fire line in the forest duff. The list of what can be thrown at a fire is endless—and expensive. A more cynical view, popular among many, is that the government puts fires out by throwing money on them until it starts to rain.
Not much of the money, however, goes to the fire crews. A jumper makes about $8.50 an hour. If the fire is uncontrolled, as, since smoke jumpers are initial attack, it almost always is, the crews get another 25 percent hazard pay. If they work overtime—again, almost a sure bet—they get time and a half. The jump itself has been ruled as simply another way of getting to the fire, like a bus or a pickup truck, so jumpers get straight pay when they leave the airplane and time and a quarter when they hit the ground. If they are injured on the jump, however, and don’t make it to the fire, the hazard pay does not kick in. From fifteen hundred feet it takes about a minute and a half to reach the ground with a parachute. At $8.50 an hour, that’s about 21 cents.
“In a good year you can make almost thirty thousand dollars,” said Franz. (As with all fire fighters, a “good” year is a year with a lot of fires; a “good” fire is a fire that isn’t brought under control too quickly.) “Under twenty thousand is more typical. That’s for six months. The rest of the year we sew.”
They sew everything: harnesses, fire line packs, jump bags, even little duffels with the BIFC flame logo on the side. They do it to save the government money, they do it because they’re better sewers than most manufacturers, and they do it to keep themselves employed. The only thing they don’t sew are the parachutes. Some jumpers are certified to make repairs, but the chutes themselves are bought from a manufacturer. The parachutes the BLM uses cost a thousand dollars apiece and are expected, with upkeep, to last at least ten years. They were of a design invented by a French kite maker in the early 1900s. They are called Quantum Q5 Ram Air parachutes.
Honest means capable of enduring a training regimen that used to weed out 30 percent of the preselected men at the training camp (overwhelmingly men, but not entirely). Rookies are considered the fittest and most perfectly trained because they have endured boot camp most recently: three hours of workouts a day, a jump simulator called the Mutilator, an array of courses and tests that virtually guarantee you’ll pull your ripcord after jumping out of the plane. Overwhelmingly, it works, though not always. In 1991 a jumper in Montana was killed because he didn’t reach for his ripcord until “ground rush,” when it was too late. The entire thing was caught on video because it was a training jump. The consensus was he froze.
“The biggest hazard is probably the fire itself,” Franz told me. “Felling burning snags, logs rolling down hillsides. Jumping is usually a relief. It’s hot in the airplane, and sometimes you feel sick; then suddenly you’re totally focused on what you’re doing. It’s a little dreamlike.”
After our talk Franz took me for a quick tour of the jump loft. He showed me the rigging room where the chutes are packed, and the sewing room, and the weight room. Afterward we returned to the conference table, and he popped a short tape into the VCR. It was quick and unprofessional but highly dramatic. It showed a jump crew working a fire at night, right on the line. At one point a sawyer was cutting down a huge ponderosa, and his saw was halfway through the trunk when flames started pouring out like liquid. The tree was hollowed out by fire, it turned out, and was drawing like a chimney. The sawyer kept cutting; the flames kept spurting; eventually the tree fell.
As I left, I asked Franz—against all hope—if there were any fires around for me to see. He told me I’d just missed a good one. An older couple from Pennsylvania had been towing a car behind their RV, and the car got a flat tire; sparks started a fire front two miles wide. Six thousand acres, a million dollars to put out.
“I suspect the government will try to collect too,” he said. “Try the dispatch office; they’ll know what’s going on.”
The dispatch office for the Boise National Forest was a trailer east of the airfield. “I just came from BIFC,” I told the young woman behind the desk. “I’m a reporter. Are there any fires?”
I felt a little bad asking the question. She didn’t blink. “Seven hundred acres as of midnight last night,” she said, spreading a map of Idaho out on the table. “Lightning-started, wind-driven, with three helicopters and twenty-two crews. It’s called the Flicker Creek fire. They’ve called in a type one overhead team.”
A type one overhead team is called in only when a fire is really bad or is expected to get really bad. The Flicker Creek fire was in steep terrain with extremely dry fuels and strong winds. Steep slopes help a fire because uphill fuels get preheated; winds help a fire because they make it burn hotter and push it across the land. A seven- hundred-acre fire could jump to seven thousand or even seventy thousand in no time at all.
An hour later I was driving north on Highway 21 in my green fire-retardant Nomex pants and yellow fire shirt. In the back seat were a yellow plastic hard hat and a fiberglass and aluminum fire shelter. The shelter is a pup tent that comes in a small pouch with belt loops. It reflects radiant heat, reducing what would be a 1,000-degree fire to 120 degrees or so. I would be assigned a public relations person when I got to the fire camp, the ranger told me. I would be fed and I would be lodged in a tent if I didn’t have one. Tomorrow morning a helicopter would take me into the fire line.
I breezed past some bored Forest Service guards and turned off Highway 21, into the hills.
Flicker Creek is one of hundreds of small creeks that cut through the steep, dry hills of the Boise National Forest. Most of the land is grass and rocks and sagebrush, with heavy stands of ponderosa on the north slopes and in the drainages. Flicker Creek empties into the North Fork of the Boise River, which quickly joins the Middle Fork and continues on to fill the Arrowrock and Lucky Peak reservoirs. The entire West was seven years into one of the worst droughts since the 1870s, so both reservoirs were severely depleted. Arrowrock had been reduced to a muddy brook that you could practically jump across.
After twenty miles of rough driving, the road leveled off along the North Fork of the Boise. There was plenty of water up here—or so it looked—and the river was fast and lined with big, open stands of ponderosa. The fire camp was in a huge meadow called Barber Flats that ran alongside the North Fork of the Boise. Hundreds of bright nylon tents were pitched in the yellowed grass. A helicopter thumped over a ridgeline, trailing a retardant bucket. Water trucks rumbled back and forth, spraying the dust down. Hotshot crews came and went, Indian file, or slept in the shade, or sharpened their tools. Some were black with dirt; others looked as if they’d just arrived. They all had on the same green and yellow Nomex that I wore and big lug-soled boots.
I parked my car between the trucks and water tankers and searched out the information desk. The public affairs people knew I was coming, and I was pointed toward a large, deep-voiced man named Frank Carroll. “You’ll need boots if you want to go out on the line,” he told me. “You’ll need water bottles; you’ll need food; you’ll need gloves. I’ll set you up after dinner. You can pitch your tent anywhere you like. People get going around five in the morning; make sure you’re at breakfast and ready to go by then.”
I thanked him and went off to get my gear set up. All around me, big, lean men and a few women went about their duties. I pitched my tent in tall grass behind a cabin that served as a command post and then wandered over toward the catering tent. Behind it was a full-size truck outfitted as a kitchen. Hotshot crews passed by it in line, taking plates of food from the young woman behind the window and then sitting down at folding tables under a canvas army tent. The woman was pretty and had a sheath knife on her belt. I tried to pretend I belonged there, and she loaded my plate up with steak and carrots and mashed potatoes and salad and two slices of white bread.
I took a seat by myself at a corner table and watched the crews come and go, talking loudly, eating fast. Most of the fire fighters were young white men, sinewy and unshaved. There was a scattering of women among them, but the women were treated—as far as I could tell—no differently from anyone else. I didn’t think they would be discriminated against so much as subjected to one form of gallantry or another, but they weren’t. Everyone seemed to be too tired and hungry to notice the opposite sex. (This turned out to be emphatically untrue.) Furthermore, beneath the baggy clothes and grimy faces it was hard to tell who was what.
The Indians and Latinos generally had their own crews. It was a reflection of demographics more than anything else: Twenty men from Browning, Montana, are likely to be Blackfeet, not white; twenty men taken off the farm crews in the Snake River valley are likely to be Latino, not Indian. It’s the Indian crews, the caterer told me, that can really clean out a food truck. “They’ll eat anything that’s not nailed down,” she said. The convicts eat
