On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman Read Free Book Online

and tried to shut out the torrent of expletives still pouring from his boss’s mouth. The veteran hotshots told stories of Marsh bawling out new guys for sticking the tips of their running chainsaws into the dirt, falling out of hikes, or misusing a Pulaski. One said that the first time Marsh spoke to him, it was with his middle finger raised—a joke, but one the rookie found intimidating. The ass chewings their superintendent delivered and his general surliness were the stuff of legend. Regrettably, Renan now understood what the veterans were talking about.
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    Superintendents shape their crew’s personality. A superintendent’s relationship with his crew is like that of a coach to his athletes, but Marsh held his men even closer. He called the hotshots his kids—they called him Papa—and Marsh joked with his wife, Amanda, that they didn’t need children because they had nineteen already.
    Marsh wasn’t a westerner by birth, but the West had always appealed to him. He grew up the only child of a biology teacher in a small town in North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. As a kid, he was outdoorsy and used to steal bareback rides on his neighbor’s horses, but in high school, Marsh temporarily abandoned his outdoorsy passions, trading his western garb for Polo and earning the nickname Biff, as a reflection of his preppy dress. After high school, he spent a few years dabbling in a wide range of pursuits. He worked construction, learned to weld, and was an aspiring horseman, a rock climber, and an avid mountain biker. He learned to shape leather into saddles, fixed bikes, and painted logos on ambulances. He studied biology at Appalachian State University. He married young.
    Marsh took his first fire job—with an engine crew in Arizona’s Tonto National Forest—while still in college. At season’s end he returned to North Carolina to finish his degree, which he completed in 1992. Following a divorce, he left the South and started over in Arizona. He quit fighting fire for five years and bounced between jobs throughout the nineties. During his hiatus, Marsh took classes in practical skills—Microsoft Office Applications—and got by with odd jobs that relied on his ability to work with his hands.
    In 1998, he returned to work for the Forest Service as a firefighter. Marsh was twenty-eight then and the agency hired him as the captain of a two-to-five-person engine out of Globe, Arizona. In that remote and dusty mining town, Marsh felt the allure of hotshotting. When the Forest Service’s Globe Hotshots needed an extra hand, he occasionally filled in as a squad boss in charge of as many as ten men. Though Marsh never worked full-time as a member of Globe’s overhead, or even spent a full season as a crew member, the fires he fought with the hotshots left a lasting impression. The speed and quality of line construction, the rookie intimidation, the brooding way the superintendent distanced himself from the crew—many elements of Globe’s firefighting style would resurface on Granite Mountain when Marsh became the crew’s superintendent almost a decade later.
    Despite his attraction to the job, Marsh took five more years before fully committing himself to wildland firefighting. He was married again. He’d met his second wife, Kori Kirkpatrick, in the early nineties while battling a blaze in Texas. Kirkpatrick was also a firefighter. Driven and cerebral, by 2000 she had begun making plans to found a fire academy. Marsh, apparently in need of change, left his engine captain’s position in Globe after just two fire seasons, and the couple moved northwest to the cooler air of Prescott. For the next few years, as Kirkpatrick got the fire academy up and running, Marsh pieced together jobs, working as an emergency medical technician on a local ambulance, as a supervisor for a small industrial company that employed a fire engine for safety measures, and eventually, for a few short months, as an instructor at his