Mentally, I was ready for Granite Mountain. Physically, I wasn’t even close. I was a pale, thin, 145-pound party hound. I’d never run more than two miles in my life. I’d been a stoner for eight years and a drinker for six. I was detoxing off heroin. And I could barely run a half mile without getting a stitch in my side.
I thought fighting fires would be the hardest thing about joining Granite Mountain. I was wrong. There would be days in the coming months when my buddies and I would close our eyes and pray for a fire, just so we wouldn’t have to go through the gut-wrenching training that Eric had designed for us.
I was the last rookie to be hired that season. There were four other guys who’d been training for a week already and had started bonding with the veterans. My first week, I had the feeling I was trying to sneak one more Oreo into the package, and that Oreo didn’t want to fit. I was the man on the outside.
Besides that, I’d known a couple of the guys casually for years, and they had my number. They knew the old Brendan from parties and brawls and high school gossip, and they weren’t buying the new one. A couple of them told me straight up that they were going to try their damnedest to get me to quit.
They thought I was a punk. No one expected me to last a week.
The first day I did part of my pack test with a full-time veteran named Clayton Whitted, a strong Christian man who’d already passed the test but had volunteered to do it again so I’d have someone there to motivate me. The pack test measures muscle strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity. Basically, it’s a test to see if you can handle the job physically, and the requirement is to finish a three-mile hike with a forty-five-pound pack in forty-five minutes.
We did the test on flat ground. I was wheezing from the get-go. I finished the hike with about two minutes to spare. Not good. Clayton was waiting for me.
“That was a bitch,” I said.
“That,” Clayton replied, “is about the easiest thing you’ll do as a hotshot.”
I didn’t believe him. I should have.
Day two, I showed up at the station early and by nine a.m. we were off on a training run. PT was next—physical training to build us up for the days when we’d be fighting a fire for fourteen or sixteen hours in the middle of nowhere with no one coming to relieve us. It was hot as hell, creeping up toward a hundred degrees. We got in the buggies and drove to the Brownlow Trail, near Pioneer Park in Prescott. I got out of the buggy and thought, Oh no. There wasn’t a shade-giving tree anywhere in sight. You could see heat waves shimmering two feet off the ground. We’re gonna roast, I thought. I put some chewing tobacco in my cheek and tried not to think about it.
We started running, making a tramping noise on the packed dirt. The trail was fairly flat, which I was thankful for, but it was still brutal, full of switchbacks and bordered by pollen-bearing bushes. One of the things I’d hidden from the group was that I was asthmatic. For years, I’d used an inhaler. One look at that brush and I could feel my lungs twitch.
I’ve never been much of a runner. And now I was trying to keep up with a bunch of guys who were in hella good shape. It felt like I’d caught a refrigerator on my back.
Two miles out—with five more to go—I felt someone behind me. I looked back. It was this veteran, Chris MacKenzie. He was a black-haired guy with tattoos and a big mustache. And right now, he had a pissed-off look on his face.
“Dude, pick it up!” he yelled.
Guys were passing me on the right. Just blowing by me like I was using a walker. And they were the new guys, too, rookies like me. I swore at each one under my breath, Motherfucker, I will get you back for this.
I was ready to topple over from the heat and sickness. My blood was beating in my temples. I turned back around and ran faster.
We ran mile after mile, the dust floating up and choking me. I was gasping for breath and I could see the gap forming between me and the guy ahead of me. Bad news.
Come on, Brendan. Stop bitching and MOVE. But my body was drained. Just lifting my legs was agony. Getting them to move faster was not going to happen.
Just then I heard someone running up behind me.
It wasn’t a jogger; it was Eric. The man had steel springs for legs; he could run all night if he needed to.
I felt a wave of anxiety. Is he going to let me go right now? Did I blow this already?
To tell the truth, some part of me was half hoping that was the case. My lungs were shredded and my legs were screaming. If he let me go, there’d be less shame in leaving.
Eric fell in beside me. He didn’t say a word. We ran through the Arizona backcountry in silence, my nervousness growing, the two sides of me debating whether it was better to be fired or to keep going. As we approached the last mile of the run, I had to slow down even further. My legs felt like they were going to lock up on me. I was embarrassed, the breath coming out of my mouth in ragged bursts. Eric was barely breathing hard.
Get it over with and fire me now, I thought. Or maybe I should just quit and save some face.
I was about to tell Eric I couldn’t run anymore, that I was done. Just then, he leaned over. “If you give up on this run,” he said quietly, “you’re gonna quit on your daughter every day of your life.”
I finished the run.
After we stopped, I put my hands on my knees and wheezed. My lungs felt like they were full of steel confetti. I didn’t even know lungs could hurt, but they did.
Eric was standing, barely breathing hard. He took a swig from a water bottle.
“All right, guys, push-ups.”
“He said what?” I whispered to the guy next to me.
The guy ignored me and dropped to the ground. I felt a bright pain in my forehead, but I got down on my knees and got into the push-up position. Eric was counting out. My arms were shaking.
It was a full hour of calisthenics.
The other rookies were in better shape. They’d gotten through their first week and were already starting to get conditioned. I’d basically come off the party circuit straight into marine boot camp.
I made it through the calisthenics and then the run back to the trucks. At times, I was half walking. Chris continued to harass me, snarling about how I was fucking up the crew. Man, that guy hates me, I thought.
We got in the buggies and drove back to the station, covered in sweat. We got out and I collapsed against the side of the building, sitting with my back to the corrugated metal, chugging water. The ground was cooking hot. I felt like I weighed six ounces and a good breeze would pick me up and carry me away.
Someone sat down next to me. It was Chris MacKenzie. He leaned back and looked up at the sky. I tried not to watch him. We were silent for a couple of minutes.
Finally, he spoke up. “Why don’t you just quit?” he said.
I didn’t understand why he was dogging me. But I wasn’t giving in.
“Not fucking happening,” I said.
Chris acted like he hadn’t heard me.
“You’re slow,” he said. “In fact, I’ve never seen anything as slow as you. You look like a gazelle but you ran an eleven-minute mile today. Eleven fucking minutes.”
I hadn’t realized I was being timed. Damn.
“No offense, dude, but you run like you weigh three hundred pounds,” Chris said. “You’re wheezing. You can’t carry your weight. You’re going to be a liability to every guy here when we really get out fighting wildfires. Is that what you want?”
I closed my eyes and tried to block out the sound of his voice. I thought of Michaela. I tried not to think of smashing Chris right in the face, which is what I really wanted to do.
I felt that if I opened my mouth we were going to fight. And I couldn’t lose this job.
Chris leaned in toward me. “So let me ask you that question again. Why don’t you just fucking quit already? You’re never gonna be a hotshot.”
I took another sip of water and waited for him to leave. Finally, with a snort of disgust, he did. I watched him go, feeling more alone than I had in months.
What if he’s right, though? What if I get out there and can’t hack it and someone dies because of me? How’s that gonna feel?
That was just the morning. In the afternoon, we went out and fought a simulated fire.
The exercise had two objectives: teach the rookies like me what they were doing out there, and work on fuel breaks. A fuel break is a strip of land that’s been cleared of fire fuel. If a fire comes roaring across terrain, a fuel break is supposed to stop it, or at least slow it down.
Eric set out different-colored flagging to represent a small fire: the green flag might be the eastern flank, the red flag the western flank, and so on. He was teaching us how to see a fire, how to get its size and its shape into our heads so we could fight it. So, in a way, we could outthink it. If we knew the shape of the fire, the fuel it was consuming, the terrain it was on, and the weather that was driving it, we should have an idea of how to kill it.
But that was way above my pay grade for now. That first day, I was brute labor. Some guys took out their chainsaws and started cutting brush, while their partners hauled it off to a safe distance (this is called “swamping”). I was part of a dig team, using my Pulaski tool to root out the last of the vegetation from the firebreak. The Pulaski was a double-headed tool that had both an ax and an adze, which is a kind of narrow shovel. The thing had been invented by a forest ranger named Edward Pulaski a hundred years earlier. It just showed you how being a hotshot hadn’t changed that much in a century—which wasn’t the most encouraging thought. It was still a few men against a fire, with only a couple of modern tools.
I thought I’d worked my ass off doing day labor. I’d dug ditches, installed fence posts, and all that before, and I’d held my own. But the pace Eric maintained was unbelievable. The guys were digging like the fire was twenty yards away and getting closer. There was an urgency that I’d never been part of before.
“Let’s go! Pick it up!” Jesse called.
The heat, the brutal work, the yelling. Is this really the job?, I thought. And this was just a trial run. This wasn’t even real.
I’d imagined something different. I knew more about structure firefighting, where you’re mostly hauling hose. But this was like building a house or something. Clearing the land. Digging the roots out. It was work.
I thought of Tony Sciacca and his telling me about being a hotshot. That son of a bitch, I said to myself. He was like the recruiter who tells the dumb young kid about how the marines get all the girls, about R&R in exotic places and buying a big lifted truck with your first check—and forgets to mention the drill sergeant and getting your ass shot at.
The guys worked without a break. The job was nonstop, you just kept hustling until your shift was over. I thought, I’m sorry, boys, but I’m going to have to sit down. I didn’t, but I wanted to.
Chris saw me taking a little breather.
“Out drinking last night, rook?” he yelled, not in a friendly way.
I shook my head. I wished I had that excuse, but I didn’t.
I couldn’t picture the fire. There were going to be days when the temperature was hotter because of a blaze bearing down on us, and I didn’t know how I was going to get through it. It was near a hundred degrees already. What would it be like when flames were a hop, skip, and jump away?
My feet were numb and my mouth was parched, but I worked my ass off. By four p.m., I was nuked.
Thank Christ it was a Friday. If the next day had been a workday, I doubt I would have made it out the door. I went home that night and just collapsed into my bed, not even bothering to shower.