Weather Briefing
A high-pressure system will continue to mature and bring widespread instability to the region. As this vertical mass develops, it will absorb all ambient liquidity, leading to atmospheric polarization and inwardly-spiraling vortices. At the uppermost layer, small parcels will detach in the jet stream and circulate according to patterns entirely distinct from the increasingly cyclonic mass. However, this mixing height is projected to rise so rapidly that a high-level inversion develops, creating conditions for the system’s complete collapse. In the likely event of implosion, current forecasting models rapidly deteriorate, but abundant energetic discharge and violent outflows are a virtual certainty. Needless to say, red flag warnings are in effect for the foreseeable future.
Orthometry
More often than not, the wildfire will be burning on a hillside so steep your motor skills regress to late toddlerhood. More often than not, there will be a strike tree near the bottom of the burn, with a cauterized wound running the length of the bole. More often than not, this tree will be so compromised as to endanger everyone working in the vicinity. Inevitably, all the men will gather at the lightening-scarred base and look up and begin to proffer opinions about the proper method for cutting it down. Someone will suggest a Humboldt, aimed downslope. Another man will argue no, quarter-cut, sidehill, and make sure to send it behind that stobby piss fir so it doesn’t roll into the drainage, because then we’d be properly Bravo Foxtrot. After a moment, the third man will start musing about dropping the cat-faced snag uphill, and how, if it were him, he’d put the back-cut in first and set a pair of wedges just to nudge the old girl straight, then zip in a bird’s beak and give a couple smacks and she’d go over, no problemo.
But it won’t be him. Or him, or him. Inevitably, it will be you, and all this jaw-jacking and speculation about which way the burning snag is leaning has got you more confused than ever. You’re always surprised, how tricky it is, determining a tree’s lean. Especially after three old salts give three divaricating perspectives. Plus the plunging slope confuses everything, a canted axis tilting every perpendicular acute. Which is to say nothing of the other trees: each, in its bias toward this or that sunlit gap a false vertical suggestion shifting gently in the wind. Meanwhile, the strike tree is creaking and popping as all that heat chews up the hollow trunk, causing the snag to grow more deadly by the minute. It must come down and you, it has been determined, must be the one to cut it. By now the burning snag is so compromised that any attempt to take it off its lean will bring catastrophe: it will sit back and pinch your bar, or crack too early and hang up in another tree, or topple over sideways on top of you.
So here’s a little trick: take a length of cord and tie it to your knife, then hike your way across the slope. Sight the cord against the crown and let the metal hang. Ignore the voices; you have the datum. Repeat again from crosswise on, for a tree’s life is long and allows for many skews. Now fire up your saw.
Unfortunately, here the metaphor must end. But perhaps some solace might be found in the knowledge that some still risk their lives atop facts as immutable as gravity.
Perhaps not.
Who’s to say?
Parallax
From the sky, your jump partner always seems much lower, much wider, than he actually is: cracking stalls over the granite-screed abyss, soaring too far downwind above an avalanche chute alive with glacial runoff, desperately flying back toward the meadow, boot-heels nearly skimming the broke-top snags. But almost always, your JP has flown a proper pattern, and lands in the jump-spot uninjured. This distortion in perspective stems from a well-known astronomical principle wherein the apparent position of any free-floating object is skewed across various lines of sight. But despite learning about this optical illusion early in your career, you never get used to the heart-startling fear of watching your jump partner steer his parachute towards what looks like catastrophic injury. Especially because catastrophic injuries, while rare, are not that rare. If you’ve been smokejumping long enough, you’ve watched one of your buddies fracture his back or snap her femur or shatter his pelvis out in the woods somewhere. You’ve heard the sounds a broken body makes, you’ve seen the sharp, misshapen bulges press against the skin. The truth of gravity’s merciless disregard is always obvious at 2000 feet AGL.
But perhaps more frightening is how fast the concern for your jump partner fades, how quickly your concern retracts and your focus turns back to your own flight. How you landing safely in the meadow below becomes all that matters. Because you cannot help your jump partner. He cannot hear you and both of you are falling fast towards the hostile country below.
Bedrock Fire
I was dispatched to the Bedrock Fire as a Heavy Equipment Boss and spent the first several shifts hiking through the burning forest, scouting buttes and ridges where we might push dozer-line to create fuel breaks and stop the wildfire’s advance. Half the wildfire was on Bureau of Land Management ground, and designated late-successional reserve forest, which meant it was slated to one day become old-growth and thus protected by stringent regulation. The other half belonged to Weyerhaeuser Logging and consisted of fir plantations in various stages of maturity. This proprietorship checkerboarded the hills around Fall Creek: plots of BLM land bordered on all sides by Weyerhaeuser, which then gave way to BLM, and so on. Inside this cartography of negotiation between state and private capital, the ecological effect of ownership was stark. I’d wander a hillside shaded by 200-foot spruce, each titanic trunk a tree length away from the next, inhaling the cool, needle-clean air that pools beneath preindustrial branches. Then I’d cross an invisible line and suddenly find myself sweating, struggling through tight cornrows of adolescent fir. Alongside their divergent strategies of arboreal management, the two entities also subscribed to entirely different schools of firefighting: the BLM Resource Advisors, two young women with short hair and severe countenances, kept asking if I could walk the agency-contracted Caterpillar D4 bulldozer through the acres of soon-to-be old-growth without lowering the blade, suggesting that perhaps the disturbance created by the metal tracks would be enough to stop the fire. Meanwhile, Weyerhaeuser’s Fire Management Officer, a man with the unflappable affect of someone who laid off long-time employees several times a month, instructed his equipment operators to winch their brand-new Komatsu dozers to several brand-new Hitachi excavators and punch fire-line down the cliffs stair-stepping the sun-baked plantations. But the debris unearthed by the tethered Komatsus tumbled into Fall Creek, a BLM-owned waterway, which served as critical habitat for Lahontan cutthroat. Given the protected status of the fish, the BLM Resource Advisers and Weyerhaeuser’s Fire Management Officer found themselves at intractable loggerheads, spending hours each day arguing about the primacy of conservation versus action, about old-growth versus new growth, about the lives of trout versus the value of board feet. Meanwhile, all around us, the mountains continued to burn.
The Gist
On the last wildfire I ever jumped no one stayed at camp to assume logistical responsibility. Out on the fire-line we bemoaned snafus: cargo dropped three boxes short, chainsaws sent without their kits, water unrequested and thus postponed until tomorrow. So despite forgoing sleep for days, despite the desperate fear inside our limbs, the plan we had and then the next, amoral heat ripped across the land and scorched everything we saw. I wish you knew how hard we fought, right there along the edge. But within the plasmic roar and freakish shape burned one reaction endless in potential, and only exhaustive coordination could have extinguished that awful logic. In this we failed, and we claimed no glory in our loss.
