Drift Smoke: Loss and Renewal in a Land of Fire

3. Learning to Remember | Loss of Life

Decades have passed through the hour-glass of time, and nature has long since reclothed the naked landscape with grass, shrubs and trees, but the great sacrifice of human life can never be replaced or forgotten. —Joe Halm, reminiscing about the fires of 1910 As for tragedy, the universe likes encores to its catastrophes and does not have to be coaxed long to repeat them. —Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire On the anniversary of this terrible tragedy, we pause to remember the lives and the courage of the firefighters who died on Storm King Mountain as they worked to protect the things we so deeply cherish —our landscape, our forest, our homes and our very lives. —Montana governor Marc Racicot july 9, 1 994 We thought we had the son of a bitch licked. Lisa, Trevor, Glen, and I had spent the morning and early afternoon mopping up the perimeter of what we were now calling the “Smith Canyon fire.” With a measly two hundred gallons of water on the back of our four-wheel-drive engines and with a forty-five-minute turnaround time for refills from the nearest farmhouse spigot, we used what water we had sparingly. Mist the hot sagebrush stumps, dig. Mist again, chink some more. Don’t bury anything: [ 44] 3 | lea rn i n g to re me mb e r | loss of life it will just smolder in its fiery grave until it ignites roots or duff, resurrecting to the surface in running fire while you’re not watching . Eventually, all that you want left is a steaming black stob. Then move on. There were still spots of white-hot ash and smoldering cow pies in the fire’s interior, but the edge looked and felt secure. By now the Grass Valley volunteers were back at their station tapping kegs in preparation for their fireman’s ball later in the evening, and the Prineville engines were back at the district wareyard, their crews sharpening shovels and pulaskis (combination grubhoes/axes) and filling coolers with ice and Gatorade. The memorial service was over, and I was resigned to spending the rest of the day babysitting a black slope under a blinding sun that even reptiles hide from. Typically, on a scrubby range fire, you contain it (by smothering it, drowning it, or starving it of fuel), secure the edge, then watch. Forest fires require hour upon hour of labor-intensive mop-up, turning over deep layers of duff and litter and roots, cooling and stirring, then repeating the process until you can touch the soil with the back of your hand without getting burned. Cold-trailing. But with the exception of pockets of heavy sage, range fires along the breaks of the Deschutes or John Day Rivers require little mop-up but a lot of patience —watching and patrolling a ragged black edge, sometimes miles in length, for a day or two or three, looking for smokes that then require more grubbing and more stirring. Since our fire was small, by early afternoon we were mainly just watching. Our rigs sat at the top of the fire amidst cold, black tufts of le a rn i n g to re me mb e r | lo ss o f li fe [ 45] bunchgrass, their delicate, fire-cropped stems frozen in position like so many smudged lantern mantles. I read the newspaper while sitting in my lawn chair and occasionally peered down the hill into the heavy sage for wisps of smoke. At the other engine my crew feasted on stale mres. Between bites of gelatinized ham tidbits they watched the west flank. Lisa and Trevor reclined on the utility boxes, and Glen, like one of Smith Canyon’s reptiles, took refuge in the cab. For a firefighter, no sound is more sickening than the sound of popping corn under a withering sun. It usually means that a small spark or ember has breathed its way into fresh fuel, requiring heavy breathing on our parts and an all-too-fresh return to firefighting. Having heard what sounded like crackling popcorn, I lowered my Saturday Oregonian, looked up the hill, and saw a small cloud of black smoke suspended atop a swirl of contorting heat waves. A flareup . . . in the damn cheatgrass of all places. “Hey, it’s taking off,” I yelled, while grabbing my radio, gloves, and pulaski...