sweets and spicy foods because they can’t get much of that in prison. The white ’shot crews are the most health- conscious: They eat a lot of fruits and vegetables; some won’t even touch meat.
That was hard to imagine, because the government food contracts were defined by how much protein—meat, in other words—was provided per person per meal. Everyone gets four ounces of meat at breakfast, seven ounces at lunch, and ten to sixteen ounces at dinner. Everything else—vegetables, grains, fruit—was considered a condiment and didn’t figure into the equation. It’s a lot better than it used to be, though. Back in the dark ages of fire fighting—before women, before showers, before Nomex—the crews subsisted mostly on ham.
Ham and eggs, ham sandwiches, fried ham. Catering trucks were essentially big meat lockers with ham hanging in them, and maybe some Wonder bread. Back in those days the hotshots wore T-shirts that said, “When forests burn, pigs die.”
After dinner I sat in on the planning session. It was held under a ponderosa pine by the dirt parking area. The entire overhead team was there, identifiable by the fact that they weren’t dirty and weren’t wearing Nomex. They were trained together and used on the Flicker Creek fire as interchangeable parts of a network called the Incident Command System. The system is based on the idea that any person trained for a certain job—logistics chief, information officer, helibase manager—can perform that job for any agency, in any situation. Overhead teams are made up of people from a dozen different government agencies and are pulled in from all over the country. You might find an incident commander from Georgia and an air operations branch director from Colorado and a safety officer from the next town over. There are seventeen type one overhead teams in the country, and they mainly fight fires, but they have also been effective on other catastrophes: oil spills in Alaska; hurricanes in Florida; earthquakes in Mexico. An overhead team was sent to clean up the
I went to bed when the five hundred fire fighters did, at dark. The only noise was the continuous rumble of the generators. The planning session had brought bad news, in a way: The fire was cooperating almost too quickly. A thirty-acre spot fire had started in light fuels on the south front but had been contained by three crews. Seven type two crews—less experienced than hotshots and usually used for mopping up—had cut line all the way down to the river, farther than expected. The winds were dying down, and unless they picked up again, the fire would be contained within days.
A fire camp is never completely still. All night long I was aware of the movement of men. They walked past, packed equipment, coughed, spat. Around four in the morning the sounds were so continuous that I woke up even before my watch alarm went off. It was still dark, and the camp undulated with human forms and occasional headlamps. Crews were packing their line gear, drifting toward the catering tent, clustering around the big stand-up kerosene heaters set up at intervals in the field. It was cold, maybe in the twenties. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and pulled on several sweaters and my boots—I had to wear leather on my feet in the helicopter, for some reason—and hustled toward the lights of the tent.
The person assigned to me was Bill Casey, a type two safety officer from the Boise area. He was a strong, clear-eyed man in his late forties who directed the local Bureau of Land Management district and was also qualified to command a type two overhead team. (A type two team handles smaller fires, but operates the same way.) He had bagged thirty elk in the past thirty-two years of hunting them, he said. His father hunts with him and can still shoulder fifty pounds of elk meat, at age seventy-one. Casey is part Blackfeet; he has dead-straight gray hair and brown eyes and a handsome, open face.
“We’re a little overstaffed because the fire didn’t do what we expected,” he admitted as we sat in his truck at the helibase.
“What did you expect the fire to do?” I asked.
“Well.” He chose his words carefully. “The guys don’t want to see the forests burn, but on the other hand, they want to have a good, productive summer. They like to have two to three weeks on a fire and then move on to another one. In that sense, it’s disappointing to have the fire lay down so fast.”
We were waiting for our flight into the fire line, and the heater was going full blast in the truck. In the clearing, men were checking the helicopters and writing up flight manifests. The first few days of a fire are usually disorganized to the point of chaos, Casey said. Then it gets better. Casey took advantage of the wait to tell me more about how fires are fought—not from the field but from the office.
“BIFC is just a logistical center that responds to needs in the field,” he said. “Suppose Unit X has a fire. As long as it doesn’t escape the initial attack, BIFC is not involved. If it does escape, then a regional coordination center gets involved. If the regional center doesn’t have enough resources to fight the fire, then BIFC steps in. We’ve had a lot of fires already this summer, and this is the first one where BIFC has been involved.”
Initial attack, he said, comes in many forms. Smoke jumpers are initial attack. Helirappelers are initial attack. Hotshots can be both initial attack and extended attack. Air attack—retardant drops from planes and helicopters— can also be initial or extended. The idea of initial attack is to hit the fire hard and early so that you avoid the expense of an extended campaign. If the attack crews can’t contain it, then an overhead team is assembled and put on the fire. A really big fire will suck in ’shot crews from all over the country. There are a total of sixty nationwide. If that’s not enough, or if they’re needed elsewhere, then type two crews that are trained in fire but often do other work for the Forest Service and BLM are deployed. Farther down in the barrel are convict crews, laborers from the Snake River valley who collect at the center of town when sirens go off, and pickup crews. Pickup crews usually just consist of people with sturdy shoes and in good enough health to pass the training course. When there are pickup crews on a fire, it’s a really bad fire. There were no pickup crews on the Flicker Creek fire.
After about an hour the helicopter was ready. It was a Bell Jet Ranger, rented from a private contractor in Arizona for two thousand dollars an hour. The huge Croman logging ships cost three times that and can sling twenty thousand pounds of retardant in a bucket beneath them. We were read the safety procedures by a helitack crewman and then asked how much we each weighed, with gear. The answers were entered into the flight manifest to calculate how much the helicopter could carry once we were out of the ground effect. Once a helicopter rises about a certain height, the downwash from its rotors no longer has the ground to push against, so it can carry less. If you combine the altitude, the air temperature, and the relative humidity, you have a figure called density altitude that determines how much a helicopter can carry. The retardant buckets, called Bambi buckets or Sims buckets, depending on their manufacturer, could even be cinched down to change the size of the container to compensate for variations in density altitude from day to day.
The crewman went over the instructions again: Keep your head down when you come and go from the helicopter. Never leave a helicopter uphill. Never go toward the rear of the helicopter. Never go anywhere that the pilot can’t see you. If you violate any of these rules, the attendant is authorized to use force to get you to comply.
“I’ll tackle you,” he said.
It was the first flight of the day for this helicopter, so the rotors weren’t turning when we boarded. Gloves on, helmets and goggles on, sleeves rolled down. The attendant made sure we had buckled our seat belts, and then he closed the doors and the rotors heaved into motion.
“By the way, why couldn’t I wear sneakers in the helicopter?” I shouted to Casey.
“Because if we crash, the nylon melts to your skin,” he yelled back.
In front of me, the copilot had a flight helmet that said, “Crashing Sucks.” The technical term for crashing is
The Bell Ranger lifted off, and within minutes we had put the camp behind us and I could see smoke coming off a distant ridge. It was not the furious orange blaze I had imagined; it was a 750-acre smudge fire that, if touched by wind or left unattended, could spring to life and go ripping off into the heavy timber north of here. Helicopters were shuttling back and forth from Barber Flats, where they dipped their buckets in a retardant tank. The retardant was rust-colored, and you could see it splotched on the hillsides. Below us, one of the big Cromans was easing down into a steep valley to fill its Bambi bucket in a stream. (Hotshots are fond of saying that fish get
