FIRE ON THE RIM
ALSO BY STEPHEN PYNE
Grove Karl Gilbert
Dutton’s Point
Introduction to Wildland Fire
Cycle of Fire
World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth
Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire
Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia
The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica
FIRE ON THE RIM
A Firefighter’s Season at the Grand Canyon
Stephen J. Pyne
With a New Preface by the Author
University of Washington Press
Seattle and London
Copyright © 1989 by Stephen J. Pyne
“Preface to the 1995 Edition” copyright © 1995 by Stephen J. Pyne
University of Washington Press paperback edition first published in 1995
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pyne, Stephen J., 1949-
Fire on the rim : a firefighter’s season at the Grand Canyon / Stephen J. Pyne
p. cm.
ISBN 0-295-97483-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Wildfires—Arizona—Grand Canyon National Park—Prevention and control. 2. Wildfire fighters—Arizona—Grand Canyon National Park. 3. Pyne, Stephen J., 1949- . I. Title.
[SD421.P93 1995] 95-4726
363.37’9—dc20 CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
To Sonja,
who shared most of it.
and the memory of Joseph R. Pyne,
who made it possible.
Contents
Preface to the 1995 Edition: Reburn
Preface to the Original Edition: Fire Call
PREFACE TO THE 1995 EDITION
Reburn
FIRE ON THE RIM was a book I wanted to write for a long time but didn’t know how and to some extent didn’t know why. There were really three problems, related of course, but also autonomous.
The first was technical. How do you make a profoundly seasonal experience into a coherent narrative? Fire season has a beginning, middle, and end, and so do fire careers, but how to reconcile an annual cycle with a secular one baffled me for many years. The typical solution is to imitate a diary and highlight the bigger events of the chronology or to collapse the whole into a single, composite year. Neither, I decided, was good enough, but in pursuit of an alternative I chased a lot of waterdogs. Eventually I hammered out a format around the idea of a “great season,” framed by initiating and valedictory years, that allowed me to say what I wanted to say. That decision led to the use of the historical present, the creation of composite events, and inevitable distortions as to who did what when. Not least it committed me to a narrative persona more or less fixed at a particular, and timeless, stage in his career. Accordingly I even found it necessary to invent one character to convey certain of my experiences without forcing the narrator to claim them. Still, all this gave coherence to the prose.
The second, more daunting problem was a coherence of purpose. Was this a collection of beer-fogged anecdotes, or did the experience, and through it, fire, acquire a larger significance? If so then the story needed the discipline of literature (with a small “1”). It needed, at its core, some moral drama.
As I read it, the literature of fire falls into three genres, a kind of conceptual fire triangle. One exploits fire as a narrative driver. The chronicle of a fire carries the other plots along with it, and fire illuminates, literally and symbolically, that larger narrative. Probably the classic expression is George Stewart’s novel, Fire. That book captured most of the possibilities of fire as narrative, which is why, despite its technological anachronisms, the book continues to find an audience. The second genre hovers over the central existential drama of firefighting, the tragedy of the burned-over crew. Here is the trying fire, the fire of judgment, the fire that sorts out the living from the dead. It is the prospect of death by fire that, in practice, moves the experience of firefighting beyond the domain of outdoor recreation and that, in principle, elevates its literature beyond juvenile sports stories. But until Norman Maclean wrote Young Men and Fire the genre had few serious practitioners. Possibly Maclean has exhausted the literary prospects. It is difficult to imagine anyone revisting the subject without quoting his vision if not his words.
That leaves the third genre, firefighting as a rite of passage, fire season as a coming-of-age story. This is, by far, the most common experience of wildland firefighting, linked as it is to the seasonal employment of young people. Fire season becomes a time in one’s life, the passage from adolescence to adulthood. What added rebars to the narrative concrete, however, is the fact that the year after I began at the North Rim the National Park Service changed