(note: to readers of my regular blog, I am cross-posting this on request. Since I wrote this, the fire crossed the dozer lines. It cost ten million dollars and change to put out. One structure was lost, a historic cabin. Make of this what you will–these are your tax dollars at work)
I sit in a trailer, watching helicopters fly. Grounded like this, it is easy to forget that I just spent 19 days in the wilderness. A young helitack crewmember bounces in, looking for scissors. Driven by boredom, the men on her crew are cutting their hair into mohawks.
“Greetings, Box People!” she says. “I’m so glad I’m not in here.”
Still, I’d rather sit in a box and coordinate helicopters with Air Attack than do what they are doing, which is trying to fill the hours by hunting up shade and sculpting hair into mohawks. We have seven helicopters working this fire, and at any given time they are either landing, leaving, or being sent someplace with buckets of water. We have eight radios to monitor, which means we always know what is going on with this fire, which is currently racing across the grasslands of Hells Canyon.
I used to be out on the ground like the crews I hear on the radio, but after my epic hike I am nursing a sore tendon and it is good for me to sit for awhile. I drive to the gym at five in the morning to get some exercise. My companion in the Box is Sebastian, who was four years old when I went on my first wildfire. He remembers watching media coverage of the Yellowstone fires when he was five. It should make me feel old, but it doesn’t. I am finding it hard to care about things I used to think were important.
I am still figuring out things from my hike. They involve the future and the present. While I do this I direct helicopters. I torture Sebastian with reading from a Glamour magazine. It is mindless and good.
The fire will do what it wants to do. I cringe when I hear about dozer lines three blades wide. I don’t know when we will learn that fire is a necessary force. There are no houses threatened here, only deep wrinkles and folds in the landscape, gulches and ridges and drainages that have burned before and will burn again. We learn nothing, it seems.
The radios erupt in a torrent of sound and fury. The helicopters lift off again, starring the sky.
I’ve always felt that wildland fires were actually a good thing. That maybe we should just let them burn. But I never say that out loud. Many of my colleagues fight these fires and I realize it is a bit of a gravy train for them. But that sounds awful. I don’t mean for it to sound that way. So it is a relief to hear a fire fighter herself voice this opinion. How does the saying go? To fight a wildland fire, you just pour money on it until it rains.
Kim, I just read an article about you in Ski Journal!
It IS a gravy train, and I don’t necessarily begrudge it to the lowly GS 5 seasonal worker trying to make money for college. What I do regret is some of the damage I have seen–dozer lines in permafrost, in Florida swamp. This year an edict came down from USDA to suppress all fires and I think we are doing way more harm than good. And who needs an overhead team of 80? This is not the actual ground pounders; these are the overhead team folks.
I still get something out of the fire thing but yes, I am conflicted.
We have to suppress all fires but we’re still building like crazy in the interface…