On the Burning Edge (11 page)

When considering whether to become a hotshot, Grant, of course, didn’t delve into the relative death rates of firefighters versus trash collectors. His calculus was far simpler: To survive, he needed to trust Steed and the rest of the overhead. In many ways, the relationship between superintendents and their firefighters is most similar to that between mountain guides and their clients. On a well-functioning crew, rookies warn their supervisors of hazards but must trust their leaders to interpret the risks and guide them safely through a blaze. For this reason, “I’d follow them blindly” is a widespread sentiment among firefighters, and among hotshots, “Keep your head down and shut up” is spoken as a mantra. Standing before the hundred-foot flames leaping from the forest, Grant was more than willing to do exactly as Steed told them.

Steed told him to get the drip torches. To meet the fire on their own terms, Granite Mountain and four other crews would burn out along a road that ran between the cabins and the wildfire. The majority of the hotshots would hold the line, watching the cabin side of the dirt road for spot fires, while Bob, Grant, and a few other hotshots worked the torches.

In a staggered pattern, Grant and the other burners widened the line by laying strips of fire parallel with the road. Bob went first, swinging his torch back and forth with the easy swishing motion of a horse’s tail. A line of flames spun out behind him. Grant followed a few feet from Bob. He tried to mimic his cousin’s fluid movements, but a few minutes into the operation, his wick seemed to clog. The fire stopped pouring out. He stood in a field of quickly spreading two-foot
flames and shook the torch back and forth. Still nothing. He pointed the torch upward to check the wick, which further agitated the fuel mix in the steel canister and sent a burst of flame at his face. Before Grant could jerk the torch downward, the flames burst so close to his face that his eyebrows were nearly singed.

“It’s fine, Grant!” came a cautionary yell from one of the veterans. The reassurance shook Grant from his moment of stupor. The burst of flames seemed to have cleaned the wick, and when the fuel started flowing again, Grant tripped as he rushed to catch up to Bob.

As Grant burned, the
other hotshots spread out along the road, with ten to fifteen feet between each man, and watched for spot fires across the line. Every so often, when a thicket of young pines burst into flames, one of the squad bosses yelled, “Eyes in the green!” For the jittery rookies, like Kevin Woyjeck, ignoring the fireworks was almost impossible. He paced about the road, glancing neurotically from the flames to the unburned meadow.

When a sound like a tropical squall bouncing off broad leaves burst from the forest, Woyjeck couldn’t resist the urge to watch the spectacle. The flames climbed into the upper branches of a fir tree and ripped well above the forest’s crowns. Embers swarmed upward in the smoke and drifted slowly back to the ground in wide and shimmering arcs. Woyjeck could feel the heat from seventy feet away. Behind the burning fir he saw, on the distant hillsides where the fire had burned hours before, thousands of embers still glowing and pulsing, as if the stars had been tinted orange and reflected off the blackness of the Jemez Mountains. Thompson Ridge was terrifying and beautiful like few things Woyjeck had seen.

“Turby?” Woyjeck said to Bravo’s lead firefighter. The erupting tree concerned the rookie.

“Yo,” Travis Turbyfill said, his typical monosyllabic response to Woyjeck’s questions. Turby, a father of two little girls, had served in Afghanistan as a Marine before coming to Granite Mountain, where he’d worked for two seasons.

“Should we go stand by the house?” Woyjeck asked.

Turby paused and looked at the rookie, as if surprised by the question. He dropped his voice an octave, jutted out his chin, and said, “Nah, let’s just stay where we’re at, spread out, and keep our eyes in the green.”

Turby wanted Woyjeck to stop watching the fireworks and keep his eyes toward the green. A spot fire could threaten not only the buildings but also the men’s safety. For the rest of the night, Granite Mountain secured the fire around a half dozen homes tucked into a stand of old-growth ponderosas. Sometime after 2
A.M
., the humidity climbed, the fire calmed down, and fatigue began to override adrenaline.

To fight off drowsiness, Zup, Bunch, and his swamper Wade Parker met together on the fire line and took shots of instant coffee at the top of every hour. Zup and Bunch both carried pint-glass-size backpacking stoves in their packs, but that night, they didn’t have time to boil water. Instead they shook the packets of grounds straight into their mouths and washed the coffee down with a swallow of water. After their fourth or fifth caffeine cocktail, and almost thirty hours without sleep, delirium took a firm hold.

During one of their meetings, Renan walked up to borrow Parker’s tool, and the swamper started chuckling for no reason other than exhaustion. It grew into the sort of insane laughter that feeds on its own sound, and Zup and Bunch were soon infected. With Renan staring at them, the men from Bravo shook with hysterical laughter. Bunch was literally on his back, howling.

Renan, doubtful that anything could be that funny, found it mildly irritating. He had no idea what had made them lose sanity. He snatched Parker’s tool and walked back toward the house he was working beside, their laughter pealing behind. In the darkness, Renan moved slowly down the middle of the thin road as the shadows of the flames danced on the pines and white smoke drifted across the road. Suddenly, beyond the crew’s clamor and in his momentary silence, Renan felt more exhausted than he had in a very long time.

O
ne of the reasons there are so many excellent photographs of the country’s wildfires is that land management agencies often hire photographers to document the action. On June 4, the Valles Caldera National Preserve hired Kristen Honig, a thirty-three-year-old planner at Los Alamos National Lab and a semi-professional photographer. The Valles Caldera was happy to have her. Honig had once been a firefighter herself, but even with her experience, Day’s management team wouldn’t let her onto the line until the fire behavior calmed down. Around midnight, it did, and Division Zulu assigned Clayton Whitted, Alpha’s squad boss, to be her minder.

Clayton had accepted a temporary detail as a task-force leader trainee, a position that helped Farnsworth—Division Zulu—orchestrate the movement of resources assigned to his section of the fire. Hotshot crews regularly offer up their most skilled firefighters when needed, and though Granite Mountain was already down a few key overhead, Steed let Clayton go for a few shifts. He trusted that Bob Caldwell, Travis Carter, and Travis Turbyfill could fill the void. The detail would provide Clayton with valuable experience.

Honig was pleased to have a chance to shoot such an active fire.
She sat in the passenger seat beside Clayton, who had parked at the preserve’s entrance, where he was directing incoming resources to their assignments. From across the meadow, Honig snapped photos of the fire lighting the sky like a distant city. Clayton wasn’t paying attention to her. He was leaning out the window, briefing one of the many resources rushing to the fire. Day had ordered 1,092 firefighters to be on scene in the next few days, and the influx of men and machines had been more or less continuous that night.

“There’s a bunch of little marshes and shit out there,” Clayton said to one engine captain. “So it’s not a good idea to drive the engine off the road.”

Clay, who was balding, with a thick handlebar mustache, sent the captain and his engine rumbling down the road toward an old sheep corral, then popped his truck into gear and followed the emergency lights toward the flames.

“Here we go,” he said to Honig. “Now, let’s see about getting you some good pictures, then.”

Crews had started the firing operation on the east side of the caldera, and the burnout was moving back toward the wildfire in the west. As they moved along the fire’s edge, Clayton stopped often to check in with firefighters spread out along the road.

The conversation consisted mostly of Clayton deflecting requests for additional resources and more water. The firefighters were stretched uncomfortably thin, and though the burnout was holding, Clayton and everybody else in Division Zulu was aware that one strong gust of wind could change everything.

While he worked, Clayton did what he could to help Honig get good photos. At one point, the fire intensity picked up in the meadow, and he led her on foot toward the fire’s edge to get close-ups. Then the breeze shifted, and both hustled back to the truck through blowing smoke. “You doing okay?” Clayton yelled to her. She couldn’t see much beyond the glow stick that Clay had attached to his helmet—a safety precaution he and the other hotshots had taken to make themselves more visible. But yes, Honig said, she was doing just fine.

When they met up with Granite Mountain, Grant and Bob were still burning out. Clayton called Bunch and Turbyfill over and asked them to pose for a few pictures.

“You’re not with the news, are you?” Bunch asked Honig, bristling a little at the sight of a camera. “ ’Cause we had a lady once who followed us around for days.” Then he mumbled, “It got a little weird.”

“What’s that?” Honig hadn’t heard him.

“It got a little weird,” he said, this time clearly, if not too loudly. “She was at spike camp and stuff.”

“Yeah?” Honig asked. She wasn’t quite sure how to respond to this comment, and Clayton recognized the awkwardness and politely stepped in to explain who Honig was, what she was doing, and why Granite Mountain was happy to help. But what struck her more than Bunch’s odd story about the other photographer was the hotshots’ utter lack of concern. The wildfire was feet away from the men, the house, and its 250-gallon propane tank, and the entire forest was glowing as if lit by floodlights, but as they worked, the hotshots’ primary concern seemed to be tobacco. They called it bung.

“Turby, you want some bung?” Bunch yelled to him. The normalcy of their conversation put Honig at ease. She asked Turby to pose near the cabin, framing a shot of the big ex-Marine silhouetted by the fire. Clayton looked over her shoulder.

“Well, I wanted to be your main subject,” Clayton told her, his voice hushed and fringed with western twang. She laughed.

“But I don’t have no gloves on,” he said.

He was referencing a Fire Service edict that no photos or video are to be shared unless all rules—even those often broken, like wearing gloves—are being followed in the images. Honig liked Clayton immediately.

At twenty-seven, Clayton was in general either unconcerned or unaware of what people thought of him. That quirky confidence was part of his charm. He’d made a hobby of thrift-store shopping and used Granite Mountain’s station, where he worked all year as one of the hotshots’ six permanent crew members, as a gallery for his collection of useless kitsch: a strip of Halloween paper skeletons, a stitched
velvet picture of Jesus, an antique chainsaw. Naturally easygoing, Clayton tried not to take firefighting—or life—too seriously. Years earlier, during a nighttime burning operation similar to the one on Thompson Ridge, a friend of his had spent his birthday on the fire line. Clayton, who was working on the other side of a lake, grabbed a drip torch and burned his friend’s initials—W.W.—into the side of a mountain. W.W. could see it from a half-mile away.

Honig and Clayton spent the night working together. By morning, she needed to return home to Los Alamos but found that she didn’t want to go. She didn’t know why, exactly, but she was enjoying herself. By dawn it was clear that the operation had been a success. The burnout on Division Zulu had blackened the fuel around the cabin. No homes had been lost, and now, with cooler nighttime temperatures and higher humidity, the fire gathered itself in the heavier logs strewn across the forest floor. It wouldn’t become dangerous again until the day got hot, that afternoon. The day shift could deal with the fire’s reawakening. For now, the firefighters on Division Zulu could pause.

Clayton parked the truck facing east, and he and Honig sat in the cab watching the sunrise through the low smoke that hung above the caldera like morning fog. Elk herds with young calves grazed in the forest just beyond the creeping flames, and coyotes and bears sporadically passed through the meadow. A few days later, firefighters would rescue a burned cub and give it the name Redondo. As they sat in the cab, Clayton handed Honig his iPod and asked her to pick out the music.

“Much of it is my wife’s,” he said, adding, “She’s a second-grade teacher.”

“Whatever I pick, you’re going to hate,” Honig warned. She only listened to country and Christian music, and few firefighters she knew listened to country, and even fewer to Christian. But she scrolled past his archival selection of Tupac albums and recognized in the hip-hop collection Casting Crowns, a Christian rock band.

“I love ‘Set Me Free,’ ” she said, a little self-consciously. It was one of Casting Crowns’ more popular songs.

“Me, too,” Clayton said. In a field as rough as firefighting, conversations about church and faith are rare.

Clayton told Honig that the job actually brought him closer to Christ. Six years earlier, he was working with the Prescott Hotshots when his mom died of a brain tumor—a similar illness to the one that had stricken Chris MacKenzie’s mom while Granite Mountain was on the Hart Fire that week. As Chris had done, Clayton left the Prescott Hotshots in the midst of fire season to help take care of his mom. During her sickness, he became a youth pastor at the Heights Church, and she died in 2008, a year after getting sick. Clayton returned to the fire line the following spring.

He found that hotshotting and ministry work had their similarities. Both attracted followers who were young and drifting. Firefighting, though, was his calling, Clayton said. That was part of the reason he’d come back to the line. It gave him an opportunity to share his faith in a subtle way.

Before he dropped Honig off at her car, she told him that her father had recently died of cancer. His decline had taken the better part of a decade.

“Do you think it’s easier for the family if the death is long and drawn-out?” Honig asked, and she looked at Clayton, his face streaked with ash nearly as dark as his mustache. “Or is it easier if a loved one goes quickly?”

Every season, there’s one
particular fire that teaches rookies what it means to be a hotshot—why the job is so self-selecting, why hazing exists, why the physical training is so demanding. Enduring these fires gives most young hotshots an unassailable pride. The intensity of the experience also breeds a shared mindset: If you’ve been there, you understand the commitment the job demands; if you haven’t, it’s something that’s difficult to fathom. As hard as these fires are, they also forge friendships. For Grant and Renan, their test was Thompson Ridge.

After the third night shift and their seventh day since leaving
Prescott, the battle buddies waited by a barn in the caldera’s meadow for a displeasing breakfast of dehydrated eggs. For the first time in days, they were far enough from the other hotshots that they had space to speak openly.

“How you doing, man?” Renan asked Grant.

“I’m struggling,” he said.

Grant was tired of being watched and judged; tired of the grime, the smoke, the bad food, the lack of sleep. Just tired. The work was mostly burning and holding, not particularly hard, as hotshotting goes, but since the first night shift, Donut was the only person on the crew who had slept much or well. He’d brought Tylenol PM and had the foresight to take a healthy dose before lying down. The rest of the crew suffered. They slept in a campground a fifteen-minute drive from their section of line, and during the day temperatures often climbed into the nineties. For most of the eight hours Grant and Renan were supposed to be sleeping, they lay on their mats swatting flies and sweating. By 5
P.M
., when Granite Mountain reported to fire camp for their night shift, they’d slept for three hours, maybe four.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about home,” Grant said. “About Leah.” The last time he’d talked to her was after his spat with Tony on the Hart Fire, and the work—and his loneliness—had only gotten harder since then. He told Renan how he’d fallen for Leah.

Four days after they’d first met, Grant called and asked Leah if she wanted to go to the beach. She’d never been.

“When?” she asked.

“Now,” he said.

Eight hours later, they were in Newport Beach, California. Grant and Leah met Bob, his cousin, at their grandmother’s house, and immediately after, the trio went to a restaurant at the end of the Santa Monica Pier, then to Venice Beach and to Hollywood.

Later that night, Grant led them to the empty Disneyland parking lot. It was late night by now, and he parked between streetlights and put on a hip-hop album that Bob had bought from a musician on the street that morning. Grant and Leah held hands in the front seat, Bob drank canned Coors beer and got funnier in the backseat, and all
three of them watched the Happiest Place on Earth glow in the darkness.

“You’re coming to our wedding,” Grant said to Renan in the meadow. He plucked a blade of grass and folded and tore it into neat strips. Grant had known Bob his whole life, but his cousin had other responsibilities on the line. Renan understood what Grant was going through better than anybody else.

Renan felt the same. They were partners who literally spent every waking moment together. As battle buddies they had to. They also wanted to. The newness of the fire line made them crave a companion to share and contextualize the experiences. That morning, Renan told Grant about his girlfriend and the ring he’d bought six months earlier. He wasn’t going to give it to her until he had a structural firefighting job and enough money to pay for the wedding.

“You and Leah will be there when that happens,” Renan said.

Scott walked up, and the rookies put their conversation on hold. He lingered long enough that Grant volunteered, “I’m feeling it, dude. I’m worn out, I’m missing home—my dog, my girl.”

“Oh, little rookie’s missing his girl?” Scott asked. Renan prepared for the belittling and inevitable jokes that often pass for conversation among young men. But they didn’t come. Scott realized that now wasn’t the time. He changed tack.

“It’s your first fire. Everybody wonders what the hell it is they’re doing out here,” Scott said. “That’s normal. It’s a phase, though.”

Scott had plenty of slow moments on Thompson Ridge in which to worry about the puppy and unpaid bills, fantasize of past lovers, create and dispel fears of losing Heather again. He also thought about his sister. She was due any day. He wanted to be there for his nephew’s birth.

“It gets easier,” Scott said to Grant, perhaps with more conviction than he felt.

“Do you remember your first hard shift on a fire?” Grant asked.

“Oh, man, of course I do,” Scott said. But he didn’t tell them about it. Instead he just offered some simple advice. “There will always be times when you get sick of this shit. Having somebody at home makes
it harder. It makes it feel like you’re never fully here,” he said, squeezing Grant’s shoulder. “Just grit your teeth and you’ll get through it.”

They could see a couple of green Forest Service pickups bouncing down the road toward the barn, dust billowing behind them.

“You’re doing good, dude,” Scott said.

When the trucks pulled up next to the barn, the men unloaded white buckets filled with hot plates of breakfast. Grant, Renan, and Scott lined up along with the other crews spooling out from the folding tables and rejoined the world they’d momentarily left. After breakfast, fed and exhausted, the men in Alpha buggy returned to the campsites in silence. There was no music, and each spent the short drive alone with his thoughts. Whatever euphoria had driven Bunch, Zup, and Parker to momentary madness had evaporated, and a deep fatigue now loomed over the crew like a great collective hangover.