Smokejumpers, ’49: Brothers in the Sky by Starr Jenkins (review)

Reviews 179 in a Dickens novel. After the death of his father when the boy was four years old, his mother left him with her father and stepmother in Okemah, Oklahoma, to find work in larger towns. When the grandfather lapsed into alcoholism and even deeper failure during the Great Depression, his w ife left him to open a disreputable hotel and take up with another man, further cutting the boy off from respectable society. As Rutland’s life came to seem more and more pinched, he increasingly pined for his beautiful mother. Finally she brought him to the shining metropolis of Tulsa for a happy ending worthy of a Victorian novel, couched in language like “The m ystic chords o f memory encourage us to hold on to the moments when life was full o f everyday pleasures and hope, as our youth should always be.” In texture, the book is largely governed by this sentiment, seldom marked by self-pity or by retrospective judgments. Rutland sees adults— few children are described— through a child’s eyes, unaccountable and imperfect but on the whole benign. But except for natives of Okemah and Rutland’s immediate family, readers w ill value the book for its description of the material culture of the town and period: what people wore, ate, played with, drove, and longed for. Because money was scarce, the youthful Rutland knew the price o f most things and, because of deferred or unsatisfied longing, the value of everything he really wanted. Rutland has had a distinguished career as an historian, with a dozen or more books to his credit, but he has not attempted to overlay memory with sub­ sequent learning. In fact, the early pages of the book are not well-crafted: details are repeated and characters pop up mysteriously. Later, Rutland gains better control o f his material, although the form remains casual and the struc­ ture essentially anecdotal. Still, his book gives a valuable if minor portrait of a time and place most readers haven’t experienced. ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS U niversity o f Oklahoma Smokejumpers, ’49: Brothers in the Sky. By Starr Jenkins. Photographs by Peter Stackpole. (San Luis Obispo, California: Merritt Starr B ooks, 1995. 221 pages, $23.95.) Set against a backdrop of the rugged, forested terrain of Montana, Idaho, California, Washington, and Oregon during the late 1940s, Starr Jenkins’s col­ lection chronicles the adventures and sacrifices of the men who formed the U.S. Forest Service’s first line of defense against summer w ildfires. Loaded down with seventy pounds of equipment, smokejumpers bail out of a Ford Trimotor over a smoking lightning strike, steer their parachutes down to land between giant spruce and pine, quench the fire, and then hike out of the w ilder­ 180 Western American Literature ness to the nearest road, river, or camp— only to repeat the process again and again in response to the lookouts’ calls. Formerly a smokejumper him self (and now a retired English professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo), Jenkins brings together twenty-one stories, several enriched by diary entries and letters, and illustrated by over fifty pages of spectacular black and white photographs by Life m agazine’s Peter Stackpole. Under such evocative titles as “D ouble D elight in the Bitterroot W ilderness,” “We Jump into Fire,” and “G allows in the Sky,” Jenkins recounts the exhilaration of smokejumping but also the perils posed by chutes that fail to open or hang up in trees, landings in rivers or in the fires them selves, and the grueling demands of building a fire line with axe and shovel. Indeed, the hardship and danger of the smokejumper’s life emerge again and again, nowhere more poignantly than in the account of the tragic Mann Gulch fire of August 5, 1949. A ssisted in part by Norman M aclean’s record of the event, Jenkins reconstructs the afternoon during which thirteen smokejumpers lost their lives when a rogue wind turned the fire back upon them. Mann Gulch forms the mythic center of the book, foreshadowed in its early chapters and pictorially recounted in Stackpole’s photographs. Like Dana’s Two Years...