Young Men and Fire (4 page)

Of the two main kinds of forest fires distinguished by their causes, man and nature itself, the Mann Gulch fire was a lightning fire, as 75 percent of the forest fires in the West are. Lightning fires usually start where lightning gets its first chance to strike—high up near the top of a ridge but slightly down its side where the first clump of dead trees stands, and the start of the Mann Gulch fire fits this description. The fire in the dead snag may drop live ashes for several days before starting a fire on the ground, for the ground near a mountaintop is likely to be mostly rocks with at best only a light covering of dead leaves, needles, or grass. But the lightning storm that started the Mann Gulch fire passed over the gulch on August 4, and by the end of the next afternoon on the hottest day ever recorded in nearby Helena thirteen Smokejumpers were dead.

Once started on the ground the lightning fire became simply a “ground fire,” a term that includes most fires, and so ground fires are of many sizes, shapes, and intensities, and practically all man-made fires such as campfires and fires set to burn slash or brush but allowed to get away at least start as ground fires. A ground fire may become dangerous, even murderous, but most often it is just a lot of hard work to get under control. Until an hour before the end, that is what the Smokejumpers expected the Mann Gulch fire to be—hard work all night but easing up by morning.

The job of controlling most ground fires starts with the job of scraping a “fire trench” or fire-line around it or its flanks so as to force it onto rocks or open meadows. A fire trench or fire-line is some two to three feet wide, is made with a Pulaski and shovel, and is nothing more than the surface of the ground scraped down to mineral soil. Nothing flammable, such as fallen trees or hanging branches, can be left across it.

The chief danger from a ground fire is that it will become
a “crown fire,” that is, get into the branches or “crowns” of trees especially where the trees are close together and the branches interlace. So a crew has to be careful that a ground fire doesn’t burn into a jack-pine thicket where the branches are close to the ground and can be set afire by low flames. But there is still a very different way for an ordinary-looking fire to explode. A fire doesn’t always need flames to advance. A fire may seem under control, burning harmlessly under tall trees with branches too high to be touched by ground flames, but the fire is burning with such intensity that most of the oxygen has been burned out of the air near it, which is heated above the point of ignition. If the wind suddenly changes and fresh air is blown in loaded with oxygen, then the three elements necessary for a fire are suddenly present in the lower branches—flammable material, temperature above the point of ignition, and oxygen. An old-timer knows that, when a ground fire explodes into a crown fire with nothing he can see to cause it, he has not witnessed spontaneous combustion but the outer appearance of the invisible pressure of a “fire triangle” suddenly in proper proportions for an explosion.

The crown fire is the one that sounds like a train coming too fast around a curve and may get so high-keyed the crew cannot understand what their foreman is trying to do to save them. Sometimes, when the timber thins out, it sounds as if the train were clicking across a bridge, sometimes it hits an open clearing and becomes hushed as if going through a tunnel, but when the burning cones swirl through the air and fall on the other side of the clearing, starting spot fires there, the new fire sounds as if it were the train coming out of the tunnel, belching black unburned smoke. The unburned smoke boils up until it reaches oxygen, then bursts into gigantic flames on top of its cloud of smoke in the sky. The new firefighter, seeing black smoke rise from the ground and then at the top of the sky turn into flames, thinks that natural law has been reversed. The flames should come first and the smoke from them. The new firefighter doesn’t know how his fire got way up there. He is frightened and should be.

A fire-line, unless a river or a wide right-of-way on a trail is being used as a line, is not much good when a crown fire is off and running. It usually takes a “backfire” to stop a big crown fire, and the conditions are seldom right for the foreman to start one. He has to build piles of fast-burning twigs, shavings, or dried bunch grass in front of the main fire and, before starting his backfire, must wait until the wind blows back toward the main fire, and often it never does. When you fool with a backfire, you are really fooling with fire—you are counting on the wind to continue to blow your backfire toward the main fire. If the wind changes again and blows toward you, your backfire may only have given the main fire a fatal jump on you.

It’s perhaps even more unpredictable if there isn’t much of a wind to begin with, because a big crown fire can make its own wind. The hot, lighter air rises, the cold, heavier air rushes down to replace it in what is called a “convection effect,” and soon a great “fire whirl” is started and fills the air with burning cones and branches which drop in advance of the main fire like the Fourth of July and start spot fires. The separate spot fires soon burn together, and life is trapped between the main fire coming from behind and the new line of fire now burning back toward it.

Then something terrible can happen. The space between the converged spot fires as they burn close to the main fire can become hotter than the point of ignition. If the convection effect or a change in the wind blows fresh oxygen between the two fires, suddenly replenishing the burned-out air, there can be a “blowup,” although a blowup can be caused in still other ways. Not many have seen a blowup, even fewer have seen one and lived, and fewer still have tried afterwards to recover and record out of their seared memories exactly what happened. Later on in Mann Gulch we shall try to recreate a blowup seen by almost no one who lived to record it, and it might help as preparation if we turn briefly to the great pioneer in the science of fire behavior, Harry T. Gisborne, who was one of the first to observe and describe a blowup accurately.

In 1929 Gisborne was on what was up to then Montana’s largest man-caused fire, the ninety-thousand-acre Half Moon fire in Glacier National Park (640 acres being a section or a square mile). As he says, measured “runs” show that even a big crown fire advances not much faster than a half-mile to a mile an hour. The blowup that Gisborne witnessed demolished over two square miles in possibly two minutes, although probably in a minute flat.

Returning two days later, he found the perfectly balanced body of a young grouse, neck and head “still alertly erect in fear and wonder,” the beak, feathers, and feet seared away. Within a few yards was a squirrel, stretched out at full length. “The burned-off stubs of his little hands were reaching out as far ahead as possible, the back legs were extended to the full in one final, hopeless push, trying, like any human, to crawl just one painful inch further to escape this unnecessary death.”

Although young men died like squirrels in Mann Gulch, the Mann Gulch fire should not end there, smoke drifting away and leaving terror without consolation of explanation, and controversy without lasting settlement. Probably most catastrophes end this way without an ending, the dead not even knowing how they died but “still alertly erect in fear and wonder,” those who loved them forever questioning “this unnecessary death,” and the rest of us tiring of this inconsolable catastrophe and turning to the next one. This is a catastrophe that we hope will not end where it began; it might go on and become a story. It will not have to be made up—that is all-important to us—but we do have to know in what odd places to look for missing parts of a story about a wildfire and of course have to know a story and a wildfire when we see one. So this story is a test of its own belief—that in this cockeyed world there are shapes and designs, if only we have some curiosity, training, and compassion and take care not to lie or be sentimental. It would be a start to a story if this catastrophe were found to have circled around out there somewhere until it could return to itself with explanations of its own mysteries
and with the grief it left behind, not removed, because grief has its own place at or near the end of things, but altered somewhat by the addition of something like wonder—wonder, for example, because now we can say that the fire whirl which destroyed was caused by three winds on a river. If we could say something like this and be speaking both accurately and somewhat like Shelley when he spoke of clouds and winds, then what we would be talking about would start to change from catastrophe without a filled-in story to what could be called the story of a tragedy, but tragedy would be only a part of it, as it is of life.

T
HE C-47 CIRCLED THE FIRE SEVERAL
times before dropping the crew. The spotter, Earl Cooley, lay flat on the floor on the left side of the open door, with headphones on so he could talk with the pilot; and the foreman, Wag Dodge, lay on the right side of the door so that he and the spotter could watch the country together and talk without the crew hearing much of what they were saying. They were both experienced and good. In a later statement, Fred Stillings, administrator of the Smokejumping Project, said, “In my judgment they were the best available for the jobs assigned.” And Cooley, remember, was one of the first two jumpers ever to parachute on a forest fire; later he was to become a successor to Stillings and administrator of the Smokejumping Project himself. Cooley is the only Smokejumper I ever heard say, “I don’t know why, but I was never afraid to jump. It keeps others awake at night.” He is a fine guy, but there is something not in him that is in us—he was always used on rescue work, and when some bush pilot didn’t clear a ridge Cooley was sent to the top of the mountain to separate the pieces of the fuselage from the pieces of the pilot and put the latter pieces in a pack-sack and bring them back. After finishing a couple of his rescue stories, he says, “What the hell? If you work for the Forest Service, what do you expect of life?” As far as I know, he has never answered that question, except to himself.

Even lying on the floor of the plane, Wag Dodge was un-wrinkled and handsome in his intentness. Like a fair number of men who can make anything with their hands, he was fastidious
in his dress. His wife said, when he returned after a fire and his crew were black to inside their skins, he was a fashion plate coming down the steps of the plane. Even after his return from the Mann Gulch fire, where the fire had burned over him and he had stayed until all the bodies were recovered, he seemed as fastidious as ever until she got close enough to him to see the stain of tobacco juice at each corner of his mouth. To her knowledge, this was the only time he had ever chewed tobacco.

She and I have known each other off and on for most of our lives, and we have known the Blackfoot River, where her ranch house stands, even longer. “He said to me when we were married, ‘You do your job and I’ll do mine, and we’ll get along just fine.’” Then she said to me, “I can’t help you much. I don’t know much about smokejumping, and I didn’t know any of the Smokejumpers. We never talked about them, and he never invited them home.” She added, “I loved him very much, but I didn’t know him very well. If he said my red drapes were black, I would say, trying to keep myself intact, ‘Yes, Wag, my red drapes are black.’”

His Smokejumpers didn’t know much about him either, and he knew almost nothing about them. They knew he was one of the most experienced jumpers in the outfit, having been with the jumpers from one year after their founding. All told, he had been nine seasons with the Forest Service, and since 1945 he had been Smokejumper foreman. Actually, being so gifted with his hands may have been an indirect cause of the tragedy ahead of him.

The Smokejumpers have never had a fixed organization like the military, with the same squads and officers (in the case of the Smokejumpers, a foreman and a squad leader). The crew about to be dropped on Mann Gulch had never before worked on a fire under Dodge.

Since the cost of keeping separate crews intact during a hot fire season would be prohibitive, a list is posted of all the jumpers and “overhead” (foremen, squad leaders, and spotters), and when a man has been on a fire he is dropped to the
bottom of the list and has to work his way back up. No one knows who or how many will be called next, especially since the number of jumpers dropped on a fire can vary from two men to several planeloads. You don’t have to be an administrative genius to see in this organizational scheme of things the possibility of calamity in a crisis.

The Forest Service, realizing some of the danger that might arise in a clutch when men whose lives depended upon each other did not know each other, had instituted a three-week training course at the beginning of each fire season in which crew members and overhead worked together. Whether this course produced much familiarity between crew and overhead is a question not worth asking about Mann Gulch: Wag Dodge was so good with his hands that in the spring of 1949 he had been made “barn boss” in charge of the maintenance of the base and so had been unable to take part in the course.

Another question is sure to be asked before the fire in Mann Gulch is forever cold. Was the three-week training course adequate to the emergencies Smokejumpers must meet? The Smokejumpers were still a young outfit that hadn’t figured itself out yet, and it still had to fight for a budget. It didn’t have money, for instance, to keep many of the jumpers around the base unless there were a lot of fires burning, so when things were quiet they were sent out on projects, which might mean that a jumper would find himself on a crew building trail, and that’s about as unenlightened work as you can get in the woods or anywhere else.

One thing, though, that the Smokejumpers have been taught well from the beginning is pride, and you can’t be much of a firefighter without it, and without it you certainly can’t jump out of a plane when you get sick every time you leave the ground, as some jumpers do. From the beginning one of the great realities of the Smokejumpers is its romanticism. There’s nothing wrong with romanticism, except that sometimes it isn’t enough. They were jumping into one of the roughest pieces of country Lewis and Clark had seen on their
long, long journey to the Pacific, one that does not pardon weakness on a hot afternoon of a burning summer.

The foreman who lay on the right side of the door of the C-47 was in many ways all that a foreman in the Smoke-jumpers should be. A foreman is supposed to do everything his men do and do it first and better. Dodge could do all that with a margin to spare—he could do things with his hands approaching artistry. He was impeccable and inflexible. But he didn’t tell his wife much, and he also didn’t know most of his crew, even by name, and they didn’t know him, except by name.

They spotted the fire and circled it once. In their statements to the Forest Service Board of Review after the fire, the pilot, the spotter, and the foreman agree that, when first spotted, the fire covered between fifty and sixty acres and was burning on the ridge between Mann Gulch and Meriwether Canyon and partway down the Mann Gulch side, threatening but not as yet burning into Meriwether. Even from the air, the fire’s brief history could be read—it had started on the Mann Gulch side (as it turned out, by lightning the afternoon before), had made a run for the top, and had burned hot enough to crown on the way up. Then the crown had burned out, never burning hot enough to start any spot fires.

On the ridge where the fire seemed to be most active it was burning downhill into a saddle where the fuel, chiefly grass, was thin. Besides, a fire generally burns slower downhill than up, ashes rolling downhill more slowly than flames rise up it. It was 2:30 when the plane left the Smokejumper base in Missoula and around 3:10 in the afternoon when the fire was first spotted from the plane, late enough for the wind and the temperature to start easing off, and, although August 5, 1949, was in the middle of a heat wave and the official temperature in Helena, twenty-five miles away, was ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day on record, and the fire danger rating was high at 74 with 100 as maximum, yet all three observers as they circled the fire regarded it as routine. A spotter always has the right, although he doesn’t like to exercise it, of
returning to the base without jumping his men if he thinks the wind too strong (twenty miles or more an hour) or the terrain or the fire too dangerous. Cooley and Dodge took a good look at the fire, thought it more or less routine, and figured the crew would have it under control by ten o’clock the next morning. They referred to the smoke leaking out of the ridge as merely a cauliflower, although soon it was more like a leak in a lobe of the brain of the universe. On the second swing around they were trying to pick out a landing area. They were also trying to get some idea of the general lay of the land, which was unfamiliar to them. They had been sent from their base in Missoula without maps, on the poor excuse that there would probably already be ground crews on the fire with maps. Even if there had been, it would have made no difference.

The fire was located in the “Gates of the Mountains” wild area (roadless area) just east of the Missouri River, some twenty miles north of Helena…at a point near the top of the ridge between Mann and Meriwether gulches. The general area is steep and jagged on the Meriwether side and is said to be one of the roughest areas east of the Continental Divide.

    From the official
Report of Board of Review
, Mann Gulch fire, Helena National Forest, August 5, 1949.

M
ANN GULCH IS A DRY GULCH
two and a half miles long that runs into the lower end of the spectacular stretch of the Missouri River called the Gates of the Mountains by the first white man who entered them, Captain Meriwether Lewis, when on July 19, 1805, he camped his party at the mouth of the gulch now bearing his first name. Immediately downriver from Meriwether Canyon is Mann Gulch, where the fire started near the top of the ridge between the two gulches, and almost immediately downriver from these two gulches the Gates open to the plains.

“From the singular appearance of this place I called it the
gates of the rocky mountains,” Captain Lewis said in his journals. Its singular appearance makes it a fitting backdrop for early and everlasting drama in which nature plays the leading role. If you are coming upstream from yellow flat plains, as Captain Lewis and Captain Clark had been for over a year, you can observe even at a great distance how there is something about mountains that hates to be plains. Far, far ahead are the mountains black with the haze that makes mountains look from the plains as if they were clouds of smoke from a great forest fire. As they and you come closer, the haze of the mountains breaks apart and reluctantly allows the yellow plains a final appearance. This is literally the way it was in Mann Gulch before the fire burned it out in a matter of minutes. It was the place in the Gates where the struggle between mountains and plains came face to face—below Mann Gulch belongs to the plains, upriver to the mountains and timber. Mann Gulch itself where the grave markers are was yellow with tall grass. The differences are not only scenic—there are differences between the behavior of grass and timber fires, and the differences can be tragic if firefighters don’t know them.

The Smokejumpers were on their way to a blowup, a catastrophic collision of fire, clouds, and winds. With almost dramatic fitness, the collision was to occur where vast geological confrontations had occurred millions and millions of years ago—where old ocean beds, the bottoms of inland seas, were hoisted vertically by causes too long ago to be now identified and were then thrust forward by gravity into and over other ocean beds, cracking and crumbling them and creasing them into folds and creating a geological area called in the subdued language of scientists the “Disturbed Belt,” a belt that includes in its geological history much of not only northwestern Montana but western Alberta and eastern British Columbia.

The “Disturbed Belt” in turn is a loosely tied part of a much larger geological formation scientists call the “Over-thrust Belt.” This overthrust formation not only includes the front or face of the Rockies from western Alberta and eastern
British Columbia on down through Glacier Park and northwestern Montana (the “Disturbed Belt”); it extends in both directions to northern Canada and Alaska and all the way to central Mexico. Prior to the formation of this gigantic extrusion some 150 million years ago, large portions of the western margin of our continent, which then lay several hundred miles east of our present Pacific Coast, were covered by deep layers of sedimentary rocks, limestone and sandstone, deposited there by transient inland oceans which must have been something like Hudson Bay. As the western continent was raised, squeezed, and compressed, great slabs of sedimentary layers slid over each other inland or eastward for a distance varying from a few miles to a hundred miles or more.

The present cliffs in the Gates of the Mountains are the rearings and collisions and roarings of the bottoms of oceans as they stood up like sea beasts struggling to prevent anything from finding a way around them. The cliffs on the sides of each canyon are bases to arches that once rested on the cliffs, as is proved by the matching strata on the opposite cliffs, but the key to the arch that once joined the cliffs has gone off somewhere and been replaced by the eternal arch of Montana sky.

In the Gates of the Mountains there have been many blowups. Now there are many rattlesnakes and nothing more fragile than mountain goats, themselves tougher than the mountains they disdain, although at a distance they are white wings of butterflies floating up and down and sideways across the faces of fragments of arches and cliffs, touching but never becoming attached to them.

When the Missouri escapes at the Gates from around a bend or from under a mountain it is still clear, but almost immediately after entering the plains it turns yellow like the plains and from then on there are plains and plains and plains, yellow plains parted only by a yellow river.

Do not be deceived, though, by the scenic beauty of the Gates of the Mountains into believing that the confrontations and terrors of nature are obsolescences frozen in stone, like
the battles of satyrs in Greek bas-relief, remnants of mythology and witnessed if ever by dinosaurs and now only by seismographs. It is easy for us to assume that as the result of modern science “we have conquered nature,” that nature is now confined to beaches for children and to national parks where the few remaining grizzly bears have been shot with tranquilizers and removed to above the timberline, supposedly for their safety and our own. But we should be prepared for the possibility, even if we are going to accompany modern firefighters into Mann Gulch, that the terror of the universe has not yet fossilized and the universe has not run out of blowups.