On the Burning Edge (19 page)

For a short while, the men spread out around the tree and mopped up any remaining spot fires in the vicinity, but few remained. The chaparral had little wood left to harbor a spark. After, the men sprawled out in the shade of the juniper’s branches and, while eating lunch, made deliberately crass jokes about visiting the tree during firewood-collection season.

Steed called for a crew photo after the men ate. Traditionally, Granite Mountain’s crew shots were taken during their most exotic tours or after their hardest shifts. One was on a California beach not long after receiving their hotshot status; another was during the fire burning mysteriously in the rains of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters; and a third after wrestling into submission an unexpectedly dangerous blaze on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim. Clayton framed the photos with wood scraps and salvaged materials, and each picture hung proudly on the station walls. Over the course of a season, most hotshots spent hours lingering before the photos, studying the faces of men who came before them. Each image hinted at a crew’s particular legacy. There, before the wall, they heard stories from veterans about a certain sawyer, or the fastest swamper the crew had ever seen, or some crazy one-year wonder who took a swing at a bouncer. Perusing the pictures of past hotshots made each man wonder what would be said of him when he left.

The hotshots fanned out into the tree. Wade and Clayton scooted out on some of the taller limbs and hung from them, grinning and swinging like orangutans, while the others leaned against a branch, as thick as most trees, that jutted out parallel to the ground. Donut, in a pair of aviator sunglasses, crossed his arms and adopted a look and posture that said hardened hotshot. Scott held his hands in front of him—quiet and respectful—and Grant squared up to the camera and gave a smug grin.

After the photo was shot, Steed yelled “Pyramid!”—one of the impromptu team-building exercises, like the theater moment on Thompson
Ridge, that he sometimes liked to spring on the crew. Along with four of the bigger hotshots, Steed got down on all fours and, in decreasing order of size, the men climbed atop one another. The structure collapsed a few times, the men laughing in a jumble, before Grant was able to climb up the other men’s backs to the second-to-last of the five tiers. Beside him was William Warneke, a twenty-five-year-old ex-Marine from California who had served a tour in Iraq. Billy, a rookie on Granite Mountain, had a wife and a baby on the way. With Billy and Grant in place, Woyjeck scampered up the juniper and lowered himself onto their backs—the top of the pyramid. Chris snapped a quick photo. In it, nobody is posturing, but everyone is smiling.

Granite Mountain’s saving
of the juniper became the biggest story to come out of the Doce. To the few locals who had hiked into the desert to see the enormous tree, the crew’s act felt personally important. But for most people, something else was at work. Many townspeople knew of the Forest Service’s Prescott Hotshots, across town, but didn’t know that the city employed its own hotshots until the Doce—until Granite Mountain had protected an ancient tree on the flanks of its namesake peak. It was a great story. The Prescott
Daily Courier
ran an article about Granite Mountain’s efforts and talked to Marsh about what it was like to have saved the iconic tree.

“It feels right, you know?” Marsh told the reporter. He hadn’t been there when the crew saved the juniper. During the first stages of the initial attack, the incident commander had tapped Marsh to oversee a division of the fire, and once again he hadn’t worked with Granite Mountain at all on the Doce. But he understood that the newspaper story wasn’t just about the tree.

The hotshots’ work often goes unappreciated, since it’s usually done so far away from towns, Marsh noted. After so many years of working to protect Prescott, the recognition was well earned.

Granite Mountain was
news
. The men joked nonstop about being anointed heroes. In a show of thanks, locals brought to the station
sleeping bags, doughnuts, muffins, and Gatorade. How any of Prescott’s residents ascertained that the unmarked compound on an industrial street corner was Granite Mountain’s station, the guys couldn’t figure out. None of the public had ever stopped by before.

Another perk of fighting fire in their hometown was that the hotshots, unlike the out-of-town crews, could skip the chaos and discomfort of a crowded fire camp. After the juniper, the hotshots spent five more shifts improving indirect dozer line miles away from the main fire. Running chainsaw in the heat made for long, hot, and physically taxing days. After their days on the line, the hotshots slept at the station. Steed and Marsh wouldn’t let the hotshots leave—they were technically on assignment—but they let the men’s families visit every evening.

The station had the atmosphere of a carnival. Leah came the first night.

“What do you want me to bring?!” Leah texted Grant.

“Beer!”

But Grant knew Leah couldn’t bring beer, and not just because she wasn’t twenty-one. Decades earlier, hotshots could drink on fire assignments, but that ended in the 1960s when a hotshot crew got drunk on a fire in Oregon and rioted, throwing chairs and tables out the windows of a scenic train they’d taken on the way home from an assignment.

Marsh and Steed wouldn’t let Granite Mountain drink at the station. So Leah brought Grant his backpack with speakers in it and his preferred vice: candy. When she got there, Grant proudly introduced her to his crewmates. She met his new battle buddy, Sean Misner, and his wife, Amanda, and Clayton and his wife, Kristi—even Anthony Rose, who had been the hardest on Grant at the beginning of the year. Whatever tension existed between the hotshots at the start of the season was gone. After the flurry of introductions, Grant and Leah sat alone together in the parking lot.

He winced in pain as he took off his boots. His feet were literally rotting. An angry shade of red spread across the tops and bottoms of his feet. Grant had been changing his socks regularly and had even
tried some of those weird toe gloves, in which each individual toe sits in its own cloth sleeve, but still, the long hours in his boots was taking a toll. Leah was washing Grant’s feet with warm, soapy water when Chris MacKenzie came up behind.

“You’re not really helping him with that?” he asked.

“I’m spraying him down,” said Leah, her hands working between his toes.

“You’re absolutely doing that,” Chris said, and walked away gagging.

Grant smiled at Leah. He no longer felt like an outsider. He kept comparing fighting the Doce to winning the home game in high school football. For Grant, the newspaper coverage made real the often intangible fact that, occasionally, their normally remote job had real results for people in towns. He was warming to the idea of being a hotshot.

Grant missed Renan, but in his absence, he also felt like he was making more friends on the crew. During a break in one of the long shifts building indirect line, Grant told Scott Norris about Leah’s grandmother. Her ninetieth birthday was coming up. She’d compiled a life list, and every birthday she made it her goal to check off a bold objective that year. She’d gone skydiving at eighty-six and asked to smoke marijuana at eighty-eight. Grant had helped with the latter—in front of all the guests at her birthday party, he presented her with a rolled joint. Now Grant wanted to top that for her ninetieth. He wanted to get her arrested.

“Heather’s a cop!” Scott said. “She’d do it for sure.” And so they schemed up a way to pretend to arrest Leah’s grandmother. Leah loved the idea.

Oftentimes, the men
parked their trucks in a row beside the station, and in the evenings, some of the men chose to sleep in the backs of their pickups instead of on the ground. One night Clayton and Zup had happened to park next to each other. Clayton and Kristi were quietly talking in his truck when Zup stuck his head through her window
and said, “Let me know if you guys want any privacy, if you know what I mean.”

Kristi rolled her eyes. Zup let out a laugh and then jumped into the back of his pickup, just three feet away. For Kristi there was something priceless about being with Clayton at the station. She saw him operating in the world through which he defined himself. Watching Clayton and the easy way he had as a leader satisfied a curiosity in her. It gave her pride. For many of the couples, the evenings at the station felt stolen.

A few nights later, as the crew returned from another long shift, Grant texted Leah and asked her to bring his ukulele to the station. She thought it an odd request. Grant was tone-deaf and couldn’t play a chord. But Leah brought it anyway, and Zup grabbed it from her when she arrived. He tuned the little instrument and sat on the concrete and began slowly picking his way toward a rhythm.

After some time, a song emerged, and Zup ad-libbed nonsensical lyrics about the Doce and the hotshots. The men, their wives or girlfriends, and a half-dozen kids gathered in a loose circle around Zup. Soon the other men started contributing made-up lyrics, and everybody laughed because it was contagious and fun. Clayton grabbed Kristi’s hands.

“Shhh,”
Clay said. “Papa Bear”—his nickname for Marsh—“is sleeping. We don’t want to wake him up.”

They stepped into the center of the group and started dancing. Grant followed immediately after. He pulled Leah into the circle, and there, in the station’s parking lot, with their friends and families surrounding them, the couples danced beneath the off-colored glow of the sunset filtered through drift smoke.

After the other hotshots’
girlfriends and families left the station, the men laid their sleeping bags down around the compound. Scott put his by the buggy barn, near the gate, and dozed until sometime around midnight. Then his phone vibrated and he woke quietly, took his beanie and placed it on his pillow, and filled out his sleeping bag with
extra clothes to make it look like he was still in there. Then he crept out of the station gate, the way lit dimly by the streetlights.

Heather Kennedy never made it to the station during those evenings after the Doce. She couldn’t; she worked the late shift. But during any free moments she could find, she and Scott texted with a frequency that bordered on neurosis.

Heather, still wearing her uniform, had parked in a dark section of an alley behind the station. Scott slid into the passenger seat beside her, and they kissed for a long time.

After Thompson Ridge, whatever fears Scott had about losing Heather had been put to rest. They headed back to their apartment in Prescott Valley, twenty minutes to the north.

In rapid-fire stories, Scott told Heather everything about the Doce, even things she probably didn’t need to know, like the time Donut, who was afraid of snakes and refused to head alone into the bush, “took a shit in front of the whole crew, just right there beside the line.” Scott told her about the plan for Leah’s grandmother, and they talked about the articles in the paper. He didn’t understand why everyone was making such a big deal about Granite Mountain’s actions.

“Do you think of yourself as a hero?” Scott asked Heather. They’d had this conversation before. “I don’t think of myself as a hero at all. We’re glorified landscapers.”

At home, while Heather got changed, Scott showered. They met in the kitchen, where he fell quiet and thoughtful. He’d been doing that around Heather a lot lately, pausing in the middle of conversations for what seemed like minutes. A few nights earlier, he’d stammered out, “I…I…I’ve never been so happy in my life. I’m so in love with you.” They’d been talking about buying a house together, and the word “marriage” found its way into their conversations with increasing frequency. But this time he had something far less tender on his mind. He looked afraid.

Scott told her the story of Donut and Chris crawling out of the thicket a few days earlier, the twenty-foot flames whistling and crackling behind them. He wasn’t sure they knew just how close they’d
come. “It was awful,” he said, and leaned on the kitchen island by the bookshelf. “In seven years of firefighting, I’ve never seen anybody so close to being burned over.”

Heather and Scott sometimes talked about the dangers of their respective jobs. They’d even discussed what to do if the unthinkable happened and one of them was killed at work. Heather promised him that if Scott died, she’d break the news to his sister and parents. If Heather died, he’d do the same. But the chance that somebody would pull a gun on her during a routine traffic stop seemed more likely than Scott—or anybody on his crew—getting caught by a fire.

“It was close, but the last time hotshots—guys who really knew what they were doing—got burned was in 1994,” he told her. “Storm King.” She knew the story. He’d told it to her before at an IHOP restaurant, drawing on the back of a napkin to illustrate what happened. He’d penciled in the fire line through thickets of oak scrub, the winds of an approaching cold front, the spot fire that had started below the firefighters, the ridgetop where one smoke jumper outran the blaze, and the places where fourteen firefighters who couldn’t had died.

For those chilling moments on the Doce, Scott had seen the same fate befalling Donut and Chris. Heather smoothed her hands down his forearm; he’d run nine tanks of gas through his chainsaw that day, and his muscles were still as taut as a steel cable.

“Storm King was nearly twenty years ago,” Scott said. “It happens, but it’s really rare.”

Then they went to bed, and he and Heather lay wrapped in each other’s arms until his alarm went off at 4:30
A.M
. On the way out to the car, he dropped a wet washcloth in the dust by the front door, then wiped it across his face to cover the evidence of his illicit cleanliness.

After seven shifts
on the Doce, the incident management team released Granite Mountain on June 25. The Doce wouldn’t be declared 100 percent contained until early July, but it never again ran like it had in that first terrifying shift. Sciacca’s well-coordinated initial attack
had helped end the Doce quickly. So had the flashy way chaparral burns: Unlike the timber on Thompson Ridge, which could smolder for weeks, chaparral burns as if soaked in white gas, but only when conditions align. When they don’t, brush fires tend to be relatively tame. On the Doce, the winds never returned.