Loaded for bear, Randy hikes up E-1. “The fire is to the north, left, at the third large log across the old road. Just up a little hill from there,” he remembers Recon saying.
Alston climbs into his firepack, while the SWFFs take a pack, a saw, and a fedco. Methodically, Alston adjusts his compass, smokes a cigarette, and begins to flag a route in. Two ridges. The compass hangs from a button on his fireshirt. Every twenty yards or so he takes a new reading, walks to an object in his line of sight, backsites his old flagging, and adds a new flag.
Kent and Tyson, another SWFF, reach Swamp Point. They see no smokes in the vicinity of Dutton Point. Since there are tools cached at the Powell helispot, they elect to take only firepacks and canteens across Muav Saddle. They check their map. The surface relief of Powell Plateau dips sharply from east to west; if they stay on the eastern Rim, they will cross the fewest ravines. There is no need to bring sleeping bags. They will work all day, all night if necessary.
Randy has reached the third log. The ridge is at least one hundred fifty feet above him, but he cannot see it through the dense forest. His crew hop and climb like enormous beetles over downed spruce, over branches, trunks, windfall; they move in slow motion, as though they have entered another planet whose gravity is twice, three times that of the earth. Branches tear their carefully balanced packs. Still, they climb on, blindly and always uphill.
The SWFFs follow Alston wordlessly. He halts, backsites, pulls out another cigarette. They have walked for more than a mile and a half, he estimates. Early in the season the large fuels are still wet. Plenty of time for a cigarette. May is a season for patience.
Kent and Tyson plunge down into Dutton Canyon, the great drainage, overgrown with scrub oak and locust, that segregates Dutton Point from the rest of Powell Plateau. There is no other route across the towering mesa. Overhead the midday sun glares tauntingly. Soon they will arrive at the fire; the narrowing geography of the Point will draw them irresistibly to any fire. There is no way the fire can escape them.
Randy concludes that they have reached the ridgetop. But there is no fire and no smoke; there is only an opaque forest of Engelmann spruce and white fir. Randy slumps down, crouching against a log to hold up his pack; he scans his map; he flips a coin. “Heads we go north,” he announces to the uncomprehending forest. “Tails, south.” The squad flounders north; after about fifty yards they see the fire—a flaming snag, half a dozen burning large logs, smoldering duff a foot thick, everything arranged to resemble the aftermath of a tornado. Maniacally, panicky, Randy scrambles around the site. Where, where, he screams, is the goddamn dirt?
So intent is Alston on his bearing that he hardly hears the SWFFs. “Kq’! Kq’! The fire!” He looks up from the compass. There, a mere ten yards away, is a pool of smoke. Cautiously he abandons his bearing and moves to the smoke. A dead aspen log—not more than eight inches in diameter and leaning against a white fir—is puffing furiously. There is virtually no ground fire; in fact, water oozes out of the duff as they tread. They trace the line of lightning down the furrowed trunk of the fir, untouched by fire, to the aspen. Alston sits down on a log, stuffs his compass into his pocket, and smokes another cigarette while he contemplates their incredible fortune. Had they arrived an hour later, the fire might have expired. The SWFFs want to extinguish the fire instantly, but Alston dampens their enthusiasm. He is sure there must be subtle complications in the scene. He is confident that he can extort at least an hour of overtime from the fire.
At Dutton Point the view of the inner gorge is spectacular. Kent climbs a tree, searches avidly for the smoke, and sees nothing. There is only one response possible. He requests another recon. Clyde obliges, and almost as soon as the plane leaves the airport, Clyde recognizes his error. “It looks like I gave you a bum steer,” he admits to Kent and Tyson. “I meant to say Ives Point, not Dutton Point. When you get to Ives, you’ll see the fire. There is nothing else around.” He does not say—does not need to say—that Ives Point is the farthest possible extremity of Powell Plateau, that Kent and Tyson will have to recross Dutton Canyon, hike back almost to the helispot, then trace out the declining backbone of the plateau. They arrive well past sunset. The Bumsteer fire—a flaming pinyon—acts like a beacon. They slump beside an adjacent tree, packs still on, and stare at the fire for perhaps two hours. Occasionally they drink from a canteen. At some point they fall asleep. In the morning they mop up the quietly flaming stump and start the trek back. When they reach the truck at Swamp Point, they open the doors of the cab and, reaching across the seat, pull each other in.
Randy calls for reinforcements—for water, rations, saws, firefighters. Three of us trudge in. No one has found any dirt. It will be a difficult mop-up. Sitting despondently on a sawn log that evening, Randy names it the Rekup fire. “‘Rekup,’” he explains, “is ‘puker’ spelled backward.”
Alston returns to the cache shortly after 1700 hours redolent of satisfaction. He has worked through his lunch hour; the Smoker fire was uncontrolled when he arrived; his crew will receive hazard duty pay.
CHAPTER TWO
Tipover
THE FIRE CACHE and the fireroads are symbiotic. The cache opens to the roads, and the roads take us to the Rim. Without the fireroads we are condemned to the Area. With them we can recapitulate the ritual of renewal on a grand scale. The roads take us to fires.
It is good, tough work. We exploit every tool, test every vehicle, initiate every crewman. Trees must be cut and hauled off, branches and brush trimmed back, eroded sites repaired, new signs installed. Milk Creek must be spanned with another corduroy bridge. Old roads, abandoned and retained as foot trails, must be reflagged. Every road and trail must be revisited and reopened. Hands toughen, and muscles harden to the texture of Gambel oak. Mind concentrates—a chisel rather than a probe.
From the fireroads we learn (and relearn) the geography of the North Rim. There are two geomorphic terranes: the Canyon and the Plateau. They are incommensurable; they operate according to two sets of geologic processes and represent two epochs of geologic activity. The Plateau is a landscape without vantage points. There are no peaks to which you can orient and from which you can look out. Hydrology is no better guide, for the Plateau is karstified, its drainage subterranean and deranged. Where Canyon and Plateau meet, along the Rim, their conjunction is startling, arbitrary, relic, violent. Yet only there can you determine your location with any precision.
Gradually the days lengthen, the landscape sheds its winter snowbanks and dries, and the sky clears. Forest and meadow slough off their dormancy but have yet to flower. The storm tracks have moved too far north for weather systems to pass through routinely, yet the summer rainy season has not arrived. There is neither fire nor water, only the recession of the latter and a promise of the former.
On both time and place the fireroads impose a kind of order. They instill a functional integration on a topography that is otherwise at odds with itself. They establish reference points, and they give access. The only way to move from rim point to rim point along the surface is through the Plateau, and that makes the roads mandatory. Opening the roads likewise imposes a complementary temporal order. Clearing the roads marks a tumultuous, subtle change in season, between spring melt and summer rains, when the Kaibab exchanges mud for dust, when the sun streams through the dappled woods and the air is full and warm. It is a critical moment in the annual cycle of natural history at the North Rim—and in the life cycle of a seasonal fire crew.
Whatever the season holds, the fireroads open it to us.
The fire is reported along fireroad W-1, on the last ridge before The Basin. “Yes,” Recon 1 reports, “right along the road.” Kent is restless. Others have been sent to fires reported earlier in the day, yet he and two SWFFs have remained in the cache. It has not been an easy fire bust. Recon 1 has been flying unceasingly since late morning. There have been long, indecisive walks. No more than a fraction of the roads are open. The snowpack prevents access to Sublime and W-1; only the Walhalla fireroads are passable. None of the crews can see fire from their vehicles. Kent takes the white powerwagon and proceeds down