Young Men and Fire (24 page)

The old-timer in the Forest Service I feel closest to, Bud Moore, had been top man in firefighting in Region One of the Forest Service as director of fire control and aviation management. After Bud retired from the Forest Service, he built a beautiful log cabin on the side of a Mission Glacier only thirty-five miles from my cabin, and I often go up to see him. One morning I woke with the feeling that I was about ready to write an answer to one of the first questions my father would have asked about the Mann Gulch fire. This feeling, when generalized, is a feeling that you will be ready to write if first you can find the right friend to listen to your opening paragraph. I drove the thirty-five miles to Bud’s.

Before starting to talk, we took a pail down the mountainside to his spring bubbling with underground water melted from the glacier above, and I dug out a bottle of Ancient Age from the trunk of my car. When Ancient Age and ice water
are sloshed around in a tin cup, the water is just as good as the whiskey.

Afterwards, I went back to my cabin to write on the effects the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire had on the know-how of firefighters. What I wrote comes next, and Bud Moore was the first to check it.

T
HE MANN GULCH FIRE IS
the Smokejumpers’ lone tragedy on the fire-line. Two jumpers have since died while jumping, caught and hanged in the coils of their own jumping ropes. But the fact that the Smokejumpers have suffered no fatality from fire since Mann Gulch suggests they learned some things from it.

Those who knew something about the woods or about nature should soon have perceived an alarming gap between the almost sole purpose, clear but narrow, of the early Smokejumpers and the reality they were sure to confront, reality almost anywhere having inherent in it the principle that little things suddenly and literally can become big as hell, the ordinary can suddenly become monstrous, and the upgulch breeze suddenly can turn to murder. Since this principle comes about as close to being universal as a principle can, you might have thought someone in the early history and training of the Smokejumpers would have realized that something like the Mann Gulch fire would happen before long. But no one seems to have sensed this first principle because of a second principle inherent in the nature of man—namely, that generally a first principle can’t be seen until after it has been written up as a tragedy and becomes a second principle.

In their early days, the Smokejumpers were still cautious and were still primarily limited in aim to getting on fires as soon as possible while they were small and could be put out quickly. As we have seen, the crew on the Mann Gulch fire was practically devoid of experience on big fires. For instance, according
to the
Report of Board of Review
, the second-in-command, Hellman, in 1947 had been on four Class A fires (less than one-fourth of an acre), two Class B fires (one-fourth to nine acres), and one Class C fire (ten to ninety-nine acres). In 1948, the year before Mann Gulch, he had been on two Class C fires. The almost total experience each crew member had had as a firefighter was being almost his own boss on almost his own fire where for most practical purposes he was the only one who was in a position to save his own life. One thing for sure, being almost boss of your own body and completely captain of your own soul makes you damn fast and certain of your own decisions.

Not long in coming, though, was the answer to the question, What might well happen to a bunch of early Smoke-jumpers when they take on a small fire that, for whatever reasons, suddenly becomes big? The answer to the question gets almost inevitable when it’s asked in this form: What might well happen to a bunch of early Smokejumpers who are dropped on a good-sized fire which looks ordinary when they land but suddenly blows up? The inevitable answer has to be something like the Mann Gulch tragedy. Before long, the thing out there in nature has a way of finding the heel of Achilles.

The Mann Gulch tragedy immediately became a flaming symbol to the Smokejumpers and to firefighters generally, especially those in the Northwest. Fortunately, there are a lot of able woodsmen in the Forest Service who don’t wait around for the Forest Service to do something, and it was some of these who said to me not long after the fire, “God damn it, no man of mine is ever going to die that way.” Small cracks were soon filled in, especially with technical improvements. For instance, there was widespread concern about breakdowns in the communications systems that had occurred during the fire—the failure of telephone or radio calls to be completed—and much was made of the fact that the crew’s radio had been shattered on the jump because its parachute had failed to open. As a result of these and similar failures, immediate and
on the whole helpful changes were made, such as a simple requirement that crews must carry a backup radio. But there were deeper and more conscience-stricken improvements. Among the overhead, there was an intense heightening of the realization that at all moments on a fire their primary responsibility is the safety of their crew and that controlling the fire is only secondary. Many Smokejumper foremen have told me that since the Mann Gulch tragedy they don’t make a move on a fire without first asking the question, If I go there, where can I escape with my crew if the thing blows up? And if they don’t like their own answer, they don’t go.

To carry out this commitment, the overhead have to do more than constantly pledge themselves to the safety of their crews. At all moments on a fire they must have a fully operational communications system to furnish them with the best information available on which to base decisions involving the safety of their men—insofar as the moment permits, there must be no failure in direct observation, scouting, or radio and telephone communications.

The training of the crews was also improved in many particulars. For instance, their physical conditioning was stiffened, and their knowledge of fire behavior, especially of large fires, was extended. Also broadened was their schooling in the differences between the behavior of fires burning in the dense forests west of the Continental Divide and the behavior of fires burning in the dry grass and shrubs east of the Divide, where little rain is left in the clouds that have been blown across mountain ranges from the Pacific Ocean.

All these things add up, but the greatest concern was to remove the contradiction between training men to act swiftly, surely, and on their own in the face of danger and, on the other hand, training men to take orders unhesitatingly when working under command. On a big fire there is no time and no tree under whose shade the boss and the crew can sit and have a Platonic dialogue about a blowup. If Socrates had been foreman on the Mann Gulch fire, he and his crew would have
been cremated while they were sitting there considering it. Dialogue doesn’t work well when the temperature is approaching the lethal 140 degrees.

In this delicate job of picking and training Smokejumpers so they will have almost opposite qualities, it won’t do at all to pick men who accept orders without question just because they are reticent or even retarded. They have to be so smart that they know there are times when their lives depend on not asking questions. Picking and training such men is like trying to make Marines out of civilians, but the Smokejumpers have done it, and indeed the example of the Marines has helped them do it. In 1949 many of the jumpers were veterans of World War II, and twelve of those on the Mann Gulch fire had been in military service during the war. The live and the dead have joined together to make the Smokejumpers into a semi-military outfit. If a jumper now disregards the orders of his foreman on a fire, he has just made his last jump, fought his last fire, and started for camp to pick up his last paycheck.

It is worth repeating that in the nearly forty years since the Mann Gulch tragedy no Smokejumper has died on a fire-line. Some of the changes in safety procedures that helped to establish this proud record are concrete, objective safety measures, such as the addition to training courses of experience in fighting grass fires, especially on steep slopes. But the large underlying changes are more atmospheric, like being constantly aware that one risks one’s life in fighting fire for a livelihood and that sometimes saving one’s life depends entirely upon taking one’s life in one’s own hands and that at other times one’s life and the lives of others must be put entirely into the hands of one boss—old lessons that throughout time have to be learned and relearned, only to be forgotten again.

The one invention that came out of Mann Gulch and was immediately made a part of the training courses for firefighters is the escape fire. It was spectacular and had saved Dodge’s life and soon became a permanent part of the common knowledge of forest firefighters. One of those it has saved is Rod Mclver, now the dean of Smokejumpers at the Missoula base,
whose story appears in
Reader’s Digest
(February 1976) under the title “Trapped in a Sea of Flame! Drama in Real Life.”

In 1957, after a succession of bad fire years, Richard E. McArdle, chief forester at the time, appointed a topflight task force to “recommend further action needed in both administration and research to materially reduce the chances of men being killed by burning while fighting fires.” For scientific data the task force took the sixteen tragic fires that had occurred in national forests since 1936 and looked “for threads that run through all, or most, of them.” For special study, the task force selected five classic examples, one of which was the Mann Gulch fire.

The task force itself was made up of five members, outstanding representatives of the Forest Service’s overhead, from regional forester, a region being the Forest Service’s largest administrative unit, to ranger, who is in charge of the Forest Service’s most basic unit in the field, the district. Bud Moore, then ranger of the famous Powell District on the Lochsa River in Idaho, was selected to represent the point of view of rangers about fatal fires.

The task force developed a practical set of recommendations, and at a meeting in Washington, D.C., it was decided these orders should be modeled on the military services’ General Orders. When nobody at the meeting had a copy of the General Orders, Bud Moore, who had been a Marine all over the Pacific in World War II, found a Marine standing outside at a bus stop, and together they quickly reconstructed the Marines’ General Orders, which became the model for the Forest Service’s ten Standard Fire Fighting Orders.

STANDARD FIRE FIGHTING ORDERS

1. F
IRE WEATHER
. Keep informed of fire weather conditions and predictions.

2. I
NSTRUCTIONS
. Know exactly what my instructions are and follow them at all times.

3. R
IGHT THINGS FIRST
. Identify the key points of my assignment and take action in order of priority.

4. E
SCAPE PLAN
. Have an escape plan in mind and direct subordinates in event of a blow-up.

5. S
COUTING
. Thoroughly scout the fire areas for which I am responsible.

6. C
OMMUNICATION
. Establish and maintain regular communication with adjoining forces, subordinates, and superior officers.

7. A
LERTNESS
. Quickly recognize changed conditions and immediately revise plans to handle.

8. L
OOKOUT
. Post a lookout for every possible dangerous situation.

9. D
ISCIPLINE
. Establish and maintain control of all men under my supervision and at all times know where they are and what they are doing.

10. S
UPERVISION
. Be sure men I commit to any fire job have clear instructions and adequate overhead.

These orders were issued to Forest Service personnel in the form of a training program supported by a case study of a classic fatal fire to illustrate each of the ten orders. The Mann Gulch fire was used to illustrate one of these orders, but actually all the orders could have grown out of the Mann Gulch fire except the one or two relevant only to commanding very large crews.

Their crosses are quiet and a long way off, and from this remove their influence is quiet and seemingly distant. But quietly they are present on every fire-line, even though those whose lives they are helping to protect know only the order and not the fatality it represents. For those who crave immortality by name, clearly this is not enough, but for many of us it would mean a great deal to know that, by our dying, we were often to be present in times of catastrophe helping to save the living from our deaths.

A
FTER SAYING WHAT I HAD BEEN
building up to about the influence the Mann Gulch fire had on future firefighting, I went back to work. I felt better, though, for the interlude. It is a strange thing, picking up friendships with the neglected dead, especially when you never knew any of them and also stood pledged as a writer never to sentimentalize them or pretend to imagine they were still alive. The nearest I ever came to such fantasizing was when I would imagine all the crosses on the hillside floating together and becoming one cross and the one cross becoming only a barely audible voice asking when I was ever going to get around to telling them what had happened to them. The closest I have ever come to the outer limit of friendship with the dead is when I promised myself that at the end I will use everything I know and feel to resurrect the thoughts and feelings of those about to die in a world that roared at them but obscured itself in smoke and flames.

This period in our struggling to discover the story of the Mann Gulch fire was a trying time for Laird and me. The story of the Mann Gulch fire was still mostly a concurrent set of stories, some of them leading on for a way before losing their own trails, others that had given out earlier but with luck might reveal a fresh clue with another try, and now and then a new one unexpectedly popping out of a hole almost between our feet as if we had been hunting rabbits with a ferret. “Trail jumping” would pretty much describe what Laird and I had
been doing in the three years it had taken us to locate the crevice and the origin of the escape fire.

In this process, some of these separate trails little by little became longer, but strangely they also seemed to be getting a little closer together. It was something like the fire itself. The gulch at first was full of separate spot fires; it then began to fill with smoke that largely blacked out the fires and hid what was going on—as if what was coming might be a Convergence of fires Below and Above with fires Behind and Ahead. Then suddenly such a Convergence burst into view and became total in the head of the gulch; then total Conflagration rose up and swept out of the gulch. About all that has happened since is that Laird and I have occasionally returned. This is almost the way the story of the Mann Gulch fire must go if it is to follow the fire; it must all come together as it ends.

Since we always knew that the center of the tragedy of the Mann Gulch fire was a race, early in our study we had started to make an accurate map of it, much as a storyteller early tries to make an outline of his plot. This is a story in which cartography and plot are much the same thing; if the tragedy was inevitable, it was the ground that made it so. We ultimately confirmed the accuracy of the 1952 contour map in its essential details. But the cartography of the tragedy would not be complete until we studied each leg of the race and analyzed the comparative speed of men and fire in their race between established points.

Common sense should tell us that it would be a good idea as soon as possible to locate the beginning and end of the race on the map, just as it’s generally a good idea for a storyteller to have a notion of the beginning and end of his plot before constructing what went on in between, although admittedly many stories seem more comfortable not knowing where they are going and never getting there. The end of the race is easy to locate on the ground—its location depends upon the hardest of evidence, the concrete crosses.

Where the race begins is a lot less certain than where it ends, because where things begin depends a great deal on
prior definition and general direction. The race for the fire and the race for the men did not start at the same place, and for the first leg of the race fire and men were going in almost opposite directions. The start of the race for the fire will be taken to be point 13 on the map, where the lower end of the fire jumped the gulch to its north side and then turned up-gulch to confront the crew.

In a sense, the crew began to run from the fire as early as point X on the map, when Dodge decided that the front of the fire was too hot to handle and ordered his crew to start toward the mouth of the canyon to take on the lower end of the fire, where they could jump into the nearby river if they had to. They were to proceed downgulch on contour while he and Harrison returned quickly to the cargo area for something to eat. But the real race for the men began later. From the cargo area, Dodge could see that the fire in the lower end of the gulch, instead of quieting down in the late afternoon, was boiling up. Afraid that the fire might spread and close off the mouth of the canyon, he and Harrison hastily rejoined the crew at point Y, where the foreman regrouped his men and started them on what was to be a fast trip downgulch. Accordingly, we will take Y to be the beginning of the race for the crew.

Leg 1, crew.
The first leg of the crew’s race is from point Y to point 6, a distance that can be known only approximately and so, for arithmetic convenience, will be spoken of as an even four hundred yards. The foreman tried to hurry his men, but it was tough going—there was no trail to follow, they were trying to sidehill on contour, and they were keeping a watch on the lower front of the fire just across the gulch. The gulch was narrow, and the fire close to them. But the crew thought of it as interesting, and Navon was taking his snapshots.

At point 6, Dodge saw ahead that the fire at the lower end had jumped the gulch (at point 13 on the map) and was already advancing upgulch toward them. He immediately reversed direction and started back upgulch. He also reversed
his downgulch intention of keeping to the same contour; from here on he tried steadily to gain elevation (without cutting down drastically on speed), hoping to gain the top of the ridge and presumably the greater safety of the other side.

Leg l, fire.
The fire’s first leg of the race is from point 13 to point 6, where it started to follow directly in the footsteps of the crew. The fire almost literally followed on their heels. At point 6, Dodge estimated that the fire was 150 to 200 yards away. By the time Sallee and Rumsey left the foreman behind at the escape fire and broke for the top of the ridge, Sallee estimated the fire was only 50 yards behind.

Legs 2, 3, and 4.
After point 6, the race became practically identical in course and distance for both fire and men, and, although in the first leg of the race men and fire were going in almost opposite directions, we shall see that the distance covered by each in their first leg was approximately the same (400 yards) and that, as far as total distance went, the race was an even-steven affair.

The final legs of the race also appear as divisions of the tragedy from so many different perspectives that they seem to be divisions in nature. Legs in a race are at once scenes in a tragedy, each leading to a station that must be passed to reach crosses near the top of a hill.

Leg 2.
At point 7, 450 yards beyond point 6, the foreman was enough alarmed by the rate at which the fire was gaining on his crew to order them to discard their packs and heavy tools. Some of them did. Some of them already had. Others would not give up their tools, and fellow crew members had to take them from their hands. When firefighters are told to throw away their tools, they don’t know what they are anymore, not even what gender.

Leg 3.
Only 220 yards farther at point 8 is the breaking point. Here, the foreman, having given up hope that his crew could reach the top of the ridge, lit his escape fire and tried to persuade his crew to enter it with him. Point 8 must have been each man’s most important station until he reached his crevice or his cross. The men did not know it, but for most of them
Dodge’s escape fire was the last place where conceivably they might have been saved. Here also with the lighting of Dodge’s fire began much of the dissension and legal controversy to which the Mann Gulch fire owes a goodly portion of its afterlife. Almost immediately beyond it the crosses begin.

Leg 4.
The crosses spread over a wide area, and no two are close enough together to suggest that the crew itself stuck close together or even in small bunches. On the last leg of the race, from point 8 to the crosses, it was each man for himself, with no favors asked and none given, although before the race was over there must have been some asking. Of those whom Sallee, after crawling through the crevice, saw angling toward the top, Henry J. Thol, Jr., came closest to making it to the top. His cross (L) is some 390 yards from point 8. When a “representative cross” is needed, we will take that of Leonard L. Piper (G), the farthest from point 8 of the middle group—250 yards beyond the origin of the escape fire.

The total distance of the race from Y to the representative cross G is approximately 1,320 yards, or three-quarters of a mile, and tells us, as a race, that it was run at one of the most dramatic of distances, one calling for the utmost in human speed and stamina. Earlier in this century the two most honored races were the one to crown the “world’s fastest human,” the 100-yard dash, and the marathon, to test human stamina. Always there will be special laurels for the winners of each of these, but as the art and power of the runner have developed in modern times, middle-distance runs have changed into sprints or dashes. First, the quarter-mile run changed to the 440-yard dash, next the half-mile became the 880-yard dash, and then came the four-minute mile, and now four minutes is nothing much to brag about. Nowadays, a three-quarter-mile race tests a combination of the utmost in speed and stamina. At the end of it, no contestant trots off the field for the lockers; teammates wait at the finish line to catch collapsing runners. It is hard to imagine what the finish line of a three-quarter-
mile race would be like if the last lap of it were run on a 76 percent slope of slippery grass and rock slides, on the hottest day on record.

Piper’s representative cross is the closest to marking the end of this three-quarter-mile race. Henry Thol’s cross, the closest to the top of the ridge, is around 150 yards farther. Of both these distances, the conventional saying must have been true—the last part was the hardest.

M
UCH OF THE INTERESTING BUSINESS
of life is learning . one way or another how to represent the earth. The easiest way still to abstract short distances is by pace and (if need be) compass, but this is not as easy as it sounds and is never very accurate. It is only accurate if you have had a lot of practice in discovering what your average pace is (inches per pace) and a lot more practice in maintaining an average pace over different kinds of ground. If you are a practiced walker, then all you need is a “tally whacker” (pedometer) to count the paces, although it should go without saying that what you need most is fairly even and level ground. In Mann Gulch, especially when you have to sidehill (as you do all the way in order to follow the course of the race), it is useless—compass-and-pace is no good where you can’t pace and do well just to crawl. The most accurate method, of course, is steel tape or chain, but it takes two to run it, one to hold each end, and a lot of time to operate, and unless you live close by in Helena or Wolf Creek you are going to need three days just to get part of a day in Mann Gulch. We used a 100-yard steel tape only when we measured such crucial distances as from point 8 to the crevice.

Your best friend when you feel curious about what you are walking on is usually a good map of it, if you can find one. Fortunately Laird and I had found a very good large-scale map, the 1952 contour map titled “Part of Mann Gulch Fire
Area.” But how do you use this map to measure the distance of the crew’s race with fire? In fact you don’t find it by putting your ruler on the map, ascertaining the number of inches between point Y and the representative cross, and converting the inches into miles by consulting the scale at the bottom of the map, which says that eight inches of map represents a mile of ground. When that little piece of arithmetic is completed, the figure of three-quarters of a mile, or 1,320 yards, emerges, which is the figure we have cited as the length of the race, but that’s only because it was assumed most readers have learned what they know about cartography not from contour maps but from reading maps they picked up in gas stations. If you say the race was 1,320 yards, you are reading this fancy contour map as if it were a gas station map that does not represent a third dimension, elevation.

Much of the light that can be thrown on the Mann Gulch fire comes, as we shall see, from the very modern science of fire behavior, but to solve this next problem requires a classical turn back to the sixth century B.C. From point Y, where the race began, to the representative cross G, there are 20 or 21 contour lines, each representing an interval of 20 feet, and 20 feet times 21 equals 420 feet, or 140 yards. That gives some idea of how much farther the crew had to go than the 1,320 yards, but only a general idea, because the crew did not travel 1,320 straight yards on what would be a base to a right triangle and then turn at right angles and climb up 140 yards. They climbed something approximating a hypotenuse between the two points, which among map men is called the “slant distance.”