Young Men and Fire (12 page)

Dodge later told Earl Cooley that, when the fire went over him, he was lifted off the ground two or three times.

“This lasted approximately five minutes,” he concludes in his testimony, and you and I are left to guess what the “this” was like. His watch said 6:10 when he sat up. By that time, death had come to Mann Gulch.

Dodge himself was allowed to live a little over five years more, what then was thought to be about the maximum time one who had Hodgkin’s disease could live. However, he would never jump again. His wife knew when he entered the hospital for the last time that he knew it was for the last time. Like many woodsmen, he always carried a jackknife with him in his pants pocket, always. She told me that when he entered the hospital for the last time he left his jackknife home on his bedroom table, so he and she knew.

W
HEN RUMSEY AND SALLEE REACHED
the crevice, the main fire had reached the bottom of Dodge’s escape fire. They were ahead of the flames, or at least thought they were, but couldn’t be sure because of the rolling and un-revealing smoke. Rumsey fell into what he thought was a juniper
bush and would not have bothered to get up if Sallee hadn’t stopped and coldly looked at him. In the summer of 1978, when Rumsey and I were where he thought the juniper bush must have been, he said to me, “I guess I would be dead if he hadn’t stopped. Funny thing, though, he never said a word to me. He just stood there until I said it to myself, but I don’t think he said anything. He made me say it.” They ran upgulch on the top of the ridge for a hundred yards or so and staggered down the slope on the other side of the ridge. There they stumbled onto a rock slide “several hundred feet long and perhaps seventy-five feet wide.” The dimensions hardly seem large enough, but there weren’t any other rock slides around. Within five minutes, the fire, coming down from the top of the ridge, had reached them.

Although Rumsey says they were both “half hysterical,” they were objective enough to see that the fire as it approached them was following the patterns of a fire coming over a ridge and starting down the other side. At the top of the ridge it burned slowly, veering back and forth in the way fires do as winds from opposite sides of a ridge meet each other. It flapped, sometimes it turned downhill toward them, and once it turned sideways and jumped a draw with a spot fire and, well started there, it jumped back again. Once below the fluctuations at the top of the ridge it settled down and burned straight toward them. It burned with such intensity that it created an updraft, sucking in its center so that it was now a front with two pincers. It hit the rock slide on two sides. Rumsey and Sallee, like the early prairie pioneers, tried to duck and dodge in their asylum, but there wasn’t much room for running. Rumsey says the fuel was thinner near the top of the ridge. “The flames were only eight to ten feet high.”

A form like a solidification of smoke stumbled out of the smoke ahead and died in the rocks. It was a four-point buck burned hairless except for the eyelashes.

After the fire passed the rock slide “it really started rolling” downhill, replacing trees with torches.

Soon they heard someone calling from far off, but it
turned out to be “only thirty yards away.” It was Bill Hellman. His shoes and pants were burned off, and his flesh hung in patches. When asked at the Review, “Did Hellman at that time seem to be suffering tremendously?” Sallee answered, “Yes.” To the next question, “Did he make any statement to you?” Sallee’s reply was, “He just said to tell his wife something, but I can’t remember what it was.”

They laid him on a long, flat rock to keep his burns out of the ashes. As Rumsey says, “There wasn’t much else we could do,” having thrown away all their first-aid supplies on their flight from the fire.

Suddenly, there was a shout and a form in the smoke. It was Dodge answering the shouting that had gone on between them and Hellman. He “didn’t appear excited,” but he “looked kind of—well, you might say, dumbfounded or shocked.” His eyes were red from smoke and his clothes black with ashes. He obviously was not his fastidious self, but he still had a characteristic about him.

They didn’t say much about anything, least of all about whether the missing were alive. Dodge, in coming over the hill, had seen one alive and couldn’t remember his name except that it began with “S” (Joe Sylvia). When Dodge sat up in his own fire he heard someone “holler” faintly to the east and, after a long time, found him only 150 to 200 feet upgulch and, oddly, below him, perhaps 100 feet. He was badly burned and euphorically happy. Dodge moved him to the shelter of a big rock and cut the shoes off his swollen feet, but there was no use in Dodge leaving his only worldly gift with him, his can of Irish white potatoes, since Sylvia could not feed himself with the charred and useless remains of his hands. In the hours to come, he would be without water because he could not lift his canteen.

Evidently Dodge hadn’t seen any others as he came up the hill or crossed to the other side, and, as he said at the Review, by the time he reached Rumsey, Sallee, and Hellman he “didn’t think any of [the others] were still alive.”

Rumsey and Sallee had come to a more hopeful conclusion
once the fire passed them by in the rock slide—after all, they had made it, and, besides, once they understood the intention of Dodge’s fire, they believed it would work and assumed at least some of the crew behind them had understood Dodge’s fire and crowded into it. But Dodge’s arrival eliminated that possibility, so there was very little they dared to talk about. After a while Dodge and Sallee left Hellman in Rumsey’s care and started back uphill through the ashes without saying just why. Since none had been saved with Dodge, the assumption now was that any survivors would have made it over the hill, as Rumsey and Sallee had, so their search was a short one. Besides, the heat was still so intense it soon drove them back. They didn’t have to explain why they didn’t have anything to say when they returned.

It was getting dark. Hellman already had drunk most of their water, even though it made him sick. He could see the glare of the Missouri a mile and a half below, and it inflamed his thirst, but he was not allowed to think of walking. He did revive enough to become talkative. It was here that he told Rumsey he had been burned at the top of the ridge, and it was partly on the basis of this remark that Sallee formed his assumption that Hellman had reached the top of the ridge by following the downgulch side of Dodge’s fire and so had had no buffer between him and the main fire raging upgulch. Once burned, though, like a wounded deer, he had started downhill for water but had collapsed after a few hundred yards. He was told to lie still on the rock and keep talking to forget the pain. Rumsey stayed with him, and at dusk Dodge and Sallee started for the river, Dodge leaving with them his canteen of water and his can of Irish white potatoes.

Dodge and Sallee had a tough time getting down to the river. They had to go half a mile or more before they could find a weak spot in the fire front through which to work their way. They had no map or compass, and when they reached the river they went the wrong way.

F
OR THE NEXT FEW HOURS
, the Smokejumpers who had landed in Mann Gulch passed from human remembrance perhaps as completely as they ever will. There were only five known to be alive at that moment, two of these soon to die, one with a name that began with “S.”

Although Hellman had made it over the top of the ridge, he was despairing and smelling of burned flesh and was praying with Rumsey, who had been left to take care of him. They both had let their church attendance lapse and could not remember their prayers, so in embarrassment they prayed silently. From their position near the top of the ridge they could see, when the smoke opened, reflections of the fire in the Missouri River below, and Hellman had to be told again and again that he could not run to the river and immerse himself.

Dodge had left his can of white potatoes with Hellman because Rumsey would be there to feed him, but instead of eating the potatoes Hellman drank the salt water in the can and further inflamed his thirst.

For Dodge and Sallee on their way to the river, it was a never-never land in the night and the smoke, and without a map or compass. Both were near exhaustion and shock when they reached the river, and going downstream, which was easier for the water, also seemed easier for them. A boat passed that did not see them, then turned and went back upstream, and on this slight evidence they turned around too. They didn’t know much about the world anymore, not even whether it was up or down.

Among other things, there were eleven of the crew they didn’t know anything about. The missing were probably in a world one hundred by three hundred yards—the world between the boy with a canteen of water and no hands to lift it and Hellman on the other side of the ridge, who was looking for forgotten prayers.

The two top men in the Helena National Forest, supervisor Moir and assistant supervisor Eaton, had left Meriwether in haste for the fire at York because they and Jansson had agreed it was probably more important than the Mann Gulch fire. They had left in special haste because they could not reestablish radio contact with the crew on the York fire to determine its extent and the psychological stability of the crew that was fighting it. Matters got no more composed after they left when Jansson found out that the receiver of the radio at York had been dropped and broken by a hysterical volunteer sobbing for help. Both men and equipment were breaking.

Dodge and Sallee had been going downriver to nowhere. At the same time, coming downriver from above were hordes of picnickers. Full of beer and the desire to be mistaken for firefighters, they landed at the Meriwether picnic grounds and crowded into the guard station to hear whatever they could get near enough to hear. Soon it became impossible for Jansson to tell the picnickers from his volunteer barflies, so he tried by radio to stop all except official boating on the river, but the radio operator at Canyon Ferry was off somewhere.

Jansson forever held himself guilty for not being concerned about the jumpers at this time, although it is hard to see the justice of his continual prosecution of himself. As everyone did who did not think of them, he assumed the jumpers were too good to be caught in a fire—they either had joined up with Hersey’s crew on the Meriwether ridge or had escaped over the head of the gulch into Willow Creek or perhaps hadn’t liked the looks of things from the very first and had not jumped at all.

Once Jansson did try to radio Missoula about the jumpers, but another frequency kept cutting him off. Then he went back to the job of trying to get some coherence in his camp. As he knew, there is no better way to do this than to start a training school—he tried to make a fire foreman out of one of the three men who had been on a fire before, and he tried to make a radio operator out of another volunteer, but his best luck was with two picnickers pretending to be firefighters whom he trained to be camp cooks for a crew that had now grown to thirty-five. A mystery of the universe is how it has managed to survive with so much volunteer help.

J
ANSSON WAS ALSO KEEPING AN EYE
on the fire near the top of Meriwether ridge where he had sent alternate ranger Hersey and his crew of nineteen men with two hold-at-all-cost orders: (1) hold the trail from the east open so that the jumpers could come down the ridge and join them, and (2) above all, hold the perpendicular trail behind them open so that, if they had to, they could escape back to the camp and, if they had to, from there into the river. The fire now was definitely moving down the Meriwether slope.

As it darkened, Jansson began to see flames making movies of themselves on the faces of the cliffs fifteen hundred feet straight above him.

Hersey says that when some of the crew saw the cliffs reenact the fire they tried to jump off them.

In the wide world, Hersey was probably the only man in whose mind the Smokejumpers were constantly present. Their absence was heightened by the fact that Hersey had followed Harrison’s tracks on the trail to the top of the ridge and the front of the fire—his tracks were easy to follow because he had been using his Pulaski as a walking stick, and going up that stepladder trail he had relied on it as if he and his Pulaski were a cripple and a crutch. What worried Hersey
most was that at the top of the ridge Harrison’s tracks headed into some second growth that the fire was already burning. Hersey spent most of his time organizing his crew into a fire-line and giving them another speech about how to face danger. He gave them a speech about facing danger every time he walked around the head of the fire and every time the fire ran a reel of itself on a cliff. It would be interesting to know what he told them, because it seems to have worked fairly well. Anyway, his crew stayed on the line even after the trail up the ridge to the east had disappeared in flames. His crew, though, were drinking gallons of water more than seasoned firefighters would have, so he had to send one of them all the way down to Meriwether Station with a canvas sack for another load.

When Jansson saw the waterbuck in camp, he became alarmed. Because the Smokejumpers had become nonexistent in Jansson’s mind, it was his own men fifteen hundred feet above his head who, he thought, were in danger. The returned waterbuck was a sure sign that Hersey intended to stay on the ridge and fight, and Jansson did not want him fighting fire after dark on the edge of fifteen-hundred-foot pinnacles with a bunch of drunks. Now, for the first time, he also became alarmed about the jumpers, who, the waterbuck was telling him, had not shown up on the Meriwether ridge. If they weren’t with Hersey’s crew, there were few places in the world that they could reach where they would be safe.

Jansson immediately ordered the radio at Canyon Ferry to get the radio at Missoula to use all frequencies to locate the whereabouts of the jumpers. When he was advised by Missoula that it was unable to establish contact with the jumpers on any frequency, he then asked for the exact location of their jumping area. “While they were giving me the exact spot,” he says, “foreman Dodge and jumper Sallee walked into the guard cabin at Meriwether and Dodge reported that he had two injured men. This was at approximately 8:50 P.M.”

The volunteers and the picnickers and the drunks crowded into the cabin. Jansson had to take Dodge outside and up the canyon to get any coherent information from him,
but what did Dodge know that was coherent? He knew that back in what earlier in the day had been Mann Gulch were two badly burned men, one with a name Dodge did not remember, and one unburned man, Rumsey, watching the burned man with a name, Hellman. What else was in the amphitheater for sure was fear and the smell of overcooked flesh.

Jansson immediately ordered through the Canyon Ferry radio one doctor, two litters, blankets, and blood plasma. At ten o’clock Hersey came in with his terrified postdrunks, having kept them on the fire until they had been several times trapped by it. He told Jansson about Harrison’s tracks, and, even more alarming, he told Jansson he had seen no jumpers or their tracks.

“We decided,” Jansson says, “to consider the rescue work the No. 1 job and the fire the No. 2 job. I asked Hersey to look after the fire job while I went for the jumpers.”

I
T IS LIKE THAT IN THE WOODS
and even in the wide world generally—the rescue of men and women, alive or dead, comes first. Of course, some step on the gas and leave them lying on the pavement where they landed and some sneak off, like Egyptian bas-relief, with their profiles looking one way and their bodies going the other way. But most people think they can be of help, and some even seem born to rescue others, as poets think they are. The best of them goof, especially at first, because only a few have the opportunity to keep in practice. Then as they catch on again they become beautiful in performance if one can step back for a moment to look. Almost as beautiful as when, having completed their job of deposing death, they fade into complete anonymity. It was very hard, for instance, to rescue the names of those Jansson picked for his rescue team. Even though he must have regarded them as his best, they all made mistakes, especially at first. But they also support the statement that one of the finest
things men and women do is rescue men and women, even when they know they are rescuing the dead. This statement takes into account the Egyptian bas-relief, the drunks, and the sobbing radios.

A
T 10:30, WHILE THE RESCUERS
were still waiting at Meriwether for the doctor and medical supplies to arrive, rumors and uncertainties were spreading through the camp. They spread in waves and, like waves, spent themselves draining into the sand, but one kept resurfacing—the rumor that there were injured men downriver waiting to be picked up. Jansson left in a speedboat hoping to bring back the eleven missing men, but the report turned out to be about Dodge and Sallee, who had been seen walking upriver by several boatloads of picnickers. This is a common enough way to start off a rescue operation—running after a rumor that turns out to be a misinterpretation of something already known.

For a while Jansson patrolled the lower river, signaling with a flashlight and occasionally cutting off his motor and yelling. Finally a speedboat arrived with two doctors in it, T. L. Hawkins of Helena and his guest, R. E. Haines of Phoenix, Arizona, and Jansson transferred to their boat and landed at the mouth of Mann Gulch. Soon the big excursion boat with the rescue party in it arrived, only to discover they all were at the mouth of the wrong gulch—Dodge and Sallee had come down a gulch below Mann Gulch. When they arrived at this lower one that came to be called Rescue Gulch, they discovered that the litters had been left six miles back at Hilger Landing. Almost as soon as the speedboat started back to get them, rumors and tension mounted among the crew. One of the worst things a rescue crew does is wait—they wanted to start uphill immediately to find the injured men and let the litter crew come when the litters arrived. Jansson knew he had only one man who could lead them back through night and
fire and rolling rocks and exploding trees—Sallee, who alone knew that he was just seventeen years old. Acting again on the assumption that the one sure way to quiet a crew is to get them to do something, Jansson lined them up and conducted roll call, only to discover he had six or seven men too many. They were picnickers who had smuggled themselves into the big excursion boat in the hope they could join the rescue crew. He had to cut them out and send them back. That left him with a crew of twelve, counting himself, the doctors, and Sallee, all tough men who had worked all day and now would work all night and probably the coming day in the agonizing valley.

It was 11:30 before Jansson and his crew started up Rescue Gulch. They had two litters but only one blanket, which, as it turned out, was all that was sent back to them when they had sent out for blankets. By now the insanity of the fire had passed on, and it lay twitching around its edges, like something dead but still with nerve ends. Its self-inflicted injuries had been great and had turned black. It lay in burned grass and split rocks with its passion spent. The crew crossed through the weakened fire-line into the world that might be dead.

About two-thirds of the way to the top they heard a shout, which turned out to be Rumsey coming down the hill to refill the canteen for Hellman, who had been drinking water, getting sick at the stomach, then drinking more water until he drank it all. Rumsey told Jansson that he thought his guard Harrison was dead, because when last seen Harrison had been sitting with his pack on his back not able to take it off. Rumsey didn’t know if the others had survived.

Later at the Review, when Jansson was asked if Rumsey had made any detailed comment to him at this time about himself, Jansson replied, “He made the following comment, ‘The Lord was good to me—he put wings on my feet and I ran like hell.’“ This was one good Methodist talking to another.

Nearly half a mile away the crew could hear Hellman shouting for water. In the valley of ashes there was another
sound—the occasional explosion of a dead tree that would blow to pieces when its resin became so hot it passed the point of ignition. There was little left alive to be frightened by the explosions. The rattlesnakes were dead or swimming the Missouri. The deer were also dead or swimming or euphoric. Mice and moles came out of their holes and, forgetting where their holes were, ran into the fire. Following the explosion that sent the moles and ashes running, a tree burst into flames that almost immediately died. Then the ashes settled down again to rest until they rose in clouds when the crew passed by.

Jansson, Rumsey, and Sallee pushed ahead of the main party to get water to Hellman. Jansson was the leader of the rescue crew, and he should tell it: “Hellman’s face, arms, legs, and back were severely burned with loose flesh hanging in patches. He complained of the cold and was very thirsty. We let him rinse out his mouth and take on a little water. Water upset his stomach at first.”

In ten or fifteen minutes the two doctors arrived. They gave Hellman a hypo and one quart of plasma, applied salve, transferred him to a litter, and then covered him with the one blanket. According to Jansson, “Bill’s burned flesh had a terrific odor. He was in severe pain but took his experience magnificently. Bill’s courage made men weep.”