Young Men and Fire (32 page)

But the moment of the equilibrium of the counterwinds could not have lasted long. What then? The answer is that the convergence of all these convergences in another few minutes completed itself into total conflagration at the head of Mann Gulch. Already the lower branch of the main fire had swept around the lower end of Dodge’s fire and, roaring upgulch and upslope, was closing in on the crew from below. Threatening the crew from above was the fire burning upgulch on top of the ridge. Now behind them were two other fires about
to converge, the main fire that was pursuing them upgulch and the fire Dodge had lit that was now for the moment burning roughly at right angles to the direction of the main fire, but soon would be taken over by the main fire and be propelled with it toward the head of the gulch, one indistinguishable from the other. No wonder neither Gustafson nor Thol offered to take the other or an impartial jury back to Mann Gulch to find the lighter outline of Dodge’s fire. With fires by now jumping over or sweeping around each other, or overpowering each other, there couldn’t have been much left of outlines.

The fire burning along the top of the ridge may have kept pace with the angling crew below and forced them farther and farther upgulch. It may have been the front of Dodge’s fire, turning toward the head of the gulch after reaching the top of the ridge. More likely, it was the upper branch of the main fire, or, as the convergence approached completion, both fires combined. When the survivors and Laird and I were in Mann Gulch in 1978, we split our four votes among these three alternatives, with each of us willing to admit he might be wrong and could never be sure that he was right. But in the conflagration that was about to occur, no component any longer had any individual responsibility for the simple reason that in a moment there were no individual components. Just conflagration. What was happening was passing beyond legality and morality and seemingly beyond the laws of nature, blown into a world where human values and seemingly natural laws no longer apply. Such moments can occur the world over, sometimes even at home as well as on hillsides.

The Mann Gulch fire was passing beyond issues and settlements into a world of pictures—perhaps more exactly into thoughts that pictorialize and feel and cannot reduce themselves to numbers. These are pictures made largely by us, the amateur artists who are always making pictures inside our heads (that spring from our hearts).

I
T WOULD BE NATURAL
near the end to try to divest the fire of any personal liability to those who died in it and to become for a moment a distant and detached spectator. It might be possible then, if ever, to see fire in something like total perspective as it became total conflagration. If you had known something about wildfire, you already would have seen spot fires twisting themselves into fire swirls and fire swirls converging upon themselves. But viewing total conflagration is literally blinding, as sight becomes sound and the roar of the fire goes out of the head of the gulch and away and beyond, far away. The last you saw of the ground was a mole coming out of the smoke, a little more terrified than you, debating which way to go and ending the argument with itself forever by turning back into the impenetrable fire. So it is, when you cannot see the fire because of the smoke, sight becomes sound. You hear the fire as a roar of an animal without the animal or as an attacking army blown up by the explosion of its own ammunition dump.

Pictures, then, of a big fire are pictures of many realities, designed so they change into each other and fit ultimately into a single picture of one monster becoming another monster. The pictures and the monsters are untroubled by mathematics. The monster becomes one as it extends itself simultaneously as a monster and a real animal or more likely just as a part of a real animal—after it disgorges itself, all that can be seen of it from afar are its fried gray intestines. Oddly, as destruction comes close to being total, destruction erects for
brief moments into the sexual and quickly sinks back again into destruction. Intestines stretch out all the way to the curvatures of the brain. The two don’t look much different, and they aren’t and they are.

Thus, pictures which wildfire creates of itself are at least bi-visual, part of the fire’s process of procreating its meanings. So, as the fire at the top of the ridge slithered through the rocks, it stretched itself out into a snake rearing its head to see that it was on course and using its tongue as a torch to cut through obstructions. So, too, a little lower on the hillside, when the main fire paused for a moment in front of the escape fire, the red flames crowded together until they became ravaging military monsters enraged by the precocity of an obstacle in front of them; then for a moment these deranged military monsters, blocked in their advance, raged sideways up and down the line looking for a way to pass—small fires were left behind as the phalanx of flame threw torches ahead, jumped the line, and left something like a smoldering monster in ruins.

Because of their many meanings, wildfires can be tri-visual or more. Some of what even a seasoned firefighter sees never seems real.

After its deranged military front had passed, pieces of the main fire remained burning fiercely in clutches of timber. Dead standing trees, especially Ponderosa pine full of resin, became giant candles burning for the dead. Then one would explode, disappearing from the air where it stood, detonated by its own heat. The disappearance of the tree would not be visible; it would be a theological disappearance; immediately after the explosion, its falling would be transubstantiated into spreading waves of earth generated by its own earthquake, and after its waves had swelled and broken and passed over and under and on, it would return as sound and terminate in echoes of its earthquake rumbling out of the sides and head of the gulch. The world then was more than ever theological, and the nuclear was never far off.

By now, if not sooner, the fire had become total—it was
below, above, behind, and now also in front at the head of the gulch. Spot fires must have been burning there, started in the grass by burning cones and ashes blown from the approaching fires. Suddenly in the semigloom they would pop out of the ground, bi-visual as little poisonous mushrooms. The bi-visual mushrooms bred instantly, swelled with impregnation underground and aboveground into a vast bulbous head with a giant stalk. The vast wildfire continued on its bi-visual way—sometimes the bulbous mushroom looked like a bulbous mushroom impregnated by a snake in the grass and sometimes like gray brains boiling out of the crevice of the earth. Then the brains themselves became bi-visual and changed again into suffering gray intestines.

The atomic mushroom has become for our age the outer symbol of our inner fear of the explosive power of the universe. It is the symbol of a whole age, and it took an artist to express the meaning the mushroom has for us. Henry Moore, one of our age’s most expressive sculptors, commemorated the occasion that led to the Atomic Age—the first self-sustained nuclear reaction—on the site at the University of Chicago where it occurred. His bronze atomic mushroom, with its hollow eyes, is intentionally bi-visual from every point of view. Wherever you stand, the bronze looks like both an atomic mushroom and a skull, and is meant to.

When the blowup rose out of Mann Gulch and its smoke merged with the jet stream, it looked much like an atomic explosion in Nevada on its cancerous way to Utah. When last seen, the tri-visual figure had stretched out and was on its way, far, far, far away, looking like death and looking back at its dead and looking forward to its dead yet to come. Perhaps it could see all of us.

No one could know the power of it. It stretched until it became particles on the horizon, where it may have joined the company of Sky Spirits as particles, knowing what we do not know, probably something nuclear.

Now, almost forty years later, small trees have just started to grow along the bottoms of dry finger gulches on the hillside
in Mann Gulch, where moisture from rain and snow are retained underground. Since even now these little evergreens are only six or eight inches high, the grass has to be parted to find them, but I look for such things. I see better what happens in grass than on the horizon. Most of us do, and probably it is just as well, but what’s found buried in grass doesn’t tell us how to get out of the way.

A
T THE END
, our point of view of the fire changes radically so that we no longer look down from the distant horizon and see in the blinding smoke only pictures composed of our primitive history and our nuclear future. Instead, now at the end we stay as close to the ground as we can, are guided by our compassion, and accompany highly select young men who never once realized that they could be mortal on their way to the obliterating earth. We should hope, though, in trying to identify ourselves with them that we will be able to retain our own identity, for their sake as well as ours. Because we are much older than they were ever to be and have lived in a time more advanced scientifically than theirs, we should know much that they did not know but that should be of value in this journey of compassion. In a journey of compassion what we have ultimately as our guide is whatever understanding we may have gained along the way of ourselves and others, chiefly those close to us, so close to us that we have lived daily in their sufferings. From here on, then, in the blinding smoke it is no longer a “seeing world” but a “feeling world”—the pain of others and our compassion for them.

Things moved rapidly to the end after the crew left the foreman at his escape fire. It makes no difference whether the crew could not understand in the roaring of the main fire what Dodge was trying to say to them or whether they thought his idea of lying down in the hot ashes of his own fire was crazy.
Either way they were entering No Man’s Land, lonely in the boiling semidarkness of the main fire, which by now must have been less than fifty yards behind them. Rumsey and Sallee, ahead of them, testified that the smoke parted enough for them to see the top of the ridge only two or three times. If we have difficulty seeing the rest of the men, they had difficulty seeing themselves. Heat and loneliness were becoming the only remaining properties. Their loneliness loomed up suddenly—they were young and not used to being alone, and as Smokejumpers they were not allowed to be alone, except in that perilous moment after they jumped from the sky and before they landed on earth.

It has been said since tragedy was first analyzed that it is governed by the emotions of fear and pity. As the Smoke-jumpers went up the hill after leaving Dodge it was like a great jump backwards into the sky—they were suddenly and totally without command and suddenly without structure and suddenly free to disintegrate and free finally to be afraid. The evidence is that they were not afraid before this moment, but now great fear suddenly possessed the empty places.

Beyond the world of sight and soon even beyond fear, the nonhuman elements of heat and toxic gases were becoming the only two elements, and soon heat was even burning out fear. To find a place that was cool was all that was left of human purpose. Knowing at least this much about fire and mortality, we can guess why most of the dead young men were found in depressions on the hillside; there it was thought to be cooler, so it was there that most of them went before they fell.

From our knowledge of others close to us we may learn something about how it felt this near the end. In the spring of the year my wife died from cancer of the esophagus, she remarked to me, “I feel as if I had spent all winter with my head under water.” Later, when I asked a doctor what he thought it must be like to die in a fire, not from the burning but from the suffocation and lack of oxygen, he replied, “It is not terrible,” and then added, but not as an afterthought, “It is something
like drowning.” If you compare my wife’s remark to this more scientific attempt to speak of death by suffocation, you can see how careful my wife was, when she allowed herself to speak of such matters, to speak with precision.

It was not, therefore, for most of them, a terrible death. Many of the bodies were terribly burned when they were found, so much so that later it was discovered the caskets should not have been brought into the funeral chapel. Even so, they did not die of burning. The burning came afterwards.

To project ourselves into their final thoughts will require feelings about a special kind of death—the sudden death in fire of the young, elite, unfulfilled, and seemingly unconquerable. As the elite of young men, they felt more surely than most who are young that they were immortal. So if we are to feel with them, we must feel that we are set apart from the rest of the universe and safe from fires, all of which are expected to be put out by ten o’clock the morning after Smokejumpers are dropped on them. As to what they felt about sudden death, we can start by feeling what the unfulfilled always feel about it, and, since the unfulfilled are many, the Book of Common Prayer cries out for all of them and us when it begs that we all be delivered from sudden death.

Good Lord, deliver us.

From lightning and tempest; from earthquake, fire, and flood; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death,

Good Lord, deliver us.

One thing is certain about these final thoughts—there was not much size to them. Time and place did not permit even superior young men dying suddenly “to see their whole lives pass in review,” although books portray people preparing to die as seeing a sort of documentary movie of their lives. Everything, however, gets smaller on its way to becoming eternal. It is also probable that the final thoughts of elite young men
dying suddenly were not seeing or scenic thoughts but were cries or a single cry of passion, often of self-compassion, justifiable if those who cry are justly proud. The two living survivors of the Mann Gulch fire have told me that, as they went up the last hillside, they remember thinking only, “My God, how could you do this to me? I cannot be allowed to die so young and so close to the top.” They said they could remember hearing their voices saying this out loud.

Of the two great tragic emotions this close to the end, fear had been burned away and pity was in sole possession. Not only is it heat that burns fear away; the end of tragedy purifies itself of it. Before the end of a tragedy the most famous of tragic heroes can stand in fear before ghosts and can shake in front of apparitions of those they have murdered, but by the end the same tragedy has purged these same tragic heroes of fear, as is made immortally clear by the last lines of one of the most famous of these tragic heroes: “Lay on, Macduff; / And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’”

The pity that remains is perhaps the last and only emotion felt if it is the young and unfulfilled who suffer the tragedy. It is pity in the form of self-pity, but the compassion felt for themselves by the tragic young is self-pity transformed into some divine bewilderment, one of the few emotions in which the young and the universe are the only characters. Although divine bewilderment addresses its grief to the universe, it only cries out to it. It has to find its answer, if at all, in its own final act. It is not to be found among the answers God gave to Job in a whirlwind.

The most eloquent expression of this cry was made by a young man who came from the sky and returned to it and who, while on earth, knew he was alone and beyond all other men, and who, when he died, died on a hill: “About the ninth hour he cried with a loud voice, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”)

Although we can enter their last thoughts and feelings only by indirection, we are sure of the final act of many of
them. Dr. Hawkins, the physician who went in with the rescue crew the night the men were burned, told me that, after the bodies had fallen, most of them had risen again, taken a few steps, and fallen again, this final time like pilgrims in prayer, facing the top of the hill, which on that slope is nearly east. Ranger Jansson, in charge of the rescue crew, independently made the same observation.

The evidence, then, is that at the very end beyond thought and beyond fear and beyond even self-compassion and divine bewilderment there remains some firm intention to continue doing forever and ever what we last hoped to do on earth. By this final act they had come about as close as body and spirit can to establishing a unity of themselves with earth, fire, and perhaps the sky.