Fire by Sebastian Junger Read Free Book Online

more than two days in a row. One level less comfortable than a spike camp is the coyote camp, and hotshots are not universal in their love of coyote camps. Coyoteing, as it is called, means dropping in exhaustion wherever you happen to be when it gets dark. Because hotshots have only their line packs when they fight fire, they are usually caught without food, sleeping bags, extra clothes. If it’s cold, they will make a fire in the black—the burned area—and huddle around it all night. If it’s really cold, they might decide to keep building line simply to keep warm. For food, they might have thought to pack some military MREs (meals ready to eat). If not, they go hungry.
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    T he trees torched intermittently all night, I would wake up and see their glow. The sound of flames consuming pine trees one by one easily carried the mile to camp. I tried, and failed, to imagine what it would be like to be burned over. In 1910 a fire storm overtook a group of forty-five fire fighters who were trying to escape an Idaho fire called the Big Blowup. The leader, Edward Pulaski—who later manufactured the tool that bears his name—led them into an abandoned mine shaft and had to keep them there at gunpoint because they were so terrified. Five men died; the rest emerged several hours later, burned and dazed. They had survived a fire storm of such ferocity that entire hillsides of timber had been flattened by fire and convection wind.
    The hotshots were up well before dawn, as usual, rustling about quietly with their head lamps on. It was very, very cold at that altitude at that hour, and I put on everything I had and wandered down the hill to the kitchen area. There would be a briefing at six while people ate, and then they would attack the fire. The smell of smoke still permeated the camp, but the fire had quieted down during night, and trees no longer torched along the ridge. Fires generally “lay down” after dark because the temperature drops, meaning that the relative humidity rises. People poured themselves cereal and coffee and sat on the hillside, eating and listening to the morning briefing.
    The division supervisor, a gruff, stocky man named Fred Bird, stood on a crate in the half-light and projected the plans for the day out across the mountainside. “Okay, we’re gonna try to hold our own on that ridge,” he said. “We’ve got good air support, and they’re going to work us here all day today and then bump us back to camp. Tomorrow they’ll get in some type two crews to hold the ridge and send ’shot crews up to the North Zone to chase spots down that canyon.”
    One hundred and seventeen miles of fire line had been built, there were only ten more miles to build, and overhead was saying that the fire was nearly contained. Everyone knew that one good spot into some timber could start the fire running again, though. Bird’s briefing was short and to the point, and sunlight was just touching the upper ridges when the three crews shouldered their packs and started off up the hillside. I fell in with the Union Hotshots, followed by Karen Miranda, and we worked our way slowly up a steep drainage that ended at a ridge, heavy timber on the far side. Burned timber. In the absence of wind, the ridge had acted as a fire line, and Union was simply going after the spots that had made it over. Spots were anything from a few square feet of ash to a vigorously flaming snag surrounded by an acre of black, but they all had to be put out. We were in sparse alpine fir now, Kelly Esterbrook said, and fire in alpine fir is very hard to fight. The trees blow sparks as they burn, igniting spot fires everywhere, and they grow in dense groves that provide critically high fuel loads when the fire reaches them. The flames climb up into the trees from the lower branches, which often reach to the ground, and make their way up into the densely packed crowns. A crown fire is particularly