Young Men and Fire (20 page)

French Canadians don’t take kindly to being told they don’t know where they are in the woods. Sallee said, “He wouldn’t even stop for a few minutes to let me go up the ridge and show him the right crossing.”

The investigator’s pass was certainly a low and wide one—the top of the reef had decomposed and completely disappeared for thirty or forty yards. “It’s a good-looking pass,” I told him. “A couple of threshing outfits could cross here abreast.”

“That’s one of the big troubles with it,” Sallee said. “Rumsey and I had to squeeze through a crevice in the reef one at a time.”

I knew without looking at the documents in my packsack
(which Sallee still carried) that it had been a close squeeze at the top for the survivors. Both of them early had testified that they first saw the top of the ridge as they approached Dodge lighting his fire; Rumsey stated that when they left Dodge they followed the upgulch side of Dodge’s fire until they spotted on their right a pile of rocks at the crest and headed for it; they have always agreed that Sallee was the first to edge through the crevice and Diettert did not follow. I asked Sallee, “Why didn’t you go straight uphill from Dodge’s fire to this wide pass instead of angling upgulch under a reef that might not have another opening for a long way?”

He answered, “Because by then there was a fire in this pass.”

So there at long last was the answer to one of the questions that the survivors alone could give. In their testimony they had sometimes insisted that, after leaving Dodge at his fire, they had gone straight for the top and at other times seemed less sure. Their answer is that they would like to have gone straight for the top, and did for a way, but a fire on the top of the ridge had closed a wide saddle above them and forced them to angle to their right to the next opening upgulch in the rocks above them. The sight of fire or smoke at the top of the ridge may also explain why Diettert turned aside at the crevice and why most of the crew kept angling upgulch. But Sallee’s answer raises a new question: What fire was it, anyway, that was running upgulch on top of the ridge, cutting off escape from below? Was it a branch of the main fire that had been chasing them up the gulch? Or was it their foreman’s escape fire, turning upgulch after reaching the top of the ridge?

We didn’t sit down to rest from the climb. We just kept following Sallee upgulch on the ridge looking for the crevice. For one thing, it was too cool in the winds up there to sit in one’s perspiration, although it was the first of July and the middle of the morning. The world of high altitudes is hard to believe from below. It is never what flat-country people call normal. That first summer I tried to reach Mann Gulch, a cloudburst turned our perspiration to ice and ended my
brother-in-law’s friendly visits to Mann Gulch with a case of pneumonia. Most of the times I have been there, though, it has been so hot in the day that rattlesnakes stay in the shade of their holes, although even then the cool is never far away. The heat of the mountains is not the heat of the plains, which stay hot all night. Remember, on the day of the fire it had been a record ninety-seven degrees in Helena in the shade and it had to have been a lot hotter than that in the burning gulch, but the night of the fire it had been so cool near where we were then standing that the rescue crew had given Hellman their one blanket and had huddled close to Sylvia to keep him warm. As we climbed up from the river, we soon left summer behind and were walking through the world of spring flowers, beautiful blues and yellows, lupines and vetches, and balsam roots looking with wide brown eyes at ghosts and intruders. But it became even cooler toward the end of the day, so we never sat down, tired as we were, until we got back to the boat and water level.

It took Sallee and Rumsey only a few minutes to announce their crevice. Within twenty or twenty-five yards upgulch from the open pass, the reef appears again and for fifty yards or so is solid cliff—and then there is a crevice. The two survivors took turns crawling through it, trying it on for size, as it were, and seeming to find that the passing years had shrunken it and made it a tighter fit.

I suppose they were amusing because of the difficulty they were having fitting through the crevice. But it was not possible to watch them without mixed feelings. For me, it was hard to look at the crevice and not think of Diettert turning away from it. It must have been even harder for Laird. He came over to where I was standing and finally said, “I wouldn’t have gone through there either. You couldn’t tell from here, especially in the smoke, whether you would only be walking into a firetrap on the other side.”

“In the smoke,” I said, “nothing could have looked sure.”

“I would have gone with Diettert,” he said.

There was no more to that conversation. Where could it go?

When it came Rumsey’s turn to crawl through the crevice, I followed him. Then we went looking for the juniper bush he had fallen into, so tired he had almost let matters rest there.

“That’s it, that’s it!” he said. “I was exhausted; I almost stayed there.” But when we got closer, he began to shake his head until words finally came out of it. “I just can’t believe it. I just can’t believe I have been wrong all these years. It isn’t a juniper bush. It’s a dwarf, distorted alpine pine.”

After a while, he repeated, “I just can’t believe it. You just can’t believe anything that happens in a forest fire.”

He didn’t realize at the moment what a great amount of truth he had uttered, especially about the juniper bush.

A
DAY IS AN INADEQUATE PIECE OF TIME
in which to get . anything done in rough country, so we had split the job of locating the two remaining points of the triangle—where Dodge had lit his escape fire and where Thol had fallen. Naturally Rumsey and Sallee, who had seen Dodge light his fire, wanted the job of finding where they had cut loose for the top, and Laird went with them, having himself made the escape fire something of a specialty. At the time, I was glad to have the assignment of visiting Thol’s cross and, on the way, of passing Diettert’s. There are moments of the fire that I have tried to live through again and again with Thol and Diettert—especially the moment when they came nearest to escaping but realized they were not going to make it.

To Thol’s father, the retired ranger, his boy was always a boy. When someone on the Board of Review testified that the crew consisted of highly experienced firefighters, his grief and anger again swirled up out of his son’s ashes. “My boy spent two years in the Condon [Ranger] District as fire guard.
I knew him—I knew him well—this I say of my own boy—he was a long way from an experienced firefighter. He could barely handle tools. He could handle tools well, but as being productive in handling tools, well he was not—and most of those boys—pretty much the same.”

This outcry is even more confused than its sentence structure. The young members of the crew couldn’t have been old-time experts with tools, but they had to be pretty good with the few basic tools of firefighting, and the son of a ranger had to be damn good. Anyway, what did fire tools have to do with the fate of the crew in Mann Gulch? They died in fire but had no chance to fight it. All the crew did with their tools was throw them away on orders from their foreman. The history of the Mann Gulch fire is the report of a race with fire to death. In this race, the cross nearly as close to the top of the hill as Thol’s is Navon’s, and Navon was twenty-eight; he had been a paratrooper for five years and a lieutenant at Bastogne. What do you expect of your nineteen-year-old son who had only eight jumps on a fire to his credit but was even a little closer to the top than Navon?

The crosses are simple and impressive and were made by the Smokejumpers in Missoula. As the photograph of Reba’s cross shows, they are concrete with the name on a horizontal bronze plate. That’s all there is, and that leaves everything very lonely up there, where no one goes walking or visiting. Besides rattlesnakes, there are mountain sheep and mountain goats, which also appear lonely, and, as the photograph shows, the fire left few living trees standing, so there is not even the friendship of shade.

Actually I had come to Thol’s cross to do two jobs: besides locating Thol’s cross accurately, I was to inspect the condition of his cross and that of several others nearby. Laird and I had promised Edward Heilman, director of aviation and fire management, that while in Mann Gulch we would inspect all the crosses and let him know if any needed repairing or replacing. To be sure that promise was kept, the four of us on the hill on July 1, 1978, had divided the crosses among us.

Thol’s cross is straight underneath an open saddle on the ridge where the surface of the reef had decomposed, so the reef did not act as a barrier to prevent him from reaching the top of the ridge. It is impossible to say exactly how close Thol’s cross is to the top because without instruments it is impossible to locate the crest on the wide, smooth surface of the ridge. We had recently found a 1952 Forest Service contour map of “Part of Mann Gulch Fire Area” (see pages 8-9 of the photo gallery) where the distance from Thol’s cross to the top of the ridge is probably less than 100 yards. By the same map it is 140 yards from his cross to Diettert’s. The distance from his cross to the place where Dodge started his fire will vary according to where you think Dodge lit his gofer match. If you accept the two places as correctly located on the 1952 contour map, the distance is 390 yards.

It is not certain that Thol’s cross marks precisely where Thol fell. I found his Forest Service flashlight with the batteries still in it seven or eight yards above his cross, and many of the crosses must be downhill from where the bodies fell. On that 76 percent slope of crumbled cliff and dry, slick grass it is difficult just to crawl without slipping; those running and stumbling, exhausted and terrified, may have rolled downhill after they fell. Remember that Jansson had another theory, even more terrifying. Noting that nearly all remaining nonflammable objects (such as watches and wallets) were found uphill from the bodies (unless found under a fallen body), he theorized that the power of the fire was so great it carried these objects with it. Both theories are probably correct.

O
N MY WAY BACK FROM THOL’S CROSS
, I stopped to check on the condition of the crosses near his, all the time keeping an eye on the survivors, who were supposed to be locating the spot where Dodge lit his fire. At a distance they seemed stylized, as if they had been assigned to a repetitive
one-act play with three repetitive movements—they climbed back up the hill to the crevice, gestured there to the sky with seemingly no accompanying words and no response from the sky, and then retired downhill to gesture again, here seemingly just to themselves. Such vast country that swallows up words also makes gestures seem very small. It makes humans themselves small, two- and three-foot miniatures. At a distance they were animated gestures that had found a script in the rocks and were repeating it until they could get it right. The identity of the animations could be told only from the gestures. The biggest gestures were Sallee, being French. Rumsey was the Methodist gesture with one hand raised to the sky. You could guess what the gestures meant by seeing where Laird went afterwards.

Then I noticed that, when the gestures and the accompaniment returned downhill, they did not always return to the same place. That was the tip-off—maybe there was an argument going on between Sallee and Rumsey about where Dodge had lit his fire. It certainly wasn’t what it was like at the crevice, through which they had crawled back and forth with difficulty but in complete agreement.

And, sure enough, they were arguing about where they had left their foreman behind. But as the words paralleling their gestures became recognizable, it became clear they shared basic agreements. Most important was their certainty that they had located the opening in the reef through which they had edged their way to safety. In the coming conversation note how the crevice is the North Star that guides all arguments and tells the directions of all movements and measures their distances.

The second basic agreement was their certainty that a Forest Service map prepared a month after the fire (“Helena National Forest, Mann Gulch Fire—No. 35, August 5, 1949: Fire Progress Map”) incorrectly locates the origin of Dodge’s fire, a certainty essentially derived from their first one—the map’s location of Dodge’s fire isn’t compatible with the location of
the crevice. I had long had some misgivings about Map No. 35 because it had been prepared immediately after the fire, so I had gone in search of another and had found the 1952 contour map, which I had come increasingly to respect. I should add here that on the 1952 contour map the origin of the escape fire is located close to where it is on Map No. 35.

I joined the circle of gestures just as Sallee was saying, “The map places it too far back toward the mouth of the gulch. If that’s where Dodge lay down in his escape fire, then I couldn’t have seen him entering his fire or the crew angling up the hillside after passing him. There is a lateral finger ridge here that would have been between us and would have blocked my view from the crevice.”

Sallee’s argument will be easier to follow if visualized on the photograph of Reba’s cross. Sallee has just decided that the origin of Dodge’s fire was at the base of the highest dead standing tree (marked X) between Reba’s cross and the reef, so close to the reef in fact that it is only sixty or seventy yards below it. Their crevice, they had decided almost immediately, is an opening in the reef just slightly to the right of the top of this highest tree. Remember, Sallee has always been positive that, coming out of the timber, he looked ahead and saw Dodge lighting his fire near a lone standing tree. In this photograph, then, it is almost as straight as a ruler from Reba’s cross to the two most important points we were trying to locate—first, from Reba’s cross to the origin of Dodge’s fire as located by Sallee (X) and second, from there to the crevice both Sallee and Rumsey had just crawled through. Sallee accordingly is repudiating both Map No. 35 and the 1952 contour map, which locate Dodge’s fire outside the photograph, slightly farther downgulch than Reba’s cross.