Let’s hope it’s that easy.
He was a little worried for her, but she was a big girl. She could take care of herself.
He turned onto the Terrace Road, and toward the plateau. A little way out of town, the sun peeked over the mountains and lit a thousand feet of rocky ledges, and the switchbacks working their way down, roughly following Caveras Creek from its headwaters somewhere in the park. He drove past several old ranches before the canyon narrowed, forcing the road out of the drainage and up onto a series of intermediate mesas. He passed one more ranch before climbing onto the plateau, and into the park. Slowing, he looked out over the region—San Juan Mountains to the east, and mesas, canyons and high desert to the south and west. Breath-taking.
He sped up, but slowed again in a grove of aspen. He had expected their leaves to be turned or turning, but they were green. No sign of change—surprising.
He came to the project site, and drove past the first few piles of brush. The limbs cut last fall and spring were now red and dry. They’d burn well, but they’ll have to wait. He parked and dug his canvas cruiser vest out from behind the seat, and checked to see that all the tools he would need—pens, pencils, paper, plastic flagging, compass, and map—were there in the pockets, front and back.
He took off along the edge of the project. More than three hundred acres in size, it was situated along the boundary of the national park, on a block of land that ran east to west, and then jogged north through a particularly dense piece of forest, sheltered by a slight north-facing slope. He avoided the east to west run—most of which was finished—and headed north, where no work had been done.
He crept through the dog-hair thickets and downed logs, thinking about what needed to be accomplished. The prescription wasn’t particularly complex, but it could be made to sound that way, especially when reduced to numbers. There were numbers for tons per acre of various sizes of fuels—from grasses and pine needles to downed tree limbs and trunks. Numbers for density of trees, numbers to characterize the size of gaps in the canopy, and ultimately—once restoration was complete and fire could be allowed to resume its role in the ecosystem—numbers related to fire severity, and the years between fires to simulate the natural system. It could sound very complex, but the simplicity of it settled over him as he waded through a thicket of young skinny pines and Gamble oak—ladders that could carry a fire into the canopies of the older trees. “Most of these have to go,” he said to himself.
It would take both chainsaws and burning to do the job. Anything shy of that combination and the work would not be complete. Not with the amount of change that had occurred here. “Hell of a thing to do,” he said, thinking about the years of fire suppression.
He came to a road. This was the northern limit of the burn block. He turned back.
The crew was there when he arrived at the truck. Some were pulling tools from the bed of the crew-cab pickup they lovingly called their “6-pack.”
“Good morning,” he shouted.
“Mornin, Jack,” Reger said. “I was just about to tell everyone here how Cristy saved my ass on that fire in California.” He was trying to look serious.
Jack looked over at Cristy. She was bracing herself to be the butt of a joke.
“Yeah,” Johnny continued. “It was so big. Fire camp that is. I never would have found the mess tent if not for Cristy. All you had to say was dinner and she plowed through whole crews of hotshots on the way to the chow line. All I had to do was follow. I’d a never made it.”
“Didn’t y’all have a fire to fight?” a young firefighter asked. Jack didn’t know his name, but he sounded like a Texan.
“Fire? Yeah, we did a little firefighting, didn’t we Cristy? But mostly, we just enjoyed the California lifestyle. They stopped the fire every day at three for yoga lessons.”
“Right,” Cristy said. “A real vacation.”
Jack let them go about their little rituals. As chainsaws were being fueled and maintained, he pulled out a can of spray paint and started marking small trees.
The crew was soon following. After trees were felled, they were limbed and bucked, and put into piles the size of a Volkswagen bug, and no larger. This would assure that the eventual fires would burn with only moderate intensity.
The crew fell behind, but Jack didn’t expect them to keep up. Theirs was the harder task. He cruised on ahead, trying to mark several days’ worth of work. He soon lost sight of them.
He stepped around a weathered old snag, and a warm breeze hit his face. It was only a little after nine o’clock. There was no sign of dew. The fire danger was probably quite high.
He listened to the winds in the treetops, and stepped his eye up through the brush, past the tops of the scraggly young pines, to the ponderosa that towered overhead. It would be a shame to lose the old monarch, but if a fire were to happen now, it could happen. It could turn this area into a wasteland of barren ground and standing dead trees. Natural succession starting over, at square one. It’ll be good to get this project finished.
He marked all morning, breaking to take lunch with the crew, and then resumed, plowing on through the heat of the afternoon. As the sounds of chainsaws became more and more distant, muffled by the breezes blowing through the trees, he lost the feeling that he had to push.
He stopped at a grand old ponderosa, needles packed thick at its feet. He pressed his nose to its bark and drew in a breath. The smell of vanilla. It reconnected him to so many things—the land, the work, memories of good times.
He leaned against it, and took a moment to look and to listen—to enjoy.
Chickadees and nuthatches were doing their acrobatics along the trunk and boughs. Other birds prone to scrub or to foraging on the ground darted in and out of scene, while chipmunks rummaged through the pine cones.
He went back to work, and marked steadily until a little before four. He returned to where the crew was working.
“Let’s call it a day,” he said as he approached.
The crew followed him back to the pickups. Johnny climbed up into the bed of the crew-cab and let the others hand him their tools. “Hey, Jack, you should join us for a beer at Elena’s,” he said.
“I’ll take a rain check. I was thinking I’d stay up here tonight.”
“Didn’t you get enough sleeping on the ground in California?”
“All together different circumstances.”
Jack waited for them to drive away before pulling his backpack out from under a tarp in the back of his pickup. His destination would stay his own little secret.
He headed past the piles of limbs, and into the forest. At the southwestern edge of the plateau, he started searching, skirting the edge until he saw terraces and rocky ledges below. He found a game trail at a break in the rocks. He spun around, looking for landmarks. Nothing looked familiar, but a year ago he was not exactly in the frame of mind to make note of landmarks. It was not as if he had expected to find anything worth going back to. He was simply looking for a place to be alone. He had found it, but could he find it again. This seemed like the place.
He braced himself and lowered a foot over the edge. Then the other. Now out of the park and on BLM land, he took a step and his foot slid on sand and rock, grinding to an uneasy stop. “Slow,” he told himself. “You’ve got all night.” He couldn’t remember it being this bad a year ago, but then again, he wasn’t sure safety had been first and foremost on his mind.
The trail switched back and forth, generally in a southeasterly direction. After two hundred feet he lost sight of the trail. Then, it became distinct, cutting through a break in an escarpment. He remembered the spot. He left the game trail and worked his way down through the rocky scree to the terrace, and then, bee-lined west through pinyon pine and sagebrush.