Young Men and Fire (11 page)

While Sallee was cooling his lungs, he looked down and back at Dodge and the crew and for the first time realized why Dodge had lit his fire.

I saw Dodge jump over the burning edge of the fire he had set and saw him waving his arms and motioning for the other boys to follow him. At that instant I could see what I believe was all the balance of the crew. They were within twenty to fifty feet of Dodge and just outside the burning edge of the fire Dodge had set. The last I recall seeing the group of boys, they were angling up the slope in the unburned grass and fairly close to the burning edge of the fire Dodge had set….

When Dodge first set the fire I did not understand that he wanted us boys to wait a few seconds and then get inside the burned-out grass area for protection from the main fire.

Dodge’s description of his fire is mostly from inside it.

After walking around to the north side of the fire I started as an avenue of escape, I heard someone comment with these words, “To hell with that, I’m getting out of here!” and for all my hollering, I could not direct anyone into the burned area. I then walked through the flames toward the head of the fire into the inside and continued to holler at everyone who went by, but all failed to heed my instructions; and within seconds after the last man had passed, the main fire hit the area I was in.

When asked at the Review if any of the crew had looked his way as they went by, he said no, “They didn’t seem to pay any attention. That is the part I didn’t understand. They
seemed to have something on their minds—all headed in one direction.”

He wet his handkerchief from his canteen, put it over his mouth, and lay face down on the ground. Whether he knew it or not, there is usually some oxygen within fifteen inches of the ground, but even if he knew it, he needed a lot of luck besides oxygen to have lived, although Rumsey and Sallee were to say later that the whole crew would probably have survived if they had understood and followed Dodge’s instructions.

It is doubtful, though, that the crew had the training and composure to interpret Dodge’s instructions even if some of his words reached them over the roar. The close questioning Rumsey and Sallee received later at the Review revealed that their training in how to meet fire emergencies consisted of a small handful of instructions, four to be exact and only one of which had any bearing on their present emergency. The first was to backfire if they had time and the right situation, but they had neither. The second was to get to the top of the ridge where the fuel is usually thinner, where there are usually stretches of rock and shale, and where the winds usually meet and fluctuate. This is the one they tried, and it worked with only seconds to spare. The third instruction was designed to govern an emergency in which neither time nor situation permits backfiring or reaching a bare ridgetop. When it’s that tough, the best you can do is turn into the fire and try to work through it, hoping to piece together burned-out stretches. The fourth and final warning was to remember that, whatever you do, you must not allow the fire to pick the spot where it hits you. The chances are it will hit you where it is burning fiercest and fastest. According to Dodge’s later testimony, the fire about to hit them had a solid front 250 to 300 feet deep—no one works through that deep a front and lives.

Even if the crew’s training had included a section on Dodge’s escape fire, it is not certain that the crew would have listened to Dodge, would have entered the fire and buried their faces in the ashes. When asked at the Review if he would
have gone into Dodge’s fire had he received previous instruction about it, Rumsey replied, “I think that if I had seen it on a blackboard and seen it done and had it explained so that I understood it I think I surely would have gone in—but of course you never can tell for sure.”

Dodge survived, and Rumsey and Sallee survived. Their means of survival differed. Rumsey and Sallee went for the top and relied on the soul and a fixation from basic training. The soul in a situation like this is mostly being young, in tune with time, and having good legs, an inflexible destination, and no paralyzing questions about what lies beyond the opening. When asked whether he had “ever been instructed in setting an escape fire,” Dodge replied, “Not that I know of. It just seemed the logical thing to do.” Being logical meant building one fire in front of another, lying down in its ashes, and breathing close to the ground on a slight elevation. He relied on logic of a kind and the others on time reduced to seconds. But no matter where you put your trust, at a time like this you have to be lucky.

The accounts that come down to us of the flight of the crew up the hillside nearly all conclude at this point, creating with detail only the happenings of those who survived, if only for a day, as Hellman did, or, like Diettert, at least reached the reef. Counting these two, only five are usually present in the story that goes on up the ridge. Only a sentence or two is given to those who, when last seen by Dodge, were all going in one direction and when seen finally by Sallee were angling through openings in the smoke below him as he looked down from the top of the ridge. Although they are the missing persons in this story, they are also its tragic victims. There is a simple aspect of historiography, of course, to explain why, after last seen by the living, they pass silently out of the story and their own tragedy until their tragedy is over and they are found as bodies: no one who lived saw their sufferings. The historian, for a variety of reasons, can limit his account to firsthand witnesses, although a shortage of firsthand witnesses probably does not explain completely why contemporary accounts
of the Mann Gulch fire avert their eyes from the tragedy. If a storyteller thinks enough of storytelling to regard it as a calling, unlike a historian he cannot turn from the sufferings of his characters. A storyteller, unlike a historian, must follow compassion wherever it leads him. He must be able to accompany his characters, even into smoke and fire, and bear witness to what they thought and felt even when they themselves no longer knew. This story of the Mann Gulch fire will not end until it feels able to walk the final distance to the crosses with those who for the time being are blotted out by smoke. They were young and did not leave much behind them and need someone to remember them.

T
HE FOREMAN, DODGE, ALSO
must be remembered, as well as his crew, and it is. again the storyteller’s special obligation to see that he is. History will determine the direction or directions in which the storyteller must look for his enduring memories, and history says Dodge must live or die in his escape fire. Ordinary history says he lived by lying in the ashes of his escape fire until the main fire swept over him and cooled enough to let him stand up and brush himself off. The controversial history that was soon to follow and has lasted ever since charges that Dodge’s escape fire, set in front of the main fire, was the fire that actually burned some of the crew and cut off others from escaping. Historical questions the storyteller must face, although in a place of his own choosing, but his most immediate question as he faces new material is always, Will anything strange or wonderful happen here? The rights and wrongs come later and likewise the scientific know-how.

The most strange and wonderful thing on the hillside as the escape fire swept up it, shutting it out of sight in smoke and heat, is that a spot of it remained cool. The one cool spot
was inside Dodge. It was the “characteristic in him” that Rumsey had referred to when Dodge returned from the head of the fire with Harrison and muttered something about a death trap. It was the “characteristic” he was best known by, the part of him that always kept cool and aloof and believed on principle in thinking to itself and keeping its thoughts to itself because thinking out loud only got him into trouble. It was this characteristic in him that had started him to lead the crew downgulch to safety, then didn’t like what it saw ahead and turned the crew back upgulch trying to outrun the fire without his ever explaining his thoughts to the crew. His running but not his thinking stopped when he saw the top of the ridge, for he immediately thought his crew could not make the top and so he immediately set his escape fire. When he tried to explain it, it was too late—no one understood him; except for himself, they passed it by. Except to him, whom it saved, his escape fire has only one kind of value—the value of a thought of a fire foreman in time of emergency judged purely as thought. The immediate answer to the storyteller’s question about the escape fire is yes, it was strange and wonderful that, in this moment of time when only a moment was left, Dodge’s head worked.

To see how Dodge’s life as a woodsman shaped his thoughts in an emergency and to follow his thoughts closely, one more tick must be added to the tock of his makeup. In an emergency he thought with his hands. He had an unusual mechanical skill that helped him think, that at least structured his thoughts. It was a woodsman’s mechanical skill—he liked to work with rifles, fix equipment, build lean-to’s or log cabins. He wasn’t fancy, he was handy. And in fact that spring he had been excused from training with the Smokejumpers so that he could be maintenance man for the whole Smokejumper base—no doubt part of the cause of the tragedy he was about to face with a crew only three of whom he knew. The foreman, then, was facing this tragic emergency alone, withdrawn as he often was into his own thoughts, which were the thoughts men
and women have who are wired together in such a way that their brains can’t start moving without their hands moving at the same time.

The present question, then, in its purest form is, How many brains, how much guts, did it take in those fiery seconds to conceive of starting another fire and lying down in it? In its maximum form, the question would be, Did Dodge actually make an invention when 250 or 300 feet of solid flames were about to catch up to him?

Two of the Forest Service’s greatest fire experts, W. R. (“Bud”) Moore and Edward G. Heilman, Moore’s successor as director of fire control and aviation management for the Forest Service’s Region One, have told me they never heard of this kind of escape fire before Dodge’s use of it, and their experience corresponds to my own, which, though limited to summers when I was young, goes back to 1918. Rumsey and Sallee say under oath that in 1949 nothing like it had been mentioned in their training course, and, as Rumsey adds, even if it had been explained to him and he had seen it work, it seemed crazy enough so that he wasn’t sure he would have stepped into it if it had been for real.

A lot of questions about the woods can’t be answered by staying all the time in the woods, and it also works the other way—a lot of deep inner questions get no answer unless you go for a walk in the woods. My colleague at the University of Chicago Robert Ferguson pointed out to me that James Fenimore Cooper had something like Dodge’s fire burning in his favorite of his own novels,
The Prairie
, first published in 1827. Cooper’s eastern readers are held in suspense throughout most of
chapter 13
by the approach of a great prairie fire from which the old trapper rescues his party at the last moment by lighting a fire in advance of the main one and having it ready for human occupancy by the time the sheet of flames arrives. He stepped his party into the burned-off grass and moved them from side to side as the main fire struck.

Cooper’s readers clearly were not expected to know of this device or there would be no justification for the prolonged
suspense which the chapter is supposed to create, but the escape fire on the prairie is no literary invention.

Mavis Loscheider of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Missouri, an outstanding authority on the life of the Plains Indians, sent me evidence showing that something like this kind of fire was traditionally set by Plains Indians to escape from grass fires and that pioneers on the plains picked up the invention from the Indians.

In his second volume of
The American Fur Trade of the Far West
, Hiram M. Chittenden describes how the prairie escape fire worked in the early 1800s:

The usual method of avoiding the danger of these [prairie] fires was to start one in the immediate vicinity of the person or company in peril. This fire, at first small and harmless, would soon burn over an area large enough to form a safe asylum and when the sweeping cohorts of flame came bearing down upon the apparently doomed company, the mighty line would part as if by prearrangement and pass harmlessly by on either side.

There are still good grounds, however, to believe Dodge “invented” his escape fire. Why doubt his word before the Board of Review that he had never heard of such a thing before? Even if it was known to mountain men, it could not have been much used in timbered country, if for no other reason than that it would seldom work there. The heat of a timber fire is too intense, and the fire is too slow and prolonged and consumes too much oxygen to permit walking around in it. Chances are Dodge’s fire wouldn’t have worked (wouldn’t even have been thought of) if Dodge had been caught on the other, timbered side of Mann Gulch where the fire started. Moreover, Dodge’s escape fire differs in important ways from the escape fires used by Indians and pioneers. Dodge’s fire was started so close to the main fire that it had no chance to burn a large “asylum” in which the refugee could duck and dodge the main fire. Not being able to duck and dodge and remain alive, Dodge lay down in the ashes, where the heat was least intense and where he was close enough to the ground to find some oxygen.

Of course, Dodge had a Smokejumper’s knowledge that if you can’t reach the top of the hill you should turn and try to work back through burned-out areas in the front of a fire. But with the flames of the fire front solid and a hundred yards deep he had to invent the notion that he could burn a hole in the fire. Perhaps, though, his biggest invention was not to burn a hole in the fire but to lie down in it. Perhaps all he could patent about his invention was the courage to lie down in his fire. Like a lot of inventions, it could be crazy and consume the inventor. His invention, taking as much guts as logic, suffered the immediate fate of many other inventions—it was thought to be crazy by those who first saw it. Somebody said, “To hell with that,” and they kept going, most of them to their deaths.