On the Burning Edge by Kyle Dickman Read Free Book Online Page A

wife’s fire academy. But by the spring of 2003, Marsh was thirty-three and tiring of jobs that rarely exceeded$12 per hour. He applied for a career-oriented, full-time position with the City of Prescott’s new Wildland Division, which specialized in proactively preparing the city for wildfires.
    In the years before, California’s Hunt Research Corporation had named the Prescott area one of the ten places in America most likely to be hit by a wildfire. Because of this humbling reality, the city formed Crew 7 for the sole purpose of creating defensible space, or thinning the thick ponderosa forests and brush around town. The area of thinned vegetation was designed to prevent fires that started on the outskirts of town from burning buildings. Depending on budget, crew size oscillated anywhere between three and twenty members. Initially, Prescott hired Marsh to be a squad boss, and he quickly moved up to be second-in-command on Crew 7.
    The work required all the sweat and labor of a firefight but offered little of the challenge and none of the pride. For Marsh, who learned to love the firefight while working with the Globe Hotshots, that posed a problem. Soon after becoming the captain, he made it a personal goal to turn Crew 7 into professional firefighters. He had a long way to go.
    Most jobs on Crew 7 paid only slightly better than minimum wage, and because of this, it didn’t attract career-driven firefighters. The city outfitted the men with fire-resistant clothes torn from years of use and relegated the crew to a barn situated amid a formation of granite domes, by an almost toxic lake. Not only was the city dump across the way, but in the 1980s, a radiation test at a well house not far from the station had detected radon—a gas emitted by the unusually high uranium content naturally found in the granite—at the highest levels ever measured indoors.
    “We’d leave to go for a run and the fucking rats would eat our lunches,” said Phillip Maldonado, a hotshot who was with the crew from the beginning, until early 2013. The city’s structural firefighters didn’t welcome Crew 7, either. They couldn’t understand why a bunch of feral wildland guys were allowed to wear the proud emblem of the state’s oldest fire department. Once, at a department Christmas party,one of the structural firefighters walked up to Maldonado and asked, “Who the hell invited you?”
    As captain, Marsh was heir apparent to the downtrodden crew. He regularly fought with the city on the men’s behalf, arguing that they needed more money for equipment and gear, and higher pay. But his troubles were bigger than Crew 7’s hard luck. His second marriage, to Kirkpatrick, was falling apart, and though he couldn’t hide the hurt—his colleagues considered him a moody guy—neither could he bring himself to talk about it. Once, halfway into a twenty-hour road trip to Idaho, Marsh told the only other guy in the truck, “I’m getting a divorce.” Then he didn’t speak for the rest of the trip.
    As his personal life unraveled, Marsh became hard to be around and discontented with his job. In one six-month performance review in 2005, he wrote that by the next year, “I would like to be the superintendent of Crew 7.” His supervisors rebuffed the request. For all of his competence as a teacher and organizer, and all his skill as a firefighter—“he knows what to do on the line in wildland fire situations,” his supervisor wrote in 2005—he had shortcomings as a leader and seemed unable to separate work from his private life. He had a tendency to distrust his subordinates and micromanaged. One review said, “He needs to learn not to yell when jobs are not performed to his standards…he becomes very agitated and does not accept positive criticism well. Blames other people for his misgivings.” His score for interpersonal relations was “Does Not Meet Expectations.”
    —
    Marsh’s situation started improving toward the end of 2006.