Young Men and Fire (26 page)

Laird said, “I know your son Albert. He and I were on a couple of fires together.”

Cramer was glad to look away from me, and Laird talked with him about his son and tried to loosen him up. Cramer was the remnants of a powerful man and was very tense, sure he was threatened but no longer sure by what. He was relieved to be talking to Laird about his son, but only for a moment or two, when, out of nowhere in his conversation with the former foreman of the Smokejumpers, he let me know he was thinking of me all the time by saying to me from the back of his head, “I don’t know anything about the Mann Gulch fire. I was almost in Canada then.” That was supposed to sound a long way off, but in northern Montana it isn’t.

Having not turned around to say this, he went right on talking about Smokejumpers with Laird. I really hadn’t said a word yet, not wanting to seem to crowd him, so I let him tell me twice more without looking at me that he had been almost in Canada at the time of the Mann Gulch fire before I said to the back of his head, “We didn’t want to talk to you about the Mann Gulch fire; we wanted to talk to you about what happened afterwards.”

He had started with the assumption that, if he could prove he had not fought the Mann Gulch fire, he had proved he could not have done anything wrong about it.

When he lost touch with this assumption, he stopped talking to Laird. “I don’t know,” he said to neither of us. Then he added, “I don’t remember well anymore. I had an operation.”

In retrospect, I would say that he was afraid of both me and himself, found both of us obscure, and hoped his wife would come soon and save him from me. Knowing I had time to ask only a few questions, I asked him, “Do you remember two survivors of the Mann Gulch fire, Rumsey and Sallee?” His fright visibly increased, but he might not have known why.
He said, “No, I don’t remember anybody like that.” I asked him, “Do you remember the foreman on the Mann Gulch fire, Wag Dodge?” Visibly he was more frightened. “No,” he said, “I don’t remember well.” I could not be sure his fright came from remembering these old names or from not remembering them and probably from not remembering a lot of other things. “Do you remember the ranger at Canyon Ferry, Bob Jansson, and staying at his ranger station until he agreed to change his original testimony about the time the tragedy happened at Mann Gulch?”

He looked at Laird, as if for help, and then back at me.

“Look,” he said, “this has to be brief. I don’t know anything about the Mann Gulch fire. I was on another fire near the Canada line at the time.”

There was such a long pause that it had to be taken as an injunction to leave. Then Mrs. Cramer, who had been shopping, drove up, got out of her car, and walked around to the front of my car to see its license plate. When she saw it was an Illinois license, she hurried up the steps of the porch, introduced herself, and sat down next to Laird, probably because I looked as if I could come from Illinois and Laird didn’t. She must have been deeply distressed to be caught away from home, leaving her husband unprotected from an out-of-state intruder. At first she just listened, probably trying to tell from the conversation whether we had induced her husband in her absence to say something harmful to himself. After she came to the conclusion that all the talk had been about Smoke-jumpers and a fire which was almost in Canada at the time of the Mann Gulch fire, she relaxed and chatted with Laird, only occasionally but skillfully protecting her husband. Her protective skill came from not making too big a thing of protecting him and from being open and matter-of-fact about things that were almost the things we wanted to know.

I heard her turn and say to Laird after she heard her husband give one of his “I-was-on-a-fire-near-Canada” speeches, “But he was an investigator of the Mann Gulch fire,” and she didn’t hasten to explain that admission away. She waited until
another opportunity came harmlessly along to say to Laird, “He just doesn’t remember very well anymore.” She went on to tell Laird that her husband had had “brain trouble” and now was on medication and, as she said, didn’t remember very well. Laird saw that I had heard this, as I probably was supposed to, so we would both know that the time had come for us to leave.

A flight of Canadian geese circled and lit on the water right in front of the Cramer cottage. Undoubtedly they had come from the Nine-Pipe Reservoir, a wild-bird preserve not far from the lake. The geese alternated stateliness with foolishness, then combined the two. They were stately as they circled above and as they carved the water apart for a landing and even as they stood up in their waves and slapped the water out of their wings. Then they settled back in their troughs and, just when you would expect them to reestablish the serenity of aerial motion, they broke into an anvil chorus of nonsense sounds. All of them made nonsense noise all at the same time. They headed straight for the shore and the Cramer cottage, occasionally turning to impress us with their white, majestic rear ends and then turning straight for shore again and becoming louder and more nonsensical the closer they drew. Soon the nonsense became strident and demanding and directed personally at us. I must have shown my surprise by looking at Mrs. Cramer as if for some explanation, because she said in the only remark I can remember she made to me, “He feeds the geese regularly.”

“I can believe it,” I replied, and soon after that we left, having overstayed our welcome by a wide margin. Even the geese seemed relieved—anyway they quieted down as we left. Cramer had gone down to the shore and was feeding them. With them and him together, the near-hysteria drained out of the scene. Soon they were talking peacefully to each other in gobbledygook.

By the time we reached Arlee the evening had drained the burnish out of the farmland but not the gold. Night was coming fast into the valley.

I said to Laird, “Thanks for the day. It’s been a long time since I was in the Flathead Valley.”

Like one of those youngsters who wants everything good to happen to his older friend, Laird assumed it was his fault that we hadn’t found anything, but I was the one who had started us on this mission so I had to stop him from apologizing. “What are you talking about?” I asked him. “It was a good day.”

“What was good about it?” he asked, but added, “I’ll never forget the geese.”

“I won’t either,” I told him. “Scholarship doesn’t always end finding a wooden cross hidden in grass.”

Laird and I had prepared for the worst before we went to see Cramer. We had agreed, in fact in some detail, on what we would take to be the time of the Mann Gulch fire if Cramer was not helpful in resolving the differences about it, but it took us several days to recall the full particulars of our agreements and a lunch together to put the pieces in a new kind of order.

We had agreed first that, as far as we knew, Cramer was the last living witness who might throw new light on the credibility of the evidence regarding the time of the deaths of the crew. So if, for whatever reason, he had nothing to add, we would have to make a practical choice between the testimony of Jansson on the one hand and, on the other, the testimony of Dodge and the evidence of Harrison’s watch. Such a choice has to be in favor of the evidence closest to the scene of death, not of the witness who had retreated to the river and was probably on a boat going upriver during the disputed time. Moreover, Dodge’s testimony meshes much better than Jansson’s with times assigned by Rumsey and Sallee to events in the gulch.

The practical choice of 5:56 as the approximate time of the death of Harrison, however, does not set aside the charge that Jansson was persuaded under pressure to alter his original testimony about the time of the climax of the tragedy. It also does not pass over his implied charge that members of the Regional Office had tried to create the false impression with
the public that the “established time” was based on the
only
watch found on any of the dead crew. It is unthinkable Jansson would make such a charge falsely. If he had, it is even more unthinkable that he would have finished his life in the Forest Service. Jansson and Dodge were both fine men and fine woodsmen. Remember, too, that the Forest Service is a bureaucracy, the largest in the Department of Agriculture. That certainly makes it more than large enough for little games.

So, actually before we started for Flathead Lake, we had completed the practical job of filling in the old-fashioned formula of distance divided by time equals miles per hour to get the average speed of the Smokejumpers in their race with fire. It was filled in as follows:

The distance of the race we had long ago determined as accurately as we could. It was a slant distance of 1,400 yards from Y, where the race started, to the representative cross G, which in these calculations has been taken to mark the tragic climax. As for the missing time, we did what you have to do when you finally admit that you can never be sure of the truth—you force your pride to view the spectacle of your doing the best you can, even though that doesn’t leave you looking very good to the geese or to yourself. The start of the race at Y, as best we know, was at 5:40. As best we know, the end was at 5:56. So for most of the crew the race was over in sixteen minutes, and, alas, that can be wrong by only a few minutes.

When 1,400 yards is divided by sixteen minutes and the result is changed from yards to miles, old-fashioned arithmetic says that the representative speed of the crew on its journey to the crosses was three miles per hour. The
d
divided by
t
and changed to miles says that Thol, whose cross is closest to the top and who traveled farthest and presumably the fastest of the crew, averaged 3.3 miles per hour—and that Sylvia, who by such calculations was among the slowest, averaged 2.5 miles per hour.

I had been somewhat surprised by these results, but Laird said he wasn’t—he said they were just about what he expected.
“Every guy you add to a crew,” he said, “the slower you make it. After a while it scarcely moves, especially if they haven’t fought fire together before.” He stood there, looking back through years of smoke. Finally, in awe of the earth, he said, “A crew carrying thirty-five-pound packs in rough country will average about one mile an hour.”

We talked a little about differences in the personalities of Dodge and Jansson that might account for some of the differences between them concerning the time of the catastrophe and for Jansson’s charge that Dodge had changed the time seemingly agreed upon by the two of them while the fire was still burning. We were a little embarrassed by our own talk and perhaps a little embarrassed by our embarrassment. We had never known Dodge or Jansson and were certainly embarrassed to be talking behind the backs of two members of the exclusive club of fine woodsmen who could not answer for themselves.

In any event, we knew after our trip to see Mr. Cramer that we had done our best, which means that we couldn’t think of anything else to do, straight ahead being a dead-end.

Trying to get another start, I circled back to general resolutions I had made to myself about getting old. I kept returning to my seventieth birthday, seventy seemingly being what man has been given as his biblical allotment on earth. I sat in my study making clear to myself, possibly even with gestures, my homespun anti-shuffleboard philosophy of what to do when I was old enough to be scripturally dead. I wanted this possible extension of life to be hard as always, but also new, something not done before, like writing stories. That would be sure to be hard, and to make stories fresh I would have to find a new way of looking at things I had known nearly all my life, such as scholarship and the woods. If you think vividly enough about your general resolutions, sometimes your conscience will furnish the particulars to exemplify them, and I became conscious again of the strange fact that on my many trips to the Smokejumper base I hadn’t done much more than look inside the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory, which is next
door. I had dropped in several times to see the painting of Harry Gisborne hanging in the stairwell. He always gives me the feeling that he would take a chance on trying something new, even if it didn’t work, and that he is giving me the once over to see if I feel the same way. The only other thing I knew about the Fire Lab was that a project was going on there that used mathematical models of fuels to predict the danger of wildfires and the rate of their spread. The old-timers in the Forest Service I had talked to didn’t think much of this scientific project but didn’t know much about it and were a little nervous, so much so they certainly weren’t going to learn more than they already knew about what made them nervous. The young guys I knew in the Forest Service also didn’t know much about it but thought it was great. I said to myself, “You had better be your age and learn something about it.” I thought a fresh, new way of analyzing fire spread, among other things, might save me from feeding geese, and, knowing both Laird’s and my mathematical deficiencies, I was sure that at least it would be hard. And it was.

W
HAT I REMEMBER CLEARLY
next is standing again in front of the painting of Gisborne at the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory. I have no trouble remembering back a few steps in order to explain how I got there. For a second time I had entered the lobby of the lab and again had found no one at the information desk, but by going down the equally empty hall I finally discovered an open door and was told in a somewhat dreamlike way that the two mathematicians were at a conference, in Ogden, Utah, as I remember, and the man who told me this sounded as if he were off somewhere else too. I was to discover later that being away at a conference is a basic characteristic of mathematicians wherever you find them. A lot of men have to have two places to work, one a very different place from the other. When you go into the Regional Headquarters of the Forest Service in Missoula looking for someone you need to see, you will often find that he has suddenly left to fight a forest fire in Idaho. In the Forest Service it seems as if somewhere in nature it is written, “Woe to that man who has only one place to work.” In fact, that seems to be a fairly general commandment and a fairly good one to follow.

Back in the empty lobby I noticed clearly for the first time a conference table, but I didn’t realize immediately that Laird and I would soon be occupying it for long periods of time. Then, recalling the painting of Gisborne, I went up the stairs to see it on the first landing, and to my surprise again Gisborne looked almost the way I thought he would, even though I was to be told later that Gisborne’s eyes had been blue instead
of the brown the painter chose to paint them. But whoever painted and positioned him knew how in essence he should be represented—as an observer, and one who believed you weren’t alive unless you were one too. Appropriately, he is painted full-faced, looking straight at you and looking as if looking were his business: sharp face, sharp nose, and sharp eyes (whichever color), very concentrated and aware of his powers of concentration and of how much yours could be improved.

I was glad to spend some of this day with Gisborne and the painting. Gisborne through his death kept me connected with Mann Gulch and the job I should be doing; he could connect me with the main lines of early scientific knowledge about wildfires, since he was the most important pioneer in developing the science of fire behavior. Some of these early lines of knowledge should connect ahead with knowledge about fire spread that in part resulted from the Mann Gulch fire, and some of this expanding knowledge should help to lead me to the mathematicians who I hoped would return me to Mann Gulch with a modern and exact account of the Smokejumpers’ great tragedy. It would be enclosing the Mann Gulch fire in a circle of explanation.

I stood on the stair landing until I realized that the silence of the Fire Lab was being disturbed by footsteps coming down from the second floor. Actually, the footsteps and I were both glad to see each other at the landing. I was glad just then to see anybody, and, as it turned out, he was glad to see someone looking at Gisborne.

“I was a student of his,” he said as he passed me.

“No?” I said in the form of a question. The “No?” in the form of a question stood for a whole bunch of things I wasn’t able to utter offhand, like “You must be kidding,” “Have you time for a little talk with me?” “Don’t go away yet.” All he said to my “No” with a question mark was “Yes.”

So I met Arthur P. Brackebusch, who turned out to be not only a former student of Gisborne’s but a former director of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory. The universe only some
of the time seems to be trying to prevent any discovery about it. In fact, the former director of the lab has always been gracious to me when I find him and besides I had caught him in a lull in life when he had a few moments to talk. He had been sick and had been advised to drop his full-time duties and retire to California, but not wanting to live in California he had hunted around until he found a doctor who told him California would be bad for his health. In Montana there are two kinds of doctors—those who tell you you should move to California for your health and those who tell you that you will die if you do; so Brackebusch didn’t have to hunt long to get the advice he wanted. He said he would be glad to talk to me the next morning, and when I warned him that after talking to someone about a story I would need still another session with him to say back to him what I thought we both had said, he replied that would be okay, he was sure I wouldn’t conflict with any medical advice he had received.

What follows, then, I said back to the former director of the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory before I wrote it, and after I wrote it he read it. I am grateful.

It was natural enough that Brackebusch and I almost immediately started talking about Gisborne—he was what we had in common. To my admiration for the way Gisborne had died, I soon added a good deal of knowledge of his life. I even knew some things about Gisborne that Brackebusch didn’t know, things coming chiefly from Jansson’s private insurance report on Gisborne’s death, which included his last thirty-seven “rest stops.” Gisborne was such a striking personality that we couldn’t help being carried off into the colorful corners of his life, but Brackebusch understood, really without my telling him, that Gisborne and the science he had developed belonged in this story primarily because of the light they might shed on the Mann Gulch fire.

Although Gisborne became a model of the scientific observer and speculator at work in the woods, there was nearly always some very practical end to his scientific speculations. Ultimately, most of his projects aimed to save from fire as
many board feet of lumber as possible. More specifically, most of his projects, directly or indirectly, were designed to predict the behavior of forest fires even before they got started and certainly afterwards. Even more specifically, most of these were studies to predict the rate of fire spread and its intensity measured in Btu’s.

Insofar as a date can be assigned to a beginning of a science, 1922 is generally taken as the beginning of the modern scientific study of fire behavior, for it was then that Harry Gisborne was appointed forest examiner at an annual salary of $1,920 and assigned to the Priest River Experiment Station in northern Idaho as its director. The reasons leading to the Forest Service’s establishment of this great experiment station clearly point out the aims and directions of early Forest Service research, directions which would never have led Gisborne to his death in Mann Gulch. The station was located on a piece of land near Priest River because all the major trees of the Northwest grew on it and in roughly the same proportions as on representative Northwest logging land, and because in addition it included burned-over areas upon which experimental trees could be planted, in other words, because it would make a fine tree nursery and because up to this time the major, almost the sole, field of governmental forestry research had been silviculture—in fact, research in the early Forest Service was located in what was called the Department of Silvics. That was the name of the game then, and perhaps oddly the fire year of all fire years, 1910, did less to promote the awaiting science of fire behavior than to intensify the traditional search for better varieties of trees to reforest a burned-over area large enough to make it eligible for statehood.

But when Gisborne came to Priest River, he was far more interested in climbing the “Weather Tree” than in planting seedlings in the nursery, an interest signifying a coming change in the direction of Forest Service research toward what was to be called the science of fire behavior. The “Weather Tree” was a 150-foot larch, limbed near the top, with platforms on the way up which could be reached by steel hand-
spikes. As one of his scientific friends said, Gis just loved to shinny up that tree, and only doctor’s orders finally stopped him, not even handspikes pulling out as the tree started to rot. On the way to the top Gisborne was interested in the behavior of the wind at different elevations and in different densities of branches. At the top were a recording anemometer, a wind vane, and a sunshine-duration transmitter, all wired to an old battery in the office, there being no electricity as yet at the station. With this primitive equipment, Gisborne was pursuing one of his major scientific aims—predicting the behavior of a forest fire. This pursuit resulted in what has become one of the most practically useful contributions to the study of fire control, the National Fire Danger Rating System, first put into operation in 1934. To keep this system in mind will help to lead us from Gisborne and the early science of fire behavior to the modern mathematicians and their fuel models and then back again to Mann Gulch.

A simplified expression of the results of this very complicated system can often be seen when one enters a National Forest. There on the roadside will be a big Forest Service sign giving the motorist the latest score on fire danger. The one on my roadside reads
FIRE DANGER RATING
on the top line and
TODAY!
on the bottom. In between goes a removable sign that a Forest Service guard is supposed to change according to fire conditions ranging from
EXTREME
,
HIGH
,
MODERATE
,
LOW
, and so on, presumably to
NONE
. But near my cabin for some reason or other the fire danger never gets lower than
MODERATE
and in August gets stuck on
HIGH
for days at a time, presumably because the Forest Service guard who is supposed to change it once in a while gets stuck on an emergency fire crew, and I have never seen it on
LOW
. Another ultimately simplified expression of this complicated system was used earlier in this story when it was said that on the day the Mann Gulch fire “blew,” the fire danger rating in Helena was 74 out of a possible 100. That is “Danger” and lots of it.

As we shall discover when we find our mathematicians, the
Fire Danger Rating System continues to attract the attention of some of the finest scientists engaged in the study of fire. The practical uses to which it can be applied are constantly extended and the accuracy and significance of its results constantly improved, since the results depend upon the close observation of complicated fire factors—temperature, fuel, humidity, grade of slope, and wind velocity—followed by the quantification of them by computers. When we talk about quantifying fire factors with a computer, we are getting closer to the mathematicians we haven’t caught up with yet.

You can get some notion of the amount of scientific work needed to make the whole system function by trying to imagine the amount of study (and equipment) it took to make possible just the statement that “a fire burning on level ground (1 to 5 percent) will spread twice as fast when it reaches a 30 percent slope. The rate of speed will double again as the slope reaches 55 percent.” It sounds as though somewhere around there is a computer on the side of a wind tunnel.

Gisborne seemed always to take the opposite side of whatever side you just thought he was on. He liked the spectacular and showy as well as the practical, and even wore classy leather puttees in the woods. One of his many-colored interests that brought him to Mann Gulch was lightning, and lightning was the cause of Mann Gulch’s great fire. Gisborne liked lightning, as he liked crawling up tall trees to measure the wind, partly because he was a pioneer scientist and partly because he was flashy but partly because he was the son of a sawmill owner and wanted results that could be expressed in board feet. There had to be a childlike wonder in his interest in lightning and even in the difference between red and white lightning, but he was the one who more or less settled the question of whether it was red or white lightning which started forest fires; he settled it in favor of red. So even in this instance his overriding interest was knowledge that could predict the behavior of fires—in the case of lightning, careful observations which, when correlated mathematically, would let the lookouts
and dispatchers know when to expect severe lightning storms and where in the mountains and at what time of day they would most likely strike.

Still another of Gisborne’s major interests was the development of machinery that would either improve the observation of fire conditions or correlate observations more accurately and rapidly into predictions as to what a fire would do. He liked machinery the way a sawmill operator does, knowing his life depends upon it, and he liked it with extra tenderness because to him a machine that worked was a work of art. He became especially interested in building a tunnel for burning fires under carefully controlled influences of wind, fuel, and other factors. Important as the Priest River Experiment Station was in the development of the study of fire, it had great shortcomings that Gisborne resented for limiting his investigations. His “Weather Tree” had its points and was even something of a sporting proposition, but it offered almost no opportunities to observe fire factors under controlled conditions. It is also likely that the increasing seriousness of his heart ailment made the development of a fire tunnel even more imperative. When he received doctor’s orders never to climb his “Weather Tree” again, he said, “What are you telling me? To quit?” Quit, of course, he never did. It is not even clear how closely he obeyed orders, but it is clear that before his death he had built a fire tunnel in the basement under his office at Regional Headquarters in the Federal Building in Missoula. The room had a separate chimney for dispelling smoke from his experimental fires. The great wind tunnels in the Northern Forest Fire Laboratory fulfill almost exactly Gisborne’s own requirements for a tunnel. When we finally found the mathematicians at home, there were two wind tunnels in their laboratory with computers on their sides to record instantly any change in a fire’s intensity and rate of spread. The whole setup is a lot fancier than Gisborne’s ever was, but it is certainly something he dreamed of. And he probably dreamed in a misty way of something like the great Northern
Forest Fire Laboratory, which houses as just one of its projects the mathematicians and their study of mathematical models of fuels.