefighters let him do gofer work; then they started taking him to fires.

“I thought that was just the most exciting, best thing in the world,” he says. “I got a little pager and a little tiny badge, a little uniform, and I loved it.”

As soon as he graduated from high school, McCulley joined the U.S. Forest Service as a firefighter and eventually switched to the CDF. “It’s like a family I never really had. Brothers I never really had. People that really care about you.”

As they drive south toward the Cleveland National Forest, Williams takes the temperature and humidity with a field kit. It’s 90 degrees with 17% humidity, and they’re barely out of the morning rush hour. A mile past Santa Ysabel on State Highway 79, they pass the Inaja picnic area, where there is a memorial to 11 dead wildland firefighters. Every rule that will govern their behavior in the wild, the ones Williams drums into seasonals heads, was born in this killing field.

During a wildfire on Nov. 25, 1956, a sudden shift of wind flicked a finger of flame up-canyon toward an inmate crew, trapping them mid-slope above the San Diego River. With nowhere to run, three U.S. Forest Service rangers, a prison guard and seven inmates died in the ensuing blowup. What emerged from the Inaja incident are the 10 Standard Orders for firefighters, which all wild- land firefighters commit to memory: “Keep informed of fire weather conditions and forecast . . . know what your fire is doing at all times . . . have escape routes and make them known.”

Williams quizzes his charges on this when the opportunity arises. How much faster does a fire move uphill than on the flats? (About 16 times faster.) When they do something wrong, he teases: “How could this accident have been prevented?” It’s the question he’d have to fill in on the accident form. They get his point.

Being overtaken by flames is the top cause of death in nearly a century of chronicled wildland fire battles, according to federal statistics. The introduction of aircraft--Inaja also was the first place where aerial retardant was dropped-- has put aviation accidents in second place, followed closely by heart attacks, vehicle accidents, and falling limbs and rocks. Wildland firefighters now carry fire shelters. Dubbed “shake-and-bakes,” they’re a kind of pup tent made of aluminum foil bonded to fiberglass cloth. Since coming into widespread use in the 1970s, shelters are credited with saving the lives of about 250 firefighters, according to the National Wildfire Coordinating Group. One survivor of a blowup, quoted in a shelter manual, describes his experience as “a nuclear blast occurring right over you, and you’re lying in tinfoil.”

At times like these, fire instructors advise their students to concentrate on reasons to live--a wife, a child, anything--to calm the rising panic that urges them to get up and run. One short breath of super-heated gas will asphyxiate a firefighter, and temperatures in a wildland fire can range to 1,600 degrees. Four wildland firefighters forced to deploy shelters on a rocky slope could not seal out those gases and were asphyxiated in a Washington state fire last year. Most wildland firefighters get through a career without ever taking a shelter out of a pouch slung on the belt of their web gear. But you can see their hand reach to check it every time they walk toward a fire.

By the time the strike team gets to Julian, there is little smoke visible on any horizon. The biggest fire, about 200 acres, has been brought under control, with a line cut around its entire perimeter. There’s a strange sense of victory and disappointment when Chittenden tells the strike team to “find some shade” and rest up for a night shift of mopping up what’s left. For six hours, strike team members play spades, tease, try to nap, and listen to others talk about flames that have come and gone.

Williams is unfazed by what the job tosses him. “It’s all good,” he says, a kind of mantra for the Yucaipa crew.

“I was one of those kids who grew up watching ‘Emergency,’ ” Williams confesses. ‘I know that sounds trite, but I looked at that and said, ‘That’s the coolest thing ever.’ I liked Johnny Gage, because he was always playing with people. I’m a lot like that.”

He was supposed to take over his father’s machine-shop business, and he enrolled in a business-administration track at Cal State Fullerton. ‘I mean, the degree was cool, and I loved going to college, but I just didn’t want to take that over. You know, your parents want you to do one thing and you want to do another. I told them, ‘Hey, that’s just not what I want to do.’ It worked out real good.”

Williams put in a year as a volunteer at a small department in Riverside County and two seasons with CDF when he took a permanent job as a dispatcher. “Who wants to be a seasonal firefighter when you have a house payment?” He was engaged to a young woman he’d met in Hemet, but wasn’t going to marry her until he got a permanent firefighter position. When she finally told him to pick a date or pack a bag, they chose Oct. 2.

“I’m not kidding, we drove home from lunch the day we picked a date. There was a message from this lady in Fresno, from CDF: ‘Congratulations, Riverside submitted your name for the permanent academy and you’ll be going to the permanent academy starting Oct. 9,’ ” Williams recalls. “So we got married, went on a four-day honeymoon in San Diego and then I left for six weeks.

“It was the same thing when my second daughter was born. She was like 2 months old when they sent me to the engineer academy for another four weeks. I said, ‘You guys aren’t helping me out here at all.’ ”

By sundown, Engine 3576 takes its post in the burn area. Williams, McCulley and a half-dozen other firefighters grab shovels and Pulaskis--a combination axe and grub-hoe--and walk about 4,000 feet of hose laid through the woods by a day crew. They check for leaks and search for spot fires. At an altitude of 4,500 feet, it’s a hard hike, and they step carefully over the sharp stobs of manzanita, cut away by fire crews. There isn’t much fire left. They pause and watch the chalk-like streaks of shooting stars, stragglers from the summer’s Perseid meteor shower. It’s all good.

For the rest of the night, the warriors stand on the wood porch of a summer house, watching an inmate crew’s headlamps dance across the darkened terrain from one smoldering fire to another. A few compare details on dirt bikes they have at home. Williams runs into an old friend, and they chat about his new swimming pool. Clyde Chittenden tells of rescuing a boa constrictor from a motor home’s engine compartment.

If his mother had had her say, Chittenden would have been a druggist behind a counter in a quiet town. He had taken all the college premed courses to fulfill her dream and was interning at a pharmacy, counting pills at a counter, when it struck him: “I said, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve never been so bored in my life.’ ” So Chittenden stuffed his schedule with fire-science courses and became a paid-call firefighter in Crestline, in the San Bernardino National Forest--a bottom-rung assignment where you sit in a firehouse and get paid only if you go to a call. “I still vividly remember the first call I went on was a structure fire, walking into a room with fire all around, and I said, ‘This is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life. ‘ “

In the early morning hours in Julian, Williams curls his six-foot frame into the front seat of the engine. The rest lay sleeping bags on lawns or driveways, or curl up beside a smoldering stump. It’s lousy sleep, and they rise groggy. Chittenden orders a crew to put out their “keep-warm” fire. A frightened citizen has called to report it. “We were putting it out,” a firefighter jokes back. “It just took us all night.” As they head off to town, Williams smiles. ‘We’ll be heroes now, just watch,” he jokes. Sure enough, residents who have gone through their second wildfire scare in a month wave and smile, and the firefighters of Engine 3576 smile back. Firefighters did save homes. It just wasn’t Engine 3576.

Agency rules require eight hours of rest before a strike team can head home. In the old days, that meant a tent in a noisy fire camp. Now the warriors head to the Julian Inn and pair up in a room--an arrangement the agency has calculated as cheaper than paying for the infrastructure of setting up camps. When they awake shortly after noon, they’re told to get dinner and head home. An arson suspect has been caught, a firefighter with the California Conservation Corps, a dropout from Nebraska who wanted to earn some cash fighting fires, according to Chittenden. This year, part-time firefighters have been accused of setting several blazes. They include an $8-an-hour unemployed firefighter charged with burning a half-million acres in Arizona. Arrests like that tarnish the image of salaried firefighters, but they shrug it off with a joke about getting out of town quickly, while they’re still heroes.

When engine 3576 lumbers into Lytle Creek Canyon northwest of San Bernardino on Sept. 6, the radio is tuned to KCAL, 96.7 FM, and Brett Taylor tells a crew member to turn it up. “Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire!” blasts from the radio, the lyrics of a Metallica song. The crew laughs. A hellish landscape surrounds them. Flames surge along three sides of a steep canyon. Spot fires dot the sparse grove of fir and pine on the canyon bottom, where smoking stumps burn like caldrons.

There’s fuel, and there’s fire. This is the second strike-team assignment in as many weeks for Engine 3576, a pace that has been routine for most of the year. Taylor, a second-year seasonal from San Bernardino, is joined by Katie Forrest, a college student, and Menor, who’s been at Yucaipa for little more than a month. It’s a mop-up assignment on a fire that has raced from the thick chaparral at the canyon’s narrow entrance up into the timbered peaks of its end, burning 400 acres so far. Fire officials are counting on the sheer rock faces and some quick bulldozer work to keep it from barreling on to Mount Baldy or Wrightsville.

The strike team, meanwhile, has to put out some “slop-over” on the canyon floor.

With enough water, almost anyone can put out a fire. Putting one out this deep in the woods is an art of using as little water as possible. Most wildland fire engines carry 350 to 500 gallons, and sometimes that’s barely enough to fill a few thousand feet of hose line and spray for a few minutes. Tanker trucks can take an hour or more to retrieve water for refills.

The tools of the task are Pulaskis, shovels and small bladder bags filled with foamy water. The warriors divide into pairs and wander off, smudgy yellow ghosts in the dim arc of their own headlamps. There is little dirt to bury the embers, and each shovel-full comes up with scaly rock instead. They pause from time to time and crane their heads to catch the loud crack, whoosh and thud of a burned tree falling. Showers of orange sparks whip across the bowl, and embers cascade down the mountainsides with a sound like broken glass. Before long, a pale cantaloupe-colored crescent moon rises, gliding along the silhouette of a mountain. It’s quiet, except for the scrape of shovels.

Dinner is a sack lunch--”sack nasties,” as they call them--filled with a ham-and-cheese sandwich or two, the occasional cold and salty bean burrito, and the treasured Payday, Skittles, chocolate-chip cookies and granola bars. While they can be fitness freaks, wildland firefighters eat more like lumberjacks than triathletes. An average fire-camp menu includes eggs, sausage and greasy potatoes in the morning, and steak, potatoes and an over-boiled vegetable for dinner. Personal snacks include sunflower seeds and beef jerky. Cigarette smoking, once common among the firefighters, has been replaced by chewing tobacco.

Most of the crew members still have the metabolism of a teenager. Taylor, in fact, will turn 20 after midnight and is hoping to get released from the fire in time to celebrate. He’ll make as much as $25,000 in a long fire season--March through November in Southern California--and save almost all of it by living with his parents in San Bernardino. This winter he will spend most of his savings at Victorville College, where he’ll take the courses that will earn him more points to get hired permanently.

In high school he wanted to be an arson investigator. “I went to Redlands as an Explorer [Scout] and fought my first fire, and decided this is what I want to be.”

Menor, in his first season, will turn 20 a week after Taylor. His name’s pronounced Men-OOR, he tells the crew, and, yes, he’s heard “manure” jokes since second grade. A smart student in high school, he was working toward a civil engineering degree when two firefighting buddies detoured him. “At first, my parents were questioning it, the dangers,” he says. “They said, ‘You can have a job inside, in an air-conditioned office.’ I just couldn’t see doing that.”

By 2:45 a.m., eye-burning smoke is settling thickly in the canyon, and it is quiet but for war stories and falling trees. Up canyon, a supervisor fires flares into the canyon sides, showing rookies how to light back-fires. The flares burst in bright flowers against the dark hillside. The warriors watch like kids on the Fourth of July. They roll hoses and stuff them into rucksacks stored on the back of the engine. When there are no more chores left, the captain tells them to get some sleep. Taylor says he’ll stand watch. Getting an hour or two of bad sleep is worse than none, he reasons.

At 6:15, the radio hisses to life with the news that fire has jumped the line. If it crests the canyon ridge, the next stop is Wrightsville. “I think if we round up the engines and rally the troops we can chase this one down,” a weary voice on the radio says. Taylor rouses the crew, but they’ve already heard it; even when they’re asleep, their minds filter the background chatter. Up the road, a three-acre blaze is taking off into the timber. A tall snag torches off, casting an eerie silhouette of a burning cross. Each crew member hoists a rucksack filled with two 100-foot coils of 1 3/4-inch, canvas-covered hose. They weigh 65 pounds, and the straps dig at their shoulders. In minutes, heart rates leap from a sleep rate to a sprint as they head up a slope pitched like a church roof. Heavy cotton clothing under the fire-resistent Nomex gear was comfortable for nighttime temperatures. Now it drapes like wet towels.

A crew of inmates arrives and scratches away at the duff of the forest floor while the engine crews assemble a hose line up a sinuous path along the left flank of the fire, cooling off its edges so it won’t creep back over the hose. Another group advances up the right flank, hoping to pinch off the head of the fire.

Those who carry the hose, stiffened now with water, call out the slack left before it runs out: “20 feet . . . 10 feet--that’s hose!” In a matter of seconds, they grab a new coil of hose, called a “stick,” unfurling it downhill. In a choreography of hands and shouts, they clamp the hose, remove the nozzle, couple the new stick, reattach the nozzle, unclamp the hose line and pay it forward. If they’ve done it right, they’ve left themselves with a safe, wet area where the flames won’t get to them before the new stick is added. Segment by segment, they advance up the hill, using every stick they’ve carried. They top out at a logging road, where the canyon dissipates in a talus field and granite outcrops.

Fire has jumped into a pine above them, but a chain-saw crew makes quick work of it, rolling the burning logs back down into the burned areas. They’ve corralled it. It’s taken about 40 minutes. “You see? You see?” Taylor says. “You see why we’re hooked? That’s what cracks me up about this job. One minute you’re practically asleep and the next minute, you’re giving it your all.”

First light on Sept. 23 reveals a mushroom-topped smoke column rising thousands of feet above the San Gabriel Mountains. Shana Shuttleworth, Robert Menor, Josh Rundquist and David Roberts head west on the 210 Freeway. Could this be the fire they’ve been dreaming about? Roberts, who arrived only two weeks earlier, has never put water on fire in a CDF uniform. Shuttleworth, a permanent firefighter with eight years’ experience, is getting her chance to be an engineer and drive the rig for the summer.

Shuttleworth dreamed of being a firefighter while growing up in Lake Elsinore. Back then, the state was building the 215 Freeway, and construction trucks lumbered by her home. Shuttleworth and her twin sister would run to the edge of the yard, signaling to truckers to yank their air horns. One day, she looked up and saw the driver was a woman. “I was blown away,” Shuttleworth recalls, and she decided she had to drive a truck. Her other childhood dream had been to talk on the radio. “Now I get to do both,” she says and laughs.

The suspicious fire that began near Camp Williams, on the east fork of the San Gabriel River, has swelled to 800 acres overnight, a time when fires usually cool down in Southern California. But not this year. Nighttime fires burn like daytime, and daytime fires burn like hell. Before it’s over, the Williams Fire will consume 36,000 acres and draw more than 3,000 firefighters from as far as Montana’s Blackfoot Reservation and Virginia’s Smoky Mountains. But the rookies of Engine 3576 are about to find out about bad luck.

At the Santa Fe Dam recreation area, the strike team gathers for a safety run-down. Old-school veterans who’ve heard it before feign attention, staring at the tips of their boots. Shuttleworth gathers her team afterward. “They think they know it all,” she tells them. “But I want you guys to really pay attention to it. One day you’re going to be alone up there without a supervisor and you need to know what to do.” Shuttleworth tells them to hook a 1 3/4-inch line to the pumper and lay it atop the engine, in case flame overtakes them on the way up to the fire’s western flank on Glendora Mountain Road. Rundquist, 19, is so nervous in the front seat, he keeps pressing his foot against the horn button on the floor. Each time he does it, Menor, Roberts and Shuttleworth laugh.

As they head up State Highway 39, residents headed for work give the firefighters the thumbs-up and honk horns, and they wave back gamely. By the time most of the commuters reach their offices, the strike team is arrayed along Glendora Mountain Road, where Shuttleworth parks along an inside curve and prepares for battle. The fire is above the road, “backing down” the hillside, moving slowly. Embers roll down toward them, igniting spot-fires below the fireline that quickly heat up the intervening underbrush, like a freshly struck kitchen match. When the manzanita and chemise burst into fireballs, the crew can feel the heat on their faces. They cast wary glances back below them, looking for a telltale wisp of smoke--a spot-fire on the slope below them.

Rocks tumble loose and slam onto the road. Rats scurry down, singed and dazed. It’s common to see deer, coyotes, fox and even bears run from a fire front. Firefighters’ sympathy for their plight is mitigated by their own sense of survival. Sometimes they’re forced to kill burning rats or rabbits to keep them from running into unburned brush beyond the fire line, igniting a spot-fire that can run up at them from behind.

Shuttleworth keeps a watchful gaze, showing her crew which sections will go off next, pointing out places where no firefighter should ever stand. “I love to watch it,” she admits. “When there’s quiet time to watch, it’s a great opportunity to learn fire behavior.”

Her fascination with flame bloomed later than for most CDF firefighters and after what she admits were a few wrong turns. One of them was a Deadhead biker who fathered her first son, and whose legal name she didn’t know when the nurse asked her. When he left, she was 23, a single mom and unemployed. She returned to Lake Elsinore and started dental hygienist classes at Mount San Jacinto Community College in Menifee. Then a friend suggested she take an EMT course and everything changed. “I thought it’d be a good idea to take that class, since I had a baby and it would be good to know First Aid,” Shuttleworth said. “It was full of firemen. Just listening to all their stories and seeing the firefighters, I said, ‘I have to be a firefighter.’ ”

Shuttleworth signed up as a volunteer at the Lake Elsinore CDF station in December 1993. Six months later she was a seasonal firefighter, and went to her first fire on her first day at work. “I came to work, got on an engine and was gone 11 days,” she said. “I found out I loved this job.” While at Lake Elsinore she met Capt. Dave Shuttleworth, a grizzled veteran who has been a mentor to dozens of firefighters over nearly three decades. She fell in love, and they were married two years later.

“This is what I want to do--wildland firefighting,” Shuttleworth says. “I love this right here, being out here, being in the brush, being in the dirt.” She pauses to watch a manzanita bush explode like paraffin.

By noon, fire kicks up on Glendora Mountain Road, creeping under the foliage, erupting in wider swaths, reducing the sun to a feeble diode. The situation worsens when the U.S. Forest Service crews launch flares into the hillsides to starve the approaching fire of fuel. Vegetation erupts so quickly the crews shelter themselves from the radiant heat by huddling behind the rig. But the only firefighting for Engine 3576 comes when Shuttleworth tells Roberts to put out an ember that’s rolled across the road.

Three hours later, their shift ends. When the warriors crest a ridgeline heading back toward camp, they see what the rest of the fire has been doing. Angry flames ripple from every ridgetop for miles, and the ravines and canyons look like lava fields in the dusk. Worse, flame is blowing over the road ahead, breaking the containment line and racing westward. On the radio, voices crackle with excitement. Finally, a fire they can attack. Battalion Chief Jack Consol radios to camp, offering to keep his strike team on the fire for another 12-hour shift. Some have been up since 2:30 a.m., driving from fire stations as far away as Yucca Valley.

Engine 3576 stops at a steep hillside where the flames are blowing up over the road. They give Roberts the nozzle, and Rundquist and Menor file behind him. Both Shuttleworth and Consol keep a close eye on them, shouting directions as they disappear behind a shroud. When flames reach a stand of scrub oak below them, Consol orders them to stand back and let it burn out. The flames roar up, pressing a wave of heat at them, then die out in short grass, momentarily out of fuel. They advance again, dousing what remains. It is textbook firefighting, with two instructors. But Consol gets the answer to his offer. They’re to stand down and return to camp--the night crew will handle it.

Everyone packs up, cursing the decision, savaging the U.S. Forest Service. To veterans on the team, leaving a fire that’s this active is the most humiliating moment they’ve had in years.

By morning, the blaze has grown to 8,005 acres, and hundreds of homes have been evacuated along the foothills. Scores of city fire engines have shown up to protect at least 1,000 structures threatened by the flames. Wildland firefighters call these urban rigs “pavement queens,” but they are the ones that will be on the news every night. They console themselves with the prospect of overtime--Menor, for example, will make $250 a day--that will come out of the hide of the Forest Service because the fire is in a national forest. CDF, in fact, will charge the Forest Service $11,000 a day for each strike team.

There are 10 air tankers, 17 helicopters and hundreds of fire engines staffed by more than 3,000 people battling the fire. The ad-hoc headquarters at Santa Fe Dam is swelling with everything from kitchens to showers and a mechanics bay. Blue tents of Forest Service crews dot the picnic areas. Hotshot crews play hackey-sack, with 10 pushups as punishment for the one who drops the bag. At the end of the day, a group of women unload dogs--a standard poodle, a cocker spaniel among them--and walk them around the camp. They’re with Hope Crisis Response, an “animal-assisted emotional support group” called in to soothe the stress of fighting fire. The only emotional trauma Engine 3576 is feeling comes from not fighting fire.

On day two, the strike team is assigned to the same area where they sat and watched the day before: Division Z, on the fire’s northwest side, opposite the most active front of the fire, which is creeping southeast into foothill communities. When Shuttleworth makes the tight turn onto Glendora Mountain Road, she notices the steering is unusually stiff. The strike team stops. They tilt the International cab’s hood forward and the other engineers try the steering. The engineers tease Shuttleworth that she broke the engine, and one of them suggests with a smile that she’s too weak to turn the wheel. She laughs it off, but it’s a sensitive point: Shuttleworth had to take the CDF physical three times before passing.

She’s also made three mistakes this season: She broke a taillight backing into a dirt berm, left the parking brake loose and had a hose slide off the truck while it was moving. She knows these things can be chalked off to learning the ropes--or come back to haunt her.

Firefighting, particularly forest fires, has been a macho domain for decades. But while modern times have caught up, Shuttleworth senses there are some who think she shouldn’t be an engineer this summer, and others who think she shouldn’t be a firefighter at all. “They look at my size, they hear my squeaky, Mickey Mouse voice and I think some of them are embarrassed to take orders from me.”

As it turns out, the steering really is shot, and Consol doesn’t take any chances. A CDF engine lost a drive shaft near Cajon Junction in August and careened 60 feet down a ravine, severely injuring three firefighters. “Out of service,” Consol mutters. They drive gingerly back to camp, crushed. “We’re just falling apart today,” Menor says. The rest of the team will stay around Follows Camp, a small settlement on the east fork of the San Gabriel River that has the feel of the fictional Cicely of TV’s “Northern Exposure.”

Menor can’t hide his envy: “If we get fire, it would be way cool.”

Shuttleworth charms her way through the red tape of the maintenance bay at camp. While a mechanic checks the power-steering system, the crew grabs sack lunches and heads for a bench. Above their heads, the fire header boils into a massive cumulus cloud rising to well over 20,000 feet. It’s a sign of unstable air and can produce its own weather, including powerful downward blasts of air. “If you’re on a fire and that’s above you, that’s another watch-out situation, because those downbursts will make the fire move in all directions,” Shuttleworth warns. “Don’t just look at the weather because you want to know if it’s a nice weekend or you have something planned. Learn everything you can about weather, because weather affects everything about fire. If this is what you want to do, then you should get to understand weather.”

By sundown, the fire has grown to 12,000 acres, and the mechanic works his way through every element of the power steering: filter, hose, pump. When he can’t find the source of the problem, he dispatches the engine to a shop in Montebello. At worst, he assures, it will be back in the morning.

In the morning, day three of the fire assignment, the engine is not there. The only consolation comes from the rest of the strike team. They did nothing at Follows Camp but wait for a fire that didn’t arrive. Shuttleworth borrows a rented double-cab Ford pickup and takes the crew on errands. They pass Cafe Mundial restaurant in Monrovia, where Roberts works Wednesday and Thursday nights as an order expeditor. His third job is at a city-owned skateboard park. He’ll keep at least one for the off-season.

Roberts grew up in Monrovia, where he used to light bonfires in a lot next to his house. As a teenager, he and a friend who was a fire Explorer Scout put out a fire in Grand Avenue Park, in the flood-control basin. “Ever since then, I wanted to be a firefighter,” he says. Last December, Roberts went through the 67-hour fire academy at San Bernardino CDF headquarters, then added courses in the spring and summer. With the state on high alert and the governor authorizing emergency hiring, he didn’t have to wait long. “I put in my application and they called me up,” he explains, shrugging.

The warriors wash their clothes at a laundromat, then buy 25 deli combo sandwiches at Subway for the whole strike team, which has been assigned to the Julius Klein Conservation Camp, a few miles from Follows Camp. As they head up to deliver the lunches, they see what they are about to miss: Fire is cresting over nearby ridges in sheets of up to 100 feet and is about to run through the narrow gorge cut by the east fork of the river. They could stay to fight it with the rest of the strike team. But they’ve made a crucial error: Their gear is on the rig, and the rig is in Montebello. They drop off the lunches and leave.

As they head toward camp, Shuttleworth and the others from Engine 3576 drive past the fire front, where flames arch over East Fork Road. Shuttleworth finds a wide turnout and pulls over to watch. It’s a textbook safety zone--wide and bare enough to avoid the intense heat of the flames--and a good moment to teach the concept to her rookies from the safety of the truck. They park on the downhill side and watch the flames run up toward them. When the flames come near, they move to the opposite side. When that hillside ignites from the heat below, they move back. They’re all smiles when they get back to camp. But smiles fade to scowls on day four. The engine is not in camp.

They pack into the pickup for another day, doing errands for five hours. When they return to camp at 1 p.m., there’s no sign of the engine. “This strike team assignment is officially starting to stink,” Rundquist announces. Still, the news isn’t all bad. The engine is fixed; it just needs to be picked up in Montebello. By 4:30 p.m. the warriors have completed the paperwork and are back in the engine. By the time they get back to camp, it’s too late to join the strike team. But at least they have their engine. Judging by the towering column of smoke, there still is plenty of fire for everyone.

By the morning of day five, the mood is upbeat as the warriors hear their new assignment: the Mount Baldy side of the fire. At last, it seems, they might get to battle the flame front.

They head out to a staging area at the San Antonio Dam. But it turns out to be far southwest of the real fire, and they sit for hours, waiting for orders. They play Gameboys, or scan through the radio and fight for their favorite groups: Guns N’ Roses, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eminem, Nelly. One crew makes minor engine repairs. Shuttleworth takes the rig for a tour of Mount Baldy Village and returns. A courier brings up overtime checks at 5:15 p.m. There’s talk of a back-firing operation, but by the time it starts, the shift is over.

There’s no fire, but there’s always hope. It’s what keeps them coming back every year. It’s what they train for. It’s what they wait for.

The next day breaks their heart. The warriors awake to a steady rain and thick fog, a scene so improbable in the statewide drought, they’re at a loss to process what’s happened. An unusual low-pressure system, kicked off by a storm in the Pacific, has moved in over the Angeles National Forest. Word comes from Consol: the San Bernardino strike team, and several others, are being released. They are to report to camp to be demobilized. Within hours, they’re headed back to Yucaipa. This fire is over. As it turns out, so is the season.

Through the fall, there are small brush blazes around Yucaipa’s foothills, and some accidents worthy of “Emergency” on I-10. But that’s about it.

Roberts gets to crawl into one car and rescue a driver, but he’s laid off as of Nov. 11 and starts looking for a paid-call firefighting job and weighing whether to return to his restaurant job. Menor is laid off as well and will work as a paid-call firefighter on the east side of Yucaipa. He also gets a volunteer job on the search-and-rescue team of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department.

McCulley makes the November cut but is bracing for the next round of layoffs. He’ll take some time off, he says, and may return to sales. Shuttleworth is sent back early to her station in Lake Elsinore after supervisors find shortcomings in her driving. It’s a blow, but by mid-November, she’s giving herself a pep talk. “It is a man’s world, and in order to survive, you have to be strong,” she says. “I’m going to be the best driver this department ever had. I’ll walk in the door and say, ‘Chief, let’s go for a drive.’ I’ll be an engineer one day. I’ll be a captain one day and run my own station.’ ”

Williams is badly injured by a “deck gun” hose during training and is out for three weeks. Chittenden says he is impressed by Williams’ leadership and expects him to make permanent captain soon. “I could go down the list and say good things about all of them,” he says of this season’s crew. “There’s not a single one I wouldn’t love to have as a permanent firefighter.”

In the meantime, they’ll train, stay in shape, work fall-back jobs and fill in the time of waiting.