On the Burning Edge (16 page)

After the high of the show, the men headed back onto the line and spent the night mopping up hot spots. Bravo squad’s rookies Sean Misner, Woyjeck, and the bearded redhead, Dustin DeFord, were continuing their endless conversation about things they couldn’t have—showers, steaks, sex, beer—when Bunch walked up and asked, “Who the fuck took my chips?”

He’d been saving them as a late-tour delicacy ever since Grant bought him the chips and dip from the gas station more than a week earlier. Somebody had taken them from his basket in the buggy. The rookies were silent for a moment, then Misner and DeFord both blurted out, “Woy-shack!” Everybody on the crew deliberately mispronounced Woyjeck’s name.

Bunch pivoted.

“Dude, I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know,” Woyjeck said. “Steed told me to get him some chips from the buggy, and I saw that bag in the front seat and thought those were the ones he was talking about”—in fact, they probably were; Steed wasn’t above a little espionage—“so I grabbed them.”

“Those were my fucking chips,” Bunch said, stifling a smile at, considering the crime, Woyjeck’s incommensurate fear.

“I owe you. I’ll get a bigger bag—a couple; no, a few!—when we hit the next gas station,” Woyjeck said. “I promise. Dude, I’m so sorry. I know you love chips.”

Bunch couldn’t help but enjoy watching Woyjeck grovel. The sight was almost worth losing the chips for. But poor Woyjeck felt taken advantage of. He was a polite kid with a nervous constitution. His dad was a structural firefighter, but the ego and bluster of young hotshots was still unfamiliar to Woyjeck. The twenty-one-year-old had grown up in Orange County, California, and dreamed of following in his dad’s footsteps since he was a kid. By age twelve he had his CPR certification, by fifteen he was an EMT, and he’d spent one year fighting fires on a Type 2 Initial Attack crew in South Dakota. As with Grant, the hotshots were a step toward his goal of becoming a structural firefighter. But the time away wasn’t coming easy for him, either. He called his mom and dad almost every day from the fire line.

Woyjeck didn’t mind jockeying for position and acceptance. He liked and excelled at the physical tests. But the constant posturing was tiresome and against his nature. Later that night, Woyjeck and Grant worked together on a quiet piece of line.

Grant knew that Woyjeck’s lease was running out and that he needed a place to live in Prescott. “We’ve got a spot opening at our house,” he told Woyjeck. “Take it.”

What Grant didn’t tell him was that the roommate had left because Grant had constantly badgered him about not meeting Grant’s strict cleanliness standards. In any case, Woyjeck was thrilled. Living with Grant was an easy fix to the housing problem, and it seemed to be a step toward solidifying their friendship. But later that night, when the crew staged a wrestling match, Grant took the opportunity to assert his dominance—another act of posturing. Somehow Woyjeck, the slightest guy on the crew, had handled a few of the older and bigger veterans. He was feeling good when he came to his future roommate. With the other hotshots forming a circle around the wrestlers, Grant quickly undercut Woyjeck’s legs and pinned him with skill and savage enthusiasm. Then Grant made the point he’d been trying to make in his confrontation with Tony a week earlier on the Hart Fire: He might be a rookie, but he wouldn’t tolerate disrespect.

“Now you know who the man of the house is,” Grant said, loud
enough that the hotshots surrounding the wrestlers whooped collectively, as if to add an exclamation mark.

Bunch sat alone watching
Thompson Ridge burn itself out. He’d sharpened and cleaned his chainsaw and the chains. After that, there wasn’t much to do but think about Janae, Ben, Jacob, and the baby who was coming soon. Bunch had three more weeks on the fire line before he left the crew in the beginning of July.

Bunch hadn’t talked to Janae since June 11. The crew had been heading back to their sleeping area, and the short ride in the buggy provided the only time the hotshots had to talk to their families—the campsite didn’t have service. The back of the buggy was a clamor of unconnected conversations. There always seemed to be some tidbit of news that came out of their brief calls. One day Scott learned that his sister had given birth.

“Congratulations Mama!!” Scott texted. “I’ll call you after we eat in a little bit. So proud of you and love you bunches.” His sister had never known Scott to be so emotional. Another day, the crew heard from Chris. His mom’s surgery had gone well. She was in remission, and Chris planned to rejoin the crew when the hotshots returned to Prescott.

That day, Bunch’s conversation with Janae didn’t include any news. She just told him how things were going. She never actually used the words “Please come home,” but it was the only thing she was really saying to him. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but Bunch heard it now.

The pregnancy plus two boys was getting to be too much. Jacob had been throwing fits without his dad around, and Ben, still in diapers, demanded more attention than Janae could provide by herself. She had taken the kids to her mom’s house and was staying there, but that added a new and different dimension to her stress.

Bunch’s time away from the family was nothing new to Janae. They’d gone to high school together—Bunch was a wallflower; she was
the wild one—but hadn’t started dating until after they’d graduated and bumped into each other at a local coffee shop. Janae had given birth to Jacob months earlier and was now a single mom. She was reading the Bible—a rare quiet escape from the madness of the past few months—when she saw Bunch walk in. Small talk wasn’t Janae’s thing, or, for that matter, Bunch’s. She turned her back to avoid eye contact, but Janae “kind of had to look up when Bunch stopped directly in front of me.”

Weeks later, he was telling her about his love for hotshotting. She thought the flames sounded impressive and the job dangerous, maybe even a little sexy, but she wouldn’t realize how uncomfortable dating a hotshot could be until the summer of 2011. That year, Bunch was gone on assignments 120 days. He never tired of sleeping under the stars. When the crew finally got days off, Bunch would set up camp in the backyard, and the family would fall asleep under Prescott’s clear night sky.

On Thompson Ridge, Janae called her troubles with the kids “normal fire-line whining,” but both of them knew that when Bunch left the crew in a few weeks, he wouldn’t have a job. With the new baby coming soon and two kids to deal with already, their savings wouldn’t last. A few more weeks of work could mean a few more grand.

Janae and the boys could wait, Bunch told himself. They’d have to.

Donut was holding line
with Clayton and Wade. It was nearing 3
A.M
. and, as sometimes happened, Clayton started sharing lessons from the Bible.

“I don’t want to be a Christian until I’m ready to be a
good
Christian,” Donut said. He toyed with his Pulaski in the white ash of a fire long since cooled. “And honestly, I don’t think I’m ready to be a good Christian.”

“You know you can still make mistakes,” Clayton said. “It’s not like you sign up and have to live a perfect life forever after or you end up in hell. It’s just that after accepting God into your life, you find yourself
wanting
to live better.”

This made sense to Donut. In many ways, a relationship with God sounded similar to his relationship with Granite Mountain. After coming to the hotshots, Donut had made a concerted effort to refocus his life around habits that were far more productive. It wasn’t the easiest of transitions. Once, while the men were returning home from fighting fires in Idaho, they stopped in Las Vegas for the night. Marsh rented rooms for the men near the Strip. The hotels were cheap, but putting Granite Mountain up close to the action was Marsh’s subtle way of rewarding the crew with a chance to let loose. Before letting the hotshots go, he asked the men to be back at the buggies at 7
A.M.
, an hour later than normal.

Donut was later still. He wasn’t twenty-one yet, but the older guys bought him booze and then happily disappeared to the bars, leaving Donut to find his own adventures. Sometime after sunrise, he stumbled back into the hotel with a collection of new stories—true, false, or exaggerated—that involved a stripper’s lap-dance offer to sleep with him, a fall from a moving train, and a men’s-room spat with a man in a wheelchair. The night culminated back at the hotel, where, Donut said, a lesbian couple licked him simultaneously. When he got back to the buggies, he had some of the best stories the hotshots had heard in years.

Donut had never taken part in church traditions, but if what Clayton said was true and God really could forgive his behavior, Donut could consider Christianity.

“God forgives,” Clayton reassured him. Then Clayton and Wade took Donut’s hand, and in the soft glow of the dying fire they prayed for Donut to come to God.

Given Renan’s incident,
the lack of sleep, and the urgent slop-over, Grant’s first full two-week fire tour had been harder than most hotshots’, which was probably why he felt so poignantly disappointed when Steed told the crew that they had an opportunity to spend another two weeks on the line without going home. A new fire in southern New Mexico was growing rapidly, threatening to become
the largest fire in state history. The incident commander needed crews.

The hotshots were gathered behind the trucks at fire camp, leaning on bumpers or squatting while staining the ground with tobacco spit. Steed laid out the options. Because they’d already worked two weeks straight and the SWCC wasn’t requiring them to head south, he let the men decide whether they wanted to keep rolling to fires or return to Prescott. Another fire assignment could earn the men a few thousand dollars. It also meant as many as fourteen more days away from their families. The decision was unanimous: The men wanted to go home.

Steed and the squad bosses headed into the camp to deal with the trail of paperwork—hours worked, medical incidents, vehicles repaired—that makes it possible for the NIFC to track the location, on almost an hourly basis, of the nation’s firefighting resources. Filling out all of the paperwork took Steed and the squad bosses the better part of an hour. When they finished, Granite Mountain was officially released from Thompson Ridge.

The first thing Steed and Clayton did was walk across New Mexico Highway 4 to a row of trailers parked across from the fire camp. Every one of the half-dozen trailers was occupied by a vendor printing and selling T-shirts that portrayed cartoonish scenes of Thompson Ridge. Among other things, the designs included an air tanker flying low over oversize flames and hotshots working in the foreground.
THOMPSON RIDGE FIRE, SANTA FE NATIONAL FOREST, MAY–JUNE 2013
was written across the top.

These vendors chase smoke columns around the West. Usually, locals or firefighters who see fewer flames than hotshots buy the shirts—enough for these vendors to make a modest living. It’s taboo for hotshots to buy the shirts. The tees are garish. But Steed and Clayton had a plan; they picked the loudest tie-dye off the rack.

When they returned to the buggies, the men again gathered around.

“Before we head home, we’ve got a little announcement,” Steed
said. “Bunch has got another boy on the way. He told us a few nights ago that he needed to spend time with his family. This is his last tour with us.”

Most of the men already knew as much—there are few secrets on a crew. During the slow shifts on the line, his and Janae’s conversations kept replaying in his head, until Bunch finally decided to put his family above all else. Losing a few grand over the coming weeks would sting a little bit, but missing the birth of his child would stay with him forever.

The hotshots chanted his name. “Bunch! Bunch! Bunch!”

“But before he goes, we’ve got a little something to thank Bunch for his years of hard work,” Steed said as he presented him with the T-shirt. “You’ve earned this.”

Before the advent
of cell phones, fire assignments were a lot like a sailor shipping off to sea. When firefighters left home, their families might not hear from them again for weeks. The odd calls, when they did come in, were usually made from pay phones at gas stations in the innumerable tiny ranching and mining towns that break up the empty roads of the West. Each hotshot might get five minutes in the booth to talk to a spouse or parent, deal with a late mortgage payment, or leave a heartfelt message on an answering machine before the next firefighter in line was tapping on the Plexiglas and pointing at his or her wrist. With a time limit on gas station stops, few things caused fights between hotshots like pay-phone lines.

Cell phones reduced the tension to small squabbles about charger space in the cigarette lighters. On the drive home from Thompson Ridge, the text messages flew out of Granite Mountain’s buggies by the dozens.

GRANT
: This drive is going to take forever. When we get back we have to wash the buggies, clean up…

LEAH
: Home at 6?

LEAH
: I’m cleaning the house.

GRANT
: I’ve been sleeping in the dirt for two weeks.

LEAH
: That’s exactly why I’m doing it!

But for many hours, the hotshots droned through the flat, windswept high desert that lies between Jemez Springs and Prescott. The crew didn’t pull into the base until after seven and weren’t done cleaning the buggies and preparing the trucks for the next fire until an hour after that. Grant left the station the moment Steed released the crew. Bunch, though, lingered, taking a moment to look around the place that had been at the center of his life for the past four years. There was no doubt he was going to miss the station. Small things suddenly felt sentimental—Clayton’s antique chainsaws and ever-growing piles of thrift-store kitsch, a broken hand tool with
TURBY TOUCHED THIS
written on it, the locker his old squad had painted Granite Mountain’s logo across.