Young Men and Fire (10 page)

I
N THIS STORY OF THE OUTSIDE WORLD
and the inside . world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwups that fitted together tighter and tighter until all became one and the same thing—the fateful blowup. Such is much of tragedy in modern times and probably always has been except that past tragedy refrained from speaking of its association with screwups and blowups.

This story some time ago left the inside world at its very center—Dodge had come out of the timber ahead of his crew, with the fire just behind. He saw that in front was high dry grass that would burn very fast, saw for the first time the top of the ridge at what he judged to be about two hundred yards above, put two and two together and decided that he and his crew couldn’t make the two hundred yards, and almost instantly invented what was to become known as the “escape fire” by lighting a patch of bunch grass with a gofer match. In so doing, he started an argument that would remain hot long after the fire.

At the time it probably made no sense to anyone but Dodge to light a fire right in front of the main fire. It couldn’t act as a backfire; there wasn’t any time to run a fire-line along its upgulch edge to prevent it from being just an advance arm of the main fire. Uncontrolled, instead of being a backfire it might act as a spot fire on its way upgulch and bring fire from behind that much closer and sooner to the crew.

Dodge was starting to light a second fire with a second match when he looked up and saw that his first fire had already burned one hundred square feet of grass up the slope. “This way,” he kept calling to his crew behind. “This way.” Many of the crew, as they came in sight of him, must have asked themselves, What’s this dumb bastard doing? The smoke lifted twice so that everyone had a good chance to ask the question.

The crew must have been stretched nearly all the way from the edge of the timber to the center of the grassy clearing ahead, where Dodge was lighting his fire. Rumsey and Sallee say that the men did not panic, but by now all began to fear death and were in a race with it. The line had already assumed that erratic spread customary in a race where everything is at stake. When it comes to racing with death, all men are not created equal.

At the edge of the timber the crew for the first time could have seen to the head of the gulch where the fire, having moved up the south side of the gulch, was now circling. From the open clearing they also could see partway toward the bottom of the gulch, where it was presumably rocks that were exploding in smoke. They didn’t have to look behind—they could feel the heat going to their lungs straight through their backs. From the edge of the clearing they could also see the top of the ridge for the first time. It wasn’t one and a half miles away; to them it seemed only two hundred yards or so away. Why was this son of a bitch stopping to light another fire?

For the first time they could also see a reef twelve to twenty feet high running parallel to the top of the ridge and thirty yards or so below it. This piece of ancient ocean bottom keeps the top of the ridge from eroding, as the rock lid on the top of a butte on the plains keeps the butte from eroding into plains. But no one was thinking of geology or probably even of whether it would be hard to climb over, through, or around. At this moment, its only significance was that it seemed about two hundred yards away.

When the line reached its greatest extension, Rumsey and
Sallee were at the head of it—they were the first to reach Dodge and his fire. Diettert was just behind them, and perhaps Hellman, although these two stand there separately forever and ask the same question, What did Rumsey and Sallee do right that we did wrong? For one thing, they stuck together; Diettert and Hellman went their separate ways.

The smoke will never roll away and leave a clear picture of the head of the line reaching Dodge and his burned bunch grass. Dodge later pictured the crew as strung out about 150 feet with at least eight men close enough together and close enough to him so that he could try to explain to them—but without stopping them—that they could not survive unless they got into his grass fire. At the Review, he made very clear that he believed there was not enough time left for them to make it to the top of the hill, and events came close to supporting his belief. In the roar and smoke he kept “hollering” at them—he was sure that at least those closest to him heard him and that those behind understood him from his actions. In smoke that swirled and made sounds, there was a pause, then somebody said, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here.” and a line of them followed the voice.

The line all headed in the same direction, but in the smoke Dodge could not see whether any of them looked back at him. He estimated that the main fire would hit them in thirty seconds.

In the smoke and roar Rumsey and Sallee saw a considerably different arrangement of characters and events from Dodge’s. Indeed, even the roommates differ from each other. Both agree with Dodge, however, that the line was stretched out, with a group at the head close to Dodge, then a gap, and then the rest scattered over a distance that neither could estimate exactly but guessed to be nearly a hundred yards. In fact, when in the summer of 1978 Rumsey, Sallee, Laird Robinson, and I spent a day together in Mann Gulch, the two survivors told Laird and me they were now sure some of the crew had fallen so far behind that they were never close enough to Dodge to hear whatever he was saying. The implication of
Dodge’s account is that they all passed him by, but Rumsey and Sallee believed that some of them hadn’t. As to the head of the column, Sallee limits it to three—himself and Rumsey plus Diettert, who was also a pal and had been working on the same project with Rumsey before the two of them were called to the fire. To these three, Rumsey adds Hellman, the second-in-command, and indeed suggests, with Dodge agreeing, that it was Hellman who said, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here,” and so furnishes the basis for the charge that Hellman was doubly guilty of insubordination by being near the head of the line after Dodge had ordered him to the rear and by encouraging the crew to ignore Dodge’s order to remain with him and enter his fire. Rumsey’s testimony, however, will never settle Hellman’s place in the line and hence his role in the tragedy, for Sallee was positive and still is that Hellman was at the head of the line when Dodge ordered the men to drop their tools but that he then returned to the tail of it, repeating Dodge’s order and remaining there to enforce it. So direct testimony leaves us with opposite opinions of Hellman’s closing acts as second-in-command of Smokejumpers on their most tragic mission. Either he countermanded his superior and contributed to the tragedy or, according to Sallee, being the ideal second-in-command, he returned to the rear to see that all the crew carried out the foreman’s orders and to keep their line intact.

An outline of the events that were immediately to come probably would not agree exactly with the testimony of any one of the survivors or make a composite of their testimony, as might be expected, but would be more like what follows, and even what follows will leave some of the most tragic events in mystery and litigation.

Rumsey, Sallee, and Diettert left Dodge as one group and took the same route to the reef; two of them survived. Some of the crew never got as high up the slope as Dodge’s fire. Hellman reached the top of the ridge by another route and did not survive. The rest scattered over the hillside upgulch from the route taken by the first three, and none of those who scattered
reached the top. As Sallee said the summer we were together in Mann Gulch, “No one could live who left Dodge even seconds after we did.”

In fact, the testimony makes clear that Diettert, Rumsey, and Sallee scarcely stopped to listen to Dodge. As Rumsey says, “I was thinking only of my hide.” He and Diettert turned and made for the top of the ridge. Sallee paused for only a moment, because he soon caught up with Diettert and Rumsey, and actually was the first to work his way through the opening in the reef above. When asked at the Review whether others of the crew were piling up behind while he stood watching Dodge light his fire, Sallee said, “I didn’t notice, but I don’t believe there were. Rumsey and Diettert went ahead—went on—I just hesitated for a minute and went on too.”

In the roar of the main fire that was now only thirty seconds behind them they may not even have heard Dodge, and, if they did hear words, they couldn’t have made out their meaning. Rumsey says, “I did not hear him say anything. There was a terrible roar from the main fire. Couldn’t hear much.”

It probably wasn’t just the roar from without that precluded hearing. It was also the voice from inside Mount Sinai: “I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe. I went up the right-hand side of Dodge’s fire.”

Although Sallee stopped a moment for clarification, he also misunderstood Dodge’s actions. “I understood that he wanted us to follow his fire up alongside and maybe that his fire would slow the other fire down.” Like Rumsey, Sallee interpreted Dodge’s fire as a buffer fire, set to burn straight up for the top and be a barrier between them and the main fire. And like Rumsey, Sallee followed the right edge of Dodge’s fire to keep it between them and the fire that was coming up the gulch.

The question of how Hellman reached the top of the ridge after leaving Dodge at his fire cannot be answered with certainty. What is known is that he made his way from where Dodge lit his fire to the top of the ridge alone, that he was
badly burned, that he joined up with Rumsey and Sallee after the main fire had passed, that he told Rumsey he had been burned at the top of the ridge, and that he died the next day in a hospital in Helena. The most convincing guess about how he reached the top of the ridge is Sallee’s. When he and I stood on the ridge in the summer of 1978, I asked him about Hell-man’s route to the top and he said that naturally he had thought about it many times and was convinced there was only one explanation: while he, Rumsey, and Diettert followed the upgulch (right) side of Dodge’s fire and so for important seconds at least used it as a buffer protecting them from the main fire coming upgulch, Hellman must have followed the opposite, or downgulch, side of Dodge’s fire and so had no protection from the main fire, which caught him just before he could get over the ridge.

Sallee talks so often about everything happening in a matter of seconds after he and Rumsey left Dodge’s fire that at first it seems just a manner of speaking. But if you combine the known facts with your imagination and are a mountain climber and try to accompany Rumsey and Sallee to the top, you will know that to have lived you had to be young and tough and lucky.

And young and tough they were. In all weather Sallee had walked four country miles each way to school, and a lot of those eight miles he ran. He and Rumsey had been on tough projects all summer. They gave it everything they had, and everything was more, they said, than ever before or after.

As they approached the reef, its significance changed for the worse. They saw that the top of the ridge was beyond the reef, and unless they could find an opening in it, it would be the barrier keeping them from reaching the top. They might die in its detritus. The smoke lifted only twice, but they saw a crevice and steered by it even after it disappeared again. “There was an opening between large rocks, and I had my eye on that and I did not look either way,” Sallee says.

Halfway up, the heat on Rumsey’s back was so intense he forgot about Dodge’s buffer fire, if that is what it was, and,
having spotted the opening, headed straight for it. It was not only upslope but slightly upgulch and to the right. In the smoke nothing was important but this opening, which was like magnetic north—they could steer toward it when they couldn’t see it. Rumsey was in the center. Sallee was even with him on his left; Diettert was just a few steps behind on his right.

The world compressed to a slit in the rocks. Rumsey and Sallee saw neither right nor left. When asked at the Review whether they saw pincers of fire closing in on them from the sides, they said no; they saw only straight ahead. Ahead they saw; behind they felt; they shut out the sides.

To them the reef was another one of those things—perhaps the final one—that kept coming out of smoke to leave no place to run from death. They can remember feeling sorry for themselves because they were so young. They also tried not to think of anything they had done wrong for fear it might appear in the flames. They thought God might have made the opening and might take it away again. Besides, the opening might be a trap for the sins of youth to venture into.

Beyond the opening and between it and the top of the ridge they could see no flames but there was dense smoke. Beyond the opening in the smoke there could be fire—beyond, there could be more reefs, reefs without openings. It could be that beyond the opening was the end of God and the end of youth. Maybe that’s what Diettert thought.

Rumsey and Sallee felt they were about to jump through a door in a plane and so had to steady themselves and believe something was out there that would hold them up. It was as if there were a tap on the leg. Sallee was in the lead and was first through the crevice. It was cooler, and he believed his faith had been confirmed. He stopped to lower the temperature in his back and lungs. Rumsey was through next. As a Methodist, he believed most deeply in what he had been first taught. Early he had been taught that in a time of crisis the top of a hill is safest. It was still some distance to the top, and he never stopped till he got there.

Diettert stopped just short of the opening. On his birthday, not long after his birthday dinner and just short of the top of the hill, he silently rejected the opening in the reef, turned, and went upgulch parallel to the base of the reef, where for some distance there is no other opening. No one with him, neither Rumsey nor Sallee, saw him do this—it is known by where his body was found. Diettert, the studious one, had seen something in the opening he did not like, had rejected it, and had gone looking for something he did not find. It is sometimes hard to understand fine students. Be sure, though, he had a theory, as fine students nearly always have.