Jumping Fire: A Smokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire by Murry A. Taylor (review)

1 9 6 WAL 3 6 .1 S U M M E R 2 0 0 1 legends and Sir Gawain should sound in the mind like the end of Tchaikovsky’s “ 1812 Overture.” But that’s not all. There’s the other plot dealing with Pasque’s desire for revenge against the murderers of his brothers. The heroes of both the Arthurian myth and the Western cowboy myth are formulaic and, though different in some respects, are similar in others. Each formula requires a dangerous journey into unknown territory. The dangers con­ tinue in this relatively strange environment, but the hero, obviously, must sur­ vive and return to his homeland victoriously, bringing with him new knowl­ edge or something more tangible. James C. Work is not only a scholar of western American and other liter­ atures, but an accomplished editor and essayist. Ride South to Purgatory is his first foray into the Western novel, and it is indeed a success. Work has used his knowledge of the Old West and his sensitivity to the idiom of those days to cre­ ate a novel whose authenticity is anchored in the action-packed realism of the revenge plot, carefully interwoven into the mythic quality of the Gawain plot. As Pasque finds his way through ranch country into the mining camps of Colorado and further south into New Mexico, he is sometimes aided by char­ acters who seem to possess magical insight or powers. In New Mexico, he is welcomed at the Godinez hacienda, and there he falls in love with the beauti­ ful Elena. This romance is, perhaps, the greatest of all temptations, but Pasque must leave Elena to continue his quest. Romance is followed by violence— a shooting match with John, an anachronistic mountain man, and an almost fatal attack from a warring group of rebellious Apaches. After he is rescued by the mountain man and is nursed to health by the giant Hochland’s wife, he faces the greatest challenge to his bravery and integrity. In the final chapters, suspense increases as Pasque successfully completes his ordeal and his educa­ tion on the subjects of life and death. When you begin the novel, you may wonder how on earth James Work will be able to integrate the mythical quest with the nineteenth-century formulaic Western, but he does it, and the way he does it becomes the key to the novel’s success. Jumping Fire: A Srnokejumper’s Memoir of Fighting Wildfire. By Murry A. Taylor. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 2000. 456 pages, $26.00. Reviewed by Starr Jenkins San Luis Obispo, California In Jumping Fire, Murry Taylor, the oldest active smokejumper in America, puts you right there in the door of the plane for your first of dozens of parachute jumps into numerous forest fires. With him, you leap into the sky, pull your rip­ cord, feel the glorious opening of the chute, fly your steerable ram-air para­ chute down among trees or snags to the precarious jump spot, sack up your BOOK REVIEW S 1 9 7 gear, and do battle with fire after fire through the grueling Alaska and Idaho fire seasons of 1991. Jumping Fire is the definitive book on smokejumping in the 1990s, the action taking place mostly among the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) jumpers in Alaska. As you join this group, you see that these BLM jumpers actually form the front-line summer fire brigade for that entire, huge wilder­ ness state. Taylor, who just turned fifty as he starts this 1991 season, also brings in many other hair-raising yarns from his twenty or so previous summers of jumping and firefighting since he rookied at Redding, California, in 1965. As he tells the story, the reader gets to be friends with him and his articulate, humorous, hell-raising, fire-obsessed buddies as they devote 100 percent of their lives, abilities, and energy (three to six months a year) to going after those roar­ ing blazes and (usually) knocking them down for other, less elite fire-troops to take over and mop up. He gives you the strenuousness of the life, how HARD smokejumpers work, the many-faceted dangers, the...